Brian Gonzales: Director of Operations at Solver Collective

^{Joe Fox (00:02.713)}
Hey everyone, Joe Fox here, President at Growave. Today I'm excited to welcome you all to another episode of Retain Grow Thrive. I'm very excited today because I have one half of a husband wife duo that have an amazing creative agency based out of Portland. Today I'm joined by Brian Gonzalez from Solver Collective. And I'm very excited to have Brian on because he's got some amazing insights. They do some incredibly creative work and we've

I had a very successful partnership today that we're excited to continue. So Brian, thank you so much for coming on board.

_{Brian Gonzales (00:37.364)}
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me out here, Joe. It's virtual, but living room together. So that's really cool.

^{Joe Fox (00:40.783)}
Absolutely, absolutely. And I know we're both having our morning coffees. So audience stay with us for a minute if we need a couple of seconds to get caffeinated. But Brian, thank you so much for joining. Tell me a little bit more about Solver Collective. I know that you guys have got some really cool kind of clients. You offer a variety of services.

You play a lot in the Shopify, Shopify plus space. Tell the audience a little bit more about what it is that you sort of specialize in and the brands that you work with.

_{Brian Gonzales (01:18.978)}
Yeah, so Solver Collective. Really that came out of an origin where we had myself who's web developer came in, been doing this for a long time, over 20 years.

been developing websites and working with brands. started off in retail and, I was working for this company called us outdoor.com. And so, yeah, it was, it was awesome. We're in the outdoor space. was all the things that I love the snowboarding, the camping, skateboarding, all the things that kind of fit my lifestyle. And I really got into, to e-commerce and I basically took that idea and was like, man, I would love to do more of

_{Brian Gonzales (02:02.512)}
of this, but with the brands that I'm working with. So started off kind of simple. I was working with some gloves down at the front counter there and it was a brand called Defcon gloves. So I started working with Defcon gloves and I got introduced to basically another brand that was there called Capita snowboards and they work for the same distribution company. And so me and my buddy, Greg, we decided, Hey, we should go and talk to these guys and see if they needed any help with their website.

And let's just kind of put the timeline on there. It's about 2003, 2000 and yeah, right around 2003 to 2005.

^{Joe Fox (02:47.052)}
Nice. So I would have to say you're definitely an e-commerce veteran then. That's, that's amazing.

_{Brian Gonzales (02:53.142)}
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it was...

It was basically about coming together with not only these brands, these like really influential brands at that time in that space, but also working with people like Greg and all these people that you meet within the brand. So it started off really small. It was mainly just me. but I got to a point where us outdoor, we had actually built that thing from three people in an internet department. And eventually we had like 25 people or so in chess e-commerce alone selling millions of dollars.

^{Joe Fox (03:22.499)}
Wow.

_{Brian Gonzales (03:25.858)}
of snowboarding and outerwear and things like that from the North Face and Burton snowboards. So being able to work with these brands and kind of knowing that US Outdoor was in really good place, I basically kept those relationships going and saying, hey, I would love to do more of this with you guys. Eventually, they connected me with another brand called Union Binding Company.

And then the binding company introduced me to a headwear company and I was like, okay, at that point, I kind of need to scale.

^{Joe Fox (03:57.549)}
Yes, yeah. It's like can't do all of this on my own.

_{Brian Gonzales (04:01.87)}
It was brutal because you want to but you physically can't like there's only so much time in the day, right?

^{Joe Fox (04:10.74)}
Yeah, absolutely.

_{Brian Gonzales (04:12.47)}
that's where the hiring process started and that's where the collective started. So depending on where the person was at in the journey, whether it was, you know, I've hired interns, I've hired friends, I've hired people on W2s, the whole nine yards. So we have a full gamut, I've hired family. I've actually, yeah, I've been through that whole gamut of trying to, wherever you can, be able to get the right talent. And sometimes that talent,

just wants to be independent on their own. So, you know, we became a collective. And so that was the actual origin of Solver Collective. It's this idea that, you know, whether we are all independently great on our own, but together we are stronger. So yeah, that's the origin.

