Sarah welcomes Max James, an Air Force Academy graduate, pilot shot down twice in Vietnam, who became a Fortune 500 entrepreneur and original founder and CEO of billion-dollar American Kiosk Management. Max shares some lessons learned about resilience that he’s recently shared in his book “The Harder I Fall, The Higher I Bounce.”
Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking about perseverance in challenging times, and I'm excited to have with us today Max James. Max is an Air Force Academy graduate pilot. He was shot down twice in Vietnam and has quite a journey he's going to share with us. He later became the founder and CEO of American Kiosk Management, a multi-billion dollar global presence in North America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and has had quite the journey. He recently published a book called The Harder I Fall, The Higher I Bounce. So, Max, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. Thanks for being here.
Max James: Thank you very much.
Sarah Nicastro: So that was a brief introduction. Before we get into some of the content we have planned today, tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself.
Max James: Okay. Well, it's a long journey, one full of a lot of luck, both bad and good, I might add. But, yeah, my dad was a sharecropper back in West Tennessee, and I grew up following two gray mules in the fields. Finally, my dad said, "I don't think you like the farm, why don't you get a job in town," which I did. Then I was the administrative assistant to a congressman when I was 17 years old in Washington. From there, I went to the Air Force Academy for four years, graduating in 1964, so that gives away my age, I suppose, and went to the pilot training. My class was either lucky or unlucky depending on your perception. But we graduated, went to pilot training, and went to war. I flew with the best mission you could possibly have in any war of any type, and that was to Air Rescue. Our job was to rescue fighter pilots when they were shot down in North Vietnam or Laos.
Max James: Came back and was a combat instructor pilot, left the Air Force, and went to Stanford, picked up an MBA, left there and went to work for the world's richest man, which was... For an old Southern boy, that was tall cotton, working and traveling the world with him, principally in real estate but also in movies investments. From there, I got that entrepreneurial itch, and I left the Bay Area, San Francisco, Bay Area, moved up to Sacramento to be hopefully a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and it worked out well. I then ran a couple of companies that I started up, resigned from those, sold them, and became one of the executive vice presidents of Days Inns of America when we were the sixth largest lodging chain in the world. My responsibility was to build, own, and operate hotels in California and Nevada.
Max James: That's I did for years, and the entrepreneurial bug got me again, and I left on a series of wildly failing and wildly successful entrepreneur ventures, ending up principally, as Fortune called me, the king of kiosk, opening about 1200 locations in those areas, those countries that you mentioned. We built that company up to a billion, 800 million in about 14 years. So I ended up selling the company with another that I was a distributor of, to Nestle, and Jack Canfield convinced me that since I'd been telling these wild stories all my life and people saying, "You ought to write a book, you ought to write a book"... So I did, and it took me a little longer than I thought it would take me, but it was enjoyable to look back down memory row and try to share the principles in each of the stories that either led to failure or led to success.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Max James: That's it.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That's great. That's a really good synopsis of what I'm sure has been quite a wild ride. So good. Thank you. All right. So having had a chance to look through the book, there's a couple of themes that stand out to me in your content that I want to discuss on today's podcast that I think will be relevant to our audience. So that first is around perseverance, right? That has been a top of mind term, certainly, for the past two years, right, and something that I think our audience, both from a personal perspective as leaders and then from an organizational perspective, are thinking about what it takes and how to persevere. So can you share some of your thoughts on perseverance, both personally and then from the business perspective, so as an individual and as a business?
Max James: Yeah, sure. As an individual, I think the mother of perseverance is survival. You just have to have grit. You've got to get up. When you get knocked down five times, get up six, I think, is the old expression. So it was survival in many cases. Failures often were very painful. It's not fun to have a business fail that you're involved in or running or own. So it's getting over that painful emotion, a set of emotions, really, and the result. I've never had to file bankruptcy, but I've come close a few times. I've relied on friends sometimes to bail me out, certainly. I've relied on contacts, business contacts, mentors to help me get through. In fact, an accountant, a classmate of mine from Stanford once, we went into talk to a bankruptcy attorney because I thought it was time for me to file bankruptcy. The accountant said, "No, no, I don't think so, Max. I don't think that's going to be necessary, but I'll take it to the attorney." So the attorney went through it, and he said, "Okay, here's what I'm going to need. I need $5,000 deposit up front." I reply with, "If I had $5,000, I wouldn't be here."
