Company: Covalent Logic
Owners: Stafford Wood
Year Started: 2005
Employees: 26 – 50
“An Agency Story” podcast serves as a platform for marketing agency owners worldwide to share their dynamic experiences — from the adrenaline of start-ups to the complexities of growth. Hosted by Russel Dubree, a former agency owner turned business coach, this series dives deep into the emotional rollercoaster of agency life. In this episode titled “Zest,” we feature Stafford Wood, founder of Covalent Logic, who narrates her unique journey in the communications industry.
This episode explores the intricate dance of entrepreneurship, the chemistry of client relationships, and the transformative crises that shape business futures. Stafford shares her innovative approach to business, drawing on the metaphor of ‘covalent bonds’ — sharing rather than exchanging electrons, which she parallels to creating mutually beneficial client relationships. Her story from a reluctant entrepreneur to a visionary leader illustrates the profound impact of embracing the unknown.
Stafford recounts pivotal moments, such as her “Jerry Maguire” episode where a bold decision led to a company-wide shakeup — halving her team but setting the stage for a more aligned corporate culture focused on ‘good work, good people, good deeds.’ Her anecdotal journey through initial struggles with her business partner to ultimately redefining her business solo underscores a raw, authentic insight into leadership challenges and victories. One memorable quote from Stafford resonates deeply, “We are going to only work for good people who do good things and we’re only gonna do good work.”
This episode of “An Agency Story” not only offers a glimpse into the resilience required to steer a company through turbulent times but also ignites a discussion on the essence of value-driven business practices. Stafford Wood’s narrative invites listeners to reflect on what it means to lead with integrity and vision in the face of adversity. Tune in to “Zest” for a compelling tale of transformation and tenacity that will leave you contemplating the bonds you create in your professional and personal life. Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned executive, Stafford’s story is a testament to the power of adaptability and principled leadership.
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host Russel. On this episode, we have Stafford Wood founder of Covalent Logic an award winning communications agency founded in 2009 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Stafford’s passion for the digital space started by taking her local newspaper and sports teams online and bringing them into the digital age. Listen as she shares pivotal moments, like when she had to part ways with her business partner and our very own”Jerry Maguire” moment where she gathered her team to share a vision for the future and only half the company chose to follow her. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Stafford Wood with Covalent Logic. Thank you so much for joining us today, Stafford.
Stafford:
It’s my pleasure.
Russel:
Glad to have you here. If you don’t mind, start us off with a quick overview. What does Covalent Logic do and who do you do it for?
Stafford:
Every time I get that question, I know that embedded in the question is, what is Covalent and why would you name your agency that? When I was starting the agency, I wasn’t certain what we were going to do. I didn’t know if we were going to be digitally focused or if we were going to be branding focused. I knew we were going to be a communications firm but I wasn’t certain what specialties we were going to have. I didn’t know if I was going to be an agency or a consultancy or we were going to have associates. I didn’t have a business plan when I started the company. I focused heavily not on who we are or what we do, but how we do it and that word, Covalent, for me focuses on the idea of the overlapping resources, the overlapping intelligence. There are 2 kinds of bonds. There’s ionic bonds and covalent bonds. Ionic bonds are the typical agency relationship. Where you give me money and I give you ideas and it creates a charge particle where one of us feels maybe a little bit negative, and one of us feels a little bit positive. In a covalent bond, back in high school chemistry, you might remember that they share the electron. Which means neither of them is negatively charged. They’re holding it together as a bond. Covalent for me is about how we work with our clients. It’s how we work as a team, it’s how we work with our vendors, and it’s what we think about. I truly believe that two minds are better than one. I might have a great answer, but it may not be the correct answer for our clients. The logic piece of that is we can only do things that make sense when somebody comes to me and says, I need a new website. I’m like, actually, you need a new logo and then we’ll move forward to a new website or, I want to go to a trade show because I want to get the word out there. I’m like, that’s awesome for the 400 people who show up at the trade show, but it doesn’t necessarily give you a broader thing. We try to take those two things, covalence and logic, into every relationship with our partners and our clients. We do that for corporations, government, and we primarily focus on mergers, acquisitions and transitions. Points of change, when a company is either in a crisis, or have a major opportunity to be able to change a lot of things, either layoffs or hiring when they’re creating a new project, or they’re trying to transition people to an existing product. It’s all things corporate communications, heavily focused on the unknown, which has made the last few years pretty good for us because the unknown future has been…
Russel:
Not only do we figure out cool things about agencies on this show, we also find out about physics. Thank you for that insightful lesson, always love to hear what’s behind a name. I want to hear more about kind of your story and your journey as far as the agency concerned, but take a step back or two. Long before you started the agency, where did you think your career was headed? What was your aspirations for young Stafford?
