Keith Middleton, Smith + Howard

Join us for another episode of the Richmond Leadership Lab. In this episode, co-hosts Christian Mosier (BenX Consulting) and Taylor Quinn (Filmspire and Richmond Podcast Studio) sit down with Keith Middleton, Co-Founder of Fahrenheit Advisors, to talk about building a company around values, letting go of control, and leading through growth, crisis, and change. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in leadership, entrepreneurship, company culture, change management, and creating meaningful community impact. Episode Highlights:Meet Keith Middleton: Keith grew up in Salisbury on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the son of a lifelong public-school educator and a nurse, working on his family’s nursery and chicken farms. Those early years shaped a work ethic he carries to this day. From Arthur Andersen to the C-Suite: After earning an accounting degree from Lynchburg College, Keith spent a decade at Arthur Andersen, then moved into industry at Perdue Farms and later Performance Food Group, where he served as corporate controller and divisional CFO. The Question That Changed Everything: Keith shares the moment his daughter asked if he’d be home for her senior year after missing her first three years of high school — and why he quit the very next day. A Company Built on a Couple of Beers: Introduced by angel investor Karen Booth Adams, Keith and co-founder Rich met over drinks, talked about values and family instead of business plans, and launched Fahrenheit two weeks later.500 Coffees and Counting: With no business plan and one small office, Keith and Rich built the firm one relationship at a time — logging more than 500 coffee meetings in year one, often from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Values That Never Changed: Doing the right thing, community give-back, accountability over micromanagement, and treating the business as one big experiment have guided Fahrenheit from day one. Pivoting to Meet the Market: Keith explains how Fahrenheit shifted from high-end consulting for large corporations to fractional and interim work for middle-market companies, and grew into finance, HR, executive search, IT strategy, and AI advisory. Giving Up Control: From a team “intervention” early in his career to building a real leadership team in 2019, Keith talks about learning to trust others — a decision that carried the firm through COVID when it lost half its revenue overnight. Hiring for Fit, Not Just Skill: Keith shares the three traits every Fahrenheit leader needs — an entrepreneurial mindset, risk tolerance, and faith in leadership to do the right thing — and why great résumés don’t always mean the right fit. A New Chapter with Smith + Howard: Keith discusses Fahrenheit’s acquisition by Atlanta-based CPA firm Smith + Howard, why culture drove the decision, and the move to a single national brand with all advisory practices led from Richmond. Advice to His Younger Self: Keith’s message to the leader he was 17 years ago: chill out, invest in culture, and embrace life-work integration. He also gives a shout-out to First Tee – Greater Richmond for its work building leadership and life skills in young people. Learn more About Fahrenheit/Smith + Howard: https://fahrenheitadvisors.com/Connect with Keith:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkeithmiddleton/Richmond Leadership Lab is Produced and Co-Hosted by:Taylor Quinn, CEO – Filmspire & Richmond Podcast Studiohttps://www.filmspirevideo.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-quinn-filmspire/Christian Mosier, President – BenX Consultinghttps://benxconsulting.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-mosier/Learn More About Richmond Leadership Lab: https://www.richmondleadershiplab.comThis podcast was produced and recorded by Richmond Podcast Studio. Want to start a podcast without the tech hassle? Get your professional video podcast the same day you record. 👉 Learn more: https://www.richmondpodcaststudio.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Richmond Leadership Lab, featuring business and nonprofit leaders across Richmond, Virginia. Produced and hosted by Filmspire and Ben Axe.

• 0:12Taylor Quinn?

  Welcome back to another episode of the Richmond Leadership Lab, Richmond's number one podcast. Trust me, don't look it up. We just are Richmond's number one podcast. You can trust us on that.

• 0:22Christian Mosier?

  Might be the only one left.

• 0:23Taylor Quinn?

  Exactly. This is episode 22, which is great.

• 0:30Christian Mosier?

  Man, how much did we learn in some of these conversations?

• 0:32Taylor Quinn?

  I mean, so much. For those of you who have been listening to the podcast for a while, we're back in the studio.

• 0:39Christian Mosier?

  Yep.

• 0:40Taylor Quinn?

  Because last month, we hosted our very first live podcast. We'd been hinting at that all year, that we got something big planned. So that was exciting, where we had about 40 or 50 different CEOs and executives at, meet us at Lewis Ginter. We had a breakfast catered food, had a great panel of three different executives in totally different industries speaking about leadership. So that podcast is on our channels on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. So go watch that if you're interested. But it's nice to be back.

• 1:09Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, it feels good. It feels right.

• 1:10Taylor Quinn?

  It feels so good that we actually ended up dressing almost exactly the same. If you can see us, this was not planned. So.

• 1:17Christian Mosier?

  I think you wear it better, though.

• 1:18Taylor Quinn?

  I don't know about that. I didn't bring the sneaker. So I dressed up a little bit more than you today.

• 1:23Christian Mosier?

  You're fancy.

• 1:24Taylor Quinn?

  I know. We're neighbors, we're co-hosts, and now we dress the same. So let's figure out how to.

• 1:29Christian Mosier?

  Everything just rubs together.

• 1:31Taylor Quinn?

  Exactly. Yeah. How are you doing?

• 1:34Christian Mosier?

  I'm good, man. Yeah. Here we go, Q4, October.

• 1:37Taylor Quinn?

  It's crazy.

• 1:38Christian Mosier?

  It's crazy.

• 1:39Taylor Quinn?

  It is crazy.

• 1:39Christian Mosier?

  Almost 2027.

• 1:40Taylor Quinn?

  Yep.

• 1:41Christian Mosier?

  Gas is like $9 a gallon.

• 1:42Taylor Quinn?

  Oh, my gosh. Tell me about it. Every time I drive by daycare, I'm looking at the gas prices. I'm like, this is just insane.

• 1:48Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:49Taylor Quinn?

  Enough banter. But we've got a great leader today in the room. So today, we have, sitting down with us is Keith Middleton. He's the co-founder of Fahrenheit Advisors. So we're super happy to have Keith here. So Keith, welcome to the lab. Welcome to Richmond Leadership Lab.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Appreciate the invite. Looking forward to it.

• 2:05Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 2:05Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, we are too.

• 2:06Taylor Quinn?

  We are very excited. How is your, and we'll get into it a little bit, but how is your fall shaping up so far?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  The fall is shaping up and busy. Busy. A lot of change going on. We can talk about that in a bit. But yeah.

• 2:20Christian Mosier?

  How's the golf game?

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I played last week at Wingfoot. So that was good.

