Alicia McKenzie (00:00.162)

And just think the importance of founders taking care of themselves, just it can't go without happening, right? Like you are in charge of running a company, you're in charge of your family, you can't ignore your health. And when you do, bad things happen.

And entrepreneurs, a lot of times if you were, you know, you're the CEO of the company and your company was, you know, redlining a hundred percent of the time and you were not looking at any KPIs, you were not measuring anything. You were just running. Like that wouldn't be an effective strategy for running a company. So, you know, why would you do that to your own body?

Welcome to Married to the Startup. I'm Alicia MacKenzie, a wellness entrepreneur and digital creator. Alongside me is my amazing husband, George, the CEO who's always ready for a new challenge. We've been navigating marriage and running startups for over a decade, and we're here to share the real, unfiltered journey with you. Join us for insights and candid conversations about integrating love, family, and entrepreneurship. This is Married to the Startup, where every day is a new adventure.

And we are back for episode 39. 40. We are, we're almost at 40. Wow. All right, we are going to jump right in. I would say maybe two weeks ago, I created a post on Instagram and it just highlighted a bunch of my wellness habits that I do either on a weekly or quarterly, whatever basis. The one habit that

We're back.

George McKenzie (01:10.976)

almost.

Alicia McKenzie (01:32.792)

people just went crazy for was the peptide injections. So I alluded to the fact that I do daily peptide injections and I usually I go into my love handles because that's the fattiest part of my body. Yeah, it is. That's why they're called love handles. Whatever. Okay. But that is that is where a lot of my fat lies. So I do injections into those. But let's let's take it back.

You have none.

Alicia McKenzie (02:01.866)

a little bit. Rewind. Let's rewind it. Because I have been pregnant or breastfeeding for the last 15 years. And when I weaned the baby, we knew that that was it, right? Like no more kids. Baby factory closed. You went and got your little thing done. I went and got my little thing done.

had a vasectomy, it's a big thing, it's not a little thing.

Yes, dear. He went and got a vasectomy to ensure that no more Mackenzie's would be added to the mix, both figuratively and literally. So once we closed that chapter, I decided that I really wanted to turn my focus on just longevity and making sure that I'm healthy and making sure that I just feel good in my skin because after not having that autonomy over my body for that long,

Yes, exactly.

Alicia McKenzie (02:55.17)

It was very much like, okay, I'm going to do this. So I went and I got my abdominoplasty, which is where they sew my abs back together. They fixed a hernia in my belly button. I also got my boobs done because breastfeeding five kids was just not nice to me. And then we really started experimenting in other forms of biohacking. So think peptide shots, IVs, all sorts of things, supplements, you name it. I've probably tried it. But the peptides are really interesting because

A peptide is basically an amino acid that is 40 amino acids or less. It's either 40 or 50. I think it's 50. So in order to be considered a peptide, you have to have 50 or less amino acids in that branched chain. The two peptides that I am currently on are TB500 and BPC157. Another name for that is pentadecapeptide. So there's 15.

branch chains in that for 15 amino acids in that peptide.

Wow. It sounds like a cross between the TB-12 and TB-12 on...

I mean, I'm sure Brady's on that too. Exactly. Right? Like he's probably on all of it. Has been. no, you know what? Actually, as an athlete, you're not allowed to use any of this shit.

George McKenzie (04:06.23)

or has been at some.

George McKenzie (04:12.718)

Well, Violates some of the-

Which, yeah, it violates some of the... PEDs. But is it really, I mean, I guess yes, it's form it's enhancing, but your body already has it, right? It's made from sources that are already in your body, right? Like pentadecapeptide is found in gastric fluid. So they just took that, they compounded it and they made it an injectable form. Right. Right. And the whole...

for performance enhancing.

George McKenzie (04:39.598)

There's an HTH and steroids kind of similar to what your body already produces.

Does it though? Yeah. For all steroids?

I think most of them, it's just not, you don't produce it at those levels, naturally.

Yeah, I wonder if you tested your BPC levels. No idea.

I imagine if they have banned substance they probably have a way to test for it. Maybe. We'll see.