Stafford:
Young Stafford wanted to be a foreign service officer. That was my goal. I wanted to work in international politics. Figuring out policy and all sorts of things like that. Ironically a lot of times I work in international politics or governmental policy as a communication specialist. When I graduated from college, the interweb had come into being and I had been working and building websites for fun things on the side. The web world made a lot of sense to me. I started working in that space, taking our local newspaper online and building its audience, working with sports teams to bring them into the digital age. Then I partnered with my former boss at an agency to create Covalent Logic, kind of in a pinch. I’d never planned on being an entrepreneur if nothing else. I literally never wanted to be an entrepreneur because I’m an only child of two self employed parents and I did not want that life. I wanted a check every two weeks with somebody else’s signature on it for the same amount of money, even if it wasn’t enough money because that felt like stability to me. When Katrina happened, I’m from South Louisiana, the entire world seemed out of control and we didn’t know what the future was. I thought having that control in my own hands was better than having someone make decisions for me who didn’t know my value or what we could do.
Russel:
Tell us a little bit about the evolution, as you said, you started this to take control. From that mindset shift, once you made that decision, what were the next steps from there? What did those early days look like?
Stafford:
I thought I was taking a contract. I thought I was taking a six month contract that would feed my family for a few months and then I would figure out what to do next and who to go work for next. A couple of weeks into that engagement, somebody else came to me and said, oh, you’re contracting now. We need to sign a contract with you. I was like, I can’t, I’m 1 person, I can’t handle that. He was like, we’ll hire somebody. And I thought, hire somebody? Has two contracts? That sounds amazing. I went back to some of the people that I’d worked with and said, hey, world’s up in the air. Do y’all want to take a gamble with me? We started a company with the idea that we were going to create work life balance. We were going to spend as much time with our families as we did with our colleagues at work. That didn’t work out the first few years, but I’m proud to say that I’ve built a culture where work life balance matters to my employees and my team. We can focus on it now in a very different kind of way than we could in the early years where I was working 12 hours days, 7 days a week and so was everybody else because I was so afraid of not taking the next contract that we needed to take it and figure out how to do it. That’s probably the most interesting thing is, I didn’t know how to run a business. I knew how to practice my craft. I knew how to solve business problems, but I’d never studied or even picked up much about profit and loss statements, balance sheets, understanding debt and credit and all of that, but I knew how to do what I did and we figured the rest out.
Russel:
You mean they didn’t teach that stuff in political science coursework in college?
Stafford:
They did. my degree is in Eastern European, Soviet and Russian area studies, so if you wanna run a communist country, I’m so there.
Russel:
You’re ready for it.
Stafford:
I joke that I do actually run Covalent in a little bit of a communist sort of way, where I try to make sure that everyone gets what they need out of the company, whether it is in time or resources or compensation and that everyone gives what they’ve got to give to the company, and we try to balance that as much as possible. I joke that everybody’s communist. You have to define what the we is in the communism, whether it’s yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your church, your community, your world.
Russel:
That sounds like a good book idea, how to run a communist company. I imagine you’d have some lovers and haters on both sides of that. That would be interesting. If you do decide to write that book, let me know and we’ll have you back on the show to talk about it. I heard a we in there and as I understand it, you had a partner. Did that start on the onset or how did you actually develop a partner in the business?
Stafford:
The first time we got together to talk about it, there were four of us. The original offer was we were going to each be 25%. That was how we were going to do it. I’d been thinking for a solid week about a business plan for how that structure worked. Were we going to be like a law firm that eats what you kill and what everybody does is what they get compensated? Or were we going to share our profits? How is that going to work? We show up the first day for our big work day on Saturday to structure the company and two of them say, hey, you know what, the world’s too crazy right now, I want a job. I want a salary. I want the stability of that. Me and my initial business partner looked at each other. It’s okay, I guess we’re 50/50 and we’ll figure it out. I ended up buying him out. We were at very different stages in life and had different ambitions for the company. That caused a lot of struggles. I was primarily focused on client management and business development. He was focused on production. My job was to make promises. His job was to fulfill on them. I wanted to make much bigger promises than he wanted to staff up to fulfill.
Russel:
How long did that partnership go?
Stafford:
It was about six or seven years.
Russel:
So pretty long.
Stafford:
Yeah, it was. Intellectually, we were great compliments to one another as far as what he knew and what I knew what my style was and what his was but the real difference between us was that what do we want? We had 10 years between us. Where he was in his career was different than where I was in my career. He was not the sole breadwinner in his family and I was, with 2 children to support. It was a terrible time. I was a terrible person. Everything about it made it super hard until I had this moment of, you know what, I’m going to change everything.
Russel:
As I understand that, pretty pivotal moment in your career and the journey of the agency itself. I guess you put a fork in the road in a very interesting way, if you don’t mind sharing about that.
Stafford:
I’m happy to. We had more than 50 employees at the time. We had a huge contract that was employing about 20 of those people. That’s the 1 lesson that I would say to any agency owner, is make sure that you have diversity of industries that you work with, diversity of clients, that nobody makes up more than 20 percent of your agency’s revenue because you make bad decisions when you think to yourself, I don’t know what we’d do if we lost this client. You find yourself making poor decisions for your company and for your team. I got to a breaking point and I decided we are not working with this company anymore. Unilaterally, without talking to my business partner, we had been having lots of conversations about it, but I made the decision that we are breaking this relationship. I walked in and gathered the whole team together and I was like, hey, guys we, and I guess officially he did not, we broke up with him at the same time I was breaking up with the client, they were overlapping.
Russel:
Tell us about that part first. The business one is fascinating, what you did next, but yeah, tell us how you parted ways with your business partner.
Stafford:
We did not have in our operating agreement a good way to sell out. We had the generic thing you do when you’re writing the agreement in a pinch, which is we could each get an appraiser to figure out how much it was worth and then those appraisals would go together to negotiate to come up with a price and all of that. I did something a little bit differently, which is I decided what the agency was worth by myself. I said it is worth this and I gave him what’s called a buy-sell agreement where it was blank, the buyer and the seller were blank. I said, this is what I think it is worth. You can either buy it from me or I will buy it from you, that’s the choice. He decided to sell. Then we went into a negotiation around what to sell for. That was an interesting thing because most people would make the decision about the value before they decided which side of the transaction they wanted to be on. But because he had made the decision to sell, then the negotiation around price became a focus of it. I’ll say that he was ready to go. I ended up getting a pretty good deal on buying him out of the company.
Russel:
I know that’s always a hard thing to determine, the value of the company. We’ve got stock to determine that for the fortune 500 companies, but we’re talking about a small private business. It’s a lot more nuanced in terms of what the value is. How did you even go about that to figure out that price or that value?
Stafford:
That initial number that I offered, I looked at how much money we had in the bank and how much money we were going to collect. I said, that’s the number.
Russel:
That’s one way.
Stafford:
Basically our accounts receivable and the actual cash in the bank was what the number was. In my mind at that time, because we were getting rid of our largest client and I had no idea yeah what was going to happen. All of my employees could have quit, all of my clients could have left, this could have been the end of the agency. All I knew was that I’ll probably get paid on the work we’ve already done and we have this much cash in the bank.
Russel:
There you go.
Stafford:
This is the number of the value and you get half of it, or I get half of it and we’re done. I was young enough at that moment to be able to say, you know what? If he wants to buy me out, then I will take this little bit of money and I will figure out what to do next. In the opposite, he did that and figured out what to do next. Emotionally, it was a very difficult thing that happened. Our relationship is never repaired from that but at the same time, the day before I made the offer our relationship wasn’t good. it’s not like the actual buy-sell was the thing that made it painful. It was actually painful before that.
