In that moment, 10 o'clock at night, the spirit of God rested in my office and was so clear. He said, pay attention. This is it.
You know, Joanne is writing about the boys that are selling the lemonade down the the corner. Exactly. And they do it every Saturday morning. That is just the goal.
How am I supposed to start a new business, still take care of four children and a wife staying at home to take care of them and survive?
That's hard to do, bro,
in the moment. Did you know that or did it take years of reflection to be like, oh yeah, that was the day my life changed. From South Bend to Evansville and everywhere in between. This is Get IN, the show focused on the Hoosier State and the incredible stories happening here today.
I'm Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana, and I will be your host for today's conversation. GetIndiana.com is your one-stop shop for everything Indiana. From festival and event guides, to blog posts covering hidden gems, local businesses, small towns, and more. Check it out and learn something new about the Hoosier State@getindiana.com.
And don't forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter right there at the top. My guest today is Earl Seals and he is the co-founder of The N2 Company. A fast growing media and marketing brand that connects businesses with neighborhoods across the United States. Under his leadership, N two has grown into a family of print publications that includes stroll, BeLocal, salute, Uniquely You, Greet and Real Producers.
Today we're gonna be talking about Earl's journey from East Tennessee to Chicago and eventually Indianapolis. We're gonna talk about the journey building and scaling The N2 Company and how they have been able to scale that company with purpose. Earl, welcome to the show.
Thank you,
man. So this all starts, we gotta give, give some roses to my guy, hunter Beal.
Yeah.
And, uh, both Scott and Tyler Lingle. Yeah. They were in my ears saying, man, you've got to hear Earl's story. It's an incredible story of resilience, persistence, and entrepreneurship. And uh, and as you would say. God's grace. Right,
right.
Totally. Uh, this journey starts in a small town in east Tennessee.
Yeah. Uh, what was your hometown?
It was actually Morristown, Tennessee, which is just outside of Gatlinburg. Yeah. Between Gatlinburg, Johnson City, Knoxville. So,
yeah. And like growing up, did, was entrepreneurship on your radar? Did you know you were gonna be an entrepreneur one day down the road? Just forced, forced,
forced, which was poor growing up.
A very poor background. And mom and dad saying, if you want, if you want money, you have to go get it.
Is this like, would this be like Appalachia?
Yeah, total Appalachia.
Like this is like, oh yeah, yeah. You know, Dolly Parton talks about it, you know, Dolly Parton.
Absolutely. So
like, give us a, an insight into, when you say poor, what does that mean?
In East Tennessee,
um, well's see was, that would be back in the eighties. My dad was originally just working at a chicken factory. My mom was a stay at home mom.
Yeah.
So when you're packing meat, that's not very wealthy. And then he, uh, went into the National Guard and started working on the weekends in the National Guard.
And then became civil service working on Apache helicopters, um, as time progressed. So, you know, you got three kids? Three kids. Mom and dad, only dad working.
Where were you at in the mixture of three kids. Middle. You're in the middle child,
older brother, younger sister,
yeah. Okay. Older brother, younger sister, and one parent income.
Yeah.
And was like the idea that you would grow up and go to college? No. Like what was the plan?
I was the first person that ever went to college in our family.
No way.
So there was no plan. The plan, uh, we were loved exceptionally well. Um, but you asked about, it was entrepreneurialism in our, in our, in us.
It wasn't, it was, it was real simple. We grew up on a farm. You chop tobacco, you, uh, put up hay, you milk cows for the neighbor. Uh, and you don't have any options. If you want something more than just survival, you have to go find a way. So it was very normal to work two or three jobs. You know, very normal to sell jewelry on the street corner.
I mean, whatever you had to do to survive,
what was the first way you made a dollar?
Well, that would probably have to be mowing yards. Yeah. You know, dad, I remember, it's amazing all these flashbacks. My dad saying, here's a gallon of gas and a lawnmower, which is a hundred dollars. We'll buy you a push lawnmower and you have to pay us back.
So once that, and so it was, we went around and knocked on doors.
You and your brother?
Yeah. Me and my brother knocked on doors. And, you know, I'm thinking about, um, the mowing of the Methodist church. You know, you get paid $20 in your hand pushing not the self propelled
Yeah.
With a mower for four hours straight, and you get $12 and you're like, oh, this is wonderful.
And you just, that's what you, that's how we started. Yeah. And then, and then I remember one of my, I was 16 and my teeth were insanely crooked. And my, I said, dad, I really need to get braces. He said, oh, you eat fine. You're not starving. And I said,
no, I really need it.
He said, I'll do what my dad did. Now he's talking about ignorance.
He knocked out his two front teeth playing sports. My dad did, or playing around anyway, nonetheless, probably not sports on the farm or something. And his dad, it was cheaper to get dentures at 16. So they pulled out all his teeth and gave him dentures at 16. And so for me, he was like, I'll do the same thing my dad did.
I'll give you denture, get you dentures, uh, you know it's less expensive. And I was said, nah, I don't wanna do that. So I bought my own braces.
How much for braces?
$3,000. Yeah. I was just telling my wife and some of my kids, the beauty of this,
a guy named Dr. Coffee.
I could say his name 'cause he's probably dead now, but I think about this.
Dr. Coffee I was dating, this girl went to him, she brought me in, he goes, yep, we'll put 'em on you. There was no parent involvement, there was nothing. And it was $50 a month. So I started buying baby calves from the neighbor at $50, which is a dairy farm. You buy the calves. And then I would raise 'em out a bottle and put 'em out into the pasture to eat.
And then I would sell 'em for about 200, $250 in profit. Six months later. And that's what I did to fund paying for my braces.
You were buying baby calves.
Yeah.
And raising them to pay for braces.
Right?
Like taking on $3,000 of debt as a 16-year-old is no joke.
Right?
Like that's, that's pretty intense. Um, so you started doing that.
What other things were you doing? How were, because I think today, like a lot of kids you'll see are really infatuated with like, oh, I want to, the hustle, the grind. I wanna make money. Yeah. But then when it comes to like the rubber meets the road, you gotta do stuff like, what were you doing?
My junior and senior year in high school, I would go into work at 11:00 PM and get off at 7:00 AM running the Exxon station.
So the
gas
station. The gas station, pumping gas. And my first car was a 68 Mustang. We pulled out of the junkyard.
Oh.
And you know, every redneck shows up at the Exxon at midnight and we had lifts and we put it up and take the transmission out and take the, the engine out and put a 3 0 2 in it and soup it up and all that type of stuff.
And so, you know, I was working the midnight shift. Then I would go to school and then I'd come home and milk the cows for the neighbor. 'cause he would pay me $20 in milking to milk the cows. And then I'd do my homework at night. And I did that for a few years. When
were you sleeping?
Well you just from about 3:00 AM till 7:00 AM because that's, nobody really comes in between three and seven.
So today I would never do it because I would sit there with a thousand, $2,000 in cash and someone would wake me up, I'd have it in my pocket and say, Hey, I need $20 in gas. And I would give 'em $10 to pump gas and then go back to sleep or do my homework. So it wasn't very busy from 11 till seven. So I could
But you had to have somebody there,
right?
Yeah. In case someone did. Wow.
Yeah. And I would sleep a lot in the evening. So you just milking cows are more in the fall and the spring. 'cause in the summer they don't get a lot of milk.
When you look back, do you look back and say, that was insane. Yeah. That a 16-year-old did that and like they're, even their parents allowed them to do that.
Yeah, it What's funny is that because me and my, my brother grew up with two other guys. Uh, Johnny Earl, Patrick, and Zachy, and we were the Stand by Me. It was exactly like the movie Best Friends. And we all did everything together. You know, we did Boy Scouts together, we worked at the Exxon station together.
Uh, we played sports together. It was a hundred percent US all together. I didn't play a lot of sports in school, but, you know, backyard football and all that type of stuff, we, you know, we're just best friends. There's no other way around it.
Yeah.
And so we worked together at the Exxon that was all a part of that.
And, uh, there was always something to do, you know, hauling hay or, you know, chopping tobacco in the summertime. So you just, so the answer is yes, across America. The reality is there's a lot of hardworking kids in rural areas that don't have any options, go to work or starve. Those are your options. Yeah.
How did you do in school? Like, did your grades suffer?
No, I'm dyslexic. Oh. So my brother, you know, you, those people that never study and get straight A's, that's what my brother was for me. I could study crazy and, and struggle to get a c. And so it just was never the gig. I mean, I never got a name in my life.
Yeah. So then when you were getting into your senior year time's rounding up, are you like, all right, I'm going to work at the chicken factory or I'm gonna go do, like, what, what were you gonna do? This is
where the, this is where transformation. I have to give all
glory to God.
That's just a reality because, you know, I said this once before on another interview.
I said, it's hard to hear the whisper of God when you're shouting what you want. And something drastically happened in my life. So my brother at the, he graduated his summer of his senior year, got cancer. And so
what kind of cancer?
Um, it wasn't, there was a cell structure. They didn't know what it was at the time.
I don't even know if we would know. Now they have to go back. That's a long time ago, 20 plus years ago. And, um, he looked like he was pregnant and he had a tumor attached to his liver. Half his liver, his diaphragm, part of his heart. They took it out and it's a di And it's interesting because my brother pro, that trauma forced him to ask a deeper question, does God exist or does he not?