Alicia McKenzie (05:01.73)

Bet you they don't. Which is, who was it? Was it Huberman or Asprey? They went on a whole rant, like wanting to create his own league for performance in

League of extraordinary gentlemen. That was that movie. It's us now, but yeah, creating a league where, you know, no holds barred, take all the injectables you want and let's see how far we can push the human body. Yeah. That'd be an interesting, I'm sure there's tons of liabilities there because people would get roided out.

Yeah.

Was it?

Alicia McKenzie (05:33.294)

I don't agree with the steroids. I feel like they don't fall on the same line. And I could go either way on that one. Yeah. All right. I could go either way. Where's the line? So I'm currently on BPC 157 myself, and then I'm also on TB 500. And the reason why I chose those two peptides is because they're geared towards recovery. I put my body through hell. I do a ton of tonas, I lift weights.

Morbaleish.ch

Alicia McKenzie (06:00.238)

I'm growing a company, I'm trying to run around with these kids. I just ask a lot of my body and I want to make sure that I'm recovering properly. So I'll just give you an example. I played tennis maybe a couple of weeks ago and I like tweaked my knee a little bit and it just, it felt like it was off. It wasn't enough to get me to stop, but I took a BPC injection and I literally put it right in my knee. And the next morning it felt like nothing had happened.

And I do not think that would be the case if I was not on these injectables. Right? So it helps with joint recovery. It helps with inflammation support, like all these amazing things that really support me and living the life that I want to live. And it's noticeable, like hands down noticeable. So my cycle is five days on, two days off, but then you're on a different sort of cocktail.

Yes, similar schedule to five days on two days off. So what I started based on your recommendation and the doctors was Tessa Morellen, right? So I think part of my journey is similar to yours is I'm getting older. I'm 10 years older than you. So, you know, having young children and want to be in a, want to be around when they're, you know, adults and even into middle age, which means I have to extend my lifespan to make sure that I can be my health span.

So that I can be actively engaged as a parent and then hopefully one day a grandparent. So that's kind of how I looked at it and trying to figure out, okay, what are the ways I can optimize my health? And when we had Greg on a while back, it really hit with me of, know, got to be the CEO of your own body and set out, you know, what your strategy is and what your key performance indicators, what are you, what are you trying to achieve? And if it's a longer health span than all right, what are the

things you need to measure and then what do you, what strategies are you putting in place to do that? So peptides is obviously one of them. I'm also stacking the tessameralin with vitamins, which is just like, I think vitamin D, I'm doing vitamin D drops. I'm doing taurine, which is, you know, helps with energy and creatine and protein basically. So the tessameralin is supposed to be a kind of a mild like a growth hormone. And you can go, you know, more details about it than I do. So.

George McKenzie (08:18.112)

It has been used in FDA approved studies, but mostly for HIV patients, which helps them to maintain muscle mass and also lose visceral fat, is, you know, as an older gentleman, know, visceral fat can be a killer. So those are the things that, you you try to focus on eating healthy. But for me, it was less about, you know, the losing energy and it's more about the potential for improved cognitive sharpness and then also maintaining and growing muscle mass as I'm getting older, which is harder and harder to do.

Yeah, so we're about six weeks into this current cycle, wouldn't you say? Three weeks. Has it only? So we've talked about this, that I wear the Oura Ring, so does George. Our daughter wears the Woot Band, so we're both, we're big advocates of wearable devices where you can get the data on how you're sleeping, how you're recovering. But since we started this cycle, my recovery has shot through the roof.

No, three weeks. weeks. It's only been three weeks.

Alicia McKenzie (09:14.602)

it's been noticeable. would say my scores are in like the 90s for both sleep and recovery, which isn't heard of for me. mean, granted we're in the summer now, but before this week, my recovery was really, really good. And I say before this week because once I get into the second half of my cycle,

Dan-dan, dan-dan, dan-dan.

No, it's really, it's unfair. It's unfair how my aura ring penalizes me for being a woman, right? Like my scores just suck ass.

think your scores are your scores. The female body punishes you. It's not the scores and the

No, it's the scores because I really wish that there were some form of toggle button because it's telling me that my recovery is in the 60s solely based on my body temperature and my heart rate, which naturally increase the second half of your cycle because your body is preparing for pregnancy. And then once your body figures out that you're not pregnant, you go back to that homeostasis. Right? So it's my ring is telling me that my recovery is shit, even though it's not.

