About Stephen Kaupp:
As Valiant’s COO, Stephen applies his passion for business and all of the operational aspects that produce positive outcomes for our clients and ourselves. Stephen joined Valiant in the fall of 2016, previously working for Lufthansa Airlines, and founding financial services and operational consulting firms. When not working, Stephen enjoys playing and watching soccer, exploring new places and foods, and riding his motorcycles. Stephen attended Farmingdale State College and New York University.
Megan Quick: Hello, and welcome back to The Creative Stack, a show about the intersection of creativity and information technology. I'm your host, Megan Quick, and I am joined, as always, by my co-host and the president of Valiant Technology, Georg Dauterman. Hi, Georg, how are you?
Georg Dauterman: Hey Megan, how you doing today?
Megan Quick: I'm good, I feel great. I'm really excited about this episode because we have a guest, but he's also a very valued member of our team. It's our very own chief operating officer, Stephen Kaupp. Hello, Stephen.
Stephen Kaupp: Hello Megan. Hello, Georg. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction. I'm a little taken aback by Georg's radio voice he put on here today.
Georg Dauterman: Yes, you like that? It's very smooth. Many years of vocal work. But we're just super happy to have you today, and it's such an interesting topic, because as Megan and I were preparing for this, you know, a lot of times when we work with customers, they don't realize that we have a whole back office operation ourselves. We do so many parts of our business that aren't IT, and aren't what we do publicly. And Stephen, you oversee like ninety-eight percent of them. So part of what I'd love to do, and this is how we always start The Creative Stack, is get your superhero origin story. How'd you get here, and what's the thing that gets you excited to keep coming here every day?
Stephen Kaupp: Yeah, thanks, Georg. So you've heard my spiel a couple times before. This is my third career, and they've all lived in the operational world pretty much across the board. I started right out of college, I got a job working at JFK Airport for Lufthansa Airlines. What I did there was called flight operations, or weight and balance. That job could contain two different jobs each day. One day you could be inside, planning everything that's loaded onto a plane after it comes in and empties out and goes back out on its departure. The other day you'd be the person outside, actually walking underneath the plane, in and out of the plane, making sure everything your counterpart in the office planned is actually put in the right place.
Georg Dauterman: But what happens if it's not in the right place?
Stephen Kaupp: Well, a quick Google might actually find a Lufthansa plane with some cargo coming out of the back end of it on takeoff, in Frankfurt, Germany, a long, long time ago. I was not working that flight, though.
Georg Dauterman: That wasn't you. I take the responsibility. Yeah, it happens. A shifting cargo load can make a plane crash. It's a legit thing.
Stephen Kaupp: Right. And I'll touch on the common theme with everything I've done, which is it's all sort of behind the scenes. Megan, you've been on a plane a bunch of times, right? Do you ever put any thought into what's underneath your feet, under the floor? There's a lot going on down there.
Megan Quick: No, I don't.
Georg Dauterman: I do, but that's because I make my wife and kids crazy.
Stephen Kaupp: For an airline, a plane would come in, and we'd have just under two hours to turn it around and get it back out again. In that time, you have to take off all the bags and cargo, empty the underneath of the plane, empty the toilets, empty all the catering bins and garbage, and then do it all over again. You have to load the plane with drinking water and water for the lavatories, put the cargo back on, put all the bags back on, put the catering back on.
Georg Dauterman: And the most important thing is fuel, and you can't fuel a plane with people on it, it's too dangerous. So it all has to be done in that window. And how many gallons of fuel does a 747 need? It's insane, the numbers.
Stephen Kaupp: Correct. A lot of people will sit at their departure gate, see their plane come in and leave, and not understand how much is going on behind the scenes, and how many people are involved. As far as what's underneath your feet, generally it's boxes of goods and baggage. Sometimes it's big pallets full of live baby chickens. Sometimes it's a giant fish tank with a shark headed to an aquarium or water park in another country. Some planes actually have a cargo area behind the seats upstairs that you don't know about, if you walk to the back of the plane, there's sometimes a little door there. There are cars up there, helicopters, horses. You just don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
Megan Quick: The shark and the plane, I think this is a premise for a great film. I'm not saying any more, nobody steal that idea.