^{Joe Fox (04:59.607)}
I love that. That's, that's very, yeah, that's very powerful, Brian. And I'm a, I'm a huge believer in collaboration, obviously, you know, having quite a long, career within partnerships originally, and then being in e-commerce for quite a while. And I actually have my own agency in Australia that I, scaled up and sold. And I'm a very, very, very big believer in the power of collaboration, the power of partnerships. And I really liked that idea of like being able to bring.

the right people in for the, for the right job and the right outcomes for the client. So that's super cool. And obviously, I mean, you know, I know that you work with a variety of brands, but the outdoor space is clearly something you're quite passionate about. I can see the skateboard on the, on the back wall and over the other shoulder. And so do you, Ryan, does that translate to your

kind of day to day. know as you know, people in Ecom, we were all very passionate about our work and we all work incredibly long hours. But you know, outside of the Solver Collective, are you finding that a lot of these brands that you're working with, are you actually utilizing their products in your spare time?

_{Brian Gonzales (06:16.654)}
Well, 100%, I mean, perk of the job is that we are helping these brands every day, whether it's a go-to-market strategy or maybe it's something as simple as just making a beautiful graphic.

^{Joe Fox (06:30.539)}
Mm-hmm.

_{Brian Gonzales (06:31.724)}
but that at the end of the day, we are all there to celebrate this product. Usually it's a snowboard that they've created or the glove that they created or a line of apparel or bags or something. We get access to all of it and it's awesome. I will always be the biggest Capita snowboard fan that you can get because at one point in time, there was three of us in a room, sitting there.

^{Joe Fox (06:56.404)}
Wow.

_{Brian Gonzales (06:57.698)}
kind of moving the needle and then, you know, eventually the company gets larger and to be able to have that opportunity to sit on those ground floors and be able to help direct that company and, and yeah, it's a, it's magical. And so when you're living out here in the Pacific Northwest in USA, by the way, cause we probably have a really diverse audience here. We do, if you can see out that side, yes, on that side, there was a snowboard, but on this side,

^{Joe Fox (07:18.017)}
Yes, yep.

_{Brian Gonzales (07:25.6)}
It is all greenbelt. So I have a forest right here. that is absolutely amazing. So we have fishing and snowboarding and hiking and

surfing at the Oregon coast actually there's a surf competition that's happening right now in Pacific City which is one of the most beautiful beaches Oregon Coast beaches are like almost nothing else and an absolute gem so we've got all this amazing stuff off of the outdoors and

Yeah, we use the products all day long. So yeah, we go fishing, we go snowboarding, we're using the apparel. Yeah, it's a real pleasure and I'm thankful to be able to live in that space and be a part of that activity. It also helps us bring back to the brands that we're working with. We know what we're talking about because we use it.

^{Joe Fox (08:17.535)}
Yeah, I love that. It's very hard to beat that level of authenticity, right? Like actually being really big advocates of a brand and then helping them to grow it. think that's such a kind of grassroots approach. And I really, really love that. And second to that, it sounds like I'm going to have to visit you up there sometime because that sounds beautiful. I haven't spent...

much time up there. I think I've called past there once on a layover flight at some point, but absolutely from the sky, it looks beautiful. And I think, you know, to your point, there's so much diverse landscape there and perfect for the outdoors. I'm a very avid hiker. So I'll definitely, definitely be up to visit at some point. I'd love to chat Brian a little bit about, you know, as you are an Econ veteran,

I've had some other, you know, really, you know, sort of start at the very beginning of e-commerce people on the podcast. And, but I also have had a lot of agencies that have only been around for, you know, three to five years. So I really want to kind of dig into that for the audience. And I think it'd be really cool because a lot of the audience, as I mentioned earlier, our customers, but we also have a lot of our partners watch this. So I'd really love, to approach this from two different angles. one is what.

do you see as the biggest? I mean, I know there's been a lot of changes that have happened during that period of time, but what do you see having your knowledge and experience of what has happened in the past with e-commerce, where we're at today? What do you see as the biggest changes coming for merchants in the future with e-commerce?