Alicia McKenzie (10:24.908)

And it's really frustrating. Like, why am I in the 60s? Because I'm two days out from my period. Like, I want to write a strongly worded letter to Auraring because it's not fair.

Okay, duly noted.

Anyways, moving on. Like, yes, but I would say the last three weeks, like it's been noticeable on how you feel.

Yeah, no, feel, definitely have a lot more energy and I feel better just in general.

Which when our peptide guy told me about the visceral fat, that actually didn't even dawn on me that that was plus size.

George McKenzie (10:57.762)

Yeah, I'm probably the worst at these because I should have probably done before pictures and or measurements. I don't normally do that. just, yeah, no, I'm gauging on how I feel.

I know it's definitely noticeable. Like you're starting to have abs again, but you're not like you haven't changed much. Right? Like I feel like you're still eating the same, which you didn't. It's not like you ate poorly.

Yeah.

George McKenzie (11:18.574)

I'm I'm older and I'm probably not burning as many calories as I'm used to.

But it's also summer. way more. It is. That is correct. We get kind of sloth like when it's cold.

I am more active in the summer.

George McKenzie (11:30.466)

Yeah, I just don't want to go outside. But yeah, think, I mean, the vitamins and I've, I've, yeah, a little pat on my back. Been pretty good at maintaining the, consistency of taking them at night. even on nights when I have a drink or two, I'll still make sure I take them.

Didn't you send me recently an article about rapamycin and how they did, what was it, a 40-month study?

Yeah. Is it 40 I think, I can't remember. But yeah, no, it was a study that... Yeah, I think it was singing the praises of rapamite.

Yeah, so we before the current peptides that were on we did a cycle of rapamycin and then you did a full cycle of trisapatide. Correct. And you didn't like the trisapatide. No. I didn't like the trisaposide. It made me very nauseous.

Yeah, it wasn't the sickness for me is I was micro dosing and I felt like I was eating a ton. I'm trying to compensate by making sure I ate enough and I was still losing weight, which is what it's supposed to do. So I was like, all right. I mean, I was taking it not for the weight loss benefits, but for the cognitive benefits. yeah, at my age, I want to maintain muscle mass, not lose it.

Alicia McKenzie (12:35.502)

And I would say for frame of reference, the starting dose of rapamycin is 0.25. We were taking 0.10. Yes. So you were less than half the starting dose and you still had those side effects. There are studies that trisipatitis is really good for inflammation in the body, which is why we had considered microdosing. I don't think you were trying to lose weight. I'm definitely not trying to lose weight because I don't have it to lose.

Yep, and we were doing it once a week.

Alicia McKenzie (13:05.164)

but the effects are supposed to be really, really good. Rappamycin, I think, worked really well for us, but it's better in a cycle. You don't just stay on it forever. I think we did 12-week cycle, and then we cycled off, and then we'll probably start back up in the fall.

But again, it's, I think the study validated it's microdosing. And I think that's kind of been our strategy with everything. And I know that some other people have had some different reactions with the rapamycin. And when you compare that to least our anecdotal evidence is that that they were really amping up the rapamycin. Yeah, he really took a ton versus like.

Yeah, Brian.

George McKenzie (13:47.768)

the very little and I think the microdosing is what that study kind of validates.

Yeah, you're not taking 10 milligrams a day or a week or whatever stupid shit he was doing. Why is he so extreme?

Well, I mean, he's just the guinea pig for all of us. We get to see how he reacts without having to do it ourselves.

So extreme. But we had Amory Kibler on last week. And I just think the importance of founders taking care of themselves, just it can't go without happening, right? Like you're in charge of running a company, you're in charge of your family. You can't ignore your health. And when you do, bad things happen.

Yeah. And I think that what she was saying and with Greg earlier, the, the CEO of your body. I think that's, that was such a great hit for me anyway. And entrepreneurs, a lot of times if you were, you you you're the CEO of the company and your company was running, you know, redlining a hundred percent of the time and you were not looking at any KPIs, you were not measuring anything. You were just running. Like that wouldn't be an effective strategy for running a company. So, you know, why would you do that?