Georg Dauterman: A Sharknado is what you're trying to say? Maybe an Anaconda, maybe some snakes.
Megan Quick: Sharks Take Flight, I don't know, I'm going to workshop this. Anyway, keep going, Stephen, sorry.
Stephen Kaupp: And all of this has to happen within a deadline, a time frame. Probably the shortest deadline I've had in my career: two hours to unload a 747, load it back up, and get it out again.
Georg Dauterman: So that was your first career. What was your second?
Stephen Kaupp: Second career, I went into financial services. I started a small firm with a friend of mine and grew it into a sizable broker-dealer. Again, I was behind the scenes, I was still always operations. I was chief operating officer there, and at one point elevated to president. I had the licenses required for doing financial services in every state, and took the tests for those things, but I had them more from an operational standpoint. I had a few accounts for friends and family, but I wasn't really operating in financial services, I was still doing operations. That becomes much more of an office environment, which is closer to the evolution of where I am now. At that point you're doing payroll, insurance, banking, payables, receivables, things for the office, and that's where my first foray into technology for a business came into play. That's also where I was first introduced to Georg, Valiant Technology was the IT provider for my financial services company at the time. I got some life lessons from Georg and the team over my time there.
Georg Dauterman: I got some myself, for sure.
Stephen Kaupp: I remember starting out, having acquaintances who knew about computers, buying used servers off eBay and having them laying on a storage shelf instead of a proper server rack. Having arrived here, I can look back and chuckle at that now. But in that office environment, there's a lot of other things happening behind the scenes that people don't think about. The mail has to come in, the mail has to go out, in most cases for a business like ours, someone has to go to the PO box, pick the mail up. And then there's four copy machines around the office, how do they get there? They just show up.
Georg Dauterman: Scanners. Right. Who takes care of them, magic?
Stephen Kaupp: Yep. And leasing a copier is a whole other story in itself.
Georg Dauterman: Leasing a copier, the funny part is if you actually show the MSRP of a copier, it's basically a Ferrari. Functionally speaking, it's like a hundred forty thousand dollars for a full-size Canon or Xerox copier. But people don't think about it, they just rent it as if it's always there.
Stephen Kaupp: Exactly. And people take it for granted. And then at that point I also got my first taste of office moves, with that business we moved four times, and each time it's a little more involved, especially on the technology end. You start out, you know, running data cables yourself, you go to Home Depot, buy a box of data cables, they're cheap, you run them around and hide them behind desks.
Georg Dauterman: Yep. You start relying on it. What started out as a convenience, having email and a computer, became a critical tool to do the job.
Stephen Kaupp: And then you mature, and you start to work with an IT provider, and you learn that running cables along the floor and behind furniture causes degradation in the data movement, it slows things down. It's not as good as having properly installed cables. There are things in life that you pay for that don't seem to make sense at first, running cables in a new office and hiding them in the walls with proper jacks is one of those things. It's like if you own a house and you have to pay three thousand dollars to have a tree cut down.
Georg Dauterman: The tree is the perfect example. You don't realize how expensive a tree is until you have to get rid of the damn thing. And if you don't have a professional do it, it's always, do you want to climb up there and cut the top off with a chainsaw and work your way down? No thanks.
Stephen Kaupp: Exactly, which is not unlike running cables in a wall, depending on the construction of the walls and ceiling.
Georg Dauterman: It's a specialty job, all of this stuff. So then your third career is here working with us, which is always a fascinating way of working.
Stephen Kaupp: So, obviously we had a relationship for many years. I'd taken a break after I left financial services and went out on my own to do fractional chief operating officer work for smaller companies, people I was friendly with who had their own businesses. It was a natural fit, I could take some of the larger-scale operations I'd developed at the financial services company and introduce them to smaller companies, and in some cases it made huge changes in workflow and performance, things that run behind the scenes that you never really think about.
