Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Shiloh Johnson, founder and CEO of ComplYant, a technology platform offering of business owners and entrepreneurs, a simple way to manage rules and requirements. Shiloh, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to dive into your background, your entrepreneurial background before you started the company and, and also where the company is today and, and the different mechanics behind building. Before we get into, you know, what, what's going on at ComplYant now, what were you doing before you started the company?  

Shiloh: I was running a tax practice. I worked in corporate tax for 14 years, which is basically in-house tax teams for large corporations. And then I left that and decided to run my own practice, and I did that for about a year or so, and then compliant was off to the races.

Julian: Yeah. I love that. What, what was the experience like working kind of in, in a larger organization then? Kind of taking, I guess what, what insights or what strategies or structure did you take from the large company then building your own and then now into ComplYant?  

Shiloh: Yeah, for sure. So just for context, I, I worked at sort of legacy, been around 400 years types of companies. So I worked at Technical, I also worked at Aramark, literally a hundred year anniversary while I was there like very old. And what you learn in the structures like that is just an extreme governance cuz obviously how do you operate that long without it? And so you learn very quickly the value in some of those things, but you also are very eager to disrupt.

So I, I cherry picked what I could take with me in terms of structure and organization and the power of making sure that parts and pieces work. Everything shouldn't be grassroot. Some things you do need structure around. So that helped me a lot. I think I was, so part of the work that I did in my career was basically, We would take all of the new lines of business that the entity would get into, and then we would basically do all of the tax research for that new line of business.

And then we would go and get all the permits and registrations in every jurisdiction that it required for that new line of business. So let's say Aramark was gonna start selling shoes, we went and did all of the work based on that new line of business, and then we would do all the taxability requirements.

And so I took that bit of my. Yeah. And when I left and was running my own practice, I was supporting these small businesses that were like, didn't have that support, so no one was doing that for them. So they didn't know that in, you know, LA you needed a business license or a fire permit if you were operating, you know, a certain type of store.

And so that's where I took my expertise from corporate and said, oh, this is a whole, whole, I'm gonna do this. Yeah. And I'm gonna prioritize it. Here we are.  

Julian: Yeah. Is there, based on the location you're in, is it fairly prescriptive what you have to do to be within compliance of, of whether it's a new line of business or your current business?

Or do, do things change based on the type of product that you have or service that you have?  

Shiloh: It changes. So it changes by type of product, type of service where you're doing that all the way down to the ZIP code. It changes. And then also think about like most people only think about tax by like income tax.

There are actually 10 types of business tax. So you, you're talking about compliance at 10 different levels, so Wow. Yeah. There's a lot .  

Julian: Yeah. What are, during your private practice days, what were some of the, the most exciting businesses that you were able to work on? And, and I get some stories that, that you kind of maybe inspired you to, to move towards the the technology route and enabling people kind of on a broadspectrum.

Oh.  

Shiloh: Oh yeah. So there's a couple things there. So, on the exciting side, I had a mentor at the time who runs a business management firm, which, if you're not familiar, that's just sort of the accounting and business management for celebrities and athletes. Mm-hmm. . And she is a minority woman, so she, she's the largest minority-owned business management firm out of la.

So she had a lot of like, sort of clients you would. and she had some smaller clients that she couldn't use and so she ended up saying, Hey, can I help you get your practice started here? Are these like benched athletes and sea list celebrities? I was like, yes, I will take it. So instantly I was like engulfed into their world, which is, you know, at a very minor scale.

I mean, we're not talking about Denzel Washington here, but it was definitely very exciting just to see like how their lives worked and to have sort of a front row seat really, cuz dish management is every aspect of their lives, how they spend their money, how they maintain their homes. And so you really get a front row seat, took care of logs, which was pretty exciting.

And then I just love tax, so all things around taxes are, is exciting to me. Yeah. But some takeaways which really prompted compliant, getting kicked off the ground. I had a client that ran a franchise. So she had a location of a franchise she had bought into a, a restaurant. And it was pretty kind of well known, but I don't think she had ever ran a business before.

She, so she just had a very successful son and so her son, To put her up, bought her this franchise and she was just doing all the things that are not correct. I was like, whoa. And that really sparked the idea. Like, for example, she was like reading her own like tax code for the state of California and if you read it, it says like food isn't taxable.

Like if you run, go to a grocery store in California, you're not paying sales tax on. However, if you, you know, warm that food up or if that food has carbonation in it or alcohol, it is subject to sales tax. And that piece she didn't understand. So she was not, she was charging people sales tax cuz the POS system required it.

But then she was keeping the money and I was like, oh no, so you wanna go to jail, , how this works, how this works at. And these are, you know, folks that are relatively tech savvy, at least mi you know, minorly enough to be dangerous, you know? So I was like, oh yeah, I think there's space here. Like, I was like, how did you even learn about tags?

Like, where did you go? What did you do? She was like, I just Googled. Yeah. And then I tried to go to the state of California and figure it out and I didn't really know what to do and I was like, oh yeah.  

Julian: A better, yeah. It needs to be a better silo for that information for sure. Is what are some of the common ways outside of that experience that you see, you know, businesses or people, entrepreneurs that kind of find themselves in trouble and not being compliant with, with the, the tax laws and, and cos and, and things along that nature.

Shiloh: Yeah. Two areas. I think that people try to play and do successfully play the ignorance card. Like, well, I didn't know I had to do this thing. Whatever that thing is, insert tax requirement here. But the state, the local government, the federal government, they don't care. It. This isn't a matter of like, well, you didn't know you get a pass.

No, no, no , you didn't know and you still owes $40,000. Please pay us tomorrow. So I think that's a big miss number of people. Thinks that like, you know, oh, I will, I'm gonna fly in on the ignorance boat and that should get me through. And that just, that just never works. The other thing I think I see a lot is people are very afraid of finance and tax, and so they tend to do the absolute least.

and as a result they get penalized. Like it's better to go in blind and just like kinda steal your way through than to do nothing at all. And I see just all too many times people just don't do anything and they don't apply. They don't try, they don't figure it out. They get the notices and then they ignore them, and then it becomes a much, much, much bigger problem later.

Oftentimes, a lot of those things you can, you know, resolve relatively cheaply or free, and people just aren't aware of their power, so they tend to just not do anything, which I think is just a huge mistake.  

Julian: Yeah. Where is that kind of inefficiency in accessing that information? Is it, is it the complexity of it?

Is it the resources that you're gathering? Where is it especially, you know, in community that necessarily don't have a pedigree to kind of fall back on in terms of resources and network? Where is that access and why is there such a disconnect?  

Shiloh: I think somebody else asked me this question. I think it's a couple of things.

I think it, it partially is lend to our public school system in the country as a whole. I don't think our public school system is conducive to helping people live lives outside of school. It's conditioned to help you go to college. . And while I think that's wonderful if you don't choose that path or post-college, there really isn't a ton of education or information even then about finances, your personal finances.

Right. I know I have lots of peers that I've known over the years that don't even know how to operate a successful budget. Yeah. Or to, you know, maintain savings account properly. Like there's lots of nuances around finance that are just so taboo and lots of cultural subgroups that the information just doesn't get talked about.

And when it doesn't get talked about, there's no group share. There's no group think, well, what are you doing for yourself? Tax? Oh, sales tax. Oh, I'm doing this. Or, oh, what are you doing? No one's talking about it. Everyone's just like tight-lipped and we're all pretending that we're balling out on TikTok.

Like, no, no. We have to be honest about. I'm broke, I can't afford to do this thing. Please tell me what the alternatives are and if we can have those conversations more, we can get down to the need of like, how do I get better? Cause you can't change the anything if you're still trying to pretend like everything's perfect.

And I think that's what's happening a lot. Mm-hmm. is that we're still under the cover of like the pretend and trying to appear like our lives are better than, than what they are via social media. And I think so there, there's a bit of that. And then also just tax rules are so unbelievably complex, unnecessarily.

It's really hard just navigating like city and state websites trying to figure out, like, if you sell shoes in LA it's very difficult to figure out if shoes are subject to tax in la. Like, you're like, what? Huh? Okay, I'll Google it. And then you Google that and nothing, no answer is coming up. That is even close.

So what could be accurate? It's not even an answer, it just takes you. State of California sales tax. What this is next flight question. So it's just the technology doesn't match with the expectation of knowledge, and I think that's where we have the greatest room for, for success.

Julian: Perfect. Tell us a little bit about how ComplYant is, is now giving people the access and, and how the technology works and, and kind of the user journey and, and, and, and also obviously historically how it's evolved maybe over time.  

Shiloh: Yeah so ComplYant works like a massive tax database that's much easier to navigate.

So basically a business would come onto the platform and enter some information about what they do and where they do it and how, like if they sell in person or online or some combination of the two. Then our system will use that information to return back to them all of the tax types that would apply to them based on what they do.

And then we calendar out those deadlines to them across the year. So that's like step one is like, okay, here are all the things you have to do. Don't forget to be on time. And then we do what we call like tidbits of information that I just learned over my career and my, some of my team members have learned over the lives of their career.

It's just things that you may not have known and that are not readily available on So that you just have learned from being involved in the career over time, which we think is our, like secret sauce. So for example, in certain states, if you don't have any sales let's say you have a down month or a down quarter and it's zero, you still have to file the return.

And if you don't, you get penalized. And a lot of people don't know that. They just think, well, I didn't have sales, so I don't have anything to file. But that's actually not true. You have to zero out the return and submit it. So it's like these little things that you don't necessarily know, we provide as like little nuggets of value so the business understands like, Hey, this is how I can best position us to get started and move forward.

And so on top of that, we built some additional products. So we think about taking the business owner from awareness to budgeting, to saving to complying. And so that's sort of our four part s. We are now, we now offer like a budget tool, so we help them. Now that you know all the tax types you need to pay by quarter, let's think about how much of your revenue you need to put away for those tax types so that you're not being hit with these massive bills you can't afford.

And then we think about saving. Okay? Also, let's think about putting, saving you from yourself. If you're not the type of business owner that can think and save and you need a little help in that area, we will take out in daily and weekly increments, deposits, or withdrawals from your revenue deposits so that we can put them in an actual account that's held up for your tax so that you're not overspending money that you should be sending aside for tax.

And so now we're getting into the filing and paying piece across all of the 10 tax types that I mentioned that happen. So that's who we are as a product. Now and in the foreseeable future. And then where we started was just a very basic tax calendar. So I don't even think it was a calendar. It was just like a, a spreadsheet , like, like every tax type and like all of the deadlines for those tax types.

That's what we were. Version one was a spreadsheet that I owned that I had built over my career. , and then I just slowly began to productize that spreadsheet. So that's how we kind of have grown.  

Julian: Yeah, well, just like historically, what were the products that were being offered and where were they lacking in particular that, you know, obviously from what it sounds like now, your whole product encompasses everything that that isn't necessary to run a successful business in a compliant business, but where were the incumbent products and how were those.

Shiloh: Yeah. So if you have ever tried to file your tax, you're probably saying, oh, I needed this. That's because it didn't exist. So if you were a business prior to compliant or you didn't know we existed, what you would've done is you would've tried to go to the city of Los angeles.org and then you would've tried to Google our shoes taxable the city of Los Angeles, and then you would've had to like read some notices or like scour some tech code and try to figure out if it is or it.

Oftentimes no one's doing these things, so they're just getting hit with penalties because they're waiting for the the state or city to come find them. So that was sort of what was happening before. And then if you're like a competitive product, like let's say, if you think about FinTech or tax tech as a whole, it usually exists in two spaces.

It's usually like bookkeeping, which is the precursor to tax filing, or then it's like single tax type filing. So if you think about trouble tax, that's an income tax product or a single tax type, or you think about like tax jar, that's a sales tax product or a single tax. So it's very fragmented. Like Gusto is a single tax product, so you're going to six different sites to try and take care of all of this tax, maybe if you are even halfway compliant.

And then there's this thing we call lease tax, which is like your permits. There's no site for that. You're just like, I don't know, shrugging, my shoulder isn't figuring it out. So we sort of took all of that and said, okay, let's bring it under one umbrella and give people a soft place to. Yeah.  

Julian: What was the process of, of kind of productizing? I don't think a lot of founders maybe, maybe chat about this. Maybe that's on me. Yeah. But what's the, with the process of productizing and, and how was that learning from a non-technical and very, you know, non-technical background in terms of you know, that, that whole I guess learning period or whatever, what was that process?

Shiloh: Oh, it's hard. . I have zero technical background. I have zero startup background. Again, I come from legacy corporate, like companies that like don't even have apps, like very, very legacy and, So I didn't have the awareness as to the time constraints that live between, here's my idea and here's the truth of it, living in the world.

Those things like the distance between those two is not a short distance. It is like miles and miles long. And so the first thing I had to get over was sort of the fragmented version of my idea or sort of the MVP or scaled back productizing that people don't think about or talk. I think a lot of times people are like, I wanna make an app, or I wanna build a website, and they have this grand idea and they shoot for this grand idea version one, and it just can never be that.

So that was the first roadmap pickup of like, whoa, you can't have a fully built tool. You have to have some fragmented thing that's like held up with shoestring and glue. That's exactly, we had to had to over time then. Exactly folks. Sweep it around and then, you know, hold it there, heat it up, hope it doesn't fall off.

So that definitely was hard point for us. And then also I am just a dreamer by, I find myself a product founder. Cause I love the product of, of accounting. I love the process of tax. So for me, the product side of it is love, love, love. There's just language barriers around how engineering MPMs talk about product versus how I'm thinking about.

And so that's something I think too that CEOs or founders don't take into consideration is like your idea is just that it's just an idea and there is a, a journey it has to go on to make it into product phase. That some of the, the idea gets stripped away or doesn't happen at all, or isn't even realistic.

Or maybe there's different patches or there's an API we could build that is some version of what you wanna do, and then you have to tweak it. So there's all these things that you have to. Work through that require you to be a lot more fluid as a founder because you just aren't gonna get this hard and fast result that you saw when you were like noodling it on a piece of paper.

It just never. Yeah. It never does that.  

Julian: Yeah. I, I was super interested in, I chatted with another founder in, in Umsimilar space. Yeah. Kind of giving access to tools and information to underserved kind of businesses and entrepreneurs that, you know, didn't have the, the, the whether it was, was the funding to actually access the, the more, I guess, complex tools or even individuals and service individuals.

Shiloh: And one thing that she mentioned to me was that one challenge was, was offering a product that's a fair cost and then focusing on growing that and growing the user base and then using that to compound versus trying to go upstream and upmarket to enterprise companies or mid-market. What's been your strategy around going.

You know, offering a very fair and affordable cost product that's extremely valuable. But also kind of, you know, thinking about investors and this whole, you know, projections and all the things that encompass a growing scaling startup,  

it's a little bit different for us because tax is a requirement.

And it's a hard and fast, expensive requirement, so we get to live a little more freely in that sort of pricing space where, but I still to my core, am very committed to the small business when making sure we can be a part they can afford. So I defend until the ends of the rope, my pricing structure.

But pricing is fluid anyway. I mean, it changes literally has changed so many times. We are not a mid-market or enterprise product, I don't think we ever will be, at least not a foreseeable future. So because all of those people can afford to have entire built out tax teams, and we are serving a market that can't have those things, so we get to lean heavily on like, well, we're productizing a service that.

You know, doesn't have access to a high, you know, high cost, well qualified cpa and so that, you know, what they would be paying the CPA fees is where, where 10th of that. So we have some room because of the sort of compliance requirement, but we also are very committed to making sure that small business can always afford.

I think sometimes we get lost in expectations of investors or, or asks of investors. I'm the founder that doesn't care. , I don't, because at the end of the day, we aren't much about customers. So my investors can ask for whatever they want, but my investors aren't buying compliant. Small businesses are, but we price ourselves out of who we're trying to serve.

Like how are we gonna get customers and we can't get funding if we don't have customers. But to me the problem is a no-brainer. It's always customer first. It has to be. .  

Julian: Yeah. What's you know, in regards to, to what you were saying around, around customers, what's been some successful good market strategies or ways that you've been able to reach your audience?

Yeah. And what are some non successful wave that you've learned from?  

Shiloh: We do so many things that were not successful. And to all of the founders that are listening, all those bumps, yeah, it's okay. We all go through it. I think there's a, a fair bit of naivete in the early days around what you think people will do.

I think people have really grand ideas like, well, if I build that, they will come. That's not true. You have to build it, and then you have to go talk to everybody and figure out if they would like to come or if they understand what they are joining. So I think that was the first mistake, is I, because I am a subject matter expert, I am a CPA by trade, I have been, I'm underground accounting masters in tax.

That has been my life and my practice was like, You don't have to find clients like they find you cuz they need your services. So it was never a point where I was selling anything. Yeah. So that became like, oh what? So that's probably hiccup number one. But what we've been able to do as a result is we, so early days, the shirt, I'm not wearing actually Mucker Capital, they were one of our first investors.

They have something called Mucker Lab. And precede stage. We participated in the lab and it's just literally you once a week, every week on the phone with a couple of their investors and they, you're just hammering out the nitty gritty of the business. And all we did for a year straight was work on.

Sales channels, that's it. Like all, we're a self-serve model. And so they literally built that self-serve model for me. They helped me understand, you know, did metrics around Google ad, like admitting they helped me understand and build up my entire metrics tracking system so that I could watch like.

Did watch monitor shift literally by the day, and then we were testing the heck out of everything. I mean like every permutation of a Q word phrase we possibly could. We were just testing until we couldn't test anymore, and as a result, we ended up getting to an incredible Q word mix that just. Paid itself in droves.

The other thing that they did for me that was really helpful was they put me in front of employee number three at Credit Karma and her position was in marketing. Her whole job was to go out there, SD flow. So she just gave me their tools. She was like, this is how we built Credit Karma in the like days take, take the strategy and run.

And then we did So that that worked really well for us. But I mean, that's after. Getting on webinars and trying to get on the phone with as many businesses as I could and just talking and talking and talking and trying to figure out how are you solving this and if what we're building is actually plugging what you need, or is it, this is just my version of what you need.

And so that just takes time. I mean, I think go to market strategy as a whole is not a, is not a one size fits all, and it's a mix of things. I mean, we're still doing webinars. We still get on the phone and talk to customers every single day. We're still doing the stuff that doesn't scale, because at the end of the day, there's nothing better than just hearing people say to you, here's my problem and here's what I need, and, and making sure that they are reading your story the way you intend for them to read it.

Julian: That's incredible. Tell us a little bit more about your traction, where you are now, how many people are using your product, what, what's been the, the growth, you know, this year and and into the future?  

Shiloh: Yeah, yeah. It's been a pretty exciting year. A few things that we did that are ring true is we got behind our metrics systems.

We have been able to spend more money now cause we, we've raised a few rounds, so we've been able to spend more money on systems. Yeah. Before we were doing everything just grassroots and like Excel spreadsheets. So we were able to get ahead of Excel and actually get some processes in network, and as a result, we were able to see like where customers were dropping off at in the signup process.