George McKenzie (14:55.17)

to your own body where you would just be so driven by the company and work burning candles at both ends, not really eating, not really exercising, not really looking at any measurables to see if you have any indicators that you're failing or succeeding and then just hope it works out in the end. Like I'm fairly certain no entrepreneur would run a company that way. So why are you running your life that way in terms of your

Which is essentially what general medicine is telling us, right? All you need to do is go see a doctor.

Run some basic tests. Do a BMI.

which BMI is bullshit. And then go to your eye doctor once a year and then maybe check your hearing, but probably not, who cares, right? Like you should really be looking at these data points more often so you can be proactive and not reactive. But moving on to where do I source my peptides from? That was such a big question. And I just want to say that I started

with a nurse practitioner, right? So she is who I go to. I go to a little wellness clinic that's in Gaithersburg and I get my blood work done and I pay out of pocket for it. It's not that expensive. If you can afford a new fucking iPhone a year, you can go get your damn blood work done. But I pay for it out of pocket. And then when that blood work comes in,

Alicia McKenzie (16:12.736)

She sits with me, we look over all of the results and then I will choose my peptides and I will choose my IVs based off of what that blood work says. And then they will order all my peptides and they will have it shipped to my house. So it's not me going online and trying to find a reputable peptide dealer. Like I'm not going to order my peptides online. I'm sure some people do and they've probably had good success, but that is not me. I would recommend going into Reddit and starting to read those threads and finding...

where to buy your peptides from, that's my suggestion is find a wellness clinic or a functional health clinic in your area.

Yeah, I definitely agree. I think you shouldn't take legal or medical advice from Reddit. And I don't think that you should be buying stuff off the internet, you know, hoping that you're going to inject it in your body and things are going to work out. Yeah. Right. And go talk to a licensed professional and go to a wellness clinic where that's their specialty. Right. You wouldn't, yeah. I'm a huge advocate for don't inject anything in your body that you don't have from a reputable source. And you talk to someone.

that you understand the ramifications of it on your body. Right? That you know what normal looks like in terms of your blood work and how you feel. And then you have something prescribed to you to address deficiencies that are in the numbers, that are in your blood work, that are in how you describe your day.

Yeah. And also it's really important to just make a note that peptides are not a miracle cure, right? Like they're not going to fix any of your problems. Like we're still doing the work. We're still focusing on how much we're sleeping. We're still focusing on movement, quality nutrients, right? Like it's not, okay, I'm going to inject a peptide and everything is going to be great. I'm going to hit my goal weight and all this other. Absolutely.

George McKenzie (18:04.046)

It's part of a stack of habits that you have to do to maintain a healthy health span. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's the fallacy of a lot of things like steroids, HGH, all that stuff. You can't just take a pill and it works. You still have to work out. And it really helps with you becoming feeling better in the gym. Like, I know when you get low on testosterone or you don't have some of the other things as you get older as a man, they act, wanting to go work out.

Yeah, quality of life.

George McKenzie (18:32.654)

And having the motivation to push through when it gets hard, right? And then also having the motivation to continue to work out when you're sore, right? That those are the things that are hard, but they're also muscle building and then making sure you eat enough so the muscles can actually repair. So having peptides, which are, you know, can give you that little bit of help where, hey, it doesn't hurt quite as bad. And hey, maybe I have a little more motivation today to get over the hump, which helps you, you know, do the work.

to maintain that healthy body and healthy lifespan.

I also want to say that your biceps

thank you.

Curls for the girl.

Alicia McKenzie (19:15.64)

Moving on, let's talk about the rise of the solopreneur because I feel like we're going to start seeing this more and more. And the fact that there was a six month old company that was founded by a single person and was sold for $18 million to Wix in cash.

in cash. Yeah, no, I think that is

That's such a quick turn.