Max James: So, we did not file bankruptcy, but here's the story my accountant told me that I've never forgotten. He said, "Max, just get out on your hands and knees, picture yourself, and put a peanut on the floor in front of you and just push that peanut across the floor, trying to get to the other side, and every once in a while, just turn around and look behind you and see the success that you've made and then go down and push that peanut some more." Sure enough, I got bruised knees and a bloody nose from pushing across the carpet, but it worked, and so that stuck with me forever. Perseverance on a personal level, you just have to keep trying. You have to have a long-term goal, I think, Sarah, one that you want to strive for, and you're going to have ups and downs, but the long-term goal is important. But getting there requires short-term goals, day to day, moment to moment, pushing the peanut across the floor.
Max James: So perseverance for me on a personal level is survival. On a business level, it's those short-term goals to get through day by day by day by day and then the long-term goal, knowing where it is exactly that you want to go. You have to have a plan B and a plan C. You have to be adaptable to the circumstances that you deal with on a day to day, year to year basis. There was never been a major battle won in war that went as planned, not a single one, and that comes from military history classes. So the battle's going to change, and you have to be ready. Sometimes, it's plan B, and I don't subscribe to the saying that says, "There is no plan B if this doesn't work." I don't believe that. I think you have to be adaptable.
Sarah Nicastro: Always have a contingency plan, right?
Max James: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Sarah Nicastro: But don't move on to it too soon, right? I mean, I guess that's the balance, right? You need to always have that, but you can't give up quickly or easily. I think that's the name of the game. So, in your book, you talk about a cartoon that says, "Some days, the dragon wins," okay?
Max James: Yeah.
Sarah Nicastro: So tell me what that means to you and how that relates to perseverance.
Max James: Yeah. I wish I had a copy of it. I could show you right now. But it shows the knight, and the helmet is all beat up and the chest plates and the armor on his arms, and the big long sphere that he uses to joust with is broken, but he's on his feet, and he's walking away, and the horse that he rode on is still upright, and the cartoon says, "Someday, the dragon wins." Okay, that's true. There are going to be tons of days, whether it's a contract or a sale or a distributorship or whatever, that's not going to work. It's going to fail, and it hurts like the devil when you lose those, particularly if you've been working on it for a long time.
Max James: A plan B or adaptability says, "So now what do we do?" Well, we've talked about this before, and here's the way. We're going to need to try again for the same goal, or we're going to have to shift our goal a little bit and move from this product line to that product line and use the same business principles that we've always used. But, some days, the dragon wins, and you just have to get up. As the old saying goes, you get bucked off the horse, like I did many times when I was a kid, my dad would insist that I get back up on that horse.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I like that saying because I think that it applies to a lot of different areas of business, of life, right?
Max James: Sure.
Sarah Nicastro: I think that, in the challenging times we've had over the past two years, sometimes... The dragon can be different things, I guess, is the point, right? The dragon can be your mood or your mental health. The dragon can be, like you said, a big deal you're losing. The dragon can be an initiative that you're trying to get off the ground that fails. It can be a lot of different things, but you have to remember that the dragon will win some days. They're not going to win every day, right? I guess that's what you have to use as the motivation to get up and try again the next day.
Max James: So you take your hits, lick your wounds, live to fight another day, and some days you just have to pay the piper.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the next area I want to talk about, Max, is leadership. You say in your book that being a good leader of others begins with being able to lead yourself through hard times. So tell us a little bit more what you mean by that, and maybe share an example if you can.
Max James: Sure, you bet. Here would be a good example, and then we'll spin off with that. I was a pilot flying rescue helicopters, and I had trained hard. I had studied hard. I had practiced flying that helicopter under stressful situations. So I was preparing to lead the crew that I had on that chopper. The pilot gets shot down in Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the crew and you and the helicopter are going in to see if you can rescue and bring that guy home to his family and to a full life hopefully. When it comes time to make the decision to fly into the ground fire, whether it be SAMs, MiGs, or other ground fire, you've got a crew, and you're going to make the decision as to whether to risk not only the plane but a crew of four to save one.