• 2:26Christian Mosier?

  How was that experience?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  I didn't play that well, but phenomenal golf course, as you can imagine.

• 2:31Christian Mosier?

  Gorgeous course, yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Unbelievably great shape. Trip of a lifetime. I won it, quote, bought it in a charity auction. So it was not a cheap trip.

• 2:40Taylor Quinn?

  Very nice. Yeah.

• 2:41Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Taylor Quinn?

  Before a good cause.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, other than that, golf game's non-existent.

• 2:47Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah. A little busy, maybe. Yeah, a little busy. Well, Keith, we want to just get into first, your story, the story of Keith, a little bit. So for those of us who don't know you, just give us a little bit, a little bit, couple of minutes on just your background, where you grew up, maybe kind of how you got into this whole world that you're in today, things like that, family, things like that. So tell us, take over, Keith. Tell us about yourself.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Grew up in Eastern Shore, Maryland, Salisbury. So the big, small town.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  My dad was lifelong education, public school, started out as a teacher, was superintendent, 42 years, in the same building, which most people don't experience. My mom was a nurse.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  And I think part of that is ultimately from a leadership perspective, or just a person. Both my parents grew up on farms, a mile apart, and known it since kindergarten. And we grew up working on the farms. One was a nursery, one was a chicken farm, and it just set, I guess, a work ethic. And then just watching my parents, especially my father, from a leadership perspective, his leadership style in a public school system. Went to Lynchburg College, which is now the big University of Lynchburg. I keep getting that wrong.

• 4:08Taylor Quinn?

  Yep.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Accounting degree. Spent, out of college, I was in Washington DC with Arthur Anderson. I spent 10 years with Anderson on the audit consulting side, moved to Richmond, left in 98, public accounting, went back to the Eastern Shore, worked for Perdue Farms, of course. And then 2002, had the opportunity to come back to Richmond to be the controller at Performance Food Group. Been here ever since. So CPA accountant by background. And

• 4:45Speaker 03

  then, we can talk in how we ended up at Fahrenheit, 16 years ago. But three kids, 34, 31, 29, one's here, one's in the Eastern Shore, and one's in New York City. Wife, Michelle, of 36 years.

• 5:02Taylor Quinn?

  Congratulations.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Met her at college.

• 5:04Taylor Quinn?

  That's great.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:05Christian Mosier?

  Lynchburg University, the U.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:08Taylor Quinn?

  The U. That's one of the first schools I got into, actually. Yeah.

• 5:11Christian Mosier?

  You went to CNU, though.

• 5:13Taylor Quinn?

  I went to CNU, small, even smaller at Lynchburg. But they have a great lacrosse team. That's what I remember about them. And friends who, I went to Oakdale High School in Northern Virginia, had a few play there, and it was a great, great school for that. Yeah. Eastern Shore, that is, that's a beautiful part of the country.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:30Taylor Quinn?

  Beautiful.

• 5:31Christian Mosier?

  We go to Cape Charles a lot, or a couple of times a year. But Cape Charles is so cool, too.

• 5:35Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah. And I would spend time in Easton, Maryland, every now and then. Beautiful geese hunting, you know, duck hunting, upland game hunting, things like that. I'd do that every January, growing up. Beautiful out there.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  My grandfather was a big hunter.

• 5:49Taylor Quinn?

  Really?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  His best friend was a waterman.

• 5:51Taylor Quinn?

  Okay.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Lived right on the Chesapeake Bay.

• 5:53Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  And so, we had a lot of hunting and fishing.

• 5:57Taylor Quinn?

  It is, it is beautiful. Yeah, it is like a gem out there. And just the beauty of the water and the bay and everything. It is, it is, even in the winter, dead of winter in January, when we'd go and it's freezing cold, it's still somehow gorgeous, the fields and everything. Yeah.

• 6:14Christian Mosier?

  Well, you said you worked at Purdue. Do you still eat Purdue chicken? Do you still eat that brand?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 6:18Christian Mosier?

  Yeah. I had some the other night, actually. It was, they have a good product.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Purdue, I do not eat chicken hot dogs, just to let you know.

• 6:28Taylor Quinn?

  It's just a line you won't cross.

• 6:29Christian Mosier?

  Made with, with what, rib meat or like?

• 6:32Speaker 03

  You don't want to know. But I mean, I grew up in my grandparents' chicken, poultry farm. And so, yeah, it's just part of the circle of life.

• 6:41Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Christian Mosier?

  The evolution.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:43Taylor Quinn?

  It is. So start off, like, what did you, what was your degree in?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Accounting.

• 6:48Taylor Quinn?

  Accounting. What made you, what made you think, Keith, accounting's for me.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  My dad was a business major, taught one year, two years of high school, business, accounting, and then he went to the central office and was finance. And my senior year, my dad sat me down in high school and said, you will take an accounting class and a typing class. And I realize I'm a little older than you all, but a mandatory typing class. Okay? Accounting was easy. I got to go to college. What do you want a degree in? Might as well be accounting. It was easy. What do you do when you get out of college? You go to work for a CPA firm. I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to go to work for Anderson in DC. And I enjoyed it until three kids and 10 years.

• 7:38Christian Mosier?

  In DC, yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Well, I moved to Richmond about halfway through. That was my first stint here. But just the, it was the public accounting grind. And the third kid came along, and it was time to do something else. So I flipped to the other side. And I've been on the other side at Purdue and then Performance Food Group, and then somewhere in between, when we started Fahrenheit. So the accounting was just because it was easy, and I didn't know what else to do. There's no brilliant stories here.

• 8:07Christian Mosier?

  That's great. Well, tell us about like the transition to into Fahrenheit, right? So you were working at Performance Food Group before.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:16Christian Mosier?

  And so tell us about, like, obviously, you know, the story of starting Fahrenheit Advisors.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I was at Performance Food Group, and we were sold to private equity, which some people remember and some don't. So we were public, private equity came in. I actually was the corporate controller, moved into a divisional CFO role, so more on the operational side. And just year, year and a half later, it just, between travel and fit, it just, it was time to do something else.

• 8:46Taylor Quinn?

  Sure.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  You all know Rich, my co-founder. I didn't know Rich. I got introduced to Karen Booth Adams, who's a local angel investor. She was talking to Rich about starting a finance and accounting consulting firm.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  I got introduced to her. She said, hey, Rich, you're finance, accounting, marketing recruiter. Do you know Keith? And we're like, yeah, we met once. She goes, well, why don't you two go have a couple of beers, see if you can start a company together?

