How To Manage Your Finances

How To Manage Your Finances

Paul Adams
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
2/18/2021

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

how to get some experience first there are so few and far between of the mark zuckerbergs or the bill gates that drop out and create something amazing it really is somebody who has like most people they've gone and got whether it's experience working in a startup or experience working in a big you know corporate entity those that that experience is invaluable it also starts to build up your network which then also translates into those soft skills that you need to be able to run a business [Music] hey everyone this is devon miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i am your host devin miller serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast zachary razga and i and i was making sure that i pronounced it right now it's still 50 50 that i'm going to mess up and i and i but so i apologize in advance but zachary has been a bit of a lifelong entrepreneur always been around small businesses um you know as a background his father was a bit more of a corporate guy his mom was a bit more of a small businesswoman and he tended to apparently follow in his mom's footsteps a bit more but spend a lot of time growing up around his mom's jobs um as she was doing small businesses went off to college got a finance degree and did a couple jobs went uh and then decided to move to san diego and be a beach bum for a period of time also got involved with some startups with television shows may not have been quite as expensive successful but they are great uh great experience went back to grad school did some untamed internships and i think cape town and then uh went to did some tech uh did some or worked for some early founders as tech industries i think in australia and hong kong or something of that nature and then running a consultancy period or consultancy to a 2008 financial crash made some adjustments came back to the states and uh now fast forwarding to where he's at today and he'll share a little bit more about that as we go on his journey so with that much is of an introduction welcome on the pac our podcast zachary well thanks for having me uh it's a pleasure to be here and uh that was a uh a fast-forward uh introduction for a fairly lengthy journey um i'm not uh a young buck anymore i uh you know have a few gray beards on my chin and actually no hair on my head so well i'm getting i'm getting there i've got it started to get gray in my beard and i started to lose hair on my head so i've got a bit to catch up with yeah but i'm i'm on that same track as as you are so maybe with that take us back a little bit in time i did the brief overview but take his back being a little bit of a a lifelong entrepreneur and following or kind of seeing what your mom did following him in those footsteps and walk us through your journey yeah i appreciate it so you know it's interesting to be on this podcast and have somebody actually ask about the journey because i think a lot of times when you get into these types of business conversations and podcasts everybody wants to knock talk about the now the president and the president in the future right like what are you doing now and what are you gonna do in five years time and and i it's it's often that you don't get a chance to reflect on like how did you get here and what have you done that's going to you know help you get to where you want to be in the future so you know it's funny like you said i i have tended to be on the sort of small business side with a father who was definitely at the big business side i think at the time he left wells fargo they were almost as big as like the federal government employees and probably have more power so yeah it was right after the merger with wachovia which you know they truly became a gigantic sort of i would say almost unwieldy machine but um you know and actually we saw that because they got in a lot of trouble shortly thereafter um but sidebar there uh yeah i mean my mom was mostly in the sort of small business realm and part of it was because of where we were as a family and following my dad around you know as he was getting moved from here to there with the corporate machine and so she ended up having it you know still keeping a career which i really appreciate and applaud with her and a lot of times it was in smaller businesses and you know i i took you know little jobs here and there with her at her businesses and it's you know the one thing about working in small business is you do get exposure to a lot um and when you're in large corporations you become a very narrow focused specialist whereas when you're in small businesses you have to do accounting you have to do hiring you have to do you know uh sales marketing etc and so i think that's one of the things that i i was lucky at a very young age is to get exposed to every sort of facet of a business which i think is really important when you're going to become a leader now my ambition is to actually grow my current business to something that is sizeable or at least gets you know to a point where it could maybe be acquired by a sizable business so i don't it's not that i shy away from that because you know the bigger you are the more money and resources are around absolutely but uh yeah i i definitely think that that that experience that i had as sort of a high school student has kind of carried through me with my career and yeah i mean you know after i finished college you know i had the unfortunate uh time of graduating similar to graduates right now where we weren't financially in the best place as a country um and actually i graduated august 2001 and then we all kind of know what happened in september of 2001. and i actually did go to san diego originally with a corporate job [Music] and uh ended up sort of leaving it fairly shortly thereafter uh partially i think because of 911 and then also because i kind of was not into it i just didn't didn't feel right and so i ended up grabbing a little bit of side work with an adventure travel company that was selling trips um you know primarily their focus was oceania africa so long haul destinations but with 911 they needed to focus on near shores you know opportunities and you know trips and experiences which then brought us down into central mexico um so one question just just because i think in your own