Yeah, it's the beginning of something, right? think it's probably he's one of X to the nth power of people that are doing it now. Yeah. And it's, you know, we talked about this before, how AI is lowering the barrier to entry in a lot of these things. And I think he's proof of that, that, you know, at the end of the day, it wasn't a one person company. He had several, I think it was five or six people in the company. So it wasn't, still wasn't huge. No. But how you can leverage AI to help you build products and

build companies quickly without the need of maybe even getting, you know, pre-seed rounds that you can get something from concept to beta or alpha in a couple of weeks with AI and decoding gets better quarter over quarter. the AI's ability to help you code is getting, you know, exponentially better quarter over quarter. Yeah. And, you know, he built something that was extremely profitable because, you know, it was really just

George McKenzie (20:35.67)

SaaS and a couple of people and he got a bunch of subscribers. I mean, he can't exactly replicate his model, but I think it's just proof that, you know, I think everyone feels that it's only a matter of time until you get the first, what are they calling it? Solo unicorns where it's a, you know, a one person company worth a billion dollars.

But let's look at the specifics. right. So Base 44 as the name of the company was founded by an Israeli developer and it was acquired on June 18th. So that means that January of 2025, this guy started a new company and then six months later it's sold.

Yeah. it was, but he had, I mean, it went crazy. 10,000 users in the first three weeks. 250,000 users in six months. So I could see why someone was buying that rocket ship, right? It's just the, the rate at which it was acquiring new users was astronomical and the margins, the profit margin was incredible. So, but it's just a proof that, you know, the barrier to entry of sitting around

And thinking about something and higher and storyboarding and wireframing and creating, you know, kind of a, you know, user stories and then going to a developer in development shop and then having them develop it over three to six months and store, you know, and going back and forth. It's just those days I think are behind us where you're going to have the idea and you just need to be the skillset required is less coding, more product manager where you need to see the big picture, be able to articulate.

via user prompts, what it is you're trying to achieve full stack from database to user to UX and being able to articulate that in chat prompts to generate the code and then work through the code and the bugs with an AI assistant. And it's just getting faster and faster at doing it. I'm not saying you don't need to have technical jobs, but sitting around being able to code in whatever the new language is.

George McKenzie (22:37.486)

is not 100 % going to be required now and you can get up to speed faster and get something prototyped and built out rather quickly. So what cloud did for, you know, being able to grow an infrastructure and stay evergreen, right? Where you used to be able to, you'd have to buy servers, you'd have to get the server shipped. get rack stacked and installed, powered, burn in, get, you know, wired up and connected. And then you deploy the application and boom, you do all those things. that, you know, cycle time from

You know, the logistics of it is was weeks to months. Now you just log into AWS Azure GCP and you spin up a server in seconds and then you configure it to dynamically scale and microseconds. It's just that kind of speed I think is going to come to app development. So the days I think low code, no code has kind of almost gotten blown away before it even reached a crescendo.

Yeah, yeah, and low code, no code was still, it wasn't user friendly, or like it wasn't.

Yeah, you still had the big platforms that offered it like Appian's and some of these and you still needed pro services hours or companies that's best that really had a specialty in building out apps on that platform. Yeah. And now you look at, think the market is moving to if you have data structured or unstructured in a way in which you can format that data into one warehouse. And even there's now AI agents that can help kind of

create the taxonomy and structure the data on the fly, that you build the cost to build an app on top of that data to do something with it is negligible and you can do it in a couple days, weeks, hours. it's just going to be that as long as the data is there and it's consumable, can write and to the, can exponentially continue to.

George McKenzie (24:29.176)

create apps and they can be birthed and killed in the same six months because the cost is so low that you build it. that didn't really work. It works for six months. Boom. I built another one. Power that one down. Who cares? The data is still in the warehouse. The app on top of it doesn't really matter. I'm just manipulating data that I'm pulling in.

Yeah, so this guy, so they're saying he was a solopreneur. I mean, he had a small team, right?

But yeah, small team, but you don't need those giant dev shops anymore.

And I will say that I've noticed this. So we're actually going through a building phase in my other company. And when it comes to just designs that we needed, we were working with a designer who was creating them and they all sucked. And I put into ChatGBT what I wanted it to look like and it spit out a perfect prototype of what I wanted it to be. She took that.

sent it back to the designer. She added a couple of like icons and whatever to it. But at the end of the day, I don't think I needed her.