• 9:20Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  We did. And then we started a company two weeks later.

• 9:25Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 9:25Christian Mosier?

  It's almost like matchmaking.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  It was.

• 9:27Christian Mosier?

  You know what she did?

• 9:28Speaker 03

  That's Karen's superpower is matchmaking. But yeah, so I was the technical accounting. He was the, you know, he owned Career Quest. He's a lifelong finance and accounting recruiter. Just put those two skills together. We never talked about what we were going to do or how we were going to do it. We literally spent a couple of hours talking about our values and family. And how we were going to do what we were going to do. And we just went to Karen and said, hey, we're not sure exactly what this is going to be, except it's going to be finance and accounting.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  The original company was just Fahrenheit Finance. We were only finance and accounting. And she said, I'll back you. And we launched.

• 10:11Taylor Quinn?

  Well, I'm curious, you mentioned like, you didn't even talk that much about the business, but more about like the values and really important things like what were some of those things? What were gleaned? What came to the surface? Some of those values and things like that?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  It was how we were going to go about brand. Like, we've always tried to be a high-end brand. Like, we're going to say what we do. We're going to keep our promises. It's one of our core principles. And so it was kind of a brand and we're going to keep our promises. People, very important to both of us.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Of, we were going to run a company, maybe a little bit different than than some other companies. Around a great place to work. Culture's always been important.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  And so it was more, and then it was kind of family. Right? So we joke about it. His twin boys were nine at the time. They're 26 now. And I had one, two in high school, one in middle school. And so it was very much of,

• 11:14Speaker 03

  although we worked hard, we wanted to set a culture and a great place to work where people weren't working tons of overtime. You know, there wasn't the the demands of typical finance and accounting. Right? And I even said to him, I said, hey, look, I miss my kids' high school. The reason I, one of the reasons I left Performance Food Group was my daughter asked me, and she doesn't remember the story, but she was, she goes, hey, are you going to be home? This was Thursday night. I said, we're on vacation next week and then I'll be home most of August. Then I have some budget reviews and stuff. And she said, no, you're going to be home my senior year because you missed my first three years of high school.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  I quit the next day.

• 12:01Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And so when Rich and I got together, I've told that story a thousand times now of we're going to create a company that doesn't do that. I always had great bosses. My bosses, what got me here? But we were going to make sure that our employees experience something different.

• 12:22Christian Mosier?

  That's awesome. What a good story.

• 12:23Taylor Quinn?

  As a dad of two toddlers, that hits home a lot.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:27Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah, I can't imagine.

• 12:29Christian Mosier?

  How'd you guys, when the first, you know, few months, how'd you come up with the name Fahrenheit? What did the first few months even look like? You know, when you're just trying to figure it out?

• 12:38Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  We came up the name Fahrenheit because Karen told us our name was going to be Fahrenheit.

• 12:42Christian Mosier?

  Okay.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Again, there is no brilliance of what we did. There was no business plan. There was no, no, nothing. She owned a company Fahrenheit Technology, which was IT. And the the theory was we'd put together IT and accounting. And so it was, you guys are going to be Fahrenheit Finance.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  There's always a little story in between. We show up day one and she hands us our business cards. And they're red. I'm like, Karen, we cannot be Fahrenheit Finance and have red business cards. And she's like, why not? So hence, we have a green logo.

• 13:21Christian Mosier?

  Yep, yep, yep. Chad changed the colors a little bit. Yeah, we're good with the name, but.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, and we sat in a room. We had one room with three desks. And we sat there and looked at each other and said, hey, who do you know? And who do I know? I came out of big public company corporate world. He came out of middle market. And we just started calling people and having coffees. And just saying, hey, we're, we're doing this.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  You know, how can you help us? Who can refer us to?

• 13:56Speaker 03

  I stopped counting the first year when we had our 500th coffee meeting.

• 14:03Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, that's nuts. I remember you said that story a few months ago, we were, we were talking and it's just the the grind of starting the business and getting the name out there. Because really, I mean, especially in like the professional services world, there's almost no other way in terms of like, it's one by one, it's one company by one company, right? It's not like a digital marketing or so, you know, you're not going to launch a TikTok campaign. All of a sudden, CEO is like, you know what? We want to work with that guy, you know? And so that's, that's, I mean, a lot of coffees.

• 14:34Taylor Quinn?

  It's also a great leadership lesson of just like, it's just the, the dedication over time, one at a time, getting all the reps in. It's like, oh, not, no, not after 10, not after 20, not after 100. It's 500.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  We went to the Panera on Gaskin many a days and we would start our meetings at seven and we would leave at seven o'clock at night.

• 14:53Christian Mosier?

  And just have like every hour.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Every hour. We'd have somebody else come in. They didn't really like it because I don't like Panera coffee. Sorry. So I would go to Starbucks and bring my coffee.

• 15:05Christian Mosier?

  Why do you need a Starbucks?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Because Panera was quieter.

• 15:10Christian Mosier?

  A little more space.

• 15:12Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 15:13Christian Mosier?

  At least a bagel here and there.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 15:16Taylor Quinn?

  So that's amazing. Let's fast forward a little bit further now, you know.

• 15:23Taylor Quinn?

  What would you say today? I know there, there's already been a lot of growth and change over the years with Fahrenheit. But what has remained true over all the years in terms of like the mission, your, the value you're providing? You know, the, the fight you're fighting. What, what has remained true so far? And how does that resonate today?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  I think it's the values, the principles.

• 15:41Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  We didn't sit down day one and said, hey, here's our principles and our values. Actually, I listened to a, a talk by Hyder Harris. And he talked about Harris Williams and sitting down and their founding principles. And I went back to the office and I said, hey, Rich, I just heard this from Hyder. You go home, you come up your list, I'll come up my list. And this was probably year three, year four Fahrenheit. Came back the next morning and we each had seven and five of them were overlapping.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  And those are our core values today. And, and without knowing it, you know, people talk about integrity, but without