_{Brian Gonzales (10:11.375)}
It's probably this idea of omni-channel is really, it is where we're at. We have so many different places that we can sell from. You can actually see like I have a little POS system that's over here and.

^{Joe Fox (10:24.798)}
Yes.

_{Brian Gonzales (10:25.999)}
It's because that's just one, that's just one channel for me to go and sell at, you know, it's, it's one area. You can have a pop-up, you can have a trade show event. You can have your retail, your warehouse. You can have five different stores in Portland. Um, you can have your, your Instagram shop, your, uh, your Tik Tok, like all this stuff is happening and it's exploding. Like you should see the amount of sales that come through Tik Tok or like.

Being able to really leverage those beautiful posts and the Instagram shops and just seeing all that come together like another huge reason why I love Shopify and just that unified commerce experience. is absolutely amazing to see and it's only gonna get bigger. We don't even know it's not here yet. Like it's about to happen. We're on the precipice like constantly and to be a part of that.

^{Joe Fox (11:16.019)}
Yes. Yes.

_{Brian Gonzales (11:24.319)}
Always exciting. Always exciting.

^{Joe Fox (11:27.225)}
Absolutely. Yeah. You, there's some really, really cool key points there. And I think, you know, unified is something at grow wave that we've always taken into consideration. we've worked very closely with the Shopify POS team on, developing our POS product, to be really, you know, succinct and powerful and create that omnichannel and unified. So

I personally am a very big fan of that, regardless of whether it's from a grow wave perspective or a personal perspective. think creating that ideal customer experience, no matter where someone shops is really key for brands. And I think, you know, to your point, at the time of publication of this, our TikTok integration will be live. We've spent a lot of time with the product team over there, getting that to be a little bit different than our competitors, because we saw

some ways that loyalty and reviews could be done very well through TikTok. So I'm very excited about that. But, you know, to your point, I think also with the rise of AI, that is then going to be part of this omnichannel experience to a degree as well, right? Like being able to shop directly through chat GPT, I don't think is that far away. I know at the moment it's all about like linking to product and then you still having to check out, but I very much.

visualize and see this world and I've spoken to this with a few guests is like imagine if you could literally just be like, hey, I want this and then AI knows your tastes. knows that, you know, for let's just say, for example, in skateboarding knows that I, you utilize an eight inch wide skateboard deck. I prefer decks that have, you know, like more concave, like all of these little personal attributes.

I think you're going to really play into that personalized shopping experience. And as interesting as it might sound or as foreign as it might sound to the audience now, like letting an algorithm and letting AI make some of your purchases for you directly without you having any hands-on involvement. I really think that we're leading further and further into that. And I think what's really cool is that

^{Joe Fox (13:45.884)}
You know what you're doing with the collective and solve a collective is that as those components grow and as Omnichannel grows, it's cool because I'm sure you're bringing in experts that are like more renowned for those certain things and are focused on those sort of elements when it comes to that Omnichannel journey.

_{Brian Gonzales (14:06.189)}
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, Joe, we...

As much as that collective, as much as I would like to say, yes, I bring in those experts for the most part, it's really just the five of us. and I think the experts kind of come in where we know that there's somebody who's fantastic at something. Let's just say it's an illustrator and the illustrator, cannot beat their style. Like their style is. You know, it's almost like key to the campaign. And so, yeah, we absolutely bring them in. also depends on how people like.

within our own group want to engage with a company like we in a sense are we're there to be an agent of their talent and We are definitely stronger than we are alone. So that's the bet like that's the best part but to go back into this this theory of like AI and Selling and and where we're going with that Yeah, we have so much that we are like watching in front of our eyes be changing and so whatever we're even seeing now is

^{Joe Fox (14:44.316)}
Hmm.