self-described words when we talked a bit before you said you were a beach bum so is that the case is you know what does beach bum mean to you that means you just hang out at the beach did you actually sleep on the beach did you just happen with your plate i just was curious because i always i always only think i you know know for beach bubs is what i see on tv no i i say it's because uh i'm you know when when you're at the tail end of your college career you know particularly that sort of last six months maybe even the last year of your senior year of university particularly if you're in the business school you're spending most that time interviewing for jobs right and so i went on that same path and you know this was pre-google days this was like you know again it's 2001. so there was a lot of dot-com stuff happening and there was a lot of dot-com companies sitting with booths at my school plus there was you know sort of the traditional finance businesses etc and i went through a lot of those interview processes and i was like i you know i kind of don't really care so much about the career it kind of just like i'll take the job that takes me to where i want to be and it so i i picked the location versus the job so and actually the job that i went with was probably not the best career fit for me but it was in san diego and i just i just wanted i grew up in colorado i went to university of colorado and i just wanted to get out of colorado i think is really what it was and the two jobs that i had that were sort of and this is actually something that's happened to me sort of throughout my careers i have a couple of different options and i end up taking what would be financially the least desirable option because it has something beneficial to my life versus just a financial outcome so this happened to me again after my grad school um and so yeah i took the job in san diego not because it was a great job but because it was not in colorado and the other two were in colorado and this objective to get out of colorado um so that was that that was what led me to san diego um you know you got into san diego and you in this you know kind of a self-described beast bomb but you did have some jobs you were working working with the the travel company but is if i remember right that's kind of what led to doing more of the kind of the startup with the television shows is that right yeah so when we were working in central mexico trying to put together some tourism packages we were basically being sponsored um and not in a like big dollar sponsorship way but basically had our trip paid for by the state government of chihuahua and they brought us down there to essentially do some scouting and a guy that we were connected to and to be honest i don't remember how we got connected to him he was in the television business and it was at this inflection point with mark burnett where he was leaving what he did pre-survivor which a lot of people don't probably know that he had a pre-survivor life um so he had a he had a television show called the eco challenge which was more of an adventure race that they filmed versus a television show that they made seem like an adventure and they actually as they complete a site so they had the eco challenge they actually brought it back recently on amazon prime and me and my wife actually watched it so it was an interesting show so i should probably go watch it and see if the people who i knew are in the like trailers at the end like you know they're part of the production company so there was a group of people that were eco challenge aficionados and were with that business who didn't want it to go away and mark burnett was ready to move on and just focus exclusively on you know his his new thing which was called survivor um and so the business model that they had developed with eco challenge actually he took with him over to survivor which is find a destination have that destination pay the upfront sort of production cost you know the last eco challenge was in fiji and the fijian government cut them a million dollar check and so we were trying to take that model and we had an existing relationship with central mexico in particular the taramara region which is throughout copper canyon um and that's what sort of got us down there and that's what got me into you know really my first startup uh where we had to go through put pitch decks together now these weren't like pitch decks like a startup pitch deck these were treatments so you know part of it was a deck but then also we created some like splicing together all kinds of old footage and i grabbed a buddy of mine from the university um who majored in this and we i mean i remember spending days in his house up in los angeles essentially stealing old footage and putting it together and putting new music over top of it um and taking it out and you know we probably would have made it happen except we had two problems one we didn't really know what we were doing as a team and we had a problem with intent to air rights so we got some intent to air rights but they were not in the united states that was issue number one which meant we couldn't really go and approach american u.s brands to we had or we couldn't go to the brand partner or you know brand agency in the us we had to go to where we had intent to air rights which was in latin america which was a whole different thing we didn't realize and then the other thing too is we really didn't equate or put into our budget how much insurance was going to cost and it as a first-time production company we tried to essentially get it insured by everyone and the cheapest that we could get broke the budget and so that's what ended up i think ultimately killing the the entire project was we we had a mismatch i think this happens to a lot of small businesses where we had commitments and we had you know a lot of startups we had commitments we had money coming in we had ideas we had the right people but we didn't have the exact right match of people and the exact right revenue or financial setup to make it happen and we were involving really high level production costs so you know maybe we could have run it on a shoestring but the problem was what the market expected from the eco challenge was a pretty high level production um the last one that they had done in fiji was a really really good production value and so we just take a step back we i don't we just couldn't do it so so now as you look