• 16:24Speaker 03

  proactively doing it, everybody would hear us talk about, hey, what's the right thing to do? Every question would be, all right, what's the right thing to do? We mess this up with a client. We mess this up with an employee. Like, what's the right thing to do? And that has always been the foundation. And people talk about, well, that's the foundation of every company. And I would maybe argue, no. But do you talk about it every day?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Community from day one. We've been active, giving back. Early on, it was very much the startup ecosystem. And then over time, that evolved. And so we're still, you know, involved in Startup Virginia. But how do we shift to other type of community give back? And so we have our own from a Fahrenheit perspective. We have our own personally, but then we also support probably every single thing that our, our employees want us to support. So I would say those two things have been constant. The, the other was, you know, coming out of Performance Food Group, I probably had about 400 people reporting up into me.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  And we always joke, like, I don't want anybody reporting to me.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  And so we still joke about it, you know, and now we've got about, I guess, combined now about 200, a little over 200. And we just said, well, if we're not going to create a, a micro management environment, what's the other side? And the other side is accountability. So one of our core principles is accountability. We don't tell you what to do. We don't look over your shoulder. And, and if you can't handle the accountability, you probably won't make it at Fahrenheit. And so entrepreneurialism, we've always talked about being entrepreneurial. We try stuff all the time. Fundamentally, Fahrenheit is one big experiment because we never went into it with a plan. And we have tried a lot of things and a lot has worked and a lot has not worked.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  And so we talk about, and this was actually a class that I took when I was at Performance Food Group with the executives. Like, think of your decision-making as an experiment and you're going to expect to fail a lot versus always trying to get it right. And so we're trying some new stuff now.

• 18:38Christian Mosier?

  Yeah. Well, even in startups, when you start a company, I mean, 90 days, it looks vastly different than it did 90 days prior, right? Small business, very similar, right? It's like quarter, but if not day by day, right? It's definitely quarter by quarter. And it's like, you know, it almost goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the reps. Right? It's like, some people are like, well, you know, I'll ask a couple of people and see what they think. And sometimes my response is like, well, ask 200. You know, like if you, then you'll have better, you know, those two people, you know, who, who knows what, you know, if it's good, bad or indifferent. But if you ask, you know, 200 or you had 200 coffee, you're going to get some good feedback. Right? Now, what you do with that, obviously, it's a whole different.

• 19:18Taylor Quinn?

  Whole different.

• 19:19Christian Mosier?

  Whole different ballgame.

• 19:20Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Taylor Quinn?

  I feel like if you've had your head in the sand, you don't know what Fahrenheit Advisors is, would you mind just telling us for like the person who has never heard, since we haven't really kind of gotten clear on that? What is? And then we can get into what's going on too. But tell us, what is Fahrenheit Advisors at its core?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  We struggle with the answer to this because we do so much, right?

• 19:39Taylor Quinn?

  It's hard.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  But at, at the end of the day, we were a solutions company, right? We help companies figure out, they might be growing, they might not be growing, they might need to go a different direction, they might need. So ours is truly like, how do we sit down and listen to where a company is? Where do they want to go? How do we help them get there? So that's really at the top, right? It's an advisory management consulting firm.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  If you drill it down, our core is office of the CFO. So that's how we started. It's probably about 50% of our business still. So it's anything from fractional, which is kind of what we're kind of known for. You know, talk about pivoting in leadership. We started out as a high end consulting firm. I mean, our original clients were Performance Food Group, United Natural Foods, Reynolds. And the market said, you know what? There's not enough big companies in Richmond.

• 20:37Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah, true.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  And oh, by the way, this fractional thing's taking off. And so we completely pivoted to fractional interim, purely middle market, early stage companies. So if you look at the office of CFO, processes, systems, and then we do the exact same thing in the office of the CHRO. So HR consulting, fractional interim, we've got a comp practice based out of Texas. We've got a leadership development team across the country. We develop, give training, employee investigations, just anything kind of across that whole HR spectrum. Have an executive search practice. All professionals kind of think middle management up.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  But halfway we do is finance and accounting, but we do sales executives, R and D, plant manager, engineers, construction firm, kind of the gamut. And the niche there, the value is it's it's middle market, it's conclusive, it's collaborative, it's a process. We get a lot of purple unicorns. So we just try to distinguish our search practice a little bit differently from a value proposition. And then we've got a core, what we call the misfit toys, and they appreciate it, but they don't. But we've got a couple of former Accenture IBM consulting partners that really understand IT strategy and roadmaps.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  And now we're helping companies through AI. We've got a couple of strategy people. We have a couple of sales consultant strategy people. So it's really value added niche expertise that we have. It's fastest growing part of our business.

• 22:23Taylor Quinn?

  I bet.

• 22:24Christian Mosier?

  You can't even have a conversation without AI.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, no. Everything we do, everything we do. So yeah, we're a solutions company.

• 22:31Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  You know, it's hey, call us and we think we can help you if we can't find somebody that does, but really kind of narrow down to those to those niches.

• 22:39Taylor Quinn?

  That's helpful. And that is always a challenge from a brand guy when you can do so much and it would be hard to, how do I distill this and clearly communicate it? Yeah, that's a big challenge.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:48Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  We're 16 years into that.

• 22:50Taylor Quinn?

  And that's, yeah. It's still a work, it's still a work in progress.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:53Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Christian Mosier?

  Well, it's even more of a work in progress with the change that's coming. I think this podcast is releasing in October 28th. So I know there's a couple of changes on the horizon too.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 23:05Christian Mosier?

  Within Fahrenheit.

• 23:06Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah. Can you tell us about that?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So a year and a half ago, Fahrenheit was acquired by a CPA firm in Atlanta called Smith and Howard. 55 year old, just high end brand, great company. They took on private equity money. Early on, they were the third or fourth CPA firm to take to private equity money four years ago, five years ago. And so we were acquired as their consulting arm and then we've been continuing to acquire other CPA firms and different offices. And so the concept was Smith and Howard is going to be the CPA brand and Fahrenheit was going to be the consulting brand.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  And jointly over the last year, we're like, we need one brand. We need to go to market nationally with one brand. We've actually have three different consulting brands, a couple of search brands. And so we're like, yeah, it's emotional a little bit, giving up. But I jumped on board, Rich jumped on board in that, you know, we need to go branding person, we need to go to market, you know? We don't need different websites. We don't need different LinkedIn.

• 24:19Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah, clear message, yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  We went to a conference and we had one booth with three different business cards. And we spent more time trying to explain.

• 24:27Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  That we were the same company.

• 24:29Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  And so we are launching that over the next week.

• 24:35Taylor Quinn?

  That's exciting.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, so I think press release comes on the 27th. So this would be a great time.

• 24:41Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah, yeah. We'll make sure to coordinate that drop well. Yeah, exactly.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  So but really the rebrand is to go to one brand, but the driver behind it is now I'm running all of the advisory practices for the firm. So if you're going to consolidate all the practices under one leadership and one shared services, you probably need to have one brand.

• 25:02Taylor Quinn?

  Hmm, right.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  And so the chicken or the egg. Right, we're going to rebrand and put everything together, but you had, once we decided to put everything together, we need one brand.