_{Brian Gonzales (15:09.681)}
is constantly shifting. It's going to be really exciting. Where I think we were a little bit early for, let's just say for capital. We were going to be, we had explored some AI that we were going to use to help people pick out a snowboard. And for us, it's really important that somebody goes in, especially a brand that's really focused on core. So our audience is core. They go to a core retail shop.

^{Joe Fox (15:19.399)}
Mm.

_{Brian Gonzales (15:36.663)}
That was the experience that we were used to before this whole e-commerce really kind set in and be to see. And so a consumer would come into a store, you would get lined up and somebody would say, hey, let me show you a couple of these things. And the thing is most of it was based on what we had in stock. Maybe it was a...

we just looked at it we've got certain things that we can instantly judge in this and assume. but it was also about how we communicated with that person. And when we looked into it AI and the way that they try to adapt to a natural language, just wasn't there yet. And so to get these unauthentic, ways to communicate about a product, can smell the unauthenticity right away. And we were early, but now.

^{Joe Fox (16:17.657)}
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yup.

_{Brian Gonzales (16:23.631)}
This natural language is phenomenal. Like I can't, I can hardly tell the difference between that and Matt and snowboarding. You know, like it finally got to that point where we didn't want it to be comical. It doesn't have to be, you know, over the top. It just has to feel natural, organic, and that's going to sell a lot better than something that did. And we can, we can feel that right away.

^{Joe Fox (16:48.698)}
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, when it comes to our products, you know, like snowboarding, and I only know this from, you know, my, my youth being really, really big into skateboarding. And I was lucky that I have friends, you know, back home and in the U S who kind of went in a professional direction with that skateboarding career. But it's a, it's a culture. It's a, it's a, it's a subculture. It's, it's not just a

You know, to your point that authenticity is so important to those cultures that you cannot have a chat bot, for example, that is just very clinical and not giving the right information and doesn't know what certain terminology is. And I think the way that chat bots and agents and AI in general is moving towards is really actually understanding that. And I think that's why.

A great example of that is I was reading an article the other day on LinkedIn about sources for where a lot of, you know, the major AI LLMs are pulling their sources of information from. And to that point you just made that it makes a lot of sense because Reddit, which is full of communities and cultures is a large source that people pull recommend a large source that these LLMs pull a lot of that recommendation information from.

which is really smart when you think about it because there's so many actual customers who are part of these cultures commenting, speaking, using language in these Reddit channels and forums. it's really cool to see that grow. Another question, quick pivot here for you, Brian, because of your veteran experience.

We have a, as I mentioned, we have a lot of agencies that are a part of this audience. A lot of them, you know, it might be an agency that's only been around for a year or two. Um, obviously, you know, you've continued to grow throughout the years and you've done some incredible things. What advice would you give for someone who was early days of an agency, um, or, or thinking about starting an agency, but they're not quite ready to make that leap. Like.

^{Joe Fox (19:12.089)}
What are some of the key lessons that you would like to impart on them?

_{Brian Gonzales (19:17.231)}
This is kind of a beautiful moment here because you mentioned when we came on here that, you know.

Solver really is it's a family-owned business. It's me and my wife and when I was at us outdoor and I'm working with these brands and I'm selling I'm seeing millions of dollars going through e-commerce and I said wow, this is absolutely a Blazing trail and I want to be on it and here it is I've grabbed brand one brand brand two was already in the works and I'm probably about to hit brand three and

I remember going to my girlfriend at the time and I said, hey, I've got some really great opportunities. but I'm scared. I'm totally scared. I've got some contracts and I've got all this years, know, years of experience. but I'm going to need to take that leap of faith. And so Alyssa, she goes, Hey, I'll, I'll back you. Let's do this. Let's make that happen for you.

^{Joe Fox (20:17.198)}
Love that.

