Mike Sharman — Entrepreneur, Creator, Marketer, Digital Wizzard

It's the What's Involved Show where we discuss all things business, self-development, motivation, inspiration and occasionally I go totally off the tracks and talk about something weird. Great to have you along with us. And it is yet another edition of What's Involved. Great to have you along with us, my special guest. Man, we've taken a long time. We keep sort of missing each other and you know you're doing stuff that a lot of people are not doing. And what is that? Who am I talking about? Well, my special guest is a founder, I believe, and CEO of Retro Viral. It's Mike Sharman. Hello, Mike. Hello, David. Thanks for having me. Sorry for making you run around and constantly blowing your... No, not at all. I mean, you've been busy, which I think is blooming awesome because I know there's a lot of people that haven't been busy over this time. So I'm glad you managed to take some time and fit me in and let us have a little bit of a chat about you. As I said a little earlier on to you before we went live, as you can blame Don Packett for sending me you as a great guest, a great potential guest to have on the show. It's been a bit mysterious so far. So let's start off right at the beginning and tell me a little bit about Mike Sharman.

Where do you come from? What have you been doing in your life and then what is Retro Viral? Yeah, so I mean, just a little bit of background that I think a lot of people have already known by now is that I wanted to be an actor. But then my parents basically said to me, that's ridiculous. And the number one fear of white parents is that you'll never have medical aid or you'll never be able to have a bond. So they kind of dissuaded me from going down the pure acting route and I ended up studying a marketing degree at the NREL. And yeah, what I really enjoyed about it was I had a good mix of some business subjects and some advertising thinking subjects like audio video where we were looking at creating scripts and putting together some really cheap handheld videos back in the day before we had smartphones with the technology that we do now. And after I finished my studies, I had done some part time work. I used to do promotions. I used to spray fragrances to people at malls when we could visit such places. And I used to do some telemarketing as well for my sons and for the sons of the people on the receiving end of those calls. And I think there was a lot of groundwork within those early test grounds that taught me to have a thick skin and to not take no for an answer.

And once I completed my studies, I just said to my focus and I've saved up some cash and I'm going to go to the US. I'm never going to have this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I lost out on an opportunity or I had a regret. So I found an acting school online, paid for my way to the US and fortunately my aunt and uncle lived in Northern California. And then I made my way down to Southern California, set up base in the valley near Hollywood and did some acting school, started doing some stand up comedy and learning how to write comedy. And for me, it's been the most invaluable tool as part of my daily pitch process in our current infrastructure and existing world. Because the one thing around stand up comedy and the style of writing that I learned was based on the comedy Bible by a lady called Judy Carter. And her whole thesis is around the fact that in order to develop comedy, you start with the premise and the insights and that's the truth and that's the honesty and that's the thing that anybody in an audience can nod their head to. It's like the sky is blue, like that's something that people can can relate to. And it's similar actually with advertising is like you're looking for this holy grail of a key insight about the target market or about your audience so that they can agree with your statement that you're putting out as a brand.

And then they come along with you for the ride. They're more likely to buy into what you're saying. And then in comedy, that's when you develop the humor, the act out, the timing and the delivery that will then bring the laughs and the emotional connection with you. And it's a similar kind of formula with the way in which we write content for social media and we develop advertising in the way that we like to put our bespoke twist on things. So, yeah, a couple of years, I spent my time in the US, wrote a one man show, came back, performed that adverts and that was kind of my first ever startup because we had to worry about budgeting and marketing and pricing and all that kind of stuff. And the profit we made from the show took it to Grahamstown, performed at the festival and I just realized how much of a slog this whole acting world was. And I had a mate of mine who had started a PR agency and she said to me, listen, why don't you try your hand at PR? You can do some performance. You talk well to people. So just why don't you come and give it a bash? I didn't know too much about PR. I did a course on it once at university. But I really loved the learning that I had working at this small agency, which is now one of the best midsize agencies in the country called Tribeca.

And they launched the Virgin Money credit card in South Africa. They worked with a whole host of financial services brands and tech products. So I really learned the importance of strategic insights when it came to PR and that coupled with storytelling that taught me how to really put a brand out there and how to make journalists who were the original influences excited about what it is that your brand does. And then fast forward about 18 months later, I won a fancy dress competition to go to the UK. So I moved over to London. I've never worked on one of those working holiday visas at a bar or anything like that. So I decided to use my working holiday visa for some jobs, some travel and all the good stuff associated with it. And you are working in London. I was exposed to Twitter in 2008. I signed up and I had my first kind of quasi smartphone. And what what I wanted to do off the back of that was just really start documenting my journeys from the UK. So I had a small blog set up. I started tweeting and I just became obsessed in terms of the analytics and the insights that I could gain from seeing how content is being consumed. And then just off the back of that became self taught in the social space.

And I started consulting for the agency and being seconded to different brands to give them advice and insights in terms of social media, the growth thereof, where it was going. And, yeah, just from having worked in an agency, I got to a stage where I was unable to learn from anybody in social media in the space that I worked at because no one knew anything because it was so new. So I really wanted to develop something or launch my own brand where it had what I like to call the holy trinity of marketing. So it was digital. But then digital needs to extend beyond that in order to have an emotional connection with an audience. And when you're selling and marketing and advertising, you almost go down these sales funnels. So you almost have to target people emotionally and then you have to convert, convince them with a rational argument of why they should buy your product and your service. But if you don't make that emotional connection with your audience, then you're never going to convince them to be a customer. So digital plus PR plus activation, because no matter how digital savvy, we become the more we crave human interaction. And I think that those three things together combined was kind of the vision for launching retroviral and then came back to South Africa in 2010, launch retroviral around the time of the World Cup.

And we just started off hyper focused and hyper niche. We started amplifying content for brands and we picked up some work with SAB and Miller did some social media and community management for their rock the boat campaign. And towards the end of that year, we won some work with Nando's and Nando's had traditionally never posted the posters to social media that paid for space in newspapers. And that could come into the hundreds of thousands of rounds when you consider the sweat in the Sunday Times, the city press in terms of half page or full page advertising. And we suggested them, why don't you share those posters that we now are synonymous with a Nando's brand? Why don't you start sharing them on social with influencers and Twitter celebrities? And this was before influencer marketing was an actual term. So, yeah, we kind of pioneered in that space. And then that allowed us to really kick off. And we won some awards and we really were able to elevate ourselves quite quickly based on this niche offering that we were one of the first in the country to provide and something that we weren't a threat to agencies or brands. We were a very attractive bolt on offering to add value and get more eyeballs onto brands content. And our focus was on tracking both eyeballs and conversion.

So it wasn't about just pure vanity metrics of virality. It was around getting millions of views, but then also increasing your sales. And I think that was the aspect that was very attractive. Wow. Because you've now given me a whole bunch of questions. So I'll tell you what, when we come back, I'm going to be asking you some of those questions. My special guest is founder, CEO. Do we call you a CEO, Mike? Sounds pretty wanky. I prefer to go by co-founder because I feel like it's blanket enough without being too serious. OK, so he's a co-founder of Retro Viral. We'll be back with Mike in just a bit. And we're back. It is what's involved. Mike Sharmon, my special guest, co-founder of Retro Viral. OK, so questions. You mentioned stand up comedy right in the beginning of our chat, Mike. There must be one of the most difficult things I believe in the world to do and to master, because the other thing I happen to know, for example, Barry Hilton quite well. And I mean, we've been sitting somewhere having a chat and then I'll come up to him and go, my cousin, say something funny. And he's like, oh, four, five, six kind of thing. Did you find the same thing? As soon as you mentioned comedy or stand up comedy, people expect you to be funny all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing like, hey, tell me a joke, funny man. And that's that kind of expectation that comes with saying that you've had experience in stand up comedy. And I think that it's one of those things that some of the truly funny people of the world are really good observational comedians. So if you think about the Trevino's of the world, the Seinfeld's of the world, they take really normal situations and sometimes even mundane, seemingly situations and they can make it funny. And it's because you're observing the reality and the truth of it. I mean, like I have two small babies. And when we talk about having two under two, people identify with that whether they've had two toddlers at the same time or if they've witnessed that from afar from friends and family, because they just know like, oh, there's chaos, there's drama, there's comedy, there's tears that comes with that experience. So the real comedy that appeals to me is stuff that's based around this observational humor, because we can all find something funny out of our regular day daily lives. Okay, well, that sort of makes sense. The other thing that caught my attention is you talked about social media, you talked about your travels in the UK.