Georg Dauterman: The one that never ceases to amaze me is how complex HR, PEOs, payroll, and benefits are. That's a huge component of time and complexity, and weirdness, there are these strange rules, you can do this but not that.
Stephen Kaupp: Yeah. So my third career is Valiant Technology, I've been here about ten years now. We had a relationship for a long time before that, during my time on my own I'd continually refer clients to Valiant for technology services, and I'd stay in touch with Georg. If I was in the city, we'd have lunch. After two or three years of that, one lunch, Georg said, hey, after lunch, want to come to the office? We're having some trouble. At that time Valiant was probably between twenty-five and thirty people, all technicians, and one person doing everything I've been describing, payroll, insurance, banking, receivables, payables. That person dropped the ball on a few things, no fault of theirs really, just got overwhelmed. In most small to medium businesses things are moving at the speed of light some days, and you can't always get the owner's attention when something's on fire, and it just keeps going until it doesn't go anymore.
Georg Dauterman: That's right. Well, Stephen's being very kind. We definitely had what I'd call a very near miss, and when someone helps you from a near miss, you owe them. There was a situation that was scary, let's use that word, and it started as a question like, hey, you know this is a problem, right? And I remember being like, what problem? A little confused. So we were really cleaning things up, trying to make it work, and finding a lot of broken things.
Stephen Kaupp: And the cleanup part was something you and I did together for over a year, talking to vendors who hadn't been paid, talking to clients who hadn't paid because they hadn't been billed. Whenever someone calls you personally and says, hey, you owe this money, this bill, and you say, I never got an invoice, and they say, yeah, we didn't send it, well then I don't pay it.
Georg Dauterman: Right. I've got to know what I'm paying before I pay it.
Stephen Kaupp: It's a funny part of the world. But again, it's more behind the scenes of a business. You have to get in touch with all those vendors and start conversations with them: hey, we still need you, we need what you offer, whether it's a service or a product, and we need to sit down and figure out how we get past this. In our case it wasn't as bad as we'd anticipated, it was just a lot of catching up, steady payments, and the biggest thing was communication. Communication saves everything.
Georg Dauterman: It was definitely the key. We knew what we had to do, we talked to all of our partners and vendors, and within less than a year we had everything in pretty good working order. I always joked that they ended up figuring us to be a better customer than we were beforehand, because we communicated, and we did what we said and said what we did. It made everyone feel good, so I think it's really important. There are so many little details here, and when you look at the list of things every company has to handle, what are the ones you find to be the most time-consuming? The ones where you think, hey, this always seems to be a mess everywhere I look?
Stephen Kaupp: The evolution of a lot of things in the back office is interesting. I'm old enough to say I worked in businesses where someone pulled out a big checkbook and wrote checks and put them in stamped envelopes on a Friday.
Georg Dauterman: On a Friday, when people said "we write checks on Friday," it actually meant a very specific thing.
Stephen Kaupp: When I started here, it was prior to COVID, and when COVID hit, like most businesses, especially here in New York, we took a little break from being in the office. We had stacks of checks, they'd evolved from the old-school checkbook to printing from QuickBooks, but they still went in an envelope with a stamp. Those checks are buried somewhere in this office, but they never got used again after we returned in late 2020, early 2021. We switched everything over to a company called Bill.com, which a lot of people are familiar with, it lets you pay vendors directly through a portal online. In most cases it's an electronic transfer, though in some cases they'll actually print the check for you and mail it, we still get those from clients today. Then there's payment processing, when I first got here there was still a credit card machine on a desk, and someone could call in, give us the card info, and we'd key it in.
Georg Dauterman: Key it in, yeah.
Stephen Kaupp: That doesn't exist anymore. Now it's, here's a link, fill it out yourself, pay for it. Ten years of evolution.