_{Brian Gonzales (20:20.823)}
I never looked back, Joe. I never had to. mean, that is where if you could just put that full faith into it on, you know, I know you're a man of faith as well. And it's like, if you could put that in there, you travel.

It'll show you the light and it is amazing. And you're just sitting there going, I can't believe they just introduced me to the next brand. And I remember sitting in rooms and being like, I was there on behalf of another brand evaluating another agency. what, know, beautiful thing is that, but eventually you go.

^{Joe Fox (20:50.231)}
Yeah. Yeah.

_{Brian Gonzales (20:54.235)}
you know, this is all pointing me towards you're doing the right thing. And it's not it's not easy. This whole journey has been absolutely difficult. I mean, we survived COVID. So if I say something to like, don't spend all your money, you guys like try your best to leverage all the things that you have. If you're just starting out and you're your bootstrap, at the end of the day, you're making websites, you're helping clients, you're trying to improve

^{Joe Fox (21:05.154)}
Yes. Yep.

^{Joe Fox (21:09.902)}
Mmm.

_{Brian Gonzales (21:22.883)}
you know, performance, you're doing whatever it is that you enjoy doing. But, you know, be a little bit frugal on your journey and, and you're going to last in, you know, here it is. I've been on for over 20 years. I've had relationship with brands that have lasted almost just as long, right? Like here's this timeline where you're like, man, if you do it right,

You can have long lasting relationships, a thriving business. You can be whatever scale you want to. You know, don't have to be the next agency that's only working with, you know, a hundred million dollar brands. Like you can be wherever you want to be and you know, find that, find that path, go for it. And maybe if you can get a, get somebody to say that they'll back you even if it's just spiritually.

^{Joe Fox (22:09.316)}
Yeah, no, I love that. I love that, Brian. you know, agree. And on the faith point, you know, I don't always talk about that on on here, but you know, you as a as another man of faith, I am a very big believer in that. I think that, you know, having faith in something bigger than yourself and having faith to back yourself are very co-aligned.

and, and I love to hear that. And I also think, you know, having that person to back you and be behind you, you know, not just in business, but in life is incredibly important as well. So I absolutely love that. That's a very, very, very, very, very, very good insight for our audience. I'm definitely going to make sure that that ends up as a, as a little standalone clip. Cause I think that's really powerful. okay. So we're getting near time.

You and I could talk for hours. It's very apparent. I'm loving it. We'll definitely do a part two, but I wanted to say Brian, like, you know, if, if for example, I'm a brand, you know, watching this, I'm a brand that's, know, very clearly you have a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge and a lot of, you know, pardon the pun, collective, experience within this outdoors kind of space.

_{Brian Gonzales (23:06.903)}
And this is an unjustified shit.

^{Joe Fox (23:34.323)}
and in the sporting space, let's say I'm doing two to 3 million, ARR. I'm wanting to get to the 10 million mark as a merchant. What, let's, let's just say what's the one thing that you think that I should focus on without knowing the ins and outs of my business. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

_{Brian Gonzales (23:54.85)}
ads.

All day long, every day, all these channels, all these omnichannel we were talking about, they all have their different version of ads. Run them, be authentic towards them. That's easiest way you're going to get traffic in. as best as you can, communicate to that audience. mean, Shopify, for instance, you can build anything that you want to. can build a micro site landing page in a matter of seconds. You're looking at a...

You're looking at the theme customizer. go in, you create new and it's based on something else. You're instantly in another template. You use the theme blocks, man. Theme blocks are so powerful now, right? You can just almost literally drag and drop a new experience in the matter of minutes that used to take our team much longer to develop. And we'd have to, it's so much more in the approval pipeline. We are at a pace that is unparalleled.

^{Joe Fox (24:37.984)}
Yes. Yes.

_{Brian Gonzales (24:55.407)}
to what we've ever seen before. So move fast, know, move fast and you'll definitely make that revenue, especially if your product is good. And I've actually seen some product that hasn't been that good. And at end of the day, some of it was like, it was a bit of a push, you know, you go out to the masses and it works. then once critical mass happens, it is a beautiful thing. It's a powerful thing.