• 25:12Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Headquartered in Richmond and we've got folks in Dallas, Atlanta, and a couple of other markets. So, yeah.

• 25:21Christian Mosier?

  Nice. And hopefully no red business cards.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 25:26Taylor Quinn?

  That's the one thing we know.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 25:28Taylor Quinn?

  No red business cards. Yeah, that's amazing.

• 25:31Christian Mosier?

  That's exciting.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  We are going through a rebrand and an office refresh.

• 25:34Christian Mosier?

  Okay.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Swapping out signs, swapping out colors.

• 25:37Christian Mosier?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  And it's all good. It really is. It really is.

• 25:42Christian Mosier?

  You guys have some cool space too.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Thank you.

• 25:45Taylor Quinn?

  Yes.

• 25:45Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, down at Scott's.

• 25:46Taylor Quinn?

  We'll be right back after this short message.

• 25:49Christian Mosier?

  Are employee benefits a headache for your company? At Ben X, we simplify benefits so you can focus on growing your business. From custom benefit solutions to cutting edge technology, we make it easy for companies to take care of their teams. Visit benxconsulting.com to see how we can simplify benefits for your growing company.

• 26:11Taylor Quinn?

  Your story is powerful, but is it reaching the right audience? At Filmspire, we create compelling videos and provide marketing strategies to make sure they drive real results. From crafting your message to amplifying it, we help you connect with your audience like never before. Ready to inspire? Let's tell your story. And now, back to the show.

• 26:35Christian Mosier?

  That is a huge transition. What is, I'm curious, is there a timeline where all that will get formulated? What's the timeline looking at all that?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  We started about four months ago.

• 26:47Christian Mosier?

  Okay.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  And so formal announcement coming out end of the month. And then it's, you know, the, from a reporting perspective, all that's already done, we're already going to market together. And so now it's just, you know, continuing to to roll out the branding.

• 27:04Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  And so it's here.

• 27:06Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  It is here.

• 27:08Christian Mosier?

  One of the things too, as we dive in the transition to about like leadership and lessons and stuff is, one of the things I wanted to ask you was the evolution, right? Because obviously from starting it to, hey, here we are, completely 16, 17 years later, rebranding, right? Obviously, there's been different iterations of the company throughout those years. If you wouldn't mind taking just a few, just a couple of minutes and walking us through, because like when you start a company, it needs one version of you, right? Just balls to the walls. You need to be somehow everywhere at once, getting the name out there, right? But you have a couple of employees and then he's a different version. And then all of a sudden, you know, things change and he's another. How have you and Rich been able to manage the transition of yourselves in the last 17

• 27:53Christian Mosier?

  years?

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I'll probably take a step back because starting Fahrenheit was actually an evolution of my leadership and approach to work. So I came up through the public accounting banks and then Performance Food Group, you know, public company acquisitions and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And from a leadership perspective, and this is something I've evolved probably over the last few months, is everything in my world was milestone driven. It was career driven, it was milestone, a leader was because we were getting stuff done. And I probably wasn't the most caring boss, even up until we started Fahrenheit.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  I mean, that that evolution from leaving a Fortune 500 company to starting a company.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  And my daughter. That was an aha moment for me. Um, and so, yeah, your, your head's down. And then over time, and you all love this, you know, going from the founder to a founder who's doing everything to hiring to, um, when I was at Performance Food Group, had unbelievable team, just like I do now. And they came in and they shut the door and they literally sat down and said, this is an intervention. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It says, you've got a great team. You're a control freak. We're pulling you out of the closet. And you need to understand, like, you need to quit micromanaging.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  You need to quit controlling. And, and actually, that was an aha moment for me as a leader.

• 29:32Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Um, and I'm still good friends with a couple of them. Um, and, and so when we headed into Fahrenheit, that was probably a whole nother level of taking that, kind of taking this, family's actually more important than career. And, and I didn't realize that until I was pushing mid forties. Um, and it isn't that we didn't work hard. It was only seven days a week, probably for five, six years.

• 30:00Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  We met on Saturdays at Starbucks, um, and just talked about things. But it's interesting with this, this transition now, it's getting out of truly founder CE mode to truly CEO. And that's even a shift right now for me. But we've always been engaged. We've always been involved. Uh, we started two thousand eighteen, nineteen, saying we were hitting our 10 year mark. And I think this is probably a good, a good transition there. It was the two of us. I was running all finance and accounting. He was running search. We were running the company BD. And we said, hey, what do we want to do? Like, we're, we're done with 10 years. What's the next 10 years?

• 30:44Speaker 03

  And we looked at each other and said, we're pushing the pedal down. You know? It was never a lifestyle business, but we're like, we're pushing the pedal down. So over the next two years, we put together, I guess the next year, a five year strategy. At some point, we were going to exit. It just so happens, this was two thousand nineteen, exited in two thousand twenty. Yeah, five years later. Total coincidence. Um, but we started hiring people to run our practices. We hired marketing. We hired business development. We hired somebody to run search, HR. Um, and so then we also, at that moment, created a leadership team. And went from Rich and I would literally get on the phone at seven o'clock at night and make business decisions

• 31:29Speaker 03

  to all of a sudden, we had a leadership team that jointly were making decisions, although they didn't believe us that we actually wanted, that they had authority. That this was a, a leadership team transition. Um, an aha moment after about six, nine months, we sat down and said, it's working, but it's not working. And they said, well, are you asking us our opinions or like, we actually get to make business decisions? And like, so the transition really came from that moment where we were active in the day to day to we had other people doing it and developing a leadership team that we actually wanted to make decisions. Took about a year for them to actually, one, believe us and for us to actually

• 32:15Speaker 03

  not get on the phone at seven o'clock and go, this is what we're going to do. And I think that was a moment, it just so happened, that was nineteen. COVID hits.

• 32:25Taylor Quinn?

  Yep.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  And we are so grateful for that leadership team because it wasn't just Rich and myself. You know, we lost 50% of our revenue in a day. Right? And we had, probably had about 80 employees at the time. And our leadership team, we got on the phone every night at seven o'clock for 60 days.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Of what'd you learn today? What are you doing today? How are your people doing? What do we need to do? How do we need to shift? It actually helped us get focused. Um, but it wasn't for that leadership team and that trusted inner circle. Not quite sure how we would have, we would have gotten through it. And so that, that's kind of the pivotal moment of that leadership change. And then as we continued to grow, you realize you can't know everything. You can't do everything. We still struggle. Rich and I are both control freaks. Um, and, and so, yeah, that, that's, that's probably the pivotal moment of how do you, you shift? And it was how do you give up control? And we just, one day had to.