Georg Dauterman: Much more secure, too. When we first started working here, helping mature the business, we used to routinely have customer credit cards not well managed. People would say, hey, I'll email you the credit card, and you'd say, don't do that, that's a bad idea. We evolved into a very robust payment platform for customers with a lot of clarity around what bills they have, open invoices, all of that.
Stephen Kaupp: How about a petty cash box? When was the last time you saw one of those? Do you know what a petty cash box is, Megan?
Megan Quick: I imagine like a little piggy bank.
Georg Dauterman: Says "petty cash" on it.
Stephen Kaupp: Exactly, about the size of a laptop, with a little key lock on the front. You'd open it up, there'd be two hundred dollars in there. When you needed milk for coffee, you'd take five dollars out, bring the change back, write on a little piece of paper, "spent three dollars on milk, two dollars change," throw it in there. Long gone now.
Georg Dauterman: Petty cash doesn't exist anymore. Or expenses, you know.
Stephen Kaupp: There are a lot of platforms now, we use company credit cards for the people making payments for the company, each of them has their own card. But there are platforms where every employee gets an expense card, even if they're just using the subway once a month to visit a client. Every level you could think of is out there now. And then there's payroll and HR, which is a huge part of the business. Every state has different rules, New York happens to be one of the states where if you're offering employees benefits, health insurance, life insurance, dental, any supplemental insurance, those tend to go up every year. And they're tied to your payroll provider, the old-school ones like ADP, Paychex. Now there's a ton of new ones, ranging from very small to nationwide to international. There's also PEOs, professional employer organizations, which are technically payroll companies, but the employees of Valiant would be co-employed by the PEO, which lets them get health insurance benefits based on a much larger pool than just twenty-five people at Valiant, so they get a better rate and pass it along. They also give you some light HR guidance, every one of them is different. And then there are PEO providers that emerged out of COVID, for when everyone's remote and you have workers all over the world, and now you're paying people not just in multiple states but in other countries, transferring money from US banks to banks in Portugal, South Africa, wherever the vendor happens to be.
Georg Dauterman: And the state rules differ too. It's always tough, because on the surface it looks easy, you think, just send a wire. But who's paying the taxes? Who's paying unemployment insurance? How does reporting get managed? It gets tricky really fast, and you might be violating laws you don't even know you're violating.
Stephen Kaupp: And again, these are all behind-the-scenes things that a lot of people don't realize when they walk into a business, it's not unlike technology and some of the hurdles we face when we're pitching a new client. For a lot of people, when they think about what they need to run a business, it's: I need a laptop. That's it.
Georg Dauterman: Right.
Stephen Kaupp: Any laptop. Fine if you're working out of Starbucks. But then you and your friend who got two laptops and started working out of Starbucks three days a week, now you're fifty people, now you need an office, now you think, okay, we just need fifty laptops. But wait, this isn't Starbucks, there's no free Wi-Fi here. How does the Wi-Fi get in here? Does it just come from the clouds, Georg?
Georg Dauterman: There's a magical being that allows you to connect to the internet. You're hitting on the levels of complexity, even for us day to day, all the little things you have to handle: what applications are we using, is it secure, is there an inventory, how do laptops get to people, how do we make sure they can work when they get there, how do we make sure we get the laptop back when someone leaves the company, make sure accounts are shut off. Hundreds of things. Every business function has nuances and complicated parts. Ask someone who does payroll, they'll tell you, my god, we do hundreds of things for a company, ninety-five percent of which you never see or think about. Ask someone what an accountant does versus a bookkeeper, looks like a similar function, very different role.
Stephen Kaupp: And again, when you start talking to a company, especially one just embarking on getting a brick-and-mortar location, you start throwing things at them, servers potentially, though that's not really that common anymore.
Georg Dauterman: Not common anymore.
