From Military to Medicine | Rex Adam's Path to CEO of EyeSouth Partners

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This is the second of a three-part series that features CEOs who have successfully exited (or recapitalized) a Shore portfolio company. This episode features Rex Adams, the CEO of EyeSouth, the nation's largest comprehensive ophthalmology platform headquartered in Atlanta. Rex shares how focusing on people, processes, and technology helped EyeSouth exceed their growth goals. He also discusses his advice to future CEOs and his strong belief that leaders have a responsibility to develop their people.

In October 2022, Shore Capital Partners announced the sale of EyeSouth Partners, a leading provider of comprehensive ophthalmology services across the eastern United States, to Olympus Partners. Shore formed EyeSouth in 2017 with the goal of creating a leading ophthalmology platform in the South and providing the highest level of support to its practices and clinicians. At the time of founding, Shore completed a strategic partnership with Georgia Eye Partners and its founding physician, Dr. Eugene Gabianelli, was appointed Chief Medical Officer of EyeSouth. Led by Chief Executive Officer Rex Adams, EyeSouth grew its affiliate network from 5 locations to over 155 locations throughout Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina and Illinois. The growth was driven by organic and M&A initiatives, as well as EyeSouth’s ability to support its affiliated practices and physician partners with strategic guidance, administrative resources, operating expertise and capital with an absolute focus on clinical quality and a patient-first culture.

Transcript

Introduction

Michael Burcham: Welcome to Microcap Moments, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the stories of founders, investors, and leaders who have taken on the challenge of transforming ideas and small companies into high growth organizations. The journey of building and scaling a business takes one down many unexpected pathways.

It's a journey where we learn from our mistakes, fall down often, but have the entrepreneurial grit to pick ourselves up and persevere. Within this series, we will share these stories of success and failure, of the challenges and the rewards faced by those who dare to dream big. And through their lessons learned, we hope to inspire others who are on a similar journey of becoming, growing and leading.

In this episode, Anderson Williams and I will be talking to Rex Adams, CEO of EyeSouth Partners, the nation's largest comprehensive ophthalmology platform headquartered in Atlanta. Rex's firm is committed to empowering eye doctors to deliver the highest quality medical and surgical specialty eye care for their patients.

EyeSouth has over 300 affiliated doctors providing eye care at over 170 locations. Prior to EyeSouth, Rex was the CEO of Payspan, a leading healthcare technology company focused on healthcare reimbursement and payment automation. While at Payspan, he was named a 2017 CEO Award Winner by CEO Today magazine, as well as a CEO Award Winner by Finance Monthly.

Prior to Payspan, Rex was the Chief Operating Officer of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Rex earned his undergraduate degree from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He completed his Master's in Business Administration at Harvard. Rex also spent five years in the Army, graduating from the U.S. Army's Air Assault, Airborne, and Ranger schools.

Welcome, Rex, to our podcast. Would you take a few minutes just to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about EyeSouth?

Rex Adams: I'm Rex Adams. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of EyeSouth and I've been fortunate enough to be the Chief Executive Officer since early 2018.

EyeSouth is a affiliation of ophthalmology doctors. So again, ophthalmology doctors tend to take care of patients having two major conditions. One is cataracts, which is a protein buildup on the front of your eye. And the other is retina related diseases, which is on the back of the eye. And what's great about our organization is because of the natural demographic trends in America, the good news is we all are living longer.

And what that means is that natural protein buildup on your eye that may not have been operated on back 30, 40 years ago when we're all dying of cancer or other diseases, now those people live much longer, and that protein buildup needs to be removed. So basically, a large subset of our doctors remove that protein.

And with today's technology, they can also replace that with a man-made lens that actually improves your vision. And then the back of the eye, those diseases are really related to obesity and high blood pressure and screen time. As you can imagine in today's American society with the increase in obesity, the increase in diabetes, increase in screen time, obviously those diseases are also increased.

So, it's a great service to society. We now have about 300 doctors that treat those conditions and we're really very proud of what we do to help those patients.

Foundational Elements

Michael Burcham: You've very successfully grown EyeSouth from a fairly young business to a formidable company with significant market presence. Would you go back to some of the early days of your time at EyeSouth and talk to us about some of the foundational elements that you put in place to really create an infrastructure that could scale and grow?