George McKenzie (25:29.356)

Yeah, mean, brainstorming and iterating now is seconds. imagine what you did, right? You went back and forth. They sent you 10 ones to look at. You look at the 10, you make recommendations, comments, you mark it up, you send it back. Then they do another round of iterations, send it back to you. And all those back and forths and iterations are, you know, five prompts.

That's five prompts and less than three weeks because that's what it took to get this thing designed. Yeah. It's crazy. I'm seeing it in multiple different areas of business development.

30 seconds.

George McKenzie (26:03.63)

Yeah, but just, yeah, back to the Space 44, like him being able to create that coding to build websites that Wix wanted and eight employees and they will share about 25 million in retention bonuses amongst those eight. Yeah, that's awesome.

Which is so cool. That's awesome. I feel like you're going to start seeing a lot more of these for ambitious people, right? Like we know a guy who is just so ambitious and if you tell him what to do, like he will get it fucking done. And he's not an anomaly. Like there's a of people out there like that and now they have chat GPT.

Yeah, and if you know what you want to build, if it's a SaaS platform, just make it this way. But it could be a lot of different things that AI could help with. just say for this instance, if you need a code to write some SaaS, you could do it in the weekend if you know exactly what you want it to do. And you get something up and running really, really quickly. can understand if you have product market fit, you can get kind of

users on the platform soliciting feedback and see if you have something really, really quickly without having to go raise a pre-seed round or what have you and burn through cash.

Okay, so for anybody listening, they have an idea, list your tools. Because I know that I use three different platforms for forms of AI, but what are your go-tos if you want to build something?

George McKenzie (27:32.142)

Yeah, I think AI is better at certain things. Like, Cloud is great for app developments, what most people, think, looking at it. there's, know, chat GPT is great for marketing, creating iconography, or just general QA type stuff. then, yeah, I think that goes from, goes down the list from there, but they all have purposes and you should compare them against each other. They produce different outputs.

and some are better than others, then you can also take an output from one and feed it to the other to iterate on again. Sorry, our son is blasting and I hear it.

Yeah, but I don't think I can hear it. He is like hardcore rocking out to lose yourself right now. Bless his little heart. Gotta love summertime. But yeah, just think that was a really cool story to run across.

Yes, yes, yes.

George McKenzie (28:28.994)

Yeah, it's the first one I've seen, but I'm sure there's going to be plenty more.

Yeah, yeah. mean, no more 15 years to build a SaaS company and sell it.

Yeah, I don't, and yeah, it's, it, mean, even for the companies that are buying these companies, it's a great, I think it's a great ecosystem where you don't have to spend tens to hundreds of millions in R and D every year for certain features or certain things. The market will produce something really quickly now because of this. And you can say, Hey, that's the feature I would like. And this is something that already has a user base already has something going for it. It's developed, it works. I'll just buy it, snap it into my portfolio.

versus I'm gonna spend hundreds of millions in R &D, make four bets, see what happens.

To the founder's credit, he saw the market and he saw a product that it needed and he freaking built it.

George McKenzie (29:21.506)

Yep. And then it resonated with someone who said, Hey, I want that. Right.

use that. Wix saw it and was like, we need that. Let's go ahead and buy it.

Yeah, exactly. We've been trying to make app development, web app, web page development, or home page website development easier and easier for people because we want to sell domains and the platform in which they build websites. Yeah. And if I can now have this AI plugin that anybody could build one with, they don't need coding experience, they just use a chatbot interface to create your website, this will increase my customer base.

Yeah, was my one complaint about Wix. Like, it's fucking not easy.

Yeah, but that's why they bought this to make it easier. I think everyone's going to, you'll go out in the market and instead of having tons of R and D spend, you'll just find things that help your business and people will spin them up all over the place and you just buy it. Buy versus build.

Alicia McKenzie (30:11.862)

Yep. Yep. So if you have a great idea, get on it. You could potentially sell it in six months for $80 million. All right. Moving on. Final topic for today. talk about your favorite

Yes you could.

George McKenzie (30:22.744)

Yes. No, this was a private. This was a great email by one of our friends. Yeah. And he has a podcast and runs a company and he, he kind of broached the subject that, you know, RP backed companies well run. Like, and he, he, he put a lot of one liners in, which I think is great. And to, his credit, I think he tried to educate on the past, like private equity came about, you know, early in the.