All I know is this. It was AC/DC Def Leppard and partying under the bridge, uh, with a case of beer down by the lake. It was, that was our life prior. And then I saw my brother transformed. And I remember we had a old farmhouse and my brother and I lived up on the second floor in the attic area. We put some, put a stairs going up to it, and that was our, we had one conjoined room up there.
And I looked across and I saw him reading his Bible and I couldn't understand what happened. And for a couple years I couldn't figure that out. And then on Christmas night, 1988, I went to a church. A girlfriend brought me to a church, actually brought me to church. And uh, I saw a Christmas play. Now this is really weird.
The Christmas play without question was probably the worst, uh, in America. All I know is that the night before I'd had a dream. I got on a bus and. A guy got in there and was shooting everybody and I was on the back of the bus and I said, don't shoot me, don't shoot me. I don't wanna go to hell. And so anyway, I then go into Christmas night and I'm watching this play.
And then I had conviction of all of my wrongs.
Christmas, the 23rd of December, you go to sleep and you have this Dream
24th. 'cause it was Christmas Day.
Oh, the play was on Christmas Day. So Christmas Eve, while everyone's having dreams of, you know, Santa and candy. And
That's
interesting. Thought. You, you have a dream,
right?
That is not fun. Holiday related.
No, nothing.
This dream is that you're at the back of this bus. Yeah. And it's being shot up and you say, don't shoot me. I don't want to go to hell.
Yes. And so that's my dream. That was the day before then. Christmas, uh, night, it was on a Sunday. They have a play at church.
Girl invites me to go to church with her. She introduces me to the youth pastor, which is over here. And so, uh, I don't today because I did go to Bible college. I have a theological understanding of all this, but back then I didn. All I knew is I had a deep wrestling for all of my wrong in my heart. Yeah. I grabbed him and I went outside behind the glass, there's like 700 people there.
I went out behind the glass and I started telling him and rambling on and on, I didn't understand. And this had this dream. And he stopped and he said, wait, has there ever been a time you've given your life to Christ for the forgiveness of your sins? And I said, no. Until now, I didn't understand who Jesus was.
And so from that, um, he said, if you've never given your life to Christ, you've never truly been saved. And that's where I was under the illusion of, of really adoption or salvation. I believed in God, but I didn't, I had not submitted my life under his authority. And in that moment, I literally, my prayer was, I, when he said that, the veil from my fell from my eyes.
And I bowed down and I said, I am your slave. And I truly gave my life away. And I was transformed in that moment, truly transformed. So when people talk about the success. Uh, one of the things you didn't bring up was the chosen, how did you get involved in The Chosen, which is the TV series, everything from selling Cutco, which I guess we can go into, or going to Moody Bible Institute to selling Cutco to starting a company, to working in, in the film industry and all these different things.
Um, it has been 100% by the prompting and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Now, that's really weird to say, 'cause I know a lot of people that's very deep and a little bit freaky in saying that. You heard me say earlier, it's hard to hear God's whisper when we're shouting what we want. And so that salvation in my own, I wanna say the word ignorance, I'd say the word innocence.
I got to a position where I just, I got rid of what I wanted and what I really wanted, just what he wanted. Yeah. And that was, that was the transformation.
I think that, it's interesting because, you know, we have a lot of people on the show, whether they're business leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes, and some of them have a, a story about, uh, their relationship with God and their relationship with religion.
I don't know if I've heard as a specific, like I can pinpoint the day where my life changed. Yeah. You know, it's Christmas Day, 1988.
Yeah.
Like, I don't, I don't know if I've heard one that's so specific. Yeah. Interesting. In, in the, in the moment. Did you know that? Or did it take years of reflection to be like, oh yeah, that was the day my life changed.
No, it was because you grew up at a God culture.
Yeah.
And I grew up in a God culture because I believed in God. I thought that I was a child of God and I in essence wasn't. And I was just, I did. I wasn't, and it was about submission. It was about giving my life away. That's what true s is.
So then you have five more months, you know, may comes around Uhhuh after the end of the year and you're like
graduating high school.
Yeah.
1989 at that point. What are you
doing? Graduated in 1989. Gosh, you just can't even believe it, bro. I was milking cows and running a paper route, and so you could, Ima there was desperation in going to a community college.
Oh, so you, so then you did say, or some point Yes. That you made the decision that you were gonna be, you were gonna get some sort of, uh, postgraduate education.
I just lost, yeah. I mean, it was just like all of my, most of my friends were going off to college or off to the military, and here I am. Well, I guess college is the next step. It wasn't guidance from my parents, it was just like, okay, maybe that's the thing to do, but you're lost. You don't know what you're studying or why you're there.
You're just there In a community colleges
as a poor country kid from east Tennessee. What did you dream about? Like what did success look like for you?
My, my number one goal at the time because of my paper out went to the buy the Toyota factory, was, man, if I could work at the Toyota factory someday, that would be amazing.
Today, it's like kids all over the world, like they can see the MrBeast. They can see all these like crazy luxurious lifestyles that people live and they dream these elaborate dreams. And like in 1989, not that long ago, the dream was if I could just get a job at Toyota.
Right.
And I don't think this was, this was, you're not talking about like selling Toyotas or like working in corporate.
This is like, I could work on the line putting on hubcaps,
probably some kind of parts factory was I delivered my paper there.
Wow. So then you start going to community college.
Community college, and I'm in favor of things for the underprivileged, uh, helping them because I, I was one of those kids and. Had nothing.
What do you mean
by that?
I had, you know, I didn't have money. Yeah. And I got Pell Grants from the government that paid for my co community college. Yeah. And I remember what a big blessing that was. 'cause I didn't have money and so I went to community college, I studied the normal stuff. Everybody else studies
with that being freed you.
Yeah.
Did you take that for granted or did you understand that that was a huge, that could be something that helps change your life?
Nope. Didn't understand that it was gonna change my life. Um, might've taken it for granted. And what I mean by that, it was, it was free. Yes. It was actually, it was free. And I remember thinking very distinctly, wow, they're actually giving me more than I need for the college itself.
And I had extra money left over from it. Um, but I was, by then, I transitioned out of the Exxon and I was, uh, running a paper route from one until four and then milking cows from four until seven. And, and then going to school during normal hours. Yeah.
And so how long do you end up going to community college
year?
Uh, two years. Really. Two years,
okay. Yeah. You go two years there doing this paper route milking cows. Yeah. Community college. Yeah. Do you get your associate's degree?
Yeah. Uh, no. I got, no, because I skipped one semester, so one semester I was trying to figure out, 'cause I felt so lost.
Yeah.
You know, why am I here?
Why am I studying this? What am I doing?
What
were your peers doing? Um, that's, that was part of the trauma. So here it is, the fall of 90, my brother dies of cancer.
Okay. So two years after he's diagnosed with cancer. And you said he looks like he's pregnant?
He was probably diagnosed in 87, so he had it for four years.
So he, yeah, he's, he dies of cancer. All of my real friends, my best friends, um, Patrick, Zachy, and Johnny Earl. Zach died six months later of a car accident. Patrick left and went to the military. All the bros you have at high school that you're friends with, the biggest majority of them have went off to college of some sort somewhere doing something.
I'm pretty isolated. Girlfriend. Girlfriend and I break up. Parents are in trauma going through a divorce. Brother dies of cancer. My younger sister had gotten pregnant at 16 and had a, we called a shotgun marriage, went to the altar, got married real quick. She was gone. Just everything in my life was really dissolving and falling apart.
Your older brother, he's diagnosed with cancer.
Mm-hmm.
He changes his life.
Yeah.
And does, is that what you see through the extent of his journey? Like is his commitment to God and his relationship, uh, with the Lord, like, is that the same and con, continuous all the way through?
Yeah. That was one of the greatest blessings I had is that, um, my brother would literally come to me.
I remember him very distinctly turning off the Nintendo back in the day and say, Earl, and when I die. Don't be mad at God, this is God's will for my life. That many would come to him. He understood and he accepted that that was God's will. I wish I had time to read you the letter that he wrote that I Yeah.
Have from him. But he understood that as God's will and, and he discipled us in that way as he was going through the journey.
How powerful is that man? It's
crazy. Yeah.
Like, I mean he's a 19, 20-year-old kid. Yeah,
yeah. He was totally transformed.
That has the spiritual maturity. Right. And just general maturity to, you know, talk to you about like, 'cause you're gonna be angry and you're gonna be Yeah.
Like why am I losing my a role model? My best my friend? My best friend
friend. He was my best friend. Wow. So you see a really split between Patrick and Zach and Johnny Earl. When my brother died, I drew closer to the Lord because I knew God was I The amount of people that gave it life to Christ through my brother, through his testimony was tremendous.
And when Zachy died, Patrick was angry at God and ran from. For 20 years before he just said, it's not, I don't choose the day of my birth and I don't choose the day of my death. And so he submitted under God's sovereignty, not always knowing. And biblically, if you read the story of Ruth, you'll see Naomi, the book of Ruth, Naomi, her two children die and her husband dies.
And that's super confusing. But by the end of the book, he brings him back to Bethlehem, by which, uh, um, Naomi marries Boaz, by which that is the lineage of Christ. And I, when I read that, I remember for the first time and I understood the biblical lineage. I was like, I kind of took a gasp. I was like, oh, so Ruth, how much or how much must they have cried when they lost her two sons and then lost, uh, her husband?
And, and all the way through the book, she's saying, call me Mara, which is, I am bitter. And you know, why God are you having to let picking up scraps out in the field? It's a tremendous story. Had she known the end of the story, which was God was moving her, by which Naomi would meet Boaz, by which they would have a son, which was in the line of David, which was then goes on into Jesus' birth.