Max James: So here is a situation where you learn to lead yourself. It's going to be my decision. I can't just always take a vote of the board or take a vote. Sometimes, you just have to charge forward. There's a block saying that speaks to an overly abundant ego, and it says, "I may be wrong, but I doubt it." Sometimes, you just have to rely on yourself, and if you haven't been in stressful situations where you had to make a decision, where you had to lead, then you're never going to be able to lead others. You've got to be able. So I say you have to have the skill, you have to hone the skill, you have to practice the skill, you have to implement the skill when the time comes.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It's interesting when you think about how this translates to leadership today, right? The name of your book is The Harder I Fall, The Higher I Bounce. Right? So you're talking about you can't achieve success without failure, and so what you're talking about here, being a good leader starts with leading yourself, I think one of the areas that maybe is evolving or has evolved is leaders being comfortable with leading by example, even when that means failing, right?
Sarah Nicastro: Because if you think about if you can achieve success without failure and you need to normalize that and eliminate that fear of failing, which will ultimately prohibit creativity, innovation, all of those things, I think one of the best ways for a leader to really institute that belief in their team is to be willing to be vulnerable enough to show themselves failing, which means setting the ego aside, the leader ego aside, and being okay with knowing that, yes, you have to listen to yourself, you have to follow your gut, you have to rely on your intuition and your leadership abilities, but when that doesn't go well, that's okay, too, right? I mean, that's something that you and your team both can learn from and use as an opportunity to normalize the fact that failure is a part of success. Does that make sense?
Max James: Sure. It absolutely does. A friend of mine years and years ago wrote a book called The Joy of Failure, and his whole point was that you learn so much from failing that you should take the positive from failure. Losing when you have a large team, even a company, behind you will certainly show your vulnerability. It's how you respond to that failure with your team. We often talk about servant leadership, where your job is to support the team and to draw on the team.
Max James: So if you're practicing that as a leader in a philanthropic effort or a large business or a small business as an entrepreneur, if your team knows that you're supporting them and you fail, you fail as a team, and they will get it. They will understand what happened and what the principles were that didn't work or that did work. So, yeah, I would agree with that. Absolutely. The fear of failure is overwrought. There's too much emphasis on absolutely just being afraid to fail. It's going to hurt. It may cost you a lot. It may change your entire career or your life, but life will go on. Business will go on, and you will bounce back if you have the right attitude.
Sarah Nicastro: What I'm thinking about in real time as you say that is the correlation then between eliminating that mentality of failure as bad and how that correlates to perseverance, right? If you think about it in terms of the team and the message is failure's not an option, okay, then when it inevitably happens, the emotion tied to that can be so strong that then the willingness to get up and bounce back the next day is hindered, right? So, in a way, I think that the more you normalize failure and create the understanding within your team, organization, business, what have you, that it is a part of success, a path to success, the better sense of perseverance your employees will have because they're not tied to that emotion of failure being such a negative thing, which for some people...
Sarah Nicastro: I mean, yes, some people have the fortitude where they can fail and get up the next day and try again no matter what, but others, that sense of failure being bad could contribute to less individual perseverance because it makes them not want to try again. Do you know what I mean? So the more you normalize this idea of failure not being a bad thing, the greater your ability to increase the sense of perseverance and triumph in your team because they don't perceive it as such a big negative thing, if that makes sense.
Max James: Yeah. A leader should always let his people know that he will be there to pick them up, that if they fail in an assignment, in a project that they were given, that the leader will be there to support and to pick them up in the event that this particular effort wasn't successful. One of the things we always told our people is there will be other opportunities in your life and some of them won't be here. It may not be here because you don't like it. It may not be here because you don't have the skills to accomplish all of the things that we need. But if you ever find another opportunity that is better for you than this one, we will cheer you on. We will support you. We will do all we can to help you with that.