So now we're able to follow a customer from how they came to us, how they got to us, whether it was ad, whether it was. Organic, whether it was some article, and then we're able to follow them on their journey. Do they sign up and where do they click? How long are they spending on certain pages? And so we've been able to do that work and then optimize for what wasn't working.

Yeah. And so we're seeing some of the effects of that now. So growth over the last year has been really great. So when we first let me try to quantify this. So we first launched in 2020. And I think for the first year we were very much under like five figures. I mean, we maybe, maybe had a couple hundred customers and we were still trying to just like figure things out.

But now we're at almost 9,000 customers by customers. We call them small businesses. So our business partners and we are, yeah, I don't know, nine or 10 or maybe 12 x in it. . Yeah. I love that it together. It's all good though. Yeah, I think. We try not to track where we were a year ago to where we are now.

Cause so much has changed. What we try to track is like where we were last week versus where we are now and where we were last month. That becomes how we really measure. What's working and not working. And so we're pretty good at 25% month. Month. I can complain.  

Julian: Yeah, I love that. And, and very impressive with the, the way I, I think just, just fundamentally, philosophically how you think about that in creating the more short term goals, cuz those are more controllable and, and obviously they grow as the company grows.

But tell us a little bit about what are some of the biggest challenges that you face today?  

Shiloh: Ooh, you don't have enough time here for me to discuss this with you. There are so many. I think hiring is one. We are in such weird times and all of a sudden all of these people are getting let go.

And then tech already has this really interesting like, reputation for talent and hiring. That you're trying to disrupt because as a minority founder, there are certain, you know, requirements just within me personally that I want to make sure we meet as a company in terms of our cultural makeup. And so there's this delicate dance you're doing between really, really high quality talent and making sure you're bridging the right culture and then also making sure.

You know, diverse diversity is a priority and your company is made up of what the world looks like. So there's all these things at play is like, will you sit? Are you the right person? Do you have the right skill? And it's literally like, like a shot in the dark. And sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't.

But hiring is so difficult, so, so, so difficult. So I try not to be so hard on myself. But yeah, it's a, it's a tough mix because really the success of your company in your early years is one, or lost by the help you have around the table. And so you really wanna try to make the right moves there. So that's been really tough.

But not impossible. I have a great team and I'm, I'm really excited about everybody we've been able to get together, but not for nothing. It's tough, it's tough, tough. I think also, Time is is a very delicate balance that you're constantly doing and you're doing this between time, expectations of your investors, also time expectations of your customers that are waiting, waiting for certain things to happen.

And then there's time expectations of the, as the founder and how youth prioritize what matters to the company. And all of these things are playing tug of war, and you're trying to find like the balance between like, am I doing the right thing according to my investors? Am I doing the right thing according to my customers?

Am I doing the right thing according to my. And or, or to my employees. And are, is everybody living in harmony? And almost always, it's no . Almost always it's no. So yeah, that's tough. That's been a struggle this year. And then I think just. Culture is, is a very delicate thing and I, I don't know that enough CEOs.

I think we're starting to see the result of CEOs that are not giving culture enough attention. And I don't just mean like time off and like, do we go on vacation? Not, not that I mean culture in the sense of like, How are we talking about what matters at this company? How am I showing the people that I work with and alongside that I'm caring for their livelihood and their contributions to this company?

And that's just not an easy thing. And sometimes you fail and sometimes people don't feel appreciated and sometimes people feel unseen or unheard, but I always tell my team and I tell 'em, Sandra, like your job is not to lead these people. Your job is to serve these people because leadership is is at its core.

In order for me to get you on the boat with me, I have to serve your needs so that you are not distracted by other things such that you can get on the boat with me. I can't tell you down the boat with me and then drag you on the boat. It's not gonna be successful, right? Like you're not gonna wanna come, and then when you get there, you're gonna half-ass it.

So I don't think about leadership in that way. And so I'm constantly trying to get in a place where my team feels supported by me and that I am ultimately serving them. And it just isn't easy. And sometimes you fail. Just as the breaks. So, and then mix all that with you need to take care of yourself because if you're not fully mentally and emotionally present, it's hard to make really good decisions. So, yeah, that sucks.

Julian: What thing goes well with the long term vision for compliance?  

Shiloh: Yeah. A No Star. So recently a few of my employees, I had them read this book by Ben Harwood, his most recent book he wrote, I can't think of the name of it, but there's a, a piece of it in there where he talks about Tucson, which basically led this like revolution and led this army of people that didn't look like him and they believed in him.

And so ultimately he did that around building this true North Star, this sort of statement, north Star statement. And so I've been telling the team, our North Star statement is compliant within a few clicks, and that's where we're headed to. It needs to be unbelievably easy for people to do the things they don't want to do so that they can and do, do.

It's very difficult to get someone to say, please do this thing I know you hate doing, and here's 50 steps to get it done. You're almost always gonna get defiance, and I think we, we bridge a lot of that by making it far, far easier to get things done. I mean, literally like text yes or no, if you want us to take this bill for you.

I mean, just very, very simple. Get you to what you need to get to so that you don't thin time. What we hear customers say over and over is, I just don't wanna do this stuff. So we wanna make sure that they don't have to. Yeah, no,  

Julian: I love that. You kind of alluded to to this with the recent suggested to your team, but I always like to ask this question selfishly, but also for my audience as well.

What books are people, whether it's earlier your career or now have influenced you the most?  

Shiloh: Oh, so much. Okay. So books that I think about a lot, a lot. Other than that Ben Howard's book I just mentioned true north, I can't remember the author. It's a blue book. True North is really good. I think about it a lot.

I also think about there's a board management book by Bradfield I think about a lot. I, I've participated in Techstars and they give you this like little stack of books on your first. and one of the stack of books was Adventure Deals. And early days when I was raised, I didn't know anything about anything and I think just reads like a bible adventure and it just seemed to me over and over I think about that book a lot.

I even refer to it a lot. Yeah. People, I will say I am a fan of stories, of people's experiences is why I like podcasting with the gun books. I think there isn't one person, but there is the universal journey period that just matters so much to and did matter early days. So like how I built this, how I built this, that one, because it is constantly, isn't it great?

Like it's over and over. These stories of people's sort journey that just, you don't expect to have. And they won. And it just is a constant reminder that even though the system isn't set up for complete success for everyone, and you don't see yourself resembled in certain arenas, or you feel like you're failing or it's not working out, you're hearing time after time, all these people that failed a million times and they were still successful.

And that thing, I think is what constantly inspires me. No matter who's telling that story. That story to me is just so powerful that if we could galvanize behind your journey is unique to you and there is no right way. It just is. And you. Stay at it, you'll be great.  

Julian: Yeah. I, I, I love the, the plug on how I built this, because I, I, in essence is, is what I want this podcast to kind of embody, which is, which is learning about the founder journey, learning about the tools necessary to scale and build a business, and learning about the hardships and challenges that you overcome and the lessons from that, because so much to gather from that, that experience and that information, Not only, you know, motivates you as a founder, but also kind of keys you into certain way that you can solve the problems that you're facing.

I know we're at the end of the show here and, and I'm so appreciative of you taking time and, and walking through your journey and the whole building process, where you're at and what you focus on. Your philosophies around building teams and building you know, the. But last little bit. I always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs.

So let me know on LinkedIn and websites, Twitter, where can we be a part of the journey? And if I'm a small business, where can I find the product and start using it?  

Shiloh: Yeah, complYant is@complYant.co compliant with the Y C O N P Y A T Co and we are compliant everywhere. ComplYant with a y on Twitter, on Facebook ComplYant app actually everywhere.

And then me personally, you can find me everywhere with the same handle. Five A Johnson I on every platform. I keep it simple cause you know, don't wanna over complicate, but yeah, that's where you can find.  

Julian: I love it. Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself, Shiloh, and thank you so much for being on the show.

Shiloh: I do. You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

‍