The tears would've been a lot less because she would understand the bigger story. So my brother under didn't need to know the answer. Why
did you understand?
No. Yeah, I didn't understand. I just accept my brother discipled me in a way that I accepted it.
Like I, I, so I lost my mom. I had just turned 20 and I think at first
yeah.
I was like, shot into this.
Yeah.
Poor me. Why? Like, this is so unfair. And then as I, you know, poured more into faith and everything.
Yeah.
Um, started to realize, you know, that God has this plan and, and then started to be able to not be bitter and like angry about that experience. Mm-hmm. But more. Grateful for the time and the lessons and, and like, I don't, I almost feel like holding that anger can also like taint your mm-hmm.
Memories and taint your experience with the one that you love that you lost.
Yeah.
Um, and so that's, I mean, to be young and lose your best friend is, is wild. And Yeah. And so then you end up, at some point in this story, you take a huge risk.
Yeah. You know, that's at the end. Um, and what I mean, not at the end, but at the end of that season, and here I am at the community college, I remember just walking through cow crap, milking cows every day and saying, God, what are you doing in my life?
And I was so, felt, so lost and so upset, and I just, on my knees, pouring my life out to the Lord, saying, God, show me what you want for my life. I can't do this anymore. And through a number of things, it'd be too long to speak on this podcast. Him very, very, very clearly, clearly say, I want you to go to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
And that's how I ended up leaving. East Tennessee and going to a different world. And that's a whole nother story.
Yeah. And you end up hopping on a, uh, driving a car. Driving, riding a bus. What do you, how do you get there?
Drive. Yeah, I drive.
You get in, do you sell?
Which is crazy.
I mean, how far was
Well, it's like 10 hours away.
But the bigger issue is I'd never been to a big city before in my life.
Not like, not Knoxville, not anywhere.
Well, Knoxville, yeah. Yeah. We went to Laurels Fair in 1987 or whatever it was. And that's not really a big city compared to
To Chicago. Chicago, yeah. I
mean, it's nothing. And you know, really being, basically the highest building I've been in was the Barn, second story.
And they, I get accepted, moody Bible Institute. Then they put me on the 16th floor of the dorm. The first thing I did is open the window and spit, you know, eight seconds to hit the ground. I'm like, woo, baby. We have
made
it. Yeah.
So you get up there to Moody Bible Institute. In Chicago and how quick does reality set in of like,
yeah,
I have to pay for,
that's
right, Chicago,
that's it.
Like, yeah, you don't, you don't get the 16th floor just for free, you know? No. Like how do you start, like, 'cause this is where your professional career really starts to take a change and you go from being the farm boy hustler that will do anything to becoming a real expert when it comes to things in the realm of sales.
Right? So if you remember I said earlier, just very, very quickly, I said, the cows don't give milk in the summer. So there was a little bit of a cyclical in the fall and the spring I'd worked for the farmer, farmer milking cows, but in the summer they dry up a little bit. So the $20 per milking, he couldn't pay me anymore.
So the fall and the spring of my senior, uh, the community college, the last year I was in the community college. Um, I was milking cows and delivering newspapers. But in the summer. I lost my cow milking job. So what's next? That's when I look in the newspaper and I see Cutco knives basically. And once again, we are weird stuff and I'm just telling you the prompting of the Holy Spirit just whispering, do this.
Let's do this. And I didn't wanna do it because it's a hard
group, which is crazy. Like, you know half the people that would say, like, if God is telling you to sell Cutco knives, like you might wanna check again and make
sure. Oh yeah, totally. I did check again. As a matter of fact, I went to the interview, I listened to the dude.
And I was like, I don't know man. I gotta go pray about this. And I went back home and I laid in bed. And, and that's how so often the wrestling with God between your will and his will will become conviction and the conviction to obey. And then you make a decision to, to obey or not. That's, and so I finally, I submit, I say, okay, God, I'll do it.
And I walk in with no skill, nothing and say, okay, God's told me to do this. I remember that's
what you say. Like
literally that's what I walked
in. God told me I gotta sell these knives.
So that's what I said. And so I literally then, uh, he said, do you have any money to buy the knives? And back then it was $125 to buy the knives.
And I had $150 in my checking account. And I remember writing that check. And what's crazy is he said to me, Hey, listen, you know, if this doesn't work out, you can just bring it back in a couple of days and I'll give you your money back. So he was basically, he thought I was weird, which I was, and trying to get me off the team, not onto the team.
And I walked out the door and then just started. And I, the thing I didn't know how to do is I didn't. But perseverance and work ethic, that was my, you know, it was drilled into me. I never give up. Some people are paralyzed by fear. Some people are mobilized by fear. Yeah. So in my case, I'm mobilized by that.
So I just talked to a lot of people, showed a lot of knives. I sold like $13,000 that summer. Made a couple grand.
This was before you left Tennessee.
Right. And then when I went to Chicago, I remember being on my knees in that dorm crying, saying, God, how am I gonna pay for school? And I remember his whisper.
That's why I gave you Cutco. And in that moment I went, oh, now I understand. And that's how for four years going through school, it's really, really hard. I mean, imagine back in the day before there were cell phones, I would, I would call from my dorm room and set appointments where I'd go to a payphone and put quarters in to set appointments.
In Chicago, we didn't have GPS back then you had maps. I drive an hour to two hours. One way to meet somebody you hope shows up. If they don't show up, you sit there for four hours until they come home. Or you go door to door and knock on doors and, and ask if I can come in and show you sharp objects in your house from a stranger, but you had no options but to succeed.
And so in that though, it was exceptionally hard, but I was in God's will. Yeah. And I would just, and God's peace was there. And so I would work and I would work and I'd work. And in those four years, God refined my skills of sales and, and, and then I opened a Cutco office here in Indianapolis in 1995.
Okay.
Two questions from the college cut code days and even the community college cut code days, you put you basically your life savings.
Yeah.
Like 125 bucks.
Yeah.
Of your 150 in your checking account into this, how did you feel when you turned a profit on that first set of eyes?
Yeah. I don't remember that so much.
I
just, you don't remember the first person that said Yeah,
but Oh, I know. Yeah. 'cause on the way home I called my boss to tell him I was quitting because I, I had actually gotten. From the milking cows, I'd picked up another job hanging drywall because I needed to replace it. But it, it's hard to explain this.
It wasn't the right thing to do. It wasn't unethical. But because I was walking and abiding in Christ and I was walking with him, I was so deeply in prayer. I would, is this it God? Am I in the right place? And I was like, I'm hanging drywall, but it's not the right spot I'm supposed to be. And so that's why I began to look in the newspaper.
So I called my boss, the drywall boss, and I said, yo, I'm done hanging drywall. He goes, why are, why are you done? I said, I'll just stop by your house and show you. And on the way home from the Knoxville, Tennessee and the Cutco office, I pulled in and I stood up in the presentation. I didn't even sit down at the table.
I put 'em on their couch. I had zero training. I tried, never looked at the book. I just tried to read the book Upside down. Did some, showed some how the knives worked and cut some stuff. And they said, all right, we'll buy a set. And they bought a set. And so then I went home. My parents bought a set and then, and then it just went down the track.
And so
the, the guy, you are quitting his job. You're no longer hanging drywall for your boss. You're like, he's like, why are you quitting? And he is, I'll show you. Yeah. And you stop in there and sell him knives.
Yeah. Right. $250 on all knives set. It's called the first set.
No way.
Yeah.
Throughout that journey, before you opened your office in Indianapolis.
Yeah. When you were still out in the field selling. Yeah. Like crazy. The lowest of the low moment where you said, God, there's no way you can be telling me to sell these. Like there's no way this is right for me. I quit, I give up. I'm not doing it.
Yeah. Three weeks later, so the first week I sold $1,700. The second week I sold $700.
The third week I sold $300 going in the wrong direction. I remember being on my knees and my little farmhouse crying, praying to God, saying, God, I thought you told me to do this. And then right then the phone rings and it's my uncle who had bought a set. And I said, I don't think I can do this anymore, uncle Ned.
And he said, no, God has formed you for this. He's given you the gift. To gab was the words. He said, he's given you the gift to gab. God made you for this. And it was like the voice of God literally speaking into my heart. And then I very, in that moment, I stood up and drive my tears and said, I will never doubt you again.
I will do the work and I will trust you in the result regardless of the result. Because if you go biblically and you look at the great callings of life, none of 'em are easy. That's the, that's where we get confused, is that we think it's supposed to be easy. No, actually every single one of 'em is hard. And so it's really about I will do my part and I will trust God in the result, not with the result in the result.
No matter what the result is, good or bad, it doesn't matter. I'm responsible to do my part and he is always faithful to do his part. That's what I learned in that. And so from then when I went to Chicago, I knew nothing. I didn't know anyone. I just started asking some other students, Hey, do you know anybody in Chicagoland?
And somebody was an hour and a half away in Libertyville, Illinois. And I said, what? And it was a youth pastor. I called him and said, yo, um, moody, need some help. Can I come show you these knives? He said, come sleep on my couch and we can see it in the morning. We don't have any money. I'm like, that's cool. I drive up, slept on his couch, showed him the knives, and then he gave me names of people in the church and I went and saw them, who went and saw them, went and saw them.
And four years later I graduated with no debt. And that's where the next journey began, which is starting in office.
This was the early nineties.