Is Sharman the Bomb and Mike Sharman the same person? Yeah, it is the same person. I don't really go by Sharman the Bomb in much. It was my Skype name that you dialed in to me on today. But yeah, it was that is one of my one of my early jobs and when I first had a Skype account. So I've just kept it ever since Sharman the Bomb and it stays with me and gives me a glimpse into my past. It's wonderful stuff. But now, social media, you know, to me, it's fascinating because when this whole thing started and social media started to become a thing. I was violently opposed to it. It was absolutely rubbish as far as I was concerned. Because this Teeth Bird thing and Facetagram book, I got none of it. Okay. And I thought, ah, it's a fad. People are not going to care about it. And suddenly they started to care about it a great deal. And then it went from, because you mentioned the beginning, a lot of people didn't know what it was you did to these days. I mean, everybody and their dog is a social media expert. It really can be tiring. And especially when you look at people throwing out blamboyant titles in their LinkedIn accounts. I think that it's a struggle because it has become like almost like Bitcoin miners or those people at Sulforix that follow you on Instagram.

Like, that's the kind of social media view at times. And I think that, you know, we've been really fortunate because we started out at the real early stage of the adoption. And as a result, like we were very hyper focused on amplification and getting people talking about brands. But then over the years, we've become like a more full service, creative, digital agency in the sense that we now produce TV commercials. We create outdoor experiences on billboards using Facebook Live and technology. So for us, we always try to stay ahead of the curve and look at adopting technology, not just for the adoption sake, but how can we leverage that technology to once again support business objectives? Because that's ultimately the game that we're in. We're not just in the vanity metrics or the awareness game. We're in the sales game. OK, yeah, that makes that makes sense. But now you talk about us. How big what sort of a staff complement does retroviral have? Because you seem to be very hands on. Yeah, I am very hands on, but I've got an amazing team of people. We're about 15 now. Staff. And that's a mixture of an amazing creative director who works with me, Catherine. Shout out to you. And we have community managers. We have designers. We have client service people.

And we have an amazing head of finance to help structure all of that detail and all of the insights from a finance perspective. Because I used to be afraid of finance and its function in the early days of my entrepreneurship journey. But the thing that really helped my business acumen is to understand at granular level how much does everything cost you on a monthly basis, because it's not just staff salaries. It's the desks they sit at. It's the Internet. It's the groceries. It's all of those things. Those ultimately add up to define how much value each thing comprises in your space. And if you're not taking that into consideration when you're charging out your rates for your clients, you can come up short. And it also helps you in determining your margins and where you position yourself in the market and where do you fit to your competitors. So for me, I think financial acumen is one of the most important things that we often take for granted in entrepreneurial startup space. I'm glad you mentioned that because working in the creative space like you do, and I consider myself mildly creative, I'm very much one of those don't bore me with the details kind of person. So in terms of financial stuff, I'm horrible. I'm not ever going to change that. It holds absolutely no appeal to me.