Let's say 80s, 90s, and it was around, there's lots of poorly run public and private companies. And if we were to buy those companies, merge them together, see a bigger picture, and then be ruthless with efficiency and drive higher profits. So it's kind of think about Gordon Gekko and greed. I'm going to buy this company. I'm going to rip it apart. It's worth more in parts than it is together. Like those types of people were out there. And if you looked at a private equity,

company at that point, they were like that, just ruthless. They would come in ruthlessly, operate grind efficiencies, know, grow EBITDA, grow the business and make it lean, mean, and then it would become more valuable through that transformation.

you say it was a fighting machine?

Yes, a lean, lean fighting machine. But, you know, think nowadays I'm not sure that's the case anymore. And that was one of the things he was, he was broaching that in his kind of off the cuff comment and kind of look at the marketplaces, Hey, are PE backed companies like the worst runs now? Because if you look at, I mean, there are exceptions to everything. So this is kind of not click baity or.

Alicia McKenzie (32:03.606)

I mean, full transparency. We know people that are the heads of private equity companies, right? So we're not trying to talk shit about anybody's company. We're just...

Yes.

George McKenzie (32:13.842)

No, I think there's a lot of them that are, it depends on how they operate, right? And I think that with success in that industry, there was a ton of entry into that industry where everybody became a private equity fund. were popping up, especially in this area, tons popping up, like every name your aspirational quote, private equity group. And they would raise a fund from people and then they would try to buy a company and, you know.

Some of them have never actually run a company before. They were just money guys that worked somewhere else and decided to raise a fund and were successful in raising a fund, bought a company and then, then what? And I think that what he had postured is, know, I think companies nowadays are probably better run in the beginning. I mean, I'm sure there's still a lot of poorly run companies with a lot of bloat, what have you. But if you see in the private equity space today, I think there's a fallacy that, Hey, I'm going to buy these.

five small companies and I'm going to roll them together and there's going to be a lot of cost synergies that come out in the beginning when in fact, most of the small companies are run exceptionally lean, right? That there's not bloat, there's not overhead. And then when you create these five companies that have private equity backed boards, that you end up wasting more money, you know, doing all these PowerPoints and Excels and getting everything in formats they understand and...

You you're having to hire an FP &A person, you have to hire a CFO, you have to have a finance lead, you got to have this lead, you got to have that lead. All to create documents that, you know, get read by no one. And then you are less time running and operating a business and more time doing a meeting once a week, doing a call once a week and explaining to someone who's not in your business day in and day out what's happening.

Okay. So let's pause for a sec. You recently, I feel like it's not even recently, it's been a few years. So you went through a private equity event. Yes. Did it meet your expectations of what you thought private equity was going to do? Well, I mean, I know that because I'm married to you, dear. Yes. And I hear about it all the time. Yeah. But in your mind, we were still in the era of...

George McKenzie (34:21.323)

No, obviously.

Alicia McKenzie (34:32.472)

private equity is going to come in, it's going to build this company by merging four of them together and you're going to run efficiently and you're going to exit in let's just say 36 months, right? That was what you had thought was going to happen. You still thought we were in that era. When do you think that shift happened in private equity?

No, I still think most private equities have that operating thesis. think that some of the issues come into play where it's a flawed strategy or thesis. And, you know, my advice to private equity is that if you have an operating thesis that you're running on and be at, I'm going to take the inefficiencies out when I roll these companies up, or there's going to be cross-sell synergy, or by putting these together, we're mitigating risk in the marketplace because we've done

you know, more customer distribution, the revenue is not concentrated in a certain customer base because of this acquisition, which makes the aggregate more valuable. Whatever it is, is to be transparent with that thesis to your operators. Like if they don't under, if you're, you're both not playing the same game, then it's not going to work out. And I think understanding less about the exit, but more about, okay, what is the goal here?