Yeah.
1990. You wanna identify how much money think you made selling knives in four years. Uh,
you, it was pretty good. I, I don't know the exact number, but
like, more money than you had had?
Yeah. 10 to $15,000 a year. 15, maybe 20,000 a year in, in school. Yeah, probably that.
Yeah.
And 'cause I paid for gas and I had had to pay, pay for 10 to $15,000 a year for school. So probably about 20 grand a year I'd pay.
Was that more money than you had made? Back on the farm back in
Exxon was 2 25 an hour.
Think of that $2 and 25 cents an hour working,
yeah, not, not $225,
making 40 hours a week. I was making just about $375 a month. So, and then I, my milking cow job was pretty good. 'cause that was six days a week. I made $120 a, a week and then, um, whatever, all the other side hustles that I had. But, so, yeah, I, I don't, I don't know that I ever quote kept track of it.
You were just trying in survival mode is all it was.
Yeah. And was your goal to graduate from Moody in Chicago, stay in Chicago, or go back home? Or what did you wanna do?
None of that stuff. That's where it was really, really weird. And I am really, really weird because almost every decision, major, major decision in my life has been a hundred percent God directed, not me directed.
I've made decisions that have been me directed only to get me off on tangents and get distracted from the main thing that God wanted me to do. But most of it was just God directed me. So he directed me to start with Cutco that I went through. I thought I was gonna be a pastor. But God said, no, stay in business and open a Cutco office.
I'm like, I don't have any idea how to open an office. I went to my manager and said, yo, I think I'm gonna open a Cutco office. He goes, whoa, man. People usually train two to three years to do this. We've only got a couple months before the summer. This is the summer of my graduating year, and I'm like, all right, what do I do?
And he takes out a piece of paper and shows me some points on how to run an interview, outlines four or five things to cover in training. I moved to Indianapolis and that's where I met my business partner, Duane Hixon. And he, he came in to start selling knives and I, and, and here's, this is God's awesomeness.
He made us the number one office in the United States.
How, how quick after opening
that summer. So it
was Wait, wait. Immediately.
Yeah. From zero, uh, like, God, let's just say, I don't even know how many there would be. Maybe, let's just say 200 locations across America. And we were the number one branch office that summer.
And so, um. I built a large team with
just like a few months of training. Like you zero.
Yeah. No
training really. People usually train years and you had just a few
months and that's all God's favor. I'm just telling you, I knew how to work, which is I worked really hard and I knew how to be cool with people and love people and treat them well.
And we built a pretty awesome sales team of, no
way
of college kids that had a great culture, a great team, lots of fun. And we were the number one performing team there.
So how long did you stay in Cutco for?
From 1991 to 2005.
Okay, so 14 years.
Yeah.
And you had kind of worked your way up pretty decently high there, right?
Yeah, totally. So I went from a, a branch office to a district running a year round office to a division manager and that's where I moved to St. Louis. And I oversaw five states and from, so the income changes is pretty drastic. I went from maybe making 30,000 a year and I remember in 2000 a year, 2005, I had netted over a half million dollars by 2004, uh, 2003.
By 2003 I was at a half million a year. So I was in St. Louis. And you know, you're living in a. You know, 8,000 square foot house and my neighbor was Orlando Pace from the Rams, and Coach Metheny was one of my other coach of, coach of the Cardinals, was one of my other neighbors. You know, driving a platinum edition Lexus, you have all of that.
And that was where another major transition came because what was challenging was, and Cutco, bro, I was at my office by 7:00 AM every day and I didn't get done working by nine, 10, or 11 at night every day, six days a week and a half day on Sunday. If you can conceptualize how hard that was, that, but inside of me was work ethic.
I didn't know what to do, but I knew how to work and I knew how to be cool and loving to people. And so from April 15th to August 15th, that was my schedule. 'cause college students get outta school.
Yeah.
College and high school kids. And so I poured myself into it. By then, I was married my junior year in college.
I had four kids in four years. So there, so that's, I didn't, I never understood how hard that was on my wife. You don't understand when you have four kids, little one, just one little one's a heart, take four and cram it into four years. It's insane. So my wife's family is from Chicago, so I would send my wife away basically for the month of May and June to go to live in Chicago with her parents so that I could focus on working.
And I did that for many, many, many, many years. 95 until 2000. But for 10 years I did that. And so, and I just remember here, it was the summer of 2004. I was sitting at my desk at this great big, you know, big house. You have everything that the world perceives as success. And I would say this, we had everything and nothing simultaneously.
And so I came home and, and, and it's hard to understand this, those who under know God would understand this. But I had been in prayer for a few years, literally a few years saying, God, show me what to do. 'cause this isn't it. I'm not in the right. And he kind of began to work in my heart to begin to seek the next thing.
Then, um, and that's when I came home in the summer, the end of June, 2004. And I called my friend Duane Hixon, who's my, one of the other co-founders of The N2 Company. I called him, said yeah. Was he
still working with Cutco?
No, he had worked with me. I hired him at Cutco. He worked for four or five years maybe.
And then he said, bro, I'm not running the schedule the rest of my life. Are you crazy? I'm not doing it. I'm done. He left, but we remained good friends for years. So I called him and said, Hey, Dee, just to let you know I'm done with Cutco. And he goes, good, I've got another idea. And in that moment, because I had been, we'd looked at so many different ideas, we were gonna start a franchise for haircutting.
We're like, oh, residuals man, we could do haircutting. Uh, no, that didn't. And I pray about it and it wasn't it, I started to buy, I started to buy a DirectBuy. It's a company called DirectBuy. I needed a half million dollars to buy into a franchise called DirectBuy. And, and I pray and it, I had no peace about it, so I was like, that's not it.
I was looking for what it was. I flew to Canada to be interviewed in Toronto by a company, and I came back and that's not it. And so I was just seeking the Lord, Lord, show me what you want me to do with my life. What is it? And then that's when I called my friend Duane at 10 o'clock at night. And I said, um, just to let you know, I've decided I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm, I'm leaving Cutco.
And he said, good, I've got another idea. And in that moment, 10 o'clock at night, the spirit of God rested in my office and was so clear. He said, pay attention. This is it. And it didn't even matter what it was because I was more interested in what God wanted than what I wanted. But I heard his whisper, pay attention.
This is it. And from that, it didn't matter what it was, paperclips or sunglasses, it didn't matter. And then my business partner said newsletters, and that's where we started. The N2 Company was newsletters, and it was based on a simple idea. He and I would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on advertising through direct mail.
And the problem with direct mail is we'd send it out, but the majority of it would be thrown away and never opened up. And it drove us nuts. And we said, what if we could create a direct mail idea, except when it lands in the mail, they actually opened it so that the ad is actually seen. That was the concept.
And we said, well, what if we made a newsletter that was all about the kids and all about the residents and everything going on in the neighborhood, and I'm not us writing it. Let's have the people in the neighborhood do the writing. So it's boys and their toys, and it's a child writing about athletes in the neighborhood.
It's a, it's somebody in the neighborhood writing about the other athletes in the neighborhood. It's uh, who's, who's new to the community, who's hot and who's not precious pets, what, what pets are in, you know, the heroes of the pets. Johnny ran the football back and it's all these stories written. It's like Facebook in print for the neighborhood.
Yes. Because this would've been 2005.
Yes.
So like Facebook had not blown up yet.
Yeah. Who knows back then.
And so where was the neighborhood you started at?
I started five in St. Louis.
So you off the rip? Five.
Five. And there was lots of just mistakes. We thought what if we could make a thousand in profit per publication?
So we thought $5,000 a month, let's start five. So I started five five in St. Louis. My business partner started five in Wilmington, North Carolina where he lives. And we failed miserably. We didn't make $1, not a single dollar for three years.
How were you getting started? Like how were you finding five?
Were you writing for five different neighborhoods?
No, getting started was, I went to my own neighborhood homeowners association people, and they said, Hey, I wanna do this neighborhood publication for our neighborhood. And they go, no, we don't want you to do it. And I said, great, I'm gonna do it anyway because you know, they don't control the mail system.
So I just started and at first the content was generic. Um, Pilates, how to plant a tree, financial articles. It was real generic.
Were you writing?
Were you writing it all? No. You can just get that stuff right. Wherever it was at, we would get it. And so it was just generic content. But throughout the years we begin to realize people don't care about generic content, especially in today's world.
Anything, anything you can find on your computer is exactly what we don't do
except for what you can find in a Facebook group.
Yeah, Facebook group. Yeah. That's intimacy.
Yes. It's like,
yeah, that's social.
It's like, you know, Joanne is writing about the boys that are selling the lemonade down the corner and they do it every Saturday morning.
That is just the gold.
That is it. Yeah. And so that's, so we began to learn that people cared about their community and so they began to be integrated doing the writing. And we basically don't do a lot of the writing.
Yeah. So you would find a local writer or like a, a neighborhood writer, would they do it for money or they do it to be like the champion of their
neighborhood?
Yeah. You know, sometimes people will get paid, but the biggest thing is that their face in the front as the editor or the 12-year-old face in the front as the neighborhood photographer, the the kid writer. They did it because it was theirs and about them, and they loved it.
What was harder to find writers and content for each neighborhood or advertisers to help fund and make the thing happen?
Yeah, both. I mean, 90% is sales, really. 10% is content? Probably. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, because you gotta hustle, man. You gotta go to work.
Okay, so you guys, you do this for three years and you don't make any money.
No money.
Zero. And you were going from making 500 grand, right? Plus a year,
right?
How, how did your family survive?
Well, that's it. You know, I, I just can't say, if you look me up, Earl Seals, look me up on the internet, you would find all of the success and all these stories and all that type of stuff. And I cannot tell you that it has anything to do with me because it simply does not. It has everything to do with God's story.
It is simply God's story. So when God said to me, very whispered to me and said, pay attention. This is it. Some people would be like, that's really exciting to hear, number one, to hear God's voice, and number two, to know what to do. But along with that was and sell everything you owned.
Oh,
yes. So you can't start a new, the
platinum Lexus
gone,
oh boy,
sell your Lexus, sell your house.
We just built this custom home. So I wrestled with God for six months about the Obed of the third thing. He said, sell what you own because how am I supposed to start a new business, still take care of four children and a wife staying at home to take care of them and survive? That's hard to do, bro. And you can't make your, when your mortgage payments are a hundred thousand dollars, takes a hundred thousand dollars just to a year to pay for your house.
Doesn't work. I, I began to ask people, I, I knew what the Lord was telling me to do, but I, when you hear God's voice so often, he will confirm it through both conviction and other ways. You read his word. Do not harden your heart. I remember reading that and saying, God, saying, your harden your heart. I remember I went to my financial planner and he said, how much did you build your house for?
I said, 4 75. He said, how much did you sell it for or could you sell it for? I said, I don't know, about 700,000. And he put out his calculator and he said, in two years you're making 19% a year growth on your house. The worst thing you could do is sell your house. And then, but when I would go before the Lord, he'd say, sell your house.
Sell your house. He'd whisper, sell your house. And then, then I'd read a financial article. I remember this one financial article that came out and it said, the government is expecting to raise interest rates and arms coming due. Adjustable rate mortgages at 2% are gonna go up. And I had an arm and he said, sell your house.
Sell your house. He was always whispering that, you know, and so then I then, these are the crazy things that I had a dream six, you know, six months into this wrestling with God. I had a dream. God wrestled with me at night and said, get up now and sell your house, or you will be sorry. It was very clear and I, I went, and I've been sorry in disobedience, and I went, I don't wanna be sorry.
And I woke up, it's like seven in the morning. I walk out to the kitchen and my wife is already up. She goes, where are you going? I said, I'm selling the house. She goes, what? And I'd already talked to her. She's like, I don't want you to sell the house. We just built this house. I went, God wants us to live in a nice neighborhood and our neighbors all love each other.
When, and I walked out the door to my neighborhood's realtor, her name is Kathy Beck. And I walked in, I said, Hey, just let you, God, we gotta sell our house. I mean, when you have a, when I was freaked nuts because I just had this dream. I walk into her basement where she ran her office out of there, Kathy, what?
Hey, we're selling our house. What? I'm not talking about it. We're selling our house. How do you sell a house? She goes, um, she said, go home and paint. I said, we're not talking anymore. What do I have to do? She said, go home and paint. So I walked back into my house. My beautiful wife fell under the God's authority and my leadership and said, what do we need to do?
I said, we need to paint. And so from, you know, 8:00 AM till 2:00 AM in the morning, we painted and cleaned the house because Kathy said, Earl, only 60 houses of your size sell per year in St. Louis. This should have been in the market years, uh, months ago. This was in the end of June. And so I said, I don't care.
What do we need to do? She goes, go paint. I walked out, come painted all day, got the camper, put the kids in it, left the next morning and at 10:00 AM she called and said, okay, the first person that walked through your house wants to buy it. Um, 715,000. We closed two years in a day after we built it so we didn't have to pay capital gains.
And we made 300,000 in profit plus in profit. And that's the money we lived on for the first three years. We went from living in that house and running a 2000 square foot house. And that's how he survived.
No way.
Yeah. So yeah, it's, wow, I can't, I can't take any glory. All I can take is this God prompting and then the courage to obey.
That's all it was.
It does take some courage.
Crazy courage.
Yeah.
You have to get, you have to get away from the I want, I want, I want, I want into, what do you want?
So where did the first breakthrough in The N2 Company come from? Like where if you go three years, you're not making any money. Where did it start to be like, oh my gosh, we have a thing here?
Yeah. When, when your product, we stepped out the door. It was just like I said to you, I said, I go out to a business store, Hey man, here it was. What happens next when you, you know, you're supposed to do it? What do you do? We didn't have a phone approach, we didn't have a sales presentation, we didn't have a product.
So we created a mock publication, a sample publication of what we could think about would be in it. And back then it was nothing compared to what it is today.
How often were they going out?
Every month.
So monthly. Okay. So you're gonna have 12 times five. Uh, 60 publications. Yeah. In St. Louis and 60. Yeah.
Like annual publications in women. So that makes, uh, the ad spots very valuable.
Yeah.
Or like very important. 'cause you don't like sometimes on a daily business newsletter, right. It's like you have every day. You have
Yeah.
360, not really 300. Right. But like, you have 200 days where you can throw an ad and if you skip one, no big deal.
Yeah. So, yeah. So, and then you have the cost, let's just say each publication to, to create print mail is five to $6,000. I mean, you have, that's a heavy ticket.
So it's to send one publication out one month, five, six grand.
Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah.
So, and you're doing five in st that's 50 grand across two cities.
Yeah. Easily
month one.
Right. And so in order to do that, you know, you're, you're meeting business owners and I remember I didn't have anything, so I just pulled up to a strip mall and the first thing I did is I knocked on the door number one, no, door number two, no. Door number three was a Edward Jones financial planner dude.
And he was bored sitting in the back. So he is like, yeah, come on back, tell me what you got. And I said, here's the deal. You ever spent money on direct mail? Yeah. Uh, I get so frustrated spending money on direct mail. It goes out, people throws it away. So we got this idea and the idea was what if we could figure out a way to send it directly to a target group?
So in Indianapolis Market, you think of Bridgewater, you think of, uh, you just think of every wealthy community. Chatham Hills think of every wealthy community there is. And we basically as a company, do every single wealthy community in America now, almost in America, not, not in Indianapolis, yes, but many of the top.
I mean, if I pulled up famous covers on my phone right here, you would see who did I just see in there? I saw community that we did with Oprah Winfrey. Oprah Winfrey was in there and um, I can't even remember. But you've got. Yeah, Arnold Palmer's dead, but we did Trump's communities, the owner of eBay, you just go through the list.
Um, Tim McGraw. I got a,
so like, these are, you know, the legit neighborhoods.
That's right. So the, if you wanted to target the most wealthy, influential people in America, how would you do that in a way that they would actually see the a That's our company. You do it that way. And so, so I just went out and said that neighborhood across the street is a, you know, uh, Whitmoor, it's a gated community.
800 houses on a country club. We're gonna produce a private publication for them. It's all written by them, by the residents, and it's gonna go directly to them so that when they open it up, they see your ad and the breakthrough was this. And they said, that's a great idea. And over and over again, people are, oh, that's a great idea.
I should do that. And that's what they would say. So then from there we had to figure out the price point. Then you have all the inefficiency, the dummy tax that you pay in business when you don't know what you're doing. You know, printers and how do they work and don't work, and how do they, how do you pay for 'em and leases and how do you get taken advantage of an ink toner?
And how often do they break in the mailing system? How much do you pay per print to have it mailed out? And what is bulk mail? What is it not? I mean, there's just gobs details that you fail at. Mm-hmm. And so that's why we didn't make any money is because we had to figure out all, all the inefficiencies before we finally made money.
How did you find your first publisher? Like if you're first person in that gated community neighborhood that wanted to write content for you?
Um, her name was Pam Blackwell. She was the vice, uh, the president of the HOA.
Getting consistent content that people wanted to consume could be hard. And if like a writer all of a sudden one month is like, yeah, I don't like this anymore.
Yeah. Like, what happens?
It's very difficult.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's a hard
part. So, so you end up doing this and three years in, then you start to make a little bit of money.
Yeah. Three years. Three years into it. I remember very specifically Duane and I, after three years, I would say almost, if I had kept accurate dates, I could all, I could tell you the dates, but I know it was exactly right.
At three years, I remember Duane saying, okay, we finally have enough money in the bank account. You can get four grand a month and I can get four grand a month. And that's where it began.
Wow. And so from there, what kind of staff does it take to grow a physical publication company?
Well, now we have 360 employees and 850 locations.
No way.
Yeah. We have a print facility in Dallas, which is one of the best in the country, if not the number one print facility in Dallas
with the rise of the internet. Did you guys get scared with print?
There's tons of seasons of scared.
Okay. Yeah. Take me through some of those.
Think about 2005 and 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
because we're, we're financial advisors.
A big advertiser. Like Ed, like the original Edward Jones advertiser was Oh, yeah.
Edward Jones. Those
were And what were your, what were your key advertisers?
Yeah, real, so in early 2005 through 2009 was realtors, oh. The economy was booming with real estate. But what happened in 2009?
Yeah.
The flip of real estate.
So you go from 13 realtors to one. You see what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. So what we learned, what you learn is you have fear. You can either be mobilized by it or paralyzed by it. And you begin to realize in e even in COVID, when COVID happened, what happened in COVID, I mean, I, I don't remember the day, but there was a certain announcement of a certain day that that, that we had a franchisee that might've been making 15 grand a month, and then the world shut down.
And then advertisers all wanted to call and cancel all their contracts. So they may went from 15 grand to two grand in income. So you have these. Never ending cycles of issues, but how you process it is a big, is the difference.
You guys are growing, like, take me through when you had, when you guys were able to pull $4,000 a month each.
Yeah. How many different publications did you have?
I don't even know. I mean, back then we might have had 40, 40 publications. 50 publications, something like
that. And what was your responsibility? Sales.
Yeah.
Okay. And was your partner's
manufacturing? Yeah,
manufacturing.
The back office stuff. All the accounting.
Wow.
Team legal.
Okay. So you start growing this. What ends up bringing you to Indianapolis? Back to Indianapolis?
Well, I was in Chicago for 15 years, let's say 13 to 15 years. And then another, same thing. No major decisions have ma happened in my life other than the prompting of God. And that's,
wait, when you left St.
Louis, you moved to Chicago?
I went to Chicago.
Okay. So you went Indianapolis, St. Louis, living in the big house. Yeah. Custom home, all the stuff. Sold the house, moved back to Chicago
Terrace parents, my wife's parents.
Oh, you moved with your in-laws
next to 'em. Oh, next to him in the rental house.
Oh, oh, in the rental.
Okay. Got you. So then you spent, how long up there?
Um, let's just say 2000 and. Six to January of COVID 2020.
Were you still the publications though, still started in St. Louis? Yeah. How are you finding advertisers By being in Chicago and trying to get 'em in St. Louis?
I passed them on, I passed 'em on to another person, a new person.
Oh, okay.
Aaron Cher. Yeah. Who is a, somebody who had worked for me in Cutco. Took 'em over.
Yeah. Okay.
And then I moved to Chicago and started over
and then started over with Chicago. Yeah. And building. And there's tons
started
again.
There's tons,
tons of
affluent neighborhoods in Chicago.
Right, okay. Started again.
And then in what leads you to move to Indianapolis?
That's another God prompting. I didn't quite understand at the time, but you know, that's, there's been three major times God has asked me to do major things. One was, um, leave East Tennessee and go to Chicago to college. And that time I did it with joy and uh, and I had enough very little to lose.
Right. And in that, how am I gonna pay for school? I sold Cutco and I sold my bass boat and I sold my stereo. I sold the things that I had, and I went to Chicago. The second time was start The N2 Company. That was, that was scary. And so sell your home, move into a rental house, sell your car, start over.
That's really hard. The third major one was leave Everything in Chicago. That was where I began to realize, and that one I did it, uh, with a stuck out lip. Um, so the first time was exciting. The second one was outta fear, and the third one was the bad attitude. I did not wanna leave Chicago because you have 500 acres of honey land.
I goose hunt and deer hunt. It was the best hunting. I loved my sushi place right over here. And Interstate 90 had just gotten finished. I loved O'Hare Airport. There's always things I loved about it, but God had been pressing me, pressing me to move back to Indianapolis, and I didn't know why. And that's where I found out a few years later as I was dove hunting next to a guy in Crawfordsville.
And it was to help build a church strengthening program for pastors. So The Church Hub, if you go to TheChurchHub.org, God took 15 years to teach me how to build and scale and develop locations all across America. Now we are building a centralized platform for strengthening pastors all across America, all across the world.
What was the first domino that brought you to Indianapolis though? Like what, why, what prompted you guys to come here?
Just the whole just, God,
he was like, go to Indianapolis.
Yeah. Literally. Yeah.
Like there was no business opportunity. There was no nothing. You just like heard God say to you Yeah, Indianapolis.
I
know. Yeah, I know.
Gosh.
It's all the weird stuff.
Yeah.
Go to
Indianapolis.
What did your, what did your family say?
Um, my wife has learned I'm crazy. So it's, it wasn't, it wasn't it, you know, so, and I will share what the Lord is pressing on me and she will take that into account and she will wrestle through it herself.
And then she has learned to trust. Yeah, because. I am, I'm anything but perfect. But I had seek forward for my life.
So this was 20, 25 years ago?
Yep.
When you guys end up moving here.
2020.
Okay. Where was the business at five years ago? Like?
Uh, pretty good. I mean, we're at a, we're at 163 million now, so maybe 120, 130 million a year.
Dude. Insanity. Yeah. Like That's so cool. All with neighborhood print publications.
Yeah, we sell, you know, we sell last year, 163 million.
So then all is the business side of it. Like corporate sponsors, you know, like you're getting all these affluent neighborhoods. So Lexus buys a national corporate sponsorship.
None. Very, very few.
So it's all local sponsors,
all local. A 95%, 99% are local advertisers. So you gotta think about national. Yeah, maybe Bentley will take out a national ad, but you have regional, then you have citywide, you might have a few citywide Mercedes. 'cause if someone's gonna buy a Mercedes, maybe they check out the two or three Mercedes dealerships.
But then you begin to get really narrowed down geographically. So if you're a dentist, you're not gonna advertise on the other side of the town. Yeah. You're gonna advertise within three miles of where you're at, two miles where you're at.
So did you then, were most of your employees sales staff that were working on going out and,
no.
I mean, you, like I said, we have 850 locations now and 850 publications across America. But you know, most that would be 800, you know, let's just say 700, 600 or 700 individuals or some run multiple publications. But the back office people that do accounting, printing, legal shipping, um, customer support, credit card processing, all this stuff that takes to run a company, hr, all that stuff.
It's about 350 employees.
Wow. If you were starting it over again in 2026, how would, what would you do differently?
Every time you hire somebody, one of the first things they look to do is hire somebody to do the job that you hired them to do. So that's how companies as they grow, become bloated and bigger and bigger and bigger, and things get hidden in the cracks.
Yeah.
So you need to measure the task. So I, I need you to do X job. You, you need to understand what that actually means. So how long does it take? Oh, I'm in charge of communications. Okay. Let's talk about what is communications? I send out emails. How many emails do you send? I send 20 a day. How long does it take to send?
20 a day. Okay. We're, so you're working an hour a day, so you have to not only know what the task is, but you have to quantify it and measure it. Because if you don't do that, you have a lot of people with titles. Mm-hmm. And you have massive inefficiencies. So I have learned, um, I have learned to say this, uh, Nate, I want you to outline communications and what that looks like.
I want you to quantify it or break it down into the amount of time it would take and why to do that job and show it. Break it down into the micro. Yeah. So present your concept or your idea. The second thing is, once you present your idea, we will then you and I will work through that and come to an agreed upon, uh, workload.
This is what, okay, this is what you think is best. This is what, okay, this is what we agree to. And the third thing is, this is what you're held accountable to achieve.
Yeah.
Because if you don't have all three of those parts, what is the plan? Now, let's come to an agreed upon plan. Why do you have the agreed upon plan part?
'cause if you don't have the agreed upon plan part, first off, you don't know when the dickens is going on. Number two, they do a lot of kooky, goofy things. Number three, you have 25 people in this office. You have a lot of overlap. So I'm doing some of it. They're doing some of that. You're stepping on my toes.
I'm stepping on your toes. We're not, who's not? I don't know who's doing it. There's lots of confusion. So it's who's doing what by when?
Yeah.
Who's doing what by when? So develop a plan. Okay. Let's come to an agreement upon plan.
Yeah.
Now you're gonna be held accountable to achieve that plan.
Okay.
And if you don't have the accountability, you won't execute.
I want you, I wanna get your feedback on our business. 'cause it's kind of, uh, it's a media company. Yeah. Modern media, not print. But I would be curious on how, what your. Thoughts on breaking down what we have that would get us to, let's say, $2 million a year if we wanna get this business to $2 million. So currently we have a statewide newsletter that covers, uh, you know, news, lifestyle, things happening, new restaurants, hitting gems in Indiana, 15,000 subscribers.
We have a Fishers specific newsletter. We have a South Bend specific newsletter. We have this podcast and we have my social media and the Get Indiana social media. How would you, looking at what you guys know with, you said $162 million that you guys are doing in publications, in print, how would you get us to the $2 million range
always comes down to sales.
You have to have a product that people are interested in. Then it comes down to selling. Yeah. It's not complicated. So you have to say, um, who is reaching out to businesses that is measured? Now you have to measure it. How many people are you reaching out to think of that for a second? Uh, I'm reaching out to five a day.
How much time does it take to reach out to five a day?
Seven minutes,
right? 10 minutes. So you're working 10 minutes a day. Okay. So if you have a sales person that has to be measured, what is the activity that is expected? What's realistic within the job? Job description, then you're gonna have an outcome.
And what I mean by that, if I reach out to 10 for illustration, 'cause it's easier number, if I reach out to 10, how many am am I in front of? So you've got both. Who is the target client? Am I reaching out to the right people? Are you reaching out to a donut shop or financial planner? You have to have a target client.
So are you reaching out to the right people? And are, are, what is the method by which you're communicating with them? So if 10 people don't pick up the phone, or 10 people don't respond, your method of communication or reaching them is the wrong way. So you have to figure out, how am I gonna get through the door?
Then when I get through the door, do I get appointments? So let's just say I call a hundred. I get through the door on 20, and of those 22, set an appointment with me. How many of 'em show up? Then what am I presenting? So you have to have a sales process. You know, what is the need? You know, this is the general problem, these are the specific problems.
Here's what makes us different. Here are the options for the sale or the options of packages. And here's, uh, the benefit to buy. Today. You have to have a sales process or fail sales philosophy.
Yeah.
And then from that, uh, of the, I called a hundred. I set, I, I talked to 20, let's just say I set five, or I set 10.
I set 10 appointments. Of the 10, how many did I do the presentation with? Six showed up and I closed two. Now, I, I have something to measure. So if I wanted to close. 30 sales, I need to call X amount of people to get to 30 sales.
Yeah. It's like you gotta go all the way up so that you multiply that out 15 times.
You need 1500 people in the top end
Yeah.
That are getting your email. And then you gotta book 60 appointments to get 40 to show up to close 20 or whatever.
That's it. And then you ask what is your average order? So if your average order is a hundred dollars and you clo that's, uh, $2,000, yeah. You're going broke, you're never gonna make it.
Mm-hmm.
So you gotta know what your average order
is. Well, was there a breakthrough from like pricing or packaging or a piece of your razor's business that you had where it was like, 'cause I do feel like, uh, local, like small businesses, local dentists, it's like, even though it is really important to advertise to people in your geography, they usually don't have big advertising budgets or they're, you know, smaller.
And it's usually you're talking to the actual dentist, like, doctor so and so is like fielding this call and they don't want to,
it's an impo. It's an impossibility. What I mean by that is. It's impossible to know. And what I mean by that is that some dentists actually have a, I don't know, you could even ask these inquiries when you meet with the business, generally speaking, what, what kind of advertising budget do you start off with at the new year?
So some people may have a hundred thousand dollars. I remember sitting down with Baer Cadillac in St. Louis and he was really cool. He goes, alright, I, I spent a hundred thousand dollars a month on advertising. What do you have? That's how he started the appointment with me. That's a really good situation, right?
Yeah. I spent a hundred grand a month. So you know that on c certain businesses spend way over here, but others a dog walk or somebodys a walking a dog, bro. It's just, it's not the right person. So you're gonna find some dentists may spend, I remember one dentist I met with spent $3,000 a month on, uh, cable television.
So some people spend that. Um. It's impossible to know. You just have to walk, find, go
through. It. Was there, was there another crazy one where like, okay, luxury cars, Cadillac, right? Yeah. Like that makes sense to have a large marketing budget. Was there one that blew your mind where it's like, I cannot believe the poop scooper down the road is spending 10 grand a month or whatever?
No. Some of it is a balance of reason. And what I mean by that, if you do research, you realize what is the average profit margin, uh, per category of a business. So if you, if you know that construction projects probably have a 20 to 30% profit margin. So if a, uh, a construction company is advertising, building a custom home, they know it's gonna be a million dollar home, they're gonna profit $300,000 on that.
Is it reasonable for them to give you $20,000 in advertising? Well, yeah. So the, the, the mitigation of risk to them. Or the ROI So you have to man it. You have to think about, uh, ROI. Jewelry would be another one. Yeah. What is the profit margin on jewelry? A real estate agent? What is the profit margin on the sale of a house?
So the certain industries have greater margins in today's world. You could probably right now, type in with ai what are the average profit margins per industry. And instantaneously you would have, huh, I should really think about these categories. And I've never done that. And I just told you to do that.
I said, what are the top 10 profit margin of businesses in Indiana?
Yeah, let's see what they, it's gonna be like pharmaceuticals for sure.
Oh really?
I bet that's like my guess. I dunno, it's, it's saying reading Google, oh, here are 10 business types that have the highest profit margins. Software and sas. That's like, you know, pretty easy. Accounting, tax prep, bookkeeping.
Interesting.
That's a good one. Uhhuh Legal Services. Uh, marketing agencies, insurance agencies. Wow. Financial advisory, wealth management, medical slash dental practices, specialized B2B services, home services storage and self-storage facilities.
Isn't that interesting? So when you realize, when you, you might ask what are the top 50?
Now you have a much broader industry base when you're thinking about a target market. Yeah, I guess that is what I'm saying to you.
That's really interesting.
So then when you're presenting, uh, would you give me $500 a month? And they're like, well, if I close once, if I close one sale in a year, I'm gonna triple my investment.
That's the way the business owner's thinking. Mm-hmm. So you need to know those profit margins. Before I step into the environment,
with the shift towards digital, did you guys get pushback ever of like, what's your reporting? Like, how do you prove value
if you pull into McDonald's and buy a coffee? How did you hear about McDonald's?
What was the thing that, was it the app, the the push notification? Was it
the billboard?
The billboard. The radio spot.
How about this one? Uh, GEICO. If you have GEICO insurance, can you tell me why you have GEICO insurance?
Because you're a fan of lizards, right? Yeah. That's crazy.
I remember pulling up to the Illinois to toll station and seeing a freaking lizard, GEICO commercial on the i the booth at the Illinois.
I was like, you know, or you open your ComEd bill and there's a GEICO freaking ad in there. Yeah. So what you find is you need to be in front, the business owner needs to be in front of their ideal client consistently.
Mm-hmm.
For two reasons, number one, for brand awareness, and the next one, here's a big one, when they come into the buying cycle, what I mean by the buying cycle is I remember having sold TV with a DVD and a, uh, VHS track in it, and even though it was really, really old.
I would never buy a new TV until I needed it. But eventually when the screen started flicking out, I'm like, I freaking need a new tv. Then when you start looking around, there's TV ads everywhere. You don't, you're not aware of the TV ad until you come into the buying cycle. So if you were working with a roofing company and someone gives you money as a media company for roofing, um, they may say, I'm not getting results.
What you can control is getting your, your media in front of a target group. What you can't control is whether they need it.
Yeah.
You can't control that.
That's a big thing with creators just in general. It's like, uh, whoever, you know, if there's an influencer or YouTuber, whoever that you like, Joe Rogan for instance, it's like, what?
You know, I might not need, uh, this supplement today, but if I come to the point where I do need it, usually people have the affinity towards the content that they. Consume there, and they're like, you know what, I'm gonna use that brand because they support my favorite creator. And so and so,
so you've got brand awareness, you've got associations, and then, you know, um, then you're in front of them when they actually need it.
That's called top of the mind advertising.
The, uh, the final thing I wanna talk to you about is your association with this production, the show, the chosen.
Yeah.
This has like, become a huge thing. Um, was it three seasons?
Uh, we're six seasons
now. You're Six seasons, okay. Um, and how you got involved with this, and I know we're kind of coming close on time.
Yeah. But I'd love to just know how you got involved with this and like, the business behind big production media.
When I moved to Chicago, I went to a church called Harvest Bible Chapel, and there was a guy named Dallas Jenkins that also came there to do media for the church. And he and I became friends.
Our families became friends. We ended up entering a Bible study together, or a life group together, small group together. And we did that for 10, 12, 14 years. So his wife, Amanda and I, and Tara, my wife and three other families raising 21 kids, going through school together for 12 years. We walked through life together for 12 years.
And so when he went, his dad is Jerry Jenkins, who is an author of the Left Behind series. He came from a media background, uh, Dallas wanted to produce movies, had produced previous films, was producing short films for our church. Um, and he wanted to produce a full length movie called The Resurrection of Gavin Stone that was gonna make take five or six or $7 million to produce this movie.
So I was an investor in that to help that get started. And it failed miserably and I lost a lot of money from that.
Like what's at this point in your life? What's a lot of money?
Uh, I lost 800,000, so Oh,
that's a lot of money.
Yeah. So at
any stage in anyone's life, that's a
lot
of money. Yeah. So you lose a lot of money and, but I've made millions and I've lost millions many times.
And so there, so, but, so I didn't like it. I didn't like that at all. I hate it. I hate losing money. But what, there's so much to learn from God's awesomeness because in that God was allowing that to happen. Here's what's crazy is that everything said the resurrection of Gavin Stone was supposed to be a blockbuster hit.
When you have all these study groups and everything that view it, um, Sony, MGM. Um, all the major ama, Amazon, all of them wanted to get into the faith-based space. And they said, who do we know that's a Christian in Hollywood that could help us market to the faith-based industry? And the only person they could think of was Dallas Jenkins.
So they called Dallas Jenkins, my friend, they said, Hey, can you produce us a film? Sure. It's gonna cost $6 million to produce. Okay. Get some investors. That was one of 'em. And everything was tracking, showing, wow, this is gonna be amazing. Look at the reviews and how the people are watching it, and all that.
But then, uh, when it came out and very, you didn't watch it. No one watched it, and it became a giant colossal failure. But what was in Dallas' Heart, I think outta fairness is Dallas desired success and not, I would say not. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he came from LA maybe it was the, you know, fancy haircut, the fancy plane, the, you know, there was a struggle in his heart about himself.
I would say the right way to say it. And God had to strip that all from him
with this failure,
with that great failure. And in that great failure, I saw him go from Hero where all the, the organizations, the major, uh, major production companies were lined up to do a faith-based series with him. One right after the next, until that failure.
And then they all left instantaneously. And there he was at his house with absolutely nothing. No job, no future career, a complete failure. No one that wanted to do films with him and completely empty. And that's where he met God at a very deep level to where through a number of things, 5&2 Studios, which is the studio today, five and two.
Five loaves. And two Fishes was born in that moment, and that's where The Chosen was born.
You lose $800,000 on that first movie. And decide to go back for more.
Yeah. That's the, I should, you know, if you're doing it from a business strategy perspective, I should have put more money into it, uh, than 800,000.
I should have put more in money into 'cause of its success today. I mean the success today, it's at 106 languages in across the world of the
chosen.
The Chosen. But
you lose 800,000 on the first one. And what do you go back in and what do you invest into the chosen?
Uh, a lot. I'm not gonna A
lot,
a little at first and a lot over time.
Yeah.
And now it's blown up.
Sure.
But like, I think regardless of whether it was even a hundred thousand more dollars, let's say like you are already 800,000 in the hole.
Yeah.
Right.
So like why do you end up going back in for more?
That's just God's story. That's just all God's story, which is, I believed in Dallas and I believed in the mission.
That's it. I mean, what? He came to me sitting on my little black couch in my house and said,
I got this idea.
I've got this idea. What if we could be like a breaking bad you take watch. It's a multi-season, multi episode season of the life of Christ, developing the characters of, uh, the disciples, developing this whole thing into a full, multi-season, uh, show.
I'm like, this is as bad as this sounds. That would be awesome if it worked,
right?
Yeah. That's all it could be. Alright man, I'll, because I love you and I love Jesus, I'll give you money to help you get this thing going. That's it. And then God did everything else. He did everything else.
How does a series in a show like this end up making money?
Like what has, what are the dominoes that have to fall for you guys to get a return on your investment?
You make almost, it's almost an impossibility. Yeah. So if someone, I hate to say this. If someone comes to you and says, let's put, make a movie, say no. Because it's,
someone literally came to me yesterday and said, we're making a movie and we're raising money.
Same. And I all right. There, there we go.
Because there's 3,600 films per year produced. How many th how many shows, how many movies do you go see? 3,600. Oh my God. How many do you know? None of them. There's only three that you could name Wicked that just came out. Wicked. The second one.
Wicked and, uh, Zootopia two.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's not gonna be seen.
Yeah.
And how much marketing dollars do you need to get it out to where it actually is known? I mean, it is almost an impossibility and that's why I'm saying, uh, so, so there was a few of us, uh, four partners that came together to start the chosen and then God did everything else.
God. Um, there's a guy named Derral Eves, who's the one that produces, created MrBeast. Uh, cute girls' hairstyles, multiple different channels. He's the YouTube king, the king of YouTube. So he, God used him to create a vision for what it could be. He brought him onto the team, Ricky Ray Butler, who's an AI guy, and a, just a, a prodigy in his own space.
But anyway, um, he came onto myself and so we came and started it. We created what was called the Shepherd, which, uh, if you, you could look that up. It's available on YouTube, the Shepherd. It's only 18 minutes. It was a small little show about the birth of Christ through the shepherd's eyes. So that was the first little baby film that we built, or that was built that we used as fundraising.
So what happened then is that we had a prototype Yeah. Of the quality of the film that we wanted to build about the life of Christ.
Yeah.
So that prototype, then we went to fundraising. Which was on, um, whatever
we, funder or whatever.
Yeah. Whatever we raised. It was the largest fundraise in history. Yeah.
Not crowdfunded. I think it was, I think I wanna say it was 16 million. No, no, no. It was 11 million. $11 million given by 16 million people. So 16 million people gave, let's just say 80 bucks. And that gave us $11 million to kick off the first show. And the first show went from 11 million for season one to 20 to 40.
Cost to produce,
cost to produce 11 to 20 to 40 to 60 to 65 to 90 million to produce six. Season six. So, because there's a lot of things that happened. The actors were no names.
Now they, they have some names
by season two. Uh, they go from, uh, whatever to 20 million. They become a name.
Yeah.
To where the, uh, actors go gets involved and unions get involved.
Now it goes to 40 million. How does medical insurance,
so you said 11 million for the first season. How does that make any money? Back in the door? You
don't make any money.
But
how does, do you get enough money to produce the next season?
That's part of it too. Maybe you're selling some t-shirts. But really we had what's, if you look on, uh, the chosen, you'll see pay it forward.
So other people give money to pay it forward. You have T-shirt sales and DVD sales and DVD, bro. Who bought
A DVD?
You would. That's in our world. You would say that. But that's way huge. Market way. Yes. Huge market.
That's crazy.
So,
so when, and you're at season six now?
Yes. We just finished season six in Italy.
What, so season six,
well, how many seasons do you believe there will be?
Uh, we're gonna have season seven.
Yeah.
Then you have the book of Act, or we're gonna actually do, I think it's Life of Joseph is being shot now. Moses, uh, the book of Acts, uh, which will be two seasons. Um. There'll be a number of things are a couple of mo, other little full length movies about the life of Christ.
You're integrated into that. Wow.
You've had such an interesting life.
A crazy life, bro. I had nothing to do. So as far as my involvement, I've just been blessed to be at the front, to be involved at the front a little bit along the way and help guide the project initially. But it is way beyond where I'm at today.
'cause you've got, I don't even know, 80 employees
when it comes to The N2 Company. What is your greatest wish or achievement that could be done with The N2 Company?
The N2 Company is an amazing opportunity for individuals that want something more, because we started it in a way that said, how could we create a business that an average, normal person that is self-disciplined can be put into a model that they can succeed at a high level.
That's in essence what N two is. We have people that are single moms to fighter pilots, to people that play in the NFL here, even in with the Colts. And they're, they found a way to make anywhere from a hundred thousand to, I'm gonna say 700,000 a year running, doing these
publications,
running one or more publications.
Wow. And we have a proven model for success. They can go to the n two company, uh, dot com, I'm sure. And find a way to apply.
Yeah. Top right. Become a publisher that's like,
become
a publisher.
So that's, you're looking for almost franchisees.
Yeah. What's the hardest part is we have 800 locations, but we have 5,000 locations identified.
So that's the bad part.
Oh my gosh. There's a huge opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. Every neighborhood. 'cause it's also, you have these different segments, right?
Yeah. We have a veteran's magazine. We have a, a real estate publication. We have a Uniquely You, which is a special needs magazine. You have city magazines, you have local neighborhood magazines.
We, a lot of opportunity, so listeners, listeners out there that maybe want to try their hand and, and are committed to, you know, publishing, becoming a, um. A publisher and creator could go to your guys' website and go through the process of, go
through the process. It's not easy. We have, what
does it
cost?
20,000 applications probably a month.
What does it cost to be a franchisee?
Oh, that's the weird part. When Duane and I started in two, we sat down on the floor's room and wrote a mission statement, which is this, to honor God, strengthen the family, and provide financial wealth for everyone. And so although we are a franchise, we, we say to honor God, what is to honor God, to love people regardless of who they are.
So they're not all Christians by any means. But one of the big rules Jesus said is two things, love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind. Two do to others as you'd want them to do to you. So a lot of people don't have 20 or 50 or a hundred or 500,000 to buy a franchise. So when we were being coached by the iFranchise Group, which is the top franchise company in the United States, we just said, can we give it away?
Because there's a lot of good people don't have money to actually buy, put half million dollars into a business. They said that'd be, they said this, they said, if you guys become a franchise, you'll become instant millionaires. We said, well, we don't care about that, but what we do care about is God's mission.
Can we give it away? And they said, that'd be very odd, but you could do that. So that's in essence it. If someone's accepted, which is very rigorous and they're given the chance to work with them too, it doesn't cost, we don't charge any fee for them to start with the organization. They're able to go through training and everything else and get started and we support them.
That's so awesome.
It's all God's mission. It's not ours. That's why we do that.
Earl, man, it's been a pleasure to sit here and learn about your story from Appalachian East Tennessee Community College to Chicago, to Indy to St. Louis, back to Chicago and Environ home. Back
Indy. Yeah.
Here in in Indiana. I think that your story of The N2 Company, you guys how many 800 publications?
Yeah. 852 or 860 now I can't remember.
And your. Uh, experience with the chosen. So interesting. You've lived an incredibly interesting life and your commitment to faith is incredible, man. Yeah. Uh, it's been awesome to hear about it. We do have three questions that we ask every guest who comes on the show.
Okay. This is all about the state of Indiana. So you've talked about the places that you've lived, uh, on the show. You've also talked about filming in Italy and you know, getting to travel around here. What's something the world needs to know about Indiana?
It's homey. As weird as that sounds, it's home, it's community.
Um, it's faith driven, it's conservative in its nature. I'm not saying everything is, but um, I just think morally it's got a very solid base to raise a family. Yeah. And that's good. People are nice. As weird as that sounds.
Uh, finally, this is your chances how we identify new guests and learn about people that are, uh, doing inspiring things.
Who's a Hoosier? We need to keep on our radar. Someone who's doing big things.
I'm sure you've had, uh, hunter Smith on here by now.
I haven't. Hunter Smith,
he's one of my neighbors, and I think he's, I don't know if he just got, uh, accepted into politics, if he got the congress role or what he did.
He was a punter in the NFL, the 1999 draft, and he's currently the representative for district 24 of the Indiana House of Representatives.
Yeah.
Hunter Smith. Good dude.
Good dude.
Oh, a Notre Dame guy.
Yeah.
Wow. What do you, what do you like about Hunter?
Just a, a good man. Godly man.
Yeah.
Hard worker. Just all the fundamentals. That's awesome. I'm sure his story has, I don't know his story other than I know him.
Yeah. Well, hey, Earl, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show and learn about your story, learn about all the different things that you've done and are doing.
Um, I'm, I'm really intrigued to keep following this, uh, The N2 Company, see all the new publications you said you guys have identified. Over 5,000 potential opportunities there. Yeah. Uh, if people are interested, go to, uh, n2co.com. Yep. Up the top right corner you can see become a publisher.
Yeah. The letter N, the number 2, co.com.
Um, Earl, we appreciate you stopping by. You're
welcome. Take
it
easy, man.
Welcome. Yep. Talk to you soon.
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