• 33:32Taylor Quinn?

  What was that aha moment in 2018? It sounds like that it was like, hey, now we want to hire a leadership team. Was it just like a moment that you and Rich had or was it a, a series of events?

• 33:44Speaker 03

  We talked a little bit about, hey, heading into year 10, 10 year anniversary, which was, you know, it's 2020. What do we want to do? And I think we went out to Kenlock and had some drinks and said, hey, do you want to push the pedal down? You know? We probably can finish each other's sunsets at the time. We knew what both people were thinking. Um, but it was an evolution, but it was actually just a moment to go, hey, let's go do this.

• 34:18Taylor Quinn?

  So kind of that decision like, hey, let's keep growing or hey, let's just kind of

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:21Taylor Quinn?

  ride off into the sunset, it sounds like.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Or just continue to make, turn it into, to lifestyle business.

• 34:26Taylor Quinn?

  Right.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And neither of us are bound that way. So we already knew what the answer was.

• 34:30Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  We just needed to look each other and, and agree on it.

• 34:34Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah. Yeah. How has, I think, there's probably a lot of people who listen to our show, founders, owners, starters who have challenges with, uh, you know, they can be control freaks, if you will, to a degree, and like perfectionists. And I, I struggle with that to a big degree. And how has that been for you? Or like, what was there any moments when you were letting go of control and you realized, oh, actually, this is, this is better, that I am letting go of control? What were any moments like that? Or how have you grown in letting go over time?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Well, if you're an entrepreneur, you're a little bit of a control freak. Right?

• 35:10Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Especially when it's how you pay your mortgage.

• 35:13Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Um, I think that the aha moment was hiring, when you finally hire the right people and you get them on the right seat on the bus. And we have failed often. Right? And so I, I think it just takes time. You know, when we hired, uh, Mark Vita to run the finance and accounting group that I was doing, right? We just, you know, we had a, a three month plan that, hey, you're going to sit in and I'm going to run. And then you're going to run and I'm going to sit in. And then when I'm comfortable, I'll get out of your way. And I don't know exactly what he does on a day to day basis.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  I don't know what's happening in the practice because it's complete trust.

• 36:00Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  There also has to be performance. But I, I think it's, it's, you can give up control

• 36:10Speaker 03

  when there's trust built. You know, and I think that's, we talked about leadership. You know, I was always milestone driven. And then over time, especially I think with some of the things we talked about in Fahrenheit, it's really come to, hey, my role is really to gain trust, provide clarity and not necessarily have the answers. And I'm, I'm in a stage now of my career where I don't want to come up with the answers. Right? Uh, I, I want to take all of the pieces that's happening across the firm and make sure people are communicating and collaborating. But I'm not telling Mark how to run his practice. I'm not telling Laura how to run her HR practice.

• 36:52Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  But you got to get there. And as a founder, it's a whole lot harder than me coming into a Purdue or Performance Food Group where the team was already there.

• 37:05Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Right? And it just so happened, they got a new boss.

• 37:10Taylor Quinn?

  Mm hmm. Also, I feel like too, it's like holding the standard and it kind of comes from the core values too. It's like, hey, we're going to, we're here. Here's our principles.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:17Taylor Quinn?

  And then here's the standard that we have or the, what we want to be in the market. Now, I'm watching the coach, the Nick Saban documentary. I don't know if you guys have seen that. Just came out on ESPN. Great watch. I think I'm like four, I think there's six episodes. I'm four, four through. He was a little crazy for sure. But obviously he had, um, he was such, such a successful coach and just leadership, leading men, right? Leading young men and, and, um, developing and growing, mentoring. And his big thing was, was holding the standard, right? Like they had a standard, right? In Alabama, and, and he plays a coach and it's like, he lets you know, you know, if you weren't meeting that standard.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:54Taylor Quinn?

  But he also had, you know, hundreds of, you know, coaches and assistant coaches and nutrition, you know? So like, I feel like it's also kind of holding the standard too, making sure like you're, what you want to portray is portrayed. Yeah. Yeah. This is what the work requires for this role. And, and this is, this is, anything below, we, this is our benchmark. Anything below, we're not meeting that basically.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:17Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  And that's where we talk about its brand.

• 38:19Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  And it's a great place to work. That's been a non-negotiable from day one. And with that is the integrity and the accountability. And you can do a lot of things, but those two things are, are non-negotiables.

• 38:35Taylor Quinn?

  We talk a lot on the show about finding, helping to find talent and the way in which people or brands or companies go about doing that to identify that right person. Cause it is, does seem that's something we see in our podcast a lot. It's like, it goes back to getting the right butt in the right seat, basically. And that does take time. How have you, over the years, helped to better hone in or identify to sift through, you know, to find and hopefully bring to the surface that right talent pool for Fahrenheit? What does that look like?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  I, I think for us, when we started hiring a leadership team.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  There's always an assumption that people are technically correct, right? They know what they're doing, especially at a later stage of their career. And so a lot of us was like, it was culture. It was like, to the extent you could, like, community. What do you do in the community? Family, values, principles. In that we kind of start there. And even now, a long time ago, I gave up the technical recruiting side of things. Like, you don't want me doing that anymore. But we would meet with everybody before we hired them. And it was purely a fit conversation.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Now, just from a timing perspective, we meet with every new hire in the company within a couple of days and just talk about fit and culture and be able to ask questions. And so it really shifted from the technical, can you do the work?

• 40:11Taylor Quinn?

  Right.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  To are you going to be a fit in our culture? Are you going to be a fit with our leadership team? Are you going to be a fit with your team? And it took some while because we were moving so fast and hiring so fast that we weren't getting it right. And even to a little bit of, hey, this is a consulting firm, you know? And if you need to be in one place with one supervisor, one system, this isn't the place for you, right? And it took us a while to have that aha moment. Not everybody who wants to be a consultant can be a consultant.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Not everybody who wants to be in a middle market, fast-growth firm can handle being in a middle-market firm, you know, as part of the core team. And it just took us a while to get it right and get it wrong, to hone in on. You know, we went through a strategy with a professor from U of R one year, just to help us through a strategy for the next year. And he interviewed everybody and we went through the plan and had the offsite. And then he came in and said, hey, I just need to make sure you all know, like, when you're hiring leaders, there's a certain criteria that you need to make sure they have that you know, but you don't know.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  And they better be entrepreneurial. They better have some level of risk tolerance. And they need to have faith that you guys are going to do the right thing.