Max James: So I'm going to give you one other example. I had a foundation for kids that are terminally ill and chronically ill, and we talked about this failure business, and they have fallen, right? They're very ill, not their fault that they have fallen, but they're very ill, and several of them, a large percentage, weren't going to make it, and they were aware of it. But here's what we told them. I took a tennis ball, and I dropped the tennis ball, and it only comes back about, what, halfway? But if you throw the tennis ball down, it bounces much higher. These kids that were five to 16, 17 years old, they got that illustration, that they had fallen hard but they could bounce back higher if they were like that tennis ball and were resilient and willing to bounce. So I think that's true of failure. You don't have to fear failure. Be willing to accept failure, learn from it, and go onto the next project or business or entrepreneurial effort.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Do you think that that perception of failure is... What do you think the state of that is in business today? Do you think the perception of failure is different than it was earlier in your career? Do you think it's evolved?
Max James: I think there's far less fear today than was my experience early on in my career. Getting fired, to me, was back then a very frightening thing. I'm not talking about the time in the military. I'm talking about the time when I got out of Stanford and started businesses. In fact, listen, I've been fired three times, okay, three times, not always my fault, okay? The business changed, the tax changed, the company got purchased for another. But the point is I never feared it. You just gird your loins and say, "I got to get through this, and here are the things I'm going to do." Opportunity knocks. No, opportunity rarely knocks at your door. You have to go out and find opportunity. When you find it, you got to grab it by the neck and shake it and beat it up until opportunity is yours, okay? So you always have to be prepared. Opportunity doesn't knock. You may have to go find it.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Okay. So-
Max James: But the fear today... There's so many opportunities and it's so much easier to find them because we have this thing called the Internet and social media and the ability to stay in contact with past friends and business associates, the ability to find good mentors to help you through these things. No, I think that the fear of failure should be far less today. Fall hard, bounce high. The next book may be fail fast, fall forward. I kind of like that. Fail fast, fall forward.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I like it. Okay. So one of the things that I found interesting about you, and I'm not sure why, it's probably something to reflect on, is you say that meditation is one of your, if not the, top business tools. So how did you discover that? How do you practice it, and what value do you feel it brings to you in your business life?
Max James: Very good. How I found it, for me, I was at a seminar, and the gentleman that was teaching the seminar said, "Before we got started, I want to show you something and have you experience it." So it was transcendental meditation, and we hummed for a while, and he explained in his mind what the benefits were. So I went ahead with the seminar, and afterwards, at home, I would do as he had suggested, take up to maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes sometime and just try not to think. Here's what happened to me. I'd sit in a chair most of the time, I don't do it laying down, and I would take a notebook, and I would lay it down beside the chair. When I finished the meditation, all of these thoughts had come into my subconscious and risen into the conscious mind, and I would write them down. I used to, for fun, entertain people in the Air Force at the officers' club, and I'd do the same thing. I'd wake up in the mornings and immediately write down all the cute little ideas for the next show at the officers' club.
Max James: So I discovered that, one, it reduced stress enormously just to stop worrying for 15 or 20 minutes or trying to figure everything out. Just take a real break, not a break where you sit and say, "Okay, I'm going to think about this for a while." No, no, no. Stop and don't think. That's what helped me, and it helped me through many personal situations in life so far, and it certainly helped me in business. So I continue to do it. By the way, I must have, I don't know, 30, 40 books on meditation. So it's something that I've felt strongly enough about. I've taught it in my companies. I've tried to get my friends to do it from time to time, and I still do it. To relieve stress is the principle reason.
Max James: I could give you examples, and there's a good example in the book where I had missed an airplane and it was an important meeting and I got there and it was a mess and I had a headache so bad I couldn't stand it. They took me back to the hotel before we had dinner, and I did meditation for about 15 to 20 minutes. The headache went away, and we had a successful dinner meeting. So I believe in it, yeah.
Sarah Nicastro: So I have a few questions, okay?
Max James: Okay.
Sarah Nicastro: So at the conference when this was first introduced you, what was your initial reaction?
Max James: "Oh, you got to be kidding. What is this? This is a bunch of... I'm not going to do this." But I had previously known the speaker, and I knew how bright he was. I knew his background. I knew his education, and it was transcendental... TM back then was popular. You could buy the book. So I thought, "Well, if it's good enough for him, I'm going to try it," and I liked it.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And do you typically practice in the morning, or do you wait until you just feel that you need that stress relief? What is your routine around it?