So the concept of getting somebody that works well with creative people, but is a financial brand, that makes a lot of sense to me. Definitely. And it's all about complementary services and skills. And it's also about that that old adage of playing to your strengths, but also working with people who cover your blind spots to make sure that there is nothing that you can drop on that side. Now, Mike, when we come back, I want to ask you a little bit about the kinds of people or organizations that you deal with, you know, what kind of a client do you have? So we'll talk about that when we come back. What I want to keep saying anti, from retroviral.co.za, that's the website, retroviral, co-founder Mike Sharman, my special guest on what's involved. And we're back with my special guest, Mike Sharman. So Mike, yeah, just before the break, we were talking about what sort of your ideal client, the clients that you have, because it amazes me. And I take my hat off to you because obviously, you guys maybe have not been as busy, but you've still been fairly busy over this whole corona lockdown. The world's gone to hell in a hand basket. The corona coaster as we affectionately know it. So, yeah, talk to me about that. I mean, you know, who do you what kind of companies do you like to work with?

I'm going to read you our manifesto that we we kind of co-wrote as a company. And then if you ever get to visit our offices one day in the future, you'll see that we basically got it emblazoned on our entry wall. So it's the first thing that guests and staff see when they come into the office in the morning. And I think it's something that was important because it allowed us to really define what we are and who we best work with, because there's a real challenger approach to the way that we take on briefs. And we don't work well with all clients. And I think that's a lesson for startups and entrepreneurs is that once you can define who you are, the better your opportunity is understanding who you're best suited to work with is because you can't be all things to all people. And I think that's very valid because, you know, when you when you starting out, at least in my experience, when I started out, you suddenly realize, hang on, I don't have this thing called a J.O.B. anymore. So I need to make money. And you're not particularly picky or choosy about where you make money. You're just scrambling to make money. Yeah, I think that can that can actually do a lot of damage if you don't define that kind of stuff, you know, right up front, like a game of hungry hippos, you just opening your mouth to try and take briefs and you inevitably drop balls and you're inevitably going to disappoint.

And I think you have to go through that phase to figure out what it is. I mean, we are 10 years young this year. So I mean, it's taken us a journey to figure out it only took us like four or five years to figure out what our kind of key positioning was. And we continue to refine that and tweak that. So I feel like it's a proper marathon. You never you never finished. Our manifesto goes something like this. Retroviral is the alternative agency. We were the kids who had insecurities but found our calling in comms, the thing that we're great at. We question our natural universe. We're not afraid to tell our clients when we feel they're wrong. We thrive on challenger brand challenges. We are the agency that has made more brands go viral than any other agency in Africa. We are viral scientists. We emotionally elevate brands, rationally drive sales. We are retroviral. Wow. Okay. Yeah, sure. So I love the part specifically there, Mike, about the about the insecurities because I think that resonates with a lot of people. You know, it's weird because a lot of people, I mean, and you talk about that. I've got like I've got hordes of insecurities and imposter syndrome and all sorts of things. Do you find that that I don't know, does it make you guys try harder? Having insecurities. Yeah, I think that advertising is such an interesting space because I think it's a home for so many misfits.

And I think that the more people can understand that there is a place, there is a lid for every pot, that there is a space for you to feel safe that, you know, even in corporates, like we work with some brands where they welcome the difference and they welcome people to be able to participate because it brings out the best in the product or service that they're offering. So I think that we've just labeled it because then it allows people to feel like, okay, I can be myself. If someone wants to come to work with purple hair, they're more than welcome to. But it's more about the internal happiness and the internal comfort as opposed to like an external force of what they're trying to achieve. And I think by knowing ourselves and knowing our limitations, we can ultimately be a better service provider to the brands and products and services that we that we offer support to. Okay, because and the reason I find this so refreshing is I mean, oftentimes, you know, I'm not afraid to tell my customers, my clients that no, no, I'm not going to do this or if somebody approaches me and it's not a good fit. I'm not afraid to go no. And it's a difficult lesson to learn when you're hungry. When you're hungry, you kind of, you know, if all else fails, lower your standards.