Stephen Kaupp: But definitely routers and switches, the wiring in the walls, Wi-Fi access points all over the office. And again, most people go to work and just think, my work is my laptop, that's it, there's nothing else here. So when you talk to business owners or management at these companies, they don't value what's involved until something bad happens or a challenge hits. Same with payroll, you have to take the time to vet it properly. There's no shortage of payroll companies calling you once a day to pitch business, but then there are companies that don't really understand what you need, if you've been through any kind of labor situation, you value even the smallest assistance you get from your payroll company on the HR side. There are payroll companies now offering tech support too, and for anyone considering that, they don't value the real essence of what you need from someone. It's one thing to go to a car dealer, buy a car, go to a tire shop and buy tires, go to a car wash, that all kind of makes sense, it's all in the same category. What makes sense about a payroll company doing tech support?
Georg Dauterman: I think the logic is that it's one set of tools to get started in the client lifecycle, it's an abstraction, but it misses certain components, the strategic planning side of things. There's a lot more to it than just devices and starting up. For some people it might be where they need to be, and it might be a really cost-effective way to do it, if you don't have any compliance requirements or a complex environment. Or it could be a terrible idea.
Stephen Kaupp: And you'll have that business owner or manager who says, this is the best thing in the world, I had all my business operations with one company. And then that one company is gone. I'll go back to my first career at the airport, when I first drove onto the JFK tarmac, if someone had told me that within ten years Pan Am and TWA would be out of business, I would have laughed all day long.
Georg Dauterman: They were the biggest airlines in the world at that point, one of them anyway.
Stephen Kaupp: When you have all your business operations with one company, and they're very different operations, if something happens to them, or you have to move, I truly believe that where you can get some synergy from a vendor, you should take advantage of it, but you should be getting professionals in all of the important areas of your business processes.
Georg Dauterman: I agree a hundred percent. Not only because that's what we do, but because we live that ourselves. I'm not going to hire a regular attorney to do tax planning, you wouldn't do that, you'd have a CPA or a specialized attorney for that kind of work. I think that really matters a lot.
Stephen Kaupp: And flipping to the vendor side, a good attorney will tell you, I don't do that, I can't do that for you. But there are some attorneys who'll say, yeah, I'll do your house closing and your labor law and this and that. We get approached every once in a while, someone asks, can you do this for us, and it's just, that's not what we do, we do this and we do it great.
Georg Dauterman: I think that's always a thing when you're vetting any third party, any company you work with: how often do they do this for people like me? Do they get what we do, do they understand us? That sounds a little goofy in this day and age of AI and cloud, but I think it matters, because when things break, you're still calling people to come help you. That's the part that's really hard to remember.
Stephen Kaupp: You never want to turn down business, but we've certainly had people come to us and say, hey, we have an office of forty people in the United Kingdom we want you to support. And I can't, our business operates eight to six PM Eastern time, I'd be selling you short if I told you I could support that properly.
Georg Dauterman: Can't do that. It's that delicate balance of yes we can do it, with the understanding that you probably shouldn't fake it till you make it on things that impact a lot of other people. That's a bad idea. I'm not going to fake it with weights and measures on an aircraft, probably best to really know what you're doing before you take that on. In comparison, obviously we're working with a lot of third-party vendors and outsourced functions, is there anything in-house that you think is important to keep in-house, where you'd say, hey, you shouldn't outsource this?
Stephen Kaupp: I think it's an interesting question. There are certain things that directly revolve around the staff themselves, if you disconnect yourself from the staff for certain things. We offer a 401k plan for our staff, we're not a financial services firm, so we contract with one, but we're still involved in giving staff the information and tools they need to manage those plans, rather than just saying here's the number, go call them.
Georg Dauterman: It's situational, I think.
Stephen Kaupp: Yeah, situational. Coming back to HR, I'm sure there are a lot of companies that contract with an HR advisory firm, and an employee comes knocking, and you just say, here's the number to call. I think it's more about being present for staff. A lot of things have been outsourced, just the everyday stuff.
Georg Dauterman: And it can be good, a good outsourced relationship. We have lots of them, people we work with who handle all the small pieces of business, and it's a healthy, growing relationship. But I think if I could sum it up, it's about not abdicating your responsibility to the people you're serving, or your staff. We work with an HR PEO, or an outside accounting firm, but at the end of the day we're responsible for having those numbers right, we're responsible for making sure payroll gets paid, and if something happens, we're the ones who have to communicate that and get it out there. I think that's an important lesson for anyone doing operations in any business, having that sense of responsibility and accountability really counts a lot.
Stephen Kaupp: Even silly things, behind the scenes. Everybody walks out of the office around five thirty, maybe occasionally someone stays later, but most of the staff doesn't realize that at six o'clock a cleaning person comes in three nights a week, cleans, takes the garbage out. Could we save money by not having a cleaning person? Sure. Could we tell staff, hey, every night take your own garbage bag out and drop it at the dumpster?
Georg Dauterman: We tried this before. It's disgusting. Don't do it, don't fall into that trap. Get professionals, cleaning professionals are critical to keeping things operational in a business. You want a clean place for people to come to, and good coffee service, food, snacks, all those little things matter, they truly do.
Stephen Kaupp: Coffee service is another thing, there are companies whose entire business is providing coffee and pantry supplies to offices, versus walking to the corner store yourself. It's all about what value you get out of it, what you're saving, what it offsets in terms of someone's time, and what that time is worth.
Georg Dauterman: That's a really good way of putting it, almost an internal metric: is this time gain going to really provide value to me and the company, or am I spending hours and hours on it? I'll be the first to admit I've spent whole days doing things that were a total waste of time, and looked back thinking, what was I thinking? Recently someone advised me, I was vibe coding something, and their point was, have you thought about how many hours you're going to spend doing this, and then how many hours troubleshooting it, versus just finding a professional to do the thing you want done. DIY is great until it's not, that's maybe a good way of putting it.
Stephen Kaupp: For me, living on the back end, there are core parts of the business, and I don't want this to sound like a cliche since it's Valiant Technology, but technology is huge. Even the idea of having redundant data service coming into your office, you pay regular price for a heavy-duty service, like fiber, or a dedicated line if required, and then you spend two hundred dollars for a cheap backup line, and they have to be two different companies, otherwise it defeats the purpose. When one goes down, it flips over to the other. Some companies go through hard times and have to make hard decisions and drop those things, but if you're starting from scratch, you should have all of this in mind. The ongoing cost of technology isn't a one-and-done thing anymore, it's amazing when people ask, why do I have to pay every month? It's the same reason you pay for an app every month if you like playing that candy and rocks game on your phone.
Georg Dauterman: Right, someone has to support it and keep it running.
Stephen Kaupp: Exactly. You shouldn't be surprised that almost everything you touch these days is a monthly subscription, that's where the economy has gone. That's really important. And we talked a lot about the PEO, payroll, and HR side of things, don't get fooled into thinking any payroll company is going to provide the HR services you need when you're in a bad situation. You should have a rolodex of professionals who may not be contracted for you, but who you have a relationship with. A real estate broker, we've used the same one for many years, we call whenever we have a question or are making a move. An HR attorney, same thing, we've also had copyright attorneys totally separate from our HR attorneys. You should have a rolodex of professionals outside of your recurring vendors.
Georg Dauterman: People you trust that you can bring in as needed, or when you're making a big decision. I'm a big fan of this, I say it to a lot of people, you should have a number of people you can go to before making a big decision, just for a sanity check, is this a good idea or a bad one. Either a trusted advisor, a professional, or a friend in business who's made decisions like that, it makes a huge difference in the outcome.