and say okay number of challenges can't do the television show kind of you know wrapping that up good experience fun or fun travel you get to do a lot of cool things you know where did i think that you you mentioned from there you went to grad school and then did an unpaid internship in cape town was that right yeah so that experience of working overseas really gave me the overseas bug and i really enjoyed working with the local culture and the indigenous population and also working with the people from chihuahua so you know that i think that's kind of what was fun about it is this thing that was a television show and i also kind of realized i think by going through this part i did not want to be in the television business like that was you know on paper and like as a 21 year old it's like super glamorous and awesome especially if you're in southern california but in reality it just you know the pecking order and the the the hoops you had to jump through to become you know a part of that industry at a really sort of substantial level was not exactly what i wanted to do but i really enjoyed the time that i had in the field overseas working with the local culture and so i decided that's what i wanted to do as a career um and and i really really enjoyed the experiential side of it like showing people something different than what they would see in their day-to-day um and so i went and got a master's degree at george washington university for experiential development and the sustainable development i you know is partially in the business school partially in their foreign services school um and uh you know at that time i had across the street for me was the world bank um and also national geographic and usaid and all the government agencies that were there um but i also was lucky to be working for the university so i had you know not just opportunities to go and be in those places but actually working relationships and so i took it upon myself to help a non-profit in south africa that i really liked because essentially what they were doing was what i was doing in central mexico but bringing these communities online so it was really teaching community managers or community tourism assets how to become a part of the internet and i really like that and i was like that's the future and so i helped them to win a really large grant from the world bank and they asked me to come over and essentially work with them on it and then when they asked me like how much i wanted to get paid after i'd been there for two months and i told them they're like you're crazy go away this is this is not really in the budget and frankly we can do what you do from here in south africa now that we have the money um so thank you very much see you later um but on the way out i i kind of thought this could have been a possibility so i as everyone does you know i registered an llc on the way out the out the door on my way to cape town um and ended up being able to leverage those relationships that i built to start my consulting practice and so this was sort of my first company that i was in charge of um i was lucky that my you know co-founder was my girlfriend who actually now is my wife and so we sort of co-preneured this business together and you know we had some you know public sector clients as our sort of get out of out the gates clients but then our first real big customer was a private sector company that also was a it was a startup um and they basically brought us on as a part of the early stage founding team which is what gave me my exposure to the startup world um and so it was really fun because you know we ran you know my wife actually did more work for the startup than for our consulting company i i did more work for the consulting company than the startup um but we kind of blended them together and it was a magical really crazy time i mean we ended up getting married during the time but at the same time collectively i think we traveled to something like 70 countries um we worked in probably like we worked with people in over 100 countries because it was in the travel and tourism business and it was essentially packaging and selling experiences to the market um and so i i think from that side from that business i really i learned the marketplace business like if you're gonna be in a marketplace and you're going to create a marketplace you have to be able to pay attention both to the supply and the demand um and i think you know the biggest understanding of that or the biggest use case we see is like amazon amazon says that they're the you know the most customer-centric company on the planet well you know what people don't recognize is they think of their customers as both sides supply and demand now we've all heard some of this horror stories from the supply side clearly they do everything really well for the demand side so you know they're always they're you know they're really great at selling product but they really have built their systems for both sides like there is a real need from the suppliers to be on the platform and there's a real you know value add from the customers to be able to get access to the platform so that kind of lands me where i am today is you know i i'm in the i'm building a you know essentially a next generation um ad network that is focused on you know experiences and content creators so i mean it really is it's it's in a different domain but it's it's actually sort of a long-term extension of what i've been doing so now one kind of question just going back just for a second so because one thing you mentioned when we chatted before is that there was kind of that overlay for a period of time with 2018 and the financial crisis and things coming in bitcoin or what sorry what did i say anyway 2008 yeah um 2008 and then you know the financial crisis obviously went er went on beyond that so was that so the businesses that your consultancy and everything reminded me was that before or after the crash or did you have to adjust or shut those down no i mean basically no i mean that's a really good point i mean the 2008 financial crisis shut us down um they they there were there were a couple of really big projects that we went out and won on the consulting side that we leveraged the private sector company to win by saying that because the private sector company was going through a capital raise we were going to take a chunk of that capital and invested into new regions so essentially our