And the goal is we want a 5X, 10X, whatever it's going to be. Okay. How do we get to that goal? The goal to get there, it's going to be an investment period of X, right? And then, you know, we have KPIs and lag and lead indicators around, are we successful on this journey together? And measuring those and then working as a team to figure out how we change the strategy or augment it. But it can't be, you know, let me go week by week and see, is this working? And if it doesn't work within two weeks, what are we doing to fix it? How are we going to shift?

We need to cut and you can't grow and cut at the same time. It's, you know, it's a very challenging environment. And I think that understanding a goal at the beginning and making sure everyone's aligned and there's no ulterior motives or undefined objectives that life would be a lot easier. And I think that maybe some of these PE firms may have the fallacy of the 80s, 90s where I'm going to buy these companies and be ruthlessly efficient and grind out profit when

George McKenzie (36:48.066)

the company you bought was more efficient than what you created when you merged everything. I think, but then, you know, to his point too, it's like, it's really interesting that how the most likely buyer of a PE backed company is another PE backed company. if the private equity marketplaces around efficiencies and economies of scale, how does one private equity company that's run by a very reputable private equity firm getting bought by another private equity company.

How are they going to make it better, different? What have you? Maybe they scale it better because they can combine it with another asset, but it just seems interesting if you look at it on its face of if I'm a private equity company Z and my stick is I've made a lot of money selling companies that I've bought because I buy them. I empower the operators and I'm ruthlessly efficient with expense.

And I grow revenue top line and I grow EBITDA because of this ruthless efficiency playbook I have. And I sell it to company Y and private equity company Y operating thesis is basically the same. How are they going to derive exponential, you know, three, five X profit on the sale of this company? How are they going to grow the enterprise value of this company three to five X if I'm buying it from Y who already has that exact same operating model?

Yeah. What am I going to do at Z? I mean, what am I going to do at Z if I bought, why if I bought it from Z? What am I going to do to grow it? Is it just five years of, you know, watering and care and feeding and it's going to grow? Three X? Yes. Or I combine it with other things, maybe have a bigger, and my guess is I am at the end of my holding period for my PE fund, right? And there's ways to hold longer, but let's just say make life easy. You know, I need to return some capital to my LPs, so.

I'm going to sell it. And then there's another fund that's just starting that needs to buy something to make the 2 % on the fund that they raised. So they'll buy it, take it off the hands so that the private equity company Z gets the win and gets to return money to LPs. Private equity company Y gets to deploy capital and make that 2 % It's a shell game basically.

Alicia McKenzie (39:04.012)

You're making my head hurt. I know.

and who's left holding the potato.

don't know. How did we go from potatoes to shells back to potato? Hot potato? Ooh, I like it. Anyway, company Y and Z. I should have used better names. Because I even confused myself. Well, it was. Probably doesn't make any sense. Maybe. Anywho, it was a it was a great email.

Have a one.

Alicia McKenzie (39:21.806)

You should have. Oh, It was a lot.

It does. Still gave me a headache.

Alicia McKenzie (39:35.918)

Thank you.

I love it. I agreed wholeheartedly.

He sends some of the best emails and it's full of chat GPT graphics. It's so awesome. Yeah. Good thought provoking. But the fact that you experienced it and almost forgot that you did, it's like giving birth where you don't actually remember the pain of what happened. You just kind of gloss over.

Very pokey though, I love it.

George McKenzie (40:03.33)

Yeah, that's why babies are cute. If the women, if women remembered the agony of childbirth, then there wouldn't be any more humans. But I think the pain goes, yeah, that pain, there's no way that you remember to the degree of which it was because you wouldn't do it again. So I'm fairly certain that the body, human, the female body goes, hey, we're going to ignore that, compartmentalize it and push it. Yeah.

don't remember it, I just don't remember the feeling.

Alicia McKenzie (40:30.222)

We're going to data dump it.

It was painful. experienced it. Now we moved on. Be happy for the baby. Let's do it. McKenzie factory back open for business. I am out.

It was great. I'd do it again tomorrow.

Alicia McKenzie (40:40.798)

And we're done.

Alicia McKenzie (40:46.882)

Thank you for tuning in to Mary to the Startup. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please take a moment to like, rate, and subscribe to our podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and keeps the conversation going. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, drop me a message. I love hearing from you guys. Until next time. George out.