Max James: Yeah. I would say both of those. For me, practicing it in the morning after I'm dressed and have had breakfast or whatever and just sit down before I really hit it. Then, secondly, if I'm feeling distress of whatever, the breathing is just... It's just so good. It's like taking a hot shower, okay? It's just a total relief. Then when I stop meditation, I feel like I have more energy. So it works for me.
Sarah Nicastro: No, I think it's really cool. Like I said, it was unexpected, something unexpected I read, and it's something I know I need to try. So I need to make a commitment to do that. I do-
Max James: I hope you will.
Sarah Nicastro: I do believe in it and think it will help. I have some of my own practices that I certainly benefit from. Mine is I work out every morning, right? So that's my time to get in the zone or whatever. But it is still different from that sense of quiet and peace and breathing and all of that. I don't know that we've talked about meditation specifically on this podcast before, but we certainly have talked about, for someone who is responsible for being creative, innovating, those sorts of things, the idea of figuring out what works for you in terms of creating white space. I think, like you said, at the end of that 15 or 20 minutes, you have all of these fresh thoughts and ideas, and it's because you literally took a break. It's not because you were thinking about it harder, right, or running faster on the hamster wheel.
Max James: That's right.
Sarah Nicastro: It's because you stepped off of it. I suppose that doesn't need to look the same for everyone, but I do think that that practice of preserving time to have that white space is incredibly important for people who are responsible for a lot of creative ideas, problem-solving, innovation, transformation. I find myself I come up with my best ideas when I walk away. So it could be in the shower. It can be on a walk. It's when I finally allow myself to take a breather that whatever the solution is or... That's when it comes to you. It's not when you're trying so hard to force it out, right?
Max James: No. In simple terms, it's blocking all the junk that goes into your head all the time. A lot of times, people have trouble sleeping. Why? Because they can't turn it off. Well, it's the same thing during the day in stress and whatnot. There are a lot of people who say they meditate while they're in an activity like tennis. Some of the pros meditate. Well, what they're really doing is they're learning to focus, to focus on one thing and getting the other stuff out of the way. "Oh, what's the score?" It doesn't matter what the score is. Just do the best you can right now. So I find it terribly beneficial and have for a long time.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Interesting.
Max James: Try it. You'll like it.
Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I will. All right. So the last thing I wanted to talk about, Max, is... And I think I saw this on your LinkedIn. So I'm going to read some text here, and then we'll talk about it, okay? You had a post and it says, "When your business doesn't appear to be accomplishing your goals, it's tempting to feel you need outside help in finding the magical solution. More often than not, however, what you really need to do first is go back and examine whether or not you have missed or ignored the basic business fundamentals. As Harvey Mackay says, maybe you just need to go back and walk the manufacturing floor, i.e., look really hard for the flaws, the flies in the ointment. Strong fundamentals and foundations lead to healthy businesses that can bounce high and withstand difficult circumstances." So the reason this stood out to me-
Max James: Oh, that's a mouthful, isn't it? Wow.
Sarah Nicastro: The reason this stood out to me is because a lot of the conversations we have on this podcast relate to some element of evolving a business, digital transformation, leveraging technology in a new or different way, introducing a new value proposition, et cetera, et cetera, right, so a lot of things to do with evolution, innovation, change. I think that this point that you're making here is where a lot of companies fail, and I don't mean failure in the good way. I mean, failure in the debilitating way, right? Because they try to race ahead when, in reality, there are some underlying foundational things that need to be addressed to set the stage for whatever success they're trying to achieve. So tell us a little bit more, your thoughts around this idea of before you look for some magic bullet, go back through and look for those flies in the ointment. Are there certain things that, in your experience, you feel like are common, or what would you want listeners to think about when they hear me read that quote?
Max James: The first thing that comes to my mind is have I been diligent in choosing the people that work for me or with me? There's a thing in the book, and I highlight it everywhere. Hire for character, train for skill. Did I really look hard at this person's background or their personality, their honesty, moral interpretative... Did I really look for that? That's, I think, one of the things Harvey says about get out of your office and go out to the field and see what you have. I oftentimes was amazed and angry with myself that we had allowed people with poor character to join the organization in a meaningful position. So that would be the first.