Russel:
So many businesses I talk to, where there’s a partnership, we basically net out to say it is like a marriage without the intimacy and when situations like that happen, it’s much akin to a divorce in so many different ways, but hopefully listeners out there hearing the key words is have your buy-sell agreement in place if you have a partner. Spells out all these things up front if and when that time does come it’ll probably make the process a lot easier.
Stafford:
The thing that I learned from that is if you are 50/50 partners, someone is in charge. It is better to not be 50/50 partners. You can actually write agreements where we are 50/50 sharing of the profit, where we get equal shares of the money, but the actual intellectual assets and control lives with one partner or the other. I think we all know this in our relationships, whether it’s with friends or siblings or anybody else, somebody’s in charge and that person who is in charge needs to have the ability to make the decision with input from everybody else. I think I’ve got a good relationship with that right now while I am 100 percent ownership owner of Covalent Logic. I have two people who work for me who I consider my partners and one is an operations manager, he’s a vice president but he controls production operations and everything that we do, money, all of that. The other is my HR director who controls who works for us. At its core, I decide what we’re going to do, but my VP decides how long it’s going to take when we’re going to do it, how much it’s going to cost, and my HR director decides who’s going to do it. If the 2 of them disagree with my decision, then I have to think about it and I will usually come back with a new decision because if we don’t have the time, we don’t have the money and we don’t have the people then I have a bad idea, but I can figure out a way to get us the time and get us the money and get us the people. If they challenge what I want to do. It’s a different kind of partnership, but it works very well.
Russel:
I like that other nugget hopefully folks take away from this too is, if you can, it’s very hard to do sometimes, but separating the owner version of yourself with also how the operations of the business go. If we can mentally make those two separate constructs that can open a lot of those situations. I want to get to the interesting part. You had this, I don’t know if it’s right around this time or right after, you had this Jerry Maguire moment with your company and your team.
Stafford:
My Jerry Maguire moment. I literally pulled the whole team into a room and said, okay, guys, I’ve fired the client. We’re not gonna work for those people anymore. I have enough money in the bank to keep everybody here employed for a year and we’re gonna figure out what we’re gonna do together. We are gonna only in the future work for good people who do good things and we’re only gonna do good work. I had this word”good” in my speech and everybody was cheering and they were so glad because it had been so hard to work for this client. I’m thinking, I have nailed this. This is awesome. Everybody is with me. These are my people. We shall be a tribe. We shall figure out what world we will conquer, where we will go, what we will do. We are on it together! The next day, 20 people resigned. 20, almost half of the company resides. I was not disheartened. Not at all. I gathered everybody together and I was like, hey. These people have left and that’s okay, because now I’ve got enough money in the bank to keep everybody here employed for almost two years while we figure out what we’re going to do together. Within two weeks, another 15 people had left, which at the time felt sad. I felt like they don’t believe in me. They don’t believe in my leadership. They were here for my partner. They think that I’ve gone crazy. I’ll admit I sounded a little crazy. I was at this place of, I’m not going to do that anymore, ever. What they heard was, we’re not taking difficult clients anymore. Wow. We’re not going to have clients because they all had been difficult.
Russel:
Every client. Read between the lines.
Stafford:
Without a clear balance, without an obvious way to control my ambition to keep me with a good risk tolerance, they saw it as I needed a person to do that. What I found was that I had some good advisors and one in particular who was personally invested in my success and professionally had the ability to help me navigate the future, he is still my primary mentor to this day and help make me make good decisions. I feel like I have to justify my decisions in some ways, that I can’t go all half cocked. What I found was that now that it was all on my shoulders, I had inside of myself intrinsically less tolerance for risk. I was not trying to pull against conservative decisions. I was making them myself.
Russel:
Not only did you have this new way forward in the business, there was a big mindset shift. It sounds like that took place that allowed you to propel the business forward into this new era. If you don’t mind sharing a little bit about that?
Stafford:
I had two children who were nearing college age. I had everything for my future and my children’s future on my shoulders. That mentor gave me a good piece of advice. I love to do pro bono work. I love to give my employees bonuses to keep them happy and keep them around, retention bonuses were a thing that I was big into. I was like, but I don’t mind giving away my money. I don’t mind. This is good. I’m investing in the future. He said to me, you are giving away Quinn and Stephen’s money. You aren’t giving away your money. You are giving away their college tuition so make sure you are giving it in a way that will enable you to pay their college tuition in the future. I changed my strategy, where it was an investment in the future. Not you did that thing in the past but I expect this out of you in the future became the way we worked when it came to giving things away, whether it was our time or our money, whether it was to our employees or to our clients to discount something to get the contract, turned out to not be the best decision all the time. Other work would fill in.
Russel:
Stake in the ground. Much of your team has left. I know probably there was a lot of parts to that story that would be worth telling, we don’t have all that much time, but what was that like once you knew, this is who I’ve got left and here we go forward? How did that look?
Stafford:
Because that large client had been taking up so much of my time, I did not feel close to my other clients anymore. I had been letting account managers manage them. I had been not taking meetings with them and because of that, we lost a few because they did not feel like they had my attention anymore. As much as now Covalent, they don’t need my attention. I have amazing people who take great care of them, who have great relationships with them. At that moment in time, my mentor, again, gave me the advice of go make sure you’ve got customers, go solidify contracts, go negotiate for the future and spend as much time as possible with those clients, making sure that you still have them. I went into a six month period of not only giving away my strategy time, which I started charging for, but giving away all of my working time to breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks. My son, when he was about six or seven years old, somebody asked him what did your mommy do for a living? And he said, she goes to drinks and dinner. Why does he think that? I work all day. The reason he thought that, as I pick him up from school and say, I’m sorry, baby, I can’t play tonight. Mommy has a dinner with a client, I have to go to drinks with so and so. I’m sorry I was late getting home, I had this dinner. From his point of view, what I did for a living was was go to drinks and dinner. For that six months, that’s what I did for a living. It was absolutely spend as much time with my clients as I possibly could to get my finger back on the pulse of where they were, what they were doing, especially now that I did need to make sure that I kept as many of them as possible so that I didn’t have to dip into my reserves when I didn’t have to pay people without the revenue to compensate me for it. There was a dip, but it was 6 weeks. My core value is sitting with an executive at a company and figuring out how communications can solve their business problems. I spent my time sitting with, whether it’s a marketing director, or CEO, or COO, or an HR director, or whoever it needed to be, talking to them about their problems and solving a lot of them for free, saying, oh you already have the resources to do that. Oh, the website we built 3 years ago. It can do that. We need to add on this little tiny module. You don’t need to spend another 100 grand with us to rebuild everything. I can do that for 2 grand or let me show you how. That solidified enough of those relationships that I was then able to go out and get new clients, but I didn’t go out to get new clients right away. I shored up my base before I went out to go and find people to replace my big client.
Russel:
Fast forward, where is the agency at today? Tell us about what’s going on with Covalent Logic today.
Stafford:
It’s been an interesting journey. We are stronger, more stable, more in control of our world and serving bigger and better clients than ever before. I say that is 100 percent true because of my team. Trey became very focused on making sure that we never made a promise we couldn’t keep and never signing a contract that we didn’t know how we were going to fulfill. Grace and my HR director became very focused on what I jokingly call the vampire theory of hiring, which is, and she doesn’t like that term, but that’s okay. This is me on the podcast, but the vampire theory of hiring is never invite in a vampire, never let them inside. No matter how much you need their skills, their experience, no matter how amazing they might seem. If they’re going to change your culture away from one of collaboration, respect, kindness, forgiveness. Everyone on my team, including me, should make a mistake this week. Those mistakes should never be seen by our clients because somebody else on my team should see their mistake. Somebody else should catch the mistake. It’s very rare that mistakes get out the door. What that means is that people have to be willing to share what they’re working on. They have to be able to share early drafts of things and they have to have the fortitude, the willingness, the confidence that my work is not me. If you criticize my work, you’re not saying I’m a terrible person. You’re saying this is terrible work. We try to do that with as much kindness and grace as we possibly can, but once we get somebody inside who wants to blame other people for the mistake they made who wants to think that they’re the king of the hill, that they’re the very best and that they know everything. As soon as somebody says I’m great and I don’t need other people, then they shouldn’t work at Covalent because that concept of Covalent is what is true. No matter how awesome I seem like I think I am. It’s like being a home run hitter. Babe Ruth had the worst batting average of anybody on the Yankees, but he could hit a home run and a grand slam. He swung at a lot of the wrong pitches. That’s me. I absolutely strike out, but I’m willing to swing and hit the grand slam. I need base hitters. I need people who will catch the ball when I pop it foul. That’s the way my team tends to work is they’re all working together, even though they know what their individual responsibilities are. They feel accountable to what is inside of their control and what’s outside of their control to share their knowledge with each other.