Rex Adams: I think I would go back to kind of the classic people, process, and technology. Between Shore and our earlier management team, we were able to recruit what I believe is really a top-notch management team. That's what really attracted me to EyeSouth. Every area we were able to recruit and staff some key people.

And obviously over time, sometimes we needed to upgrade those, or we outgrew those individuals, but that's probably was the first foundation, and that included an initial set of doctors that really were critical to our success. The second was really, I think we made the right choices in investment in technology.

You know, in these rapid scale ups, the need for investing in technology is critical. Otherwise, you're just adding more and more labor and people, and obviously that comes with a certain amount of costs, as well as training challenges. So we were really thoughtful in our selection of technology, whether that was technology that helped us treat patients, to our back office processes.

And then lastly, I think one of the things that Shore really focuses on and brings forward is establishing a set of processes, both in how you build a company, as well as how you interact with your customers, in our case patients, and whether that's in recruiting new staff, whether that's in recruiting new doctors, that ability to begin to build a playbook is really important.

And my view on processes is also, even though we're an entrepreneurial organization at the beginning, what processes do for you is it permits you to really focus on the people and the uniqueness of each individual instead of having to stop and really think about what's the next step in this process.

So again, I would just bring it back to people, process, and technology. And that has really helped us throughout our six years of high growth.

Michael Burcham: We began our conversation with Rex talking about the importance of people, process, and technology to scale a business. In the following segment, I asked Rex about which type of processes he had focused on for scale.

Rex discusses the importance of leaving the clinical process decisions with the doctors, and instead has focused on processes around marketing, recruiting, and payment collections to help the organization scale.

I want to talk a little bit more about process Rex because coming from a healthcare background myself and working with a number of practitioners, almost every medical practice has some unique processes.

What was the thought and structure and timeline around which you got a probably a fairly disparate group of folks to agree on some of those best methods so you could really implement particularly some of the patient facing or patient experience technologies?

Rex Adams: Well, the great news about our business model is the medical decisions are made entirely by the local doctor.

You know, one of the things I've been associated with healthcare over the last decade plus and firmly believe healthcare in particular is still a local decision by the patient, often influenced by the local community. So, from that standpoint, we continue to let the doctors determine what the appropriate procedures are for each patient.

Really where processes have helped us is in, you know, things like marketing, the ability to market digitally. Again, you know, digital marketing is a global capability and that has permitted us to really build that scale. The processes related to recruiting staff. Especially post COVID and the great resignation has really helped our local practices.

You know, processes associated with collections, particularly from insurance companies, is a very simple repeatable process that typically an individual doctor or a small doctor practice struggles with. Basically, the selection of technology, similarly, you know, the complexity of technology has grown so fast that a typical doctor can no longer address that, quite honestly, given, you know, all the time they spend with patients or their medical training.

And our processes on that has also helped tremendously.

The EyeSouth Opportunity

Michael Burcham: What I like about what you just shared is you really took administrative pain points for the doctor and ways that they could grow their business, and you focus on those types of technologies and processes to really help them do their best care.

Next, Rex discusses his career journey prior to EyeSouth and what attracted him to the company. He shares that he found the strength of the management team, the foundation of doctor leaders and the structure that was in place to be a winning recipe for a successful business. He also talks about EyeSouth's philosophy on how the company helps doctors bend the cost curve in health care.

You had a very successful career prior to EyeSouth. What attracted you specifically to the EyeSouth opportunity?

Rex Adams: That's a great question. I was Chief Executive Officer at the time of a healthcare technology company. Interestingly, I'm sure my wife will hate to have this be memorialized, but she actually voted against me joining EyeSouth at the time because she knew I was very happy at the technology company I was at.

And we were very, very successful and we had actually had a successful exit and I had signed up and was enthusiastic about another, you know, three to five years with the new investor. But Shore approached me, you know, through a search firm, I would say again, it's really a couple of things that really attracted to me.

You know, the first was the management team they had put in place. I thought it was top quality and that is so critical in these opportunities. The second was the foundation of doctor leaders that they were able to recruit. Our doctors were very patient focused, very clinically focused, but also understood, you know, some of the nuances of growth and operating a business, which was very unique and supportive.

The third, quite frankly, was Shore Capital. And I'm not just saying that because this is a Shore podcast, but you know, I thought Shore really brought a set of discipline, structure, processes, quote unquote, playbooks that would help a business grow. And I just have seen over time where high growth businesses that do not invest in those type of processes and structure and discipline often fail.

They outgrow their capabilities. And the other thing I've seen over the years on these entrepreneurial ventures is people think an entrepreneurial venture means encouraging chaos, encouraging everyone goes off and does their own thing, that there is no structure, there is no guardrails, there is no processes.

And I think Shore understands it's the exact opposite. You know, to be successful in these entrepreneurial ventures, you really do need some of those guiding principles, you need quarterly goals, you need tracking systems, you need dashboards, you need data to make high quality decisions. And so I found that very, very attractive with the Shore model.

And lastly, I do think the business model is extremely important. I actually think we can bend the cost curve in healthcare more easily than some of the other things that people have proposed. And again, the way we're bending the cost curve in healthcare is we're letting doctors be doctors. We're letting doctors serve patients locally.

But on the other hand, those type of administrative activities that scale wins, there's a lot of activities in business where scale wins. And so if we can use the benefits of scale with negotiating contracts for our doctors, you scale to select the best technology, you scale to select the best HR processes, whether that's recruiting or hiring.

You know we really do have a great way to bend the cost curve. Let our doctors be doctors, but at the same time really use scale in the back office where it makes the most sense.

Michael Burcham: In the following segment, Anderson asked Rex about what he learned leading a healthcare technology company that he was able to apply to leading a healthcare services organization.

Rex makes a powerful point about the importance of technology to achieve significant growth and scale.

Anderson Williams: Will you just say more, Rex, about that, your previous work in healthcare technology and then the shift to EyeSouth, what did you learn from technology that you were able to apply in terms of leading more of a care delivery services type of company?

Rex Adams: A couple of things. Number one is I do not think you can build a high growth company without technology. I mean, the reality is I just have seen over the years where high growth companies will have challenges. It's just the nature of growth. And if the solution to every challenge is hire more people, add more people, eventually that breaks under its own weight.

The second thing, the reason I'm a fan of technology, I mean, realistically, you know, technology I always say is as good at five o'clock on a Friday as it was at 9am on a Monday. And unfortunately all of us, me included, I'm probably not the strongest at five o'clock or 10 o'clock on a Friday night as I was on Monday morning.

So, I think technology provides that. I think the pace of innovation, the pace of change is tremendous. The other thing, you know, we just got to accept the fact, even our patient population, which tends to be, let's say, from the ages of 55 to 85, you know, people today want to interact digitally. And if they want the human interaction, they still want the flexibility to interact digitally.

You know, we were very thoughtful in my mind of not being on the bleeding edge. We did try to select technologies that we knew could scale. We're a very cloud-based environment, which helps both with scalability, if you think about it. You know, every time a new doctor affiliates with us, we're not buying a bunch of new servers.

We're not buying a bunch of new hardware, software, you know, we seamlessly connect them to the cloud. And the other benefit of that environment, you know, coming from a technology background is just security against cyberattacks. Again, a cloud environment, an innovative technology environment. Although no one is entirely safe against cyberattacks these days, absolutely not.

It begins to build just a better infrastructure to support that, both growth, security, and predictability.

The Growing Pains

Anderson Williams: Rex, as you look back over the past several years, what were some of the real world in the trenches, CEO story types of growing pains that you experienced as EyeSouth grew the way it grew. Give us a bit of wisdom from that hindsight during your time with Shore about what that looks like.

Rex Adams: Well, the good news is, as they say, the growth challenges we had are, you know, kind of first class set of problems. The type of challenges in this environment has just been more about recruiting the right people. Recruiting them at the right time. You want someone willing to roll up their sleeves, because you do have to do the work yourself often in these startup environments or microcap environments.

But at the same time, you want someone who knows what industrial strength really looks like. You want someone who can understand really the end state that we were driving toward. We've built the largest comprehensive ophthalmology platform in the United States. So, there's really no one who had a specific game plan or playbook for this.

But on the other hand, we wanted people who could understand of, how do you run a health care business with 200 locations? How do you run a health care business with 300 doctors? And we discuss this every day now. I mean, how do we continue to build a business with eventually maybe 500 doctors, 600 doctors and locations across 500 different clinics.

So, I think that's been probably one of the biggest challenges of course. It's just, you know, the managing growth and scale. I think the other thing is, it's like the retail business. I mean, some cases I know healthcare doesn't like to be considered retail, but in reality, every patient that shows up in our doors, we always stress, you know, that is someone's spouse or loved one or grandparent or parent.

And we need to make sure that interaction is unique and ideal for that specific patient and is individualized for them based upon their medical conditions and based upon their life situation. And that's always been a challenge. And again, not in a systemic way, uh, in a difficult way, but more in the standpoint when you see we have over a million patient encounters a year now, and even though those may want to be repetitive and repeatable processes, the reality is that is an individual person who quite frankly, without our care would eventually go blind.

And some of our conditions, they may go blind literally in a matter of weeks and others, quite frankly, would probably be years. But we need to remind our staff and ourselves of really the criticality of what we provide these people.

Developing The Team

Michael Burcham: In the upcoming segment, Rex offers some insight for new CEOs as he describes how his partnership with Shore shifted over the years. He also shares with us his approach to developing his team and protecting the culture of EyeSouth as the organization grew.

So, Rex, we have a number of founder entrepreneurs and younger CEOs who listen to the podcast. I'd like you to think about the last 5 to 7 years that you have been a part of the organization and what the partnership was Shore meant and how that support shifted and changed over time as the company grew.

Because I don't think every year is the same and the relationship does change. So, could you speak to that just a bit?

Rex Adams: I think one of the most important things that a new CEO and a CEO who hopes to be there over the next five to seven years need to decide is what work activities they are going to do themselves and what work activities they're going to delegate.

And then those work activities and decisions and other efforts that they delegate, you know, who is the right person to delegate it to? Is it someone on their immediate staff? Is it someone at Shore Capital? Or is it an entirely different resource outside the organization? I just have found over time, you know, most of us who listen to these type of podcasts are obviously high achievers, very successful people, and because of that, they tend to want to do everything themselves.

And I think to really be successful in these roles, you quickly have to figure out what are those decisions that you will make yourself? What are those work activities? For some of us, it might be looking at an Excel spreadsheet. For some of us, it might be writing your own PowerPoint presentation for a doctor or for an investor.

On other hands, you quickly need to begin to realize that I'm not as good at certain of these activities as others. For some of us that may be deferring to your HR staff on team building activities, it may be deferring to, you know, your finance and accounting staff on certain analytical analysis and decision-making tools.

In other cases, it may be deferring to a number two or number three person to help communicate and lead certain aspects of the organization. And so, if I had to give one summary advice to a new CEO, it's quickly decide what do you want to continue to retain, what are you willing to delegate.

Michael Burcham: You mentioned this a bit earlier in our conversation, but I want to go back to it and talk about it more.

You had said as the company grew, some people grew with the company, some you had to bring in some additional talent. I think that's something all of us who've sat in a CEO chair think a lot about, is how do we identify the talent we can help grow? Who is actually going to professionally develop themselves and grow with us?

And where are the places we're likely going to outgrow the talent we start with? I'd love to hear some of your reflection on that. Perhaps some of the things you worked on with you or your team at EyeSouth to try to develop talent so people could stay with you longer. And any stories or lessons learned from any of that I think would be really valuable to the audience.

Rex Adams: I think one of the things I would stress is really as leaders, we have a responsibility to develop our people. I mean, these people have made a commitment to your organization. And although you frame the question as, you know, kind of upgrading talent, or at least that's kind of how I heard it. I mean, I also think we've done a great job of developing people.

In the introduction I didn't mention I did spend five years in the army after graduating from West Point. And, you know, you literally cannot fire someone who's in the army. You're pretty much responsible to take those 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds and 24-year-olds that are under your responsibility and command and develop them.

I mean, it's not easy just to simply say you're fired. I want to bring in a new person. And so, I think that development orientation is really critical. You know, I think we're very, very proud on a lot of our roles. We have people who literally were the fifth employee or the 10th employee, and now we're in very, very senior roles.

That being said, I also think we have a responsibility to all of our employees, you know, to all of our shareholders, to our patients, to our customers. And when you do have someone who unfortunately the job has outgrown them, they're often being very challenged by that position. And my orientation has always been to think about the greater good of the other employees who are probably being penalized in some ways because of that weaker person or our patients or our customers.

And you'd hate for a negative outcome because you failed to address a person that had outgrown and not been able to keep up with their role and responsibilities.