Max James: The second one is have you really expressed, first to yourself and then to the people that you are associated with, what your goal is? Do I really know what it is that I'm hoping we're going to accomplish? Are we just trying to make a bunch of money? Are we trying to provide good jobs for people? Are we donating enough money to our favorite charities? Does everybody agree with that? Back to the basics of being a good leader. There are a million books written on leadership, and there are thousands of books written about character, starting with the bestselling book of all time. It's the Bible, okay? So where in there are you?
Max James: Dr. Robert Schuller, who was a spiritual mentor of mine before he passed and still is, by the way, I read something that he has written every single day, Schuller said, "Are you suffering a brownout or a blackout? Are you sure it's a blackout? Are you sure there's not something you're doing wrong that you can fix and really this is just a brown out, not a blackout?" So get out of your office, go out there, and really look hard at whether or not you are using the tools that you know are true, that you have practiced, and that you have skill levels in to build this. Look inside first before you go shouting fire in the theater. Are you sure? So I think that's the point I was trying to make there, is that you may be really screwing things up yourself and everybody else is trying to fix it or throwing up their hands because you don't understand the real problem. So make sure that you are doing what you know, you absolutely know, are the right things to do for leadership and for progress.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We had a podcast late last year with... Slowing Down to Speed Up, I think, was the title of it, and it was with-
Max James: Great point.
Sarah Nicastro: ... Eduardo Bonefont from BD. That was a little bit more specific to the idea of innovation via technology, right? But what he found was while the natural tendency today is to race to, "Okay, what's next, what do we add, what do we change, what's the next layer of innovation," he found that when he spent time... Exactly what you're saying. When he spent time with the frontline workforce, when it came to technology specifically, they had a lot of issues with some of the foundational systems that were in place, and so this mentality of, "Well, let's add to that and let's build, build, build," they would've been doing that on a faulty foundation, which was causing a lot of frustration among their workforce.
Sarah Nicastro: So they decided to take a pause year, pause meaning they obviously were conducting business but pause from technology investment, and take the budget that they would've invested in whatever was next or new on their roadmap, to put that into fixing these foundational issues and improving the engagement and satisfaction of their frontline workforce. It's something that, retelling it, sounds simple, sounds smart, right, but it works against the grain of a lot of business mentality, which is race, race, race, what's next, what's next? So it was such a good story to share, and it makes me think of this point that you made with your LinkedIn post and this idea of the failure often isn't in some massive misstep so much as a lot of little cracks that are adding up to frustration or misalignment or a lot of other things. So I think it's a really good point.
Max James: There are two cliches that come to mind. One is, if you remember all the old Aesop's Tales, the tortoise won the race over the hare, and so there are times when speed isn't going to... Secondly, perfection is the enemy of excellence. You can be beating up on your people to do this, that, and the other thing when the profits are pretty good, things are going well, the future looks bright. So put the whip down and feed them some ice cream.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.
Max James: Yeah. We sometimes let our own personal idiosyncrasies get in the way of an organization's idiosyncrasies.
Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. All right, Max. Any final thoughts, words of wisdom, advice that you would like to share?
Max James: A couple. The old Air Force motto is, "Fly, fight, win." It doesn't say fly and win. It says you have to fight. So whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're an intrapreneur inside a large company, you're going to have to double up your fist and fight for what you want. Prepare as well as you can that what you are fighting for is worth it and the way you are fighting is with character and integrity. So hire for character, train for skills, bet on bright, but cut your losses early and move on. Don't be afraid of failing. If you've done your best, that is success, and failure's never final. This was good, Sarah. I have enjoyed it very much. Thank you for inviting me.
Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Thank you, Max. Let folks know where they can find the book.
Max James: Amazon, The Harder I Fall, The Higher I Bounce, or put in my name and it'll come up. I told many people I'm prouder of the endorsements which you'll find on the page than I actually am of the book, and so you'll find the former Air Force Chief of Staff, the Vice Chairman of General Motors. Some people that I have high respect for have been overly flattering. So go to Amazon, The Harder I Fall, The Higher I Bounce.
Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Thank you, Max. I appreciate it.
Max James: Thank you, ma'am. Thank you.
Sarah Nicastro: You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter, @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening.