Intro: [00:00:02] Welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast series focusing on critical business decisions. Brought to you by Brady Ware & Company. Brady Ware is a regional, full-service, accounting and advisory firm that helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality.

Mike Blake: [00:00:21] And welcome to Decision Vision. This is Mike Blake, your host, and our sponsor is Brady Ware & Company. This is going to be a different show, a short show. And, really, a thank you show.

Mike Blake: [00:00:34] So, we are celebrating our third anniversary of the Decision Vision podcast with the show. And, you know, something like, I don’t even know what number of episodes this is, like 155 or something. It’s a crazy number. And, you know, I just – I think it’s a good time to pause. I don’t want to – I don’t want to do this as sort of in passing because it deserves more than an in passing mention. It deserves its own airtime.

Mike Blake: [00:01:01] And, three years is a long time for a show to be on, especially a weekly show. We have now lasted officially as long as the Star Trek original series did. I don’t know that we’re going to have Decision Vision Con anytime soon, but, you know, good things can happen after only three years, and it’s hard to believe we launched this back in March of 1999. And, you know, where do we even begin, right? So much has changed since then.

Mike Blake: [00:01:30] And before we get into some perspective on that, I want to make sure to thank everybody that needs to be thanked and there are a lot of them. First, I’d like to thank Brady Ware & Company who has supported this podcast. They have supported my investing time into it. They have supported it by listening to it and directing people to listen to it. They’ve supported it financially at not an insignificant expense. Putting on a show like this, even though I do it for free, technically is still not cheap, and you can tell the difference between this show and a show that’s done in somebody’s basement, which leads me to the second group I want to thank which is the folks at Business RadioX, and John Ray and his team have been just tremendous partners with this. And it’s not just about turning on the microphone and recording things. And they’ve certainly done that, but, you know, they’ve done some editing. They’ve made me sound much smarter than I’ve sounded. They’ve saved shows because we’ve had guests that have come on and then say things that they regret. And in order to not have the show be deleted, they’ve managed to sort of edit it and make it sound natural. Some people get in front of a microphone and they’re terrified and it’s like a hostage tape. And then, there are other people that sort of forget they’re behind a microphone. It’s like they’ve had a couple of belts of scotch before they start going.

Mike Blake: [00:02:52] And John and his team helped kind of save the day and keep the show, for lack of a better term, the way that it needs to be. You know, they do all our scheduling. In some cases, they’ve handed us guests, especially when we’ve had some show holes. And, you know, sometimes it does have a little bit behind the scenes. Like even on The Tonight Show, they get guests that cancel at the last second, and all of a sudden you’re left without a show. And believe me, we don’t rise to that level. We don’t think we rise to that level. So, there are days that we kind of scramble for guests, but we also have a high standard that we don’t want to put a show on unless it’s something that we’ll be proud of. And they’ve been great at getting us guests, and they’ve been great at just letting people know that shows are up and that the show is out there and publicizing it.

Mike Blake: [00:03:40] And, I’m under no false illusions. I don’t think so. You know, we stopped counting at 30 million downloads about six months ago. I don’t know what that number is. Maybe, it’s 30 million and one, I don’t know. But the point is we would not have reached that without our partners at Business RadioX. And if you’re thinking – this is not a paid – they’re not giving us a break. They’re not giving us any kind of promotional credit. But if you’re thinking of doing a podcast for realzies and you’re thinking of doing it from a business perspective and attracting clients and representing your company and yourself well, your company and personal brands well, you know, I cannot speak highly enough of them as a partner. So, I want to make sure to thank them.

Mike Blake: [00:04:21] I want to thank our guests who have put in well over combined 150 hours of their time to share their talent and expertise with us. Some podcasts, some radio shows are just a person talking into a microphone. This isn’t that kind of show. I’m not that interesting. I would get hoarse after ten minutes. I get boring after five. So, thank God that we have the guests to do that. And I think that’s been a good format. It makes you really – it makes you appreciate the people that are on, for example, talk radio. And, without getting political for a second, you can appreciate the talent of people who can just talk into a microphone and be interesting for three hours. That is not easy to do. It’s hard to do it for three minutes, do it three hours day after day. I don’t know how they do it, and so thank goodness for the guests who are willing to come on, sometimes twice. I don’t know how we convinced them to come back. I mean, once they’ve never [inaudibly] never listened to the program but after having been through the experience, once they’re willing to come back. And, you know, I can’t thank you enough.

Mike Blake: [00:05:28] And then, finally, of course, you guys, as listeners, whether you listen once or twice or you’re a regular Decision Vision junkie, you know, you know who you are. I appreciate your social media comments. I appreciate your emails that you send to me privately. I appreciate your reviews and your constructive feedback. You know, we try to – my hope is that whenever the last show of this thing is, I don’t know if that’s going to be tomorrow or five years from now, I hope our last show is the best one we’ve ever done because each one is a little bit better than the one prior to that. And the feedback you give us, the energy you give us is what keeps us going. And, you know, it is not easy to put on a show like this on this kind of schedule, and I’m not asking for any kind of recognition or anything. I just want to acknowledge the fact that your feedback, your energy are what give me and us the energy to keep doing this and keep doing it at what I think is a high-level show that we can be proud of. You know, if there’s no listeners, then it’s just me talking into a microphone and paying somebody a lot of money to record me talking into a microphone and that doesn’t make any sense. So, thank you for letting us know that you’re having an impact. No, we’re having an impact on you.

Mike Blake: [00:06:41] So, in the last three years, we started this and we were, pre-COVID, we hadn’t gone into any Greek letters yet. And now, we’ve gone through three of them so far. I turned 50 during this period and I have the gray hair to prove it. I was [inaudible] on the other side of 50 when we started this. We survived murder hornets. Cryptocurrency has now risen to the level where it warrants multiple Super Bowl ads. The University of Georgia won the Football Championship for the first time in 41 years. I didn’t think that’s going to happen, and I was glad to be wrong. And, Matt Stafford of all people won the Super Bowl. I don’t think a lot of people thought that was going to happen. And Tom Brady retired, or at least they say he did. There’s now rumblings he may actually come back already, so we may be in a Brett Favre situation, but that’s a – but for many people, the long national nightmare is at least over and somebody else gets to be the GOAT in football terms.

Mike Blake: [00:07:41] But, you know, and it’s just been – it’s been a wild ride. It’s been a great, you know, a great three years. And we’ve got a lot more shows coming up. We’re going to come back and revisit topics that we’ve already visited. We’re going to continue to take topics on that are hard. We’re going to continue to take topics on that are thought-provoking, that may be emotionally provoking, that may provoke a very strong reaction in the negative.

Mike Blake: [00:08:07] But that’s how you make good decisions. You make good decisions by putting all the facts out there, all the feelings, all the views out there, and giving them all, visibility in the cold light of day. Letting those ideas go to war. The ideas, not the people, go to war and figuring out what is the best path forward. And that’s really what the Decision Vision is all about. It’s a show about ideas not telling you that you should do X, you should do Y, but rather here’s what we think you need to know in order to make an informed decision based on whatever circumstances or environmental conditions you’re confronting and serve as your constraints.

Mike Blake: [00:08:50] And then, finally, I’ll tease something. We’re not formally announcing it yet, but I feel like you guys have been on the journey enough where you guys deserve some inside baseball. So, my group will be spinning off, actually has technically spun off. We just haven’t announced it yet from Brady Ware. So, there’ll be a company called Brady Ware Arpeggio, which is the – Arpeggio’s the old name of my sole proprietorship. That’s the legal name. It’ll be known to the market as Brady Ware Strategic Valuation and Advisory Services, which I think is a very apt name, and we’re going to talk about – we’ll have a show as to why we chose to do a spin-off. That was a material decision why are we doing that. But once again, I’m going to be put in the position of running a company. I’ll be a material shareholder. And it’s both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. And I think that’s probably about right. If it doesn’t scare you a little bit, you’re not taking it seriously enough. And if it’s not exciting you, why are you doing it? But that’s just me talking.

Mike Blake: [00:09:54] So, that’s sort of a state of the show. You may have been looking forward to content, but unless you’ve listened to every one of those 154 shows, and if you have, kudos to you. I haven’t. I don’t think my mother has either. But if you have, great. But for the majority of you that haven’t, there’s plenty of back catalog content that you can go enjoy and we will be back next week with a brand new show, brand new topic.

Mike Blake: [00:10:21] And, again, I just want to – I’ll just – I’ll finish like I started. You know, thank you for this opportunity to serve you, to be a focal point for your ideas, to help you think about things, to help you become a better decision-maker. I enjoy it. I find it personally enriching, and it’s an enormous compliment to me that anyone thinks that what I have to say is of value and the fact that as many of you do not just once but repeatedly. You know, at the end of the day, I think that’s what life is all about is making an impact and you’re showing me that this show is. And thank you so much. So, have a great week. Take care. And we’ll be back at you next week.