Michael Burcham: And one of the things that really helps individuals be honest about their limitations and maybe invest in themselves is the right values and culture in an organization. Given the hyper growth of EyeSouth, how did you nurture and protect that cultural feel that you started with when you became almost 100x the size you were when you started.

Rex Adams: You know, I know it's pretty trite nowadays, but I try to build personally a collegial team-oriented culture. Again, kind of back to my military background and other work environments. I think when a team comes together, they create the greatest outcome. I think also just back to what we talked about, there's just so much growth.

So many work activities on these high growth companies. If you don't have a team, if you don't have others willing to pick up the slack, you're not going to make it. And so, we've really tried to build a culture around teamwork, around supporting each other. At the same time, we do try to maintain very, very high standards, you know, reference the book Grit or you read articles about grit.

You know, it talks about having a supportive environment, but also very, very high standards. And I think Shore contributes to that as well. Obviously, they're an accountability partner in these relationships, and they set high standards for all of us. But I think the type of people we tracked, you know, are achievement oriented, who also have high standards.

And so, if everyone's that focused on achievement and high standards, if we can create a supportive environment, they'll have a lot more comfort and confidence to take risks and to take actions and to take initiatives. And if you have a lot of people doing that, you can just do so much more as an organization than everybody being kind of concerned and risk averse and unwilling to take initiative.

Lessons Learned

Michael Burcham: Next, Rex shares with Anderson and me some of his biggest lessons learned as a leader.

He speaks about the importance of team engagement in achieving goals. He also talks about the importance of continuous learning and personal growth to adapt to the rapid changes in the market. He encourages one to have a strong heart towards service if you wish to lead a business. And he talks about learning to deal with the negative when you're in the seat of the leader.

When you think back over your career, both prior to EyeSouth and where you are today, can you identify one or two of your biggest lessons learned as a leader that you could share with our audience?

Rex Adams: I think it's the importance of people.

At the end of the day, a hundred people can always do a lot more than one person. We interact with a lot of doctors that are incredibly successful, but to a certain degree, you know, they're the single Michael Jordan or LeBron James of medical. And at the end of the day, you know, Michael Jordan cannot single handedly beat a team of five people.

And LeBron James can't single handedly beat a team. You know, Tom Brady talks about this all the time. I mean, football is a team sport. Tom Brady would stress the best games, he's on the field less than the defense. And so, in theory, he contributes less than the defense. And I think team orientation, that focus on people is really, really critical.

And I would put that probably beyond anything else. I think probably maybe another one would be growth, innovation. I mean, not innovation for the sake of innovation, but I find the best leaders, the type of people who listen to these podcasts, have a growth orientation. I mean, the world is just constantly changing.

And I would add that, you know, probably a third point I haven't mentioned. I mean, I think if you are new in your career, I think if you are constantly trying to reinvent your career. Learning and growth is critical. I mean, again, rapid change makes a young, new person in a career. And again, maybe I shouldn't say young, just a new person in career, equally competitive against someone who's been there for 15, 20 years.

And for that reason, I've actually have always liked rapidly changing industries. I liked industries that are addressing either technology or regulatory or societal changes, because in those types of environments, everybody's on equal footing to compete and win. And again, if you have the best solution, you tend to win as opposed to an industry or an environment that hasn't changed in 15 or 20 years, or people can become complacent and rely on kind of past successes and not have to continue to compete and win.

Michael Burcham: So, Rex, when I reflect on the stories you shared of your military leadership, what you've done in prior companies to EyeSouth and even here, you're clearly a very seasoned CEO. There are so many young people I meet who have this aspirational idea that they think they want to be a CEO, but I'm not so sure they quite appreciate perhaps the tradeoffs they need to make in their life to have that job.

As you reflect on your own career and lessons learned, what things would you want someone who's younger and thinking this to reflect on and think about before they really jump in the pool and think, I want to have this job?

Rex Adams: I know this often sounds like platitudes when a CEO or someone makes these statements, but again, I think a strong heart towards service toward others.

I'm a firm believer that at the end of the day, leadership is service toward others. I think the example I would give to support that, and I know a lot of people may not believe this, and I'm not trying to say, oh, woe is me as a CEO. But the reality is, I'd say 98 percent of the feedback I get is negative.