company was heavily leveraged in um southeast asia the i would say eastern europe i would call it an africa and oceania and the area of the world that we hadn't started working in was the the western hemisphere and so on the private side we were actually in a capital raise in starting in 2007 where we were raising money to expand what we were doing in a significant way both from a product improvement perspective but also a geographic like domain exchange and so we then went and raised some money on the non on sort of the consulting side through government donors with a explicit one-to-one match and we were going to take the capital the the the private capital dollars we were raising in the you know the private equity markets and match the government money with it and they were okay with it actually the thing that was really interesting was the the public sector people wanted to write case studies around the world that we were doing this because it could show a true public private partnership like it was everybody was like over the moon that we could do this together and then you know the the the first inklings of we had a problem financially in the global market our first lead investor kind of backed off uh they were out of hong kong um and then our next investor kind of backed off they were out of india and then all of a sudden then boom the financial crisis happened and the stock markets plummeted and literally every investor that we were talking to is like we're not going to invest money in tourism in emerging economies period like it was just uh not happening and so you know we went back to our public partners and asked them like you know what can we do and they to their credit they bent over backwards trying to find us another investment partner particularly in the region that we were working with and we just couldn't do it um it was just it was just the wrong timing too risky and so you know we had put so much capital of our own as a consulting company into that project that we basically had for you know dried up our pipeline and we basically had no pipeline left because we put so much energy and effort into that we had a couple of other projects that were running but they were like at the tail end of them because this was going to be our big night three-year project and it was going to consume everything and actually my wife and i had already planned to move from africa back to the the americas to be able to manage it um and so this all kind of happened you know simultaneously you know it's at the end of the day like we ended up having to close the company um the consulting company the private company had to completely reorganize it it went through several different iterations after that and to a point where i think it eventually sold all of its assets off to some of our strategic partners and you know so now and so now now going now bringing us full circle bringing us to today you have the company you're working on um give us you know a little bit of kind of where are you at and kind of where do you see things headed yeah so so so where we are today is uh you know like i said after that that sort of happened i went through a series of you know oh my god what do i do kind of moments and just kept the lights burning both personally and professionally and ended up making my way into experiential marketing um which was actually a natural you know uh i would say progression of my ex my expertise in my professional career because that's essentially what we were doing was helping experiences get marketed and sold you know these were tourism experiences and so now working with brands and their brand partners to you know get of consumers and excite them and create experiences was a natural sort of progression um and so you know started doing that uh ended up building a piece of technology that was our own because one of the things i noticed in experiential activations for brands is that there was not a lot of data being captured it was we'll hire a street team and let them run down the road and hopefully that'll turn into new memberships at our gym or you know we're going to spend a bunch of money on a you know a billboard inside of this concert or we're gonna slap our name up against this sports team and it's gonna you know there wasn't a lot of you know data driven decisions and conversions of customers so we built a platform to address that and again like 2008 um who would have foresaw a global pandemic that was going to shut the economy down and shut down essentially all experiential activations as we knew them was going to come in the end of 2019 beginning in 2020 and that's exactly what happened to us we had a really significant book of business built up in the q1 of 2020 that literally within a week went from like a quarter million dollars of booked sold business to five grand um and honestly at that point i had a little bit of like a oh moment like this is gonna happen to me again like things outside of my control um but the difference between that time and this time is i didn't take in outside investment um we didn't bring in additional third party capital in any sort of super substantial way yes we did raise a little bit of friends and family to build the plot product but we hadn't closed that seed round or we hadn't and and you know we were preparing for it actually based on the book of business that we had but we didn't actually go out to market and start you know selling it and i think that's actually what in a weird way actually helped us is because we didn't have like all these third-party issues of like hey we need to realize this or no you can't like innovate in there and you can't do that you can't and it allowed us to take a deep breath and take a step back um which is what we did and look you know lo and behold we found an amazing opportunity where we could actually apply a marketplace concept to it which is in esports and gaming so basically what we're doing is we're helping brands and in particular non-endemic brands access the esports and gaming market which is a gigantic growth area in terms of media diet for people you know where they spend their time um and you know we're at the very beginning of that journey um we we came up with the concept how it would work did all the testing sort of q end of q3 beginning at q4 of last year and sort of in in took it to market i would say in november of 2020 and they're now in that moment where we're just fielding rfps and putting together um you know proposals and starting to sell that inventory well awesome that's uh it sounds like it was a good pivot and it certainly allowed you you know by not taking on that outside investors allowed to react quickly adjust and be able to keep the business alive and thriving and moving forward well as we start to wrap up i always ask you know two questions at the end of the podcast so we'll die or we'll jump to those now so and and it's a good transition point um along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it the long the worst business decision um that i made was i s the initial co-founders that i had of this business which i've actually replaced them um they were wonderful amazing people but they didn't have the right skill set expertise and experience that was necessary to turbo charge the business and that was exactly the problem that i have had in another business in the past and i didn't learn my lesson and and what the one i'm referring to in the past was the television show right we had the greatest idea the most well-intentioned people people willing to scrape scrap work as hard as they possibly could but they just didn't have the fundamental skill set to be able to do what was necessary to move the needle same thing when i originally created this company um but because i was the majority shareholder of it and because i have a situation where i had some flexibility instead of saying screw it and giving up i actually found a way a to make them whole because they did contribute a ton of time energy and effort into getting it off the ground and b replace them with somebody that does have the skill set does have the network and does have the expertise to be able to make it happen but you know i did have three years of just terrifying horrible heartache and pain working with these people and asking them to do things they just fundamentally couldn't do no i mean that makes perfect sense so no and and i think that's a good lesson to learn in the sense you know and it's one that sounded like you had to learn the hard way a second time but then you finally learned the lesson of hey you really do have to not only have people that are skilled or good workers but actually fit what the company is able to turbo charger really have that you know that drive and and culture fit and skill set all of the above in order to really drive the company i think that that's one that's too often you're trying to think hey i can they're good people they're good workers they're my friends i know them and it's hard to make that pivot yet sometimes it can hold the company back when you don't do that now as we jump to the second question which is if you're talking to someone that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them yeah you know so i actually i got this question a couple it was last week where because i was student teaching a bunch of cs students um you know they were probably in their second year of computer science and there was a lot of them that were like super enamored with the idea of starting a business and i said don't do it i said you guys need to make this if your ambition in your life is to start a business great i think that's the greatest thing you should ever do but one thing that i i think is really important is you gotta get some experience first there are so few and far between of the mark zuckerbergs or the bill gates that drop out and create something amazing it really is somebody who has like most people they've gone and got whether it's experience working at a startup or experience working in a big you know corporate entity those that that experience is invaluable it also starts to build up your network which then also translates into those soft skills that you need to be able to run a business and so that would be my recommendation i know there's probably not a lot of people per you know maybe that are in the same situation that i'm describing that listen to your podcast but i mean i think it's really important to have like real experience not just an idea because it's it's it ideas are a dime a dozen it's the execution that actually makes the business happen and and so that that would be my recommendation no and i think excuse me i think that's a great recommendation and certainly something that a lot of people would take to heart and certainly get a good piece of advice well as we wrap up if people want to find out more about your business they want to be a customer they want to be an employee they want to be an investor if you're willing to sell many of your equity uh they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to connect out find out more yeah i mean so we have a website which is www.these dot co which is called t-h-e-c-e dot c-o uh that's that's for the customer that's for the uh i would say the best friend because then if you're an investor come find me on linkedin i'm very active on linkedin i've actually taken a break from the other social platforms during the last four years um and you know kind of use linkedin as my primary sort of social platform so come find me there and you know i'm happy to connect with anybody on that space all right well i definitely encourage people to reach out find out more reach out to you to use your customer or use your platform be an investor find out more i mean any or all the above now before we wrap up just as a reminder we do have the bonus question we're going to discuss is or zachary's top intellectual property question so hang on to that if you want to listen the bonus question otherwise we'll wrap up the podcast thank you for coming on zachary been a pleasure if you're a listener make sure to click subscribe um and or backing up if you're a listener and you want to be a guest on the podcast feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the podcast love to share your journey now if you're a listener and you want to uh make sure to click subscribe so you get notifications as all our episodes come out as well as leave us a review so new people can find out about us and last but not least feel free to uh reach out to miller ip law if you have any questions with your patents and trademarks and go by going to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help thank you again zachary appreciate you coming on the podcast and now hold on just a second and then we will do the bonus question so there we are now to jump on to the bonus question for all those that