^{Joe Fox (25:13.505)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox (25:21.726)}
Absolutely. No, this is great. This has been such a powerful conversation. I'm sure the audience, you know, are loving this. And I think there's been so many valuable insights, you know, from you, Brian, so thank you. Brian, where can people connect with you? You know, if someone, like, as I said, if an audience member wants to connect with you, say they're one of our clients, obviously they can connect through our partner portal, but

You know, is it best to connect with you on LinkedIn or send you an email or what's the way you'd like to connect with the audience?

_{Brian Gonzales (25:57.615)}
Sure. I really love LinkedIn. I'll just say right now that I was one of those people who never found the true value in LinkedIn. Almost everything that we've done has been through a network referral. It has been one of those moments where it's like, once I started to understand about LinkedIn and find where that culture was at, it really made sense to me. And I absolutely love it. I love being part of the conversations.

^{Joe Fox (26:11.2)}
Yeah.

_{Brian Gonzales (26:25.743)}
I love being able to post some of my own explorations that I'm going through. I also run a local meetup group here in Portland, two of them actually I helped co-organize for.

^{Joe Fox (26:35.624)}
nice.

_{Brian Gonzales (26:36.407)}
Yeah, the PDX Shopify meetup group and the e-commerce Portland. And so these are really thriving communities. That's where we get to post our information about events there. But if you want a really quick, you know, simple dialogue, LinkedIn is great because you can actually hit me right through the DM and I'm usually seeing every day, every couple of days. Honestly, I'm pretty nose to the grind for a lot of times. So.

I might not be in it all the time. So I really do hope that people come and check us out at solvercollective.com. yeah, Solver Collective, there's a little bubble that we have on there, like a little video bubble. And if you click it, you can actually leave us a direct message. Isn't that cool?

^{Joe Fox (27:19.867)}
I that. I saw that. I really liked that. I liked that. That was a, it's the first site that I've seen that on. So I love that. That's ingenious. I honestly, you know, in saying this, I'm going to get some inspiration from you. I'm actually going to go back to our marketing team and suggest we do the same because I think that is incredibly powerful. It's adds this level of, you know, instant human connection.

I thought it was really, really cool the way that you introduced it. I love that you had your branded swag on. very, very, yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm going to have to get one of those by the way. but yeah, I really, really liked that. think that was a very, very, very cool human interaction, human touch. And as I said, that's the first site that I've seen that on. So, great work on that.

_{Brian Gonzales (27:55.007)}
it's coming back, yo, I'm coming back.

_{Brian Gonzales (28:13.741)}
Thanks, no, that's exactly what we wanted. You we try to reduce as much as we are in the matrix. We try to reduce that whole theory of.

We're humans, not robots. so, you can leave us a video message and audio message if you prefer that. You're just on the go. You can leave a text message all right on there and it goes directly to, well, it goes to the dashboard, but it also gets directed to my phone. So I get it right away. And yeah, that's a really great place to get ahold of me.

^{Joe Fox (28:45.15)}
Really, really, really good human touch. love that. And audience, just so you know, I'll make sure that all of these links that are discussed are in our show notes, wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you're listening to this. Thank you for listening. I'll make sure that's there. And then just lastly, Brian, this is one that I like to finish up with all guests. I think the interesting thing about e-comm is we all travel quite a lot.

and, and I think it's relevant to, there's been some really good little ideas on, on the podcast of things and items that people should pick up or apps that they should add to their phone, et cetera, for the travel. so on that note, and you can't say Alyssa, you can't say a person what's one thing that you can't travel without, you know, in terms of like, obviously you're going on and doing shoots, you're going to meeting merchants.

What's the one thing that you can't travel without?