• 41:50Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  And if your leaders, when you're interviewing people, don't fit those three criteria, they won't make it here.

• 41:56Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  And it happened.

• 42:00Taylor Quinn?

  How did, when he said those three, identify those three things, what went off in your brain in that moment? Did it make sense? Did it click?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  It made sense because we're a little bit of an experiment, as I said. And so we don't always have stuff figured out. And so everyone had to have a little bit of faith that we're going to do the right thing and we're going in the right direction and we were going to communicate and be transparent. Risk, when you're a small, fast-growth company, you're jumping on board because there's a risk, right? You know, when you're employee number one or 50.

• 42:37Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Right? Or even 100.

• 42:39Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  And so it all made sense to us. We hadn't just never taken that and said, okay, that's how we need to hire.

• 42:48Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, yeah. Was there a time where there's like a right person, a right technical ability person, but the wrong fit culturally?

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:59Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I would say culturally, but also a couple of the examples, great people, great leaders, had been successful CFOs, but didn't know how to be an entrepreneur, didn't know how to manage multiple clients, or clearly didn't want to do the BD aspect, right? And so we've put, we've put great people in roles that it was just the wrong role. And so we clearly learned that lesson as well, that not every successful person can be something different.

• 43:37Christian Mosier?

  Yeah. Yeah, or is the right fit for the company?

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:39Christian Mosier?

  Right? I mean, there's plenty of people who are great people, successful people, who it's like, it's just not, you know, just not a good fit, you know? And that's okay.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:48Taylor Quinn?

  You're celebrating a huge milestone, obviously, you know, singular brand coming together. I'm sure you've probably been doing a lot of reflecting over the past, you know, close to 20 years at this point, close to that. Are there any, we've probably talked about some of them, but any, any things that you are just super proud of or successful moments or things that just really stand out as pinnacle moments in your all's history so far that you're just really proud of?

• 44:15Speaker 03

  I think, and it's not stuff you necessarily apply for, but we won the Chamber Small Business Award a few years ago, right? And that was really a pinnacle moment. We had 40 employees and all 40 of them showed up for the dinner, for the ceremony, and my parents, which was awesome.

• 44:36Taylor Quinn?

  That's great.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  They came down.

• 44:38Christian Mosier?

  Mr. and Mrs. Middleton?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Everybody knows my parents, even though they live four hours away.

• 44:43Taylor Quinn?

  That's amazing.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was no different than high school. Everybody knew my parents. But I think that moment for Rich and myself and the team was like, we have made an impact. You think you're making an impact, but for somebody else to, and we applied for it and it's a competition, but to win in of, hey, you had a business impact. Because by then, we'd probably hired a couple of hundred people. We had some turnover, right? But community give back, growth, payroll. We made an impact in the community in a lot of different ways. And that was really a pinnacle, great moment for us. I think the second one was, or second one, or there's multiple ones.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Last year, Rich and I won the Junior Achievement Business Hall of Fame. And again, we got the phone call, had no idea, you know, and said, hey. And that was, again, that was a pinnacle moment. And it was a little bit on the selfish side because it was awesome. But the whole company deserved that, right? Because you're a leader, you only can do so much. And so I think that was a phenomenal moment. It was, yeah, it was, felt warm inside and this is awesome of what we built. But for the business community to recognize the business impact, but the community impact, that was really special.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  And being in and around those other laureates, we just look at it and like, how do we get here? Right? We don't belong in that group. Those probably the two from a purely recognition perspective. I think the other is, you know, and we're going through it now, just change management. You know, we were able to get through the sale of the company and we didn't lose a single employee, right? We didn't lose a single client. And even the change management now of restructuring, which is good because it's here in Richmond, but even the brand change, right?

• 46:55Speaker 03

  It's the employees, hey, we get it, right? We're here, our culture doesn't change. Our values line up perfectly with Smith and Howard's values. It's one of the reasons Rich and I sold to Smith and Howard was because of the culture. We had different offers, other offers, better offers. But he and I sat down, and actually, we sat down with our leadership team and said, where do you guys think we should go? And unanimously, we didn't have even done the management presentation. We just went out to dinner with them. And we went through seven rounds of bringing companies to town. And 100% when we got done with dinner with them,

• 47:40Speaker 03

  without even talking about management presentation, everybody voted, that's who we're going to go with.

• 47:44Taylor Quinn?

  Wow.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  And it was just the people.

• 47:48Taylor Quinn?

  That's amazing to get that kind of alignment.

• 47:50Christian Mosier?

  Yeah. When you look back at the last 17 years with, you know, with what you guys have built, is, does it make you happy? Is that something that you look back on fondly?

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and it comes back to, I think, my whole job now, you know, we talk about is just culture and people and change management. And, I mean, we've worked at culture, you know, from day one, employee engagement. And it's really hard when all your employees aren't in the office, right? And we've got people in 20-some states, right? So how do you continually engage people that you don't see? We've been doing a monthly team meeting for 15 years. Everybody in the company either comes in, it used to be everybody came in, now it's, you know, virtual for people that can't.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  And it was just a way to engage people. So I think that the people side, the culture side, the community impact, yeah, we grew a nice business, right? And starting from scratch of not knowing what we're going to do. But yeah, it really is, it's a blessing. And we're happy.

• 49:06Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Taylor Quinn?

  That's great.

• 49:07Christian Mosier?

  I heard a quote the other day that I've been thinking about a little bit. It's about essentially hard work and saying like, the moments you're most proud of in your life have always come from hard work. And it's like, very few moments in your life you can look back and you're like, well, that was easy, you know, like, I'm great, like, that was all, you know, like, at least moments that, like milestones or moments that you're proud of, like, those have always typically come from, you know, the process and hard work over time, which I think is, to your point.

• 49:39Taylor Quinn?

  I love that. Well, should we wrap up with some fun stuff, some good questions?

• 49:44Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, but I want to ask one more question. I always ask this question to wrap up the leadership side. And then we'll talk about some restaurants and some fun things. But we've asked this question, I think, to every single guest, so 22 guests. If you could go back 16 years or 17 years to when you and Rich first started Fahrenheit, right? And you are across the table from Keith Middleton 17 years ago, right? You only have two minutes. You don't have a whole day. You can't show them, hey, here's everything that we've done. But if you had two minutes, what are like the two or three pieces of advice or sentences you would give Keith?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Chill.

• 50:23Christian Mosier?

  Chill.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  I um, I was a pretty hardcore driver, right? Cause as a leader, I was milestone driven. I was career driven. I was gonna be a partner at Arthur Andersen until my wife and I decided I could either be a partner or I could stay married. You know, I was truly driven as a controller at Performance Food Group, right? I mean, it was, it was a lot. And even when we started Fahrenheit and it still goes around, there's a joke that probably about year four or five, I sent an email to the entire company that says, please do not ever send me an email that says, thank you. You being here and me paying your paycheck is thank you enough.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  I don't need one more email. And please don't send me one that says, I got your email. Right? And, and so we laugh about it, but it's true. Right? And now I look back at that and I'm like, yeah, so that, that is definitely, uh, you know, I, I've changed as a person through this. I mean, the impact that Fahrenheit has had on me.

• 51:30Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  And the culture and the people has been just as big as anything else of very, very business career focused, you know? That's why my daughter said what she said to me, right?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And so that would be one thing.

• 51:47Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Right?

• 51:49Christian Mosier?

  Calm down.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, calm down. You know, maybe work on your culture a little bit, right? I think life and we talk about life and work and, and people talk about life, work balance. And, and we have a culture of it's life and work integration. Cause you can't go, you can't go to the work and not kids or doctor's appointment or spouse or something, right?

• 52:20Speaker 03

  I'm not sure I ever took my kids to school. I remember reading once, right? And so it's the, it's the life. Like I remember, you know, Rich and his kids were nine at the time. And I was like, you need to go to school. You need to go to that play. You like, I wouldn't even in town. If I was in town, I was probably working. And so I would say that those are the two things that Fahrenheit impacted me the most. I wish somebody had beat into me.

• 52:48Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Years before. And my wife will say, I told you for years.

• 52:52Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Right? But it was some of those aha moments that you have to experience, the hard times.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  To maybe get it. But those are probably the two things I would have sat me down and said, hey, you need to wake up.

• 53:06Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Faster.

• 53:08Taylor Quinn?

  That's great.

• 53:09Christian Mosier?

  That's great.

• 53:10Taylor Quinn?

  I love that.

• 53:10Christian Mosier?

  Yeah, thanks for the, that's a good ant.

• 53:12Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Christian Mosier?

  Appreciate that.

• 53:13Taylor Quinn?

  I think so much about that, like my, my pastor at my church was talking about like, he's like, I think people are made for, and there's like, there's a great counseling center in Richmond called the Barnbus Center. And they do a lot of training and they have two things that they talk about is like, people are made for like impact, but also intimacy. And if you are too heavy on the impact, and that's been my realization, the summer's like, I'm just drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive. But then you miss out on reading to the kids and things like that. And so you gotta, but it's, it also is important for people to have a sense of, of impact, that they've made a difference and things like that. But if you are just so far on one, on that impact side, you sit down at the end of the day and you're like, well, where's my community? Where's my friends? Where's the memories? Where's all those things and things like that? So that's, that's very well said. Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  I think if you take care of your employees.

• 54:01Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  And you take care of others, everything else takes care of itself.

• 54:04Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Rich and I did a budget in year 12. Right? It was just what, what do we need to do?

• 54:11Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  What's the market, to your point? What's the market saying? What are employees saying? How do you run a business the right way? And the rest of it takes care of itself.

• 54:21Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Taylor Quinn?

  That's amazing.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:24Taylor Quinn?

  Well, um.

• 54:26Christian Mosier?

  It's a couple of fun things. So what's, it's date night or it's, you know, a milestone celebration. What are like one or two restaurants that locally in Richmond that you guys love to go to?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  So the, the regulars are Bar West and Canaho.

• 54:42Taylor Quinn?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Cause I live near them.

• 54:44Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah. So do we now, actually. Yeah, we're very good. Go to Canaho, we were there last week.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so it's easy, it's good food, right?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Date night, we try to get in and out and about different places.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  You know, I love Henley on Grace.

• 55:04Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  You know, just, it's customer service. He's awesome. Food's always great.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Special nights, we'll go out to Kenlock. Cause food is phenomenal and the atmosphere and it's kinda laid back.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  So yeah, we're, we're kind of like, go pick different things, kinda low key. We don't like, we're not foodies, right? And so my date night would be having Rich come over and cook dinner for us, cause he's a foodie.

• 55:37Christian Mosier?

  A good cook.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  He's a phenomenal chef.

• 55:39Taylor Quinn?

  Nice.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Right?

• 55:40Taylor Quinn?

  That's great.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Yes. So we just pick different places and try different things.

• 55:44Christian Mosier?

  Nice.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:45Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 55:46Christian Mosier?

  Man, Rich has so many great restaurants.

• 55:48Taylor Quinn?

  That's awesome.

• 55:49Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Taylor Quinn?

  Well, wrapping up too, so one thing we like to do as a show is give a shout out to a nonprofit. And if you give a shout out to a specific nonprofit as a small thank you for coming on the show, we give a small donation to that organization. So we'd love to know, uh, who is it that you like to give? I know you guys have done so much for the community, but is there someone you'd like to shout out?

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. First T, a great Richmond. So.

• 56:13Taylor Quinn?

  Great group.

• 56:13Christian Mosier?

  Good organization.

• 56:14Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And a little under the radar of what they do. I mean, they, they touch 70,000 kids a year.

• 56:21Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  You know, and it's, it's through golf, but it's leadership and it's life skills. And, and it's just a phenomenal, phenomenal program. Great group. On the board.

• 56:36Taylor Quinn?

  There you go.

• 56:37Christian Mosier?

  Yeah. Good organization.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 56:39Christian Mosier?

  Absolutely. We'd love to shout them out and then obviously.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 56:41Taylor Quinn?

  Yeah. Keith, this has been great.

• 56:45Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Taylor Quinn?

  Thank you so much for the time. I know, we feel so special to be a part of this announcement and having us here.

• 56:52Christian Mosier?

  It's always amazing too, like how fast an hour goes by.

• 56:55Taylor Quinn?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 56:55Christian Mosier?

  We're just having questions and next thing you know, I look up, it's like 55 minutes.

• 56:58Taylor Quinn?

  There's so much more.

• 56:59Christian Mosier?

  I'm like that.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  I'm an introverted accountant.

• 57:01Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  But you get me talking.

• 57:03Christian Mosier?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  I'll go.

• 57:05Christian Mosier?

  Yeah. Yeah, like a freight train, baby. Keep it going. Yeah. Well, Keith, we can't thank you enough, man. Thanks for being on the podcast.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 57:11Taylor Quinn?

  Thanks for coming.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Thanks for the invitation.