Stephen Kaupp: And the last thing, everybody's different, everybody values what they spend their money on differently, but you really shouldn't cheap out on some of the smaller things in an office environment. I'll leave AI out of this entirely, but one of the tools we brought in recently that not everybody uses, but I do, is called TextExpander. It's a couple dollars a month, and basically it lets you create hotkeys, so I have a few keys I press on my keyboard that automatically place ten paragraphs of pre-written text. Dealing with clients and vendors regularly, there are certain paragraphs I use over and over, I got tired of typing them every time, so now I just hit a few keys and it populates the whole paragraph, and it's done.
Georg Dauterman: It's a shockingly useful tool, I use it too, some of our heaviest users in the company use it for reports, I probably use it ten or twenty times a day for all sorts of things. It's fun, excluding AI, just these small tools can make your life easier. I think that's a big piece of it, it's not always about price, it's about value, how much value, since time is your most valuable resource, it's the one you can't get back.
Stephen Kaupp: Sure. These are all things people unfortunately debate cutting in business life. A full professional coffee machine in the office, if everybody's drinking coffee every morning, there's a cost to that, but what are you getting on the other side of that investment?
Georg Dauterman: Exactly. Or hiring the right PEO that matches your company's needs and has the right insurance plans, or working with the right technology partner who really gets where you are and what you need to be. Any of those things, a CPA too.
Stephen Kaupp: A professional label printer, if you're a company that ships a lot of things, we got ourselves one in the last couple of years. They're not cheap, a couple hundred bucks, but now nobody has to handwrite a shipping label, it prints right out for UPS or FedEx. For a while we even printed labels on paper and someone had to tape them on, now you just print the label and stick it on. You keep saving a little money here and there, but there's a cost to it, and you have to figure out what that value is to you.
Georg Dauterman: That's a good place to stop and reflect for a second, think about the value, think about where the time sink is versus the time gain. I think that applies to everything you do day in and day out, and it also helps us do a better job serving our customers and our staff. Really powerful stuff. Well, Stephen, this has been a really fun chat, it goes fast. I know I have to keep myself in check, I could go on for hours, as you know I'm a chatty guy. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Stephen Kaupp: No, I appreciate the opportunity to talk. I love talking about business, and when business goes right, it's great. I drive my family crazy when I go into stores and restaurants and I'm examining everything.
Georg Dauterman: Me too. I said to my wife once, they're using Meraki access points here, and she said, I don't care, it doesn't matter, let's go. But it's always interesting. If you could check out this podcast, listen to some really good nuggets here, we appreciate having you on and can't wait to have you back.
Megan Quick: And I have one last little thing. I've been working here a little less time than you, Stephen, but I do remember Georg crediting you with the operational maturity of Valiant pretty early on. And I love that you go into restaurants and check it all out, because that's exactly who you want handling this stuff, the professional, to your point.
Stephen Kaupp: Thank you both, I appreciate it, this was a great time. It's exciting when a business runs well, when you're like, wait, did I just do business with something and not even realize it?
Megan Quick: It's magic.
Georg Dauterman: When it goes well, it's a beautiful thing, like a ballet executed well. We always say, if we could run things here like a Michelin-star restaurant, service out front and you take a little peek in the back to see what's going on, that's a win. If you can get that level of synchronicity, it's really powerful. Alright, Megan, take us home.
Megan Quick: Thank you all again for joining us on The Creative Stack. Stephen, folks can find your bio and LinkedIn on our website if they want to connect, and he'll find you if he needs to.
Georg Dauterman: And LinkedIn as well, hunt me down.
Stephen Kaupp: Yeah, they can find me there, if anyone listening has a question or it piqued their interest, I'd love talking business.
Megan Quick: And please like, subscribe, and listen to our past episodes. This is our second episode in the Back Office series, we also had a great episode with Weinstein & Klein and their lawyers here in New York City.
Georg Dauterman: And New Jersey, admitted to the bar in both.
Megan Quick: Just so you know. Alright, well thank you all, have a wonderful day, and until next time, we'll see you again. Bye.
Georg Dauterman: Thanks everyone, bye.
Stephen Kaupp: Thanks guys, see ya, bye.