Yeah, it's such a hard lesson. I mean, I also like, I prefer not to work with startups and on early stage entrepreneurs, because the problem is that money is too emotionally connected to them as a person. Like once you're in a stage where money is just a budget, and it's a line item on a spreadsheet, then it becomes a lot easier for you to execute freely with them. And I've had relationships with clients who, in the early days, I said to them, like, I'd love to work with you, but you're just, you're too emotionally connected to that cash that you're going to be parting with that, no matter what I achieve, it's going to disappoint. And at the same time, like, you're not going to give me the flexibility to, to succeed for you, because, you know, there's this saying that I learned from Melissa Atrey at the start of our journey was like, don't ever let the fears of financial failure cripple you. Because once you are suffocated by money, it stops the creativity, it stops the, the fluidity of the flow of the cash, and money is a, it's an energy, what you give out is what you get in return. And yeah, I think in those early days, and even now, like, by saying no to a lot of people, it's come full circle. Now there are brands that have grown over the last 10 years that are multi-million, hundreds of millions of brands worth of businesses that have come back and be like, cool, let's work together now.

Because we said no in those early days, and we didn't try and take or bite off more than we could chew, we got to a much more zen space. I mean, it sounds a little bit like eat, pray, love here. But I mean, I think it's important to, to stand your ground and know is a very important word at times. I would, I would agree with you. And it takes a lot of courage to actually do that. So I was going to, you've kind of answered the question, because I was going to say to you, what sorts of companies, you know, do you do you actually deal with? So the smaller ones and the startup, you don't really deal with them. And I can understand why. I mean, I know in terms of my journey and where I am, money is still a very emotional thing. It's most certainly not a line item in a budget for me, it's very, very emotional. And I think it's that, you know, when in the early stages of a business, very often you end up with those feast or famine kind of stages. And I think to grow past that is quite a challenge. Definitely. So I mean, we work with a mixture of clients like FMCG stuff, Blue Chip, we work with Liberty, we do all of the internal comms, we actually, we built a platform to drive podcast and other multimedia content, so that the C-suite and middle management and even just regular members of the staff can engage and they can participate with conversations with one another, which then filters into a WhatsApp line for engagement and feedback based on the content, based on what's happening within the organization. So that's been a two year plus project that continues to grow.

And especially now during COVID-19, we've been able to disseminate the key stats, insights and info so that we can reduce the pandemic fatigue that is proliferating all your other social channels. We do a lot of work with the Martin and Martin brands, the Beano's, the Huskies, the Pampers, those sorts of brands. We do some work with Gumtree, which we've most recently won during lockdown. We do all of the through the line thinking, as well as on Le Let's with tampons and pads. And we've just launched a community recently where women can log on and they can ask questions about periods, different life stages and life cycles that they're experiencing. If they're too shy and they want to be anonymous, they can do so, or they can ask questions in vernac if they come from a specific part of the country where it's taboo to talk about tampons and periods. So we're really trying to enable the facilitation of conversations and have responders who can respond, whether it be in English or in vernac with those individuals. And that's having huge success. And I think that's an important differentiator of ours is like we try and solve problems as simply and effectively as possible, but leveraging and utilizing the technology that we have at our disposal that is as mainstream as possible.

It sounds very much like you've created a company in a culture where it's about giving back and the companies that you work for, you kind of encourage that in them as well. And I think that's brilliant. Two things that you mentioned is the podcast thing. I've been doing podcasting and I've been talking about podcasting and saying podcasting is the future for a couple of years and been offering that as a service to to corporates and to clients. And I've been running into brick walls left, right and center right up until COVID and suddenly people were much more willing to talk to me. Yeah, it's amazing how that shifted. And I think even now with like your zoom and your Microsoft Teams technology, it's something that existed within corporate culture prior to COVID-19. But now it's been like the kicker that's forced people to use that technology. And as people have become more comfortable with using video conferencing, they've then realized I can listen to podcasts while I'm in lockdown. I mean, I personally, I rode my bike up and down my cul-de-sac and would listen to our long podcast from Reed Hoffman from LinkedIn and just like fascinating stories of businesses that have scaled. And I think like across the board, there have been more times to research new technologies, people have been at home, so they've had the opportunity to tune in and listen to a podcast or two.

And as you know, I mean, and your listeners would know it becomes almost like something that you almost obsess over and it becomes quite contagious. Once you've listened to one podcast, your brain just wants to explode into more knowledge and you want to just delve into stuff that you can learn about. And I think like curiosity that Nick Carolambus always talks about the curiosity cult that the more curious we are, the more questions we ask, the better we can arm ourselves with insights and the better entrepreneurs and business owners and like successful employees we can become as a as a unit and as a community. Fantastic. When we come back and we're going to be wrapping up, I'm going to find out from you, Mike, where Retroviral is going, what's next for you personally, what you've got up your sleeves. I must just tell you something, though. You mentioned that you deal with the Pampers, the cat few drains and everything like that as well, the Huskies and the whole lot. We have we have three cats. And I promise you, when you buy any of those products, I refer to it as Kitty Crack because cats go nuts for it. You know, and it's like I don't understand it. Brand specific and brand loyal cats in particular, you can't mess with the cat's preference.

No, no, you can't. And trust me, I've tried, but they insist on the Kitty Crack. So there we go. Something new for you. We're not going. I don't think we're going to advertise that. When we come back, wrapping up with my special guest, Mike Sherman, finding out where they as a company are going to. This is what's involved. And we're back with my special guest, Mike Sherman. So, Mike, what's up? I mean, you have been busy during during this covid pandemic, which I think is amazing first and foremost. But where are you guys going to? What are your plans for the company and for Mike himself? Yeah, so we've had quite an interesting last couple of years. We launched a sister agency to retroviral with a core focus on sports storytelling called retroactive. And we launched that with Brian Habana. Brian was a schoolmate of mine. So I've known him since he was a skinny Scrumhoff. There are since he's retired, we've taken on this venture together with Shaka Susulu, my other retroviral shareholder, as well as Ben Koppinski. And that's we've had some great results. We were the young agency of the year at the Sports Industry Awards. We've won some local and international awards for the stories that we've told in the sports base from an average Joe who went on and did a half Ironman from never having run five kilometers and never having posted to Instagram.

He was our influencer all the way to telling Kirsten Landman's story. And she became the first African woman to complete the Dakar on a motorbike in January. And then, yeah, in covid, we we decided that we wanted to help athletes get back in the game and better commercialize their careers. So we launched a product called Matchkit. And that's literally Matchkit.co is the URL that you can go to if you're an athlete. And effectively, it's a mobile website builder that you can link to your Instagram account and you can effectively build your own athlete website in under five minutes with links to be able to sell merchandise, to be able to sell voice notes and video clips to fans, as well as being able to raise money for your foundations. We realized that athletes needed a bit of insight into be able to thinking about what they can do now that the world was in shutdown in lockdown mode for covid-19 reasons. And, yeah, we've had really great success in the first six weeks. I mean, we've attracted athletes that have access to about two point six million fans globally. We have an incredible response from women athletes, from international cricketers, rugby players, footballers. A lot of the Banyana players are signing up at the moment, cycling teams.

And that's kept us incredibly busy during this period because it's something that we just felt the timing was never better in order to have conversations with athletes, with their agents and sports bodies while they were in such flux. OK, that you know what, as I'm sitting here, I'm thinking this is one of those ideas where, you know, people all over the place are going to be kicking themselves and go, why didn't I think about that? But this is what this is what strikes me about retroviral. And even during this this covid period is you haven't done what a lot of people have done and you cannot judge them for doing it. I mean, I did I did it as well in the beginning is just going to a state of absolute panic and then numbness. But it doesn't sound like you guys have done that. Well, you know, pandemics are quite frightening. And as human beings, we don't really have too much experience with dealing with global varieties. But I think it's it's a real it's a real pandemic paralysis that permeates a lot of people out there. And, you know, for me, I think it's just it's fortunate that a lot of things have come into play and timing and all that kind of thing. But for me, I am I hate to fail.

So if there's an opportunity, I really like to keep hustling, keep digging away at it and just seeing if I can make it work. And, you know, I think that you mentioned it earlier about being hands on is that I think that there's no holy cows. Like if you have to roll up your sleeves and and try something and keep going like I think I want to see things succeed and I want to make it happen. And I think that I'm just fortunate that the understanding of writing, the understanding of dissemination of content and information is what our business is focused on. So for us, having been set up a company that was in the cloud and off Google Drive, a space where we pitched from 2015 2016 to to bring more retainer clients on boards. Like we were very thought we were a little bit more protected than the average business from a pandemic because we were less reliant on the physical world and we were more more geared to social. And because we are a group of creative thinkers, we like to solve business problems with creativity and don't like to be told no. So stick it to you, COVID-19. I love that. Mike, the web address again for the athletes? Matchkit, M-A-T-C-H-K-I-T dot C-O. Matchkit dot C-O. And this is this for sort of professional athletes.

We're not talking somebody who does a park run for fun. No, I mean, it's kind of it's semi-professional and professional athletes that are looking to almost have like a digital CV of their value. So it showcases the ecosystem. It's basically a competition to websites in its old kind of format or thinking because it allows you to log in via your Instagram account. It allows you to link your social channels and then fans and brands can come to one place and find you in this fragmented world of social. And it also showcases your key stats, your demographic. So as a potential sponsor or brand, you can see at at a glance, hey, this is someone that I'd like to sponsor. It also has the ability to embed YouTube videos so you can showcase your best highlights or your tries or your goals or whatever it may be, as well as the ability to embed TikTok video because a lot of these younger athletes are now TikTok aficionados. So we've kind of thought about this fragmented world and ecosystem and the fact that if you're a triathlete or someone who's a cyclist or one of the lesser sponsored sports, especially from a South African athlete perspective, you can go out and you can leverage your really engaged audience.

So we've got someone like Henry Schumann, who was obviously a bronze medalist in Rio. I mean, he can sell his caps, his t-shirts, his hoodies. And the fact that these individuals have such a large engaged audience or a niche engaged audience, you know, they can make tens of thousands of dollars just by selling some merchants, selling some videos and voice notes. And we don't take any profit off any of those services. It's something that we want them to be able to to generate additional income for so that they can continue to to participate in their sports. Because now more than ever, it's even more expensive for them. And, you know, a lot of them have had to get into Europe for those seasons so that they can continue exercising and participating at the highest level, especially now that the Olympics have been pushed up by next year. I was I was smiling to myself when you mentioned the TikTok thing because, you know, if if if any of the rumors are true, the orange man is soon going to have some shares or some say in TikTok. Yeah, I know. Microsoft might be the US owner. So it's interesting to see what happens there. That should be quite interesting. Anyway, like it's almost time for me to wrap it up.

What's next for you personally as Mike Sherman? I'm going to go and have a nap. I'm a big fan. I must tell you, I am a big fan. Naps because I've got a two year old, three year old and an eight year old. And naps are very few and far between in this place. The plan is to I'm busy working on a second book as well. So there's there's a few different elements that I'm working on. And yeah, I just I sleep very well at night, but I'm very busy during the days. My my my brain's always ticking over. So looking forward to finishing off 2020 strong and desperate to travel again and go somewhere exotic. And that wraps it up for what's involved for this episode. I'd love to hear from you. What's involved? What's involved? This is what's involved. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, by the way, for listening.