_{Brian Gonzales (29:46.841)}
thought about this one, Joe. I thought about it. Joe, I can't I can't leave without one of these bad boys right here. So out of the collective birthed out of complete authenticity, a little brand a little brand called solver. And I love it. It's it speaks to me personally. I thought this is real fun. I'll make a couple of hats or whatever.

^{Joe Fox (29:48.714)}
you did? Okay, you prepped for it. I like it. Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (29:57.288)}
I love it, I love it.

_{Brian Gonzales (30:15.023)}
but it never really hit until I started wearing it around and people would always ask me, it didn't matter who they were, they would just ask me, oh man, I like your hat. They would say, I like your hat, would you get that? I was like, oh, that's my little agency.

And then the narrative started to shift and I was like, maybe it's not my agency anymore. Maybe it's maybe it's its own thing. It's its own brand. And so the solver brand was born. And so I never lose out. I'm always wearing that. didn't want to wear it here because we're on a podcast. didn't want the light broken down. But yeah, we we have a whole collection, a whole line of these hats that are coming out. And we we made green ones. These are limited edition ones. This was for a golf.

^{Joe Fox (30:41.544)}
I love it.

_{Brian Gonzales (30:59.183)}
Tournament that we have it's called five five ish So if you play you'll know that that's a it's probably a little bit above par when there's a little issue in there But we also made some for Shopify additions dev and brought for we only had about six of them Instantly, we're like gone. It was so cool to and People kept saying hey, I really want to get a hold of one of those. So if I missed anybody out there

^{Joe Fox (31:09.011)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox (31:14.92)}
Nice.

^{Joe Fox (31:21.619)}
Yeah.

_{Brian Gonzales (31:29.103)}
I wanted to offer this Joe if that's alright if anybody wanted it If anybody hit me up you go to solver collective comm go check out our website go look at a case study Maybe go visit the portfolio now, but if you want to use that little video bubble and send me a message and say hey guys can you send me a discount code for one of those hats? I've got a whole lineup and then Joe we've got something real special in the works. I'm not gonna say what it is

^{Joe Fox (31:32.605)}
Yeah, of course, of course.

_{Brian Gonzales (31:56.847)}
but it's really special to me. It's actually the origins of our icon. And so I'm excited to do that with the entire audience out there too. Some you probably weren't expecting to get at the end of this podcast show, but that's what I would like to give back. I never without a hat. you know, grab yourself one, grab yourself five and wait to expect to see that little extra special gift. So hit me up, ask for a discount code. I'll hook you up.

^{Joe Fox (32:03.74)}
Okay.

^{Joe Fox (32:25.208)}
Awesome. That's so kind of you, Brian. Thank you so much. And once again, audience, that's all links below. As soon as you get to the Solver Collective website, you'll see that video pop up. Super impressive. Like I said, we're going to emulate that. So I appreciate the free consultation on that one. But look, Brian, thank you so much for joining us. We will definitely do a part two of this. Thank you for the ongoing partnership that we have. I really enjoy it.

Honestly, just thank you for being a man of faith, a good person in this industry who's doing a lot of amazing things for a lot of amazing brands. So thank you so much for coming on board. I really appreciate it.

_{Brian Gonzales (33:07.747)}
Hey, can I give two seconds to just give you guys some flowers? I'll just tell you this, the partnership, I...

^{Joe Fox (33:13.264)}
Audience, thank you so much for tuning into another episode of retain growth thrive. That was a fantastic, fantastic, fantastic episode with Brian just now. And as I mentioned, all of the links that we that we discussed will be in the show notes. Really, really appreciate as always you tuning into these episodes that it means a lot to me. We're seeing nice steady slow growth.

You know, it means a lot to me that you take the time to watch these. means a lot to us at Growave. So thank you again. If there's any guests that you would like to recommend, feel free to comment below. Shoot me an email, shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Also, if you're not connected with me on LinkedIn, please feel free to Joe Fox. I'm the only one on there that is the president of Growave. Thank you so much, audience.

See you again for another episode of Retain Grow Thrive shortly.