Quite honestly, issues that bubble up to me tend to be very negative. Either people feel they are being unfairly compensated or not being given opportunities to grow that they wish they could grow. Or third parties always asking for additional resources or things like that. I mean, the reality is, and you've heard this often about, you know, Presidents of the United States, the things that bubble up to the most senior leaders tend to be the most unfortunate or the most negative.

And again, that's not meant to be woe is me, but I think someone who thinks, you know, oh, I can't wait to be the CEO because everyone will, you know, bow down when I walk the hallways. I think that's an unfortunate perspective people may have, and it may exist in certain environments. But I think in those environments, especially with today's labor force, with the number of different options people have, with the need to be responsive to patients in our case or customers, I think that type of mentality will eventually lead to failure of the company.

So, I'd say, you have to have a certain amount of thick skin. I'll be honest. If you interviewed me 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I probably would not have that response. I think someone just comes with time and a set of experiences. So, it'd probably be the biggest thing.

Anderson Williams: If I could piggyback on that, what's the one thing that you've learned that you simply couldn't have learned in any other way than being in the CEO seat.

Rex Adams: That's a great question. I would say humility. When you're the CEO and you have the CEO title, you actually have the privilege to be humble because people are going to still give you a certain amount of respect as CEO. The reality, when I look back at my career, you know, when you're more junior, you're obviously ambitious and you obviously want to make sure others realize what you're contributing to the organization.

And with that comes a certain amount of desire to make sure others know your accomplishments. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, again, you know, every career book, success book would say, you know, you should let your boss know and let others know about successes and what you've accomplished.

Again, I think that's very, very important. I mean, quite frankly, in our business model, we try to make sure our doctors know what we're trying to accomplish for them. We let our staff know what we're trying to accomplish for them. And obviously, whether it's Shore Capital or other investors, we try to let them know what we're going to accomplish.

But the good news is with certain titles, the honest aspect is people sometimes respect the title. And I think when you do have that title, try to use it to your benefit. And again, I think people are often surprised. You know, if the CEO does defer to someone else on their staff to address an issue or answer.

In our model, you know, we always defer to our doctors, obviously our medical situations, but even on certain business items, we try to get their input. We value their input. And I think that's a privilege of being a CEO is you actually can be humble and still, you know, win and, uh, you know, rely on others to help you accomplish those victories.

CEO Advice

Michael Burcham: In this final segment, Rex shares his advice for other CEOs or entrepreneurs looking to make a similar journey. His suggestions are very clear. First, take care of yourself, focus on your health, and then be there for your family and friends. He talks about investing in these at peacetime moments so that you have bandwidth for the more challenging times.

Rex, is there any other advice you'd give a CEO?

Rex Adams: Probably two other items I'd recommend that they focus on. One is their health, and the second is their family. The reality is, in these type of roles, your health will suffer. I mean, the demands of the job are significant, and when you do have downtime or flexibility, I'd really encourage you to exercise and eat right, and I know that doesn't sound like anything that you'd expect on a business podcast, I think that's really important.

And the second one is investing in your family. I mean, you're fooling yourself if you think your family's not going to suffer at different times. And quite frankly, relationships that you have with your work, the relationships that you have with Shore and your coworkers.

And, you know, I think the ability to invest in your loved ones, your family, or whoever that may be in the times when maybe work activities aren't as intense will pay big dividends. Cause the reality is in these type of roles, you will get that phone call. Unfortunately, you know, maybe on the weekend. Or it may be, you know, in our typical weekday where you're going to stay very, very late and you're going to stay very, very late the next day and the next day and the next day in those environments, your personal health suffers, and your family's relationships suffer.

And so, the more that you can invest in those in peacetime, let's call it, the better it will be for, quite frankly, your family, yourself and your investors and your coworkers, because you will have the energy, the joy, the peace, the happiness that really comes from that supportive family outside of work. And you won't feel guilty spending an extra hour or an extra day or an extra week at work as they make sacrifices on your behalf.

Michael Burcham: Rex, this has been really exciting to talk to you, hear your story, and some of the lessons you've learned. We really appreciate you spending the time with us today.

Rex Adams: It's been a pleasure, really enjoyed it, and wish everyone the best of luck.

Michael Burcham: Thank you.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with story and narration by Michael Burcham. Recording and editing by Andrew Malone. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Rex Adams and Anderson Williams for joining me for today's discussion.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.