Russel:
Love that. All about the team and I like that concept to never let a vampire in your door. That’s a good one. Gosh, I have so many more questions but I know we’ll end up running out of time here so my last big question for you, Stafford is are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Stafford:
That is a tough one. What I will say more than anything else is that entrepreneurial spirit has to be there inside of someone as an ember. A fire needs fuel, it needs heat, it needs oxygen. You have to have all 3 of those pieces inside of you in order to make it work. What those things are is the ability to take a risk because there are some people that their risk averse nature makes it so hard to do it. They have to have a passion. They have to believe in something so much that they’re willing to do it and they have to be reliant upon other people. You can’t start a company by yourself. That’s being a freelancer. And I know a lot of great freelancers. They have the passion and they have the risk tolerance, but because they are more confident in their own abilities by themselves than they are with other people then they can’t start a company. They can start and endeavor, and I believe that you have to have all 3 of those things. There’s a lot about timing, because if you do those things when it’s wet, it’s hard to start that fire. Whereas, if you do those things when the conditions are right, you can add fuel to it in the form of clients or employees or vendor relationships that cause it to grow and become sustainable all by itself with a whole lot of people tending the fire to make it work. The other thing I know is that if you have that and the fire goes out, if you keep those embers burning, you can reignite it.
Russel:
Wonderful. Keep those embers burning. If people want to know more about Covalent Logic, where can they go?
Stafford:
CovalentLogic.com is our website. It tells you a little bit about us. You can always call me, I have a very open door policy. I love talking about business. I love talking about what we do and solving problems. Even if a client’s not the right fit for Covalent, I love having the conversation with business owners in my industry. Shoot me a text, we’ll make a plan, we’ll get together and we’ll talk because I love talking about business.
Russel:
All right, there we go. Hopefully folks will take advantage of it and learn from some of the amazing lessons that you’ve had in your journey. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Stafford, and sharing all your insights about your story and your journey is great to hear. Look forward to seeing how the future goes for you.
Stafford:
Thank you so much, Russel. I appreciate it very much. It was great fun.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Stafford:
My biggest client was the governor of the state of Louisiana, she was a Democrat, and Bobby Jindal the Republican had been elected. I call up and I’m like, I saw in the paper that y’all are trying to be supportive with the transition. Is that true? Or do you want me to turn off the website when they come into office? And my contact goes, no, that’s true. Help them as much as you can. We didn’t get as much help as we needed it so please transition it over to them. I write this big document about how the website works and I’m ready to go present it to them to say, hey, I’m here to hand off the website to your new vendor. They were like, we don’t have a vendor because we’ve been in Congress. We want to use somebody in Louisiana. I turned into a salesman and I started telling them about how great I am, going man, I assume that you guys weren’t going to use us since we were with the previous governor, but let me tell you all about it. I talk about all of our capabilities and all of the things that we do, and they’re listening to me wax poetic for a long time. They go, I have a question. You do all this stuff with the web. You do all this stuff with branding and PR. Is your degree from the comm school, or is it an IT degree, or is it a design degree? I don’t understand. I say my degree’s in Eastern European, Soviet, and Russian area studies. Without missing a beat, he goes, Spasibo. People told me all the time that I would never use my Russian degree, that my history and knowledge of the Soviet Union was never going to be valuable. And yet, he had spent a semester abroad in Moscow, spoke Russian, and it led to a very firm foundation of a relationship. All I have to say to the people out there who think that they don’t know what they want to do. Study what you love. I promise no matter what you end up doing, it will be valuable.
Russel:
That’s a pretty cool moment there. I really enjoy that. I didn’t know where that was going to go but very fascinating. What an awesome serendipitous moment for you.