continue to listen um we started this recently had a few people ask their questions but the bonus question is where we talk a little bit more about my expertise which is in patents trademarks and as related to business so with that what's your number one or what's your one top question for uh intellectual property so i have a question because as an entrepreneur who is involved obviously in all sorts of random activities and opportunities you just some people sometimes bring you business ideas or you know think that you can solve any problem and so actually uh my amazing developer um who has been working on our platform asked me a very sort of interesting ip trademark question that i genuinely have no idea what the answer to is all right so i'm going to you know give this this bonus question over to his question because i actually probably think there's other people that want to know okay although he is a web developer he is also very interested in tabletop games uh which you know is obviously interesting in the gaming space um there's a very um i would say well-known game that has had a million different iterations of it built designed and sold you know you probably buy 10 different versions of it on amazon right now i'm not going to mention what it is because i'm not sure he wants us to share to a public what it is but it's a very well-known game and he has made a slight uh augmentation to it like maybe it's the best word or a slight change to it it makes it infinitely harder you know it's kind of like a rubik's cube type game where it's a it's a mental puzzle game and so he's made a slight alteration to it which makes it much much harder and you know obviously it has a core sort of um community that loves these types of games and he seems to think the best place to take this to market obviously is the united states and so he doesn't know what what is the best next step to be able to protect what he's done and be able to you know find probably like a retailer or maybe it's a contract manufacturing partner probably he could find a contract manufacturing partner in china that's probably where it will happen but then how does he actually then sell it in the united states like is it a trademark is it a copyright is it a patent like and so that's the question is it's so it's it is intellectual property in that it is a tabletop game and is that something that can even be patented or is it something that is better protected under another uh vehicle sure yeah and there's a lot of questions in there so i'll try and keep the answer a bit more concise for the for the listeners you know there's really two ways that you'd protect a tabletop game you know one is certainly on the trademark and that would be branding and so if you're now the backing up the real question would be is can he if you're building on somebody else's game and they have it trademarked and or patented that may be a stopping point for him out of the shoot in the sense that unless he you know if it's somebody else's game and then you're going in building on top of it you're gonna have to have permission from them likely permission from them in order to use their brand unless he rebrands it or if they have any intellectual property particularly on patents if they have patented you're going to have to either go get a license or otherwise get permission from them assuming he had that permission or that it wasn't trademark it was a different it was he was going to do it under a different trademark i actually think it's slightly different enough that it would be hard for them to say that he was stealing their so i'll get maybe but i'll give you one more cabinet so one thing would be on the branding so one is either he let's say he branded it himself and he branded it a different name different you know so there wasn't any likelihood of confusion then that would be the first place he could protect it same thing if you think of you know war or work warcraft as if it was on software or you think of the magic game cards if it was you know those all those are different brands so you're going to have to build a different brand on his own that's going to protect it so he's not going to be able to piggyback off of the other company's brand now the second question is you can't necessarily patent most of the time you can't patent the game on the utility side meaning there isn't a lot of functionality as far as how it works unless you just made something that has a lot of devices and it really does have the utility and the functionality but most of the you know desktop you know or you know desktop games are going to be more on it's going to be dice or it's going to be a board game or it's going to have a few characters but there isn't you know it doesn't functional it doesn't do anything but a lot of times what you can do is protect it on the design side which means it has a unique look and feel to it and that can be you know you have a specific shape of a board game or you have specific looking dice or characters or other things that make it a unique look to it then that's where it gets into where somebody else may have the ownership of it so it depends a little bit on the tweet when we go back to the other owner of the original game is if they have a design patent what do they have the designs on and is what he doing going to piggyback off of their design such that it will infringe if it if it is again he'd have to get permission if not and he wanted to get it protected it had a unique look now if it's just a card deck card games it's going to be one where you have a new set of rules you can't really get a design on the card games but if it was the next you know magic game or you know something of that nature where it had a unique look to it then you go more towards the design pattern so one this is a quick summary one would be on the trademarks you can protect it with the brand and two of it has a unique look to it in a different design you could do it with a design patent so with that there's a question as much as i have time for to ask on the answer on the bonus question but definitely if you even if you have any more questions feel free to go to strategymeeting.com or if any any of the listeners have any additional intellectual property questions definitely go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help and with that thank you everybody for listening and zachary wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks sir