In this episode, Michael and Brad are joined by attorney Mike Lyons as he shares a story that made ESPN headlines involving a contract dispute between a major university and their former head coach. As part of our Zoom Out theme, we discuss the bigger picture when it comes to contracts and how to spot red flags from a trial attorney’s perspective.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. Below is the episode’s transcript which has been edited for readability. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, email us at info@byrdadatto.com.
Transcript
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Legal issues, simplified through real client stories and real world experiences. Creating simplicity in three, two, one.
Brad: Welcome back to another episode of Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto I’m your host Brad Adatto with my cohost Michael Byrd
Michael: Thanks, Brad. As a business and healthcare law firm we are often immersed in the heavy details of a particular issue or project. It is beneficial if not mandatory to every so often take a step back and evaluate the bigger picture. This season’s theme is zoom out. We have all been immersed in life of a global pandemic and so we’re going to make sure with each story this season that we step back and look at how the issue we discussed will be impacted in our new normal.
Brad: Now Michael, before we bring in today’s guest and really get into today’s episode and bring in our special guest, I’d like to ask you, [00:01:00] do you like college football?
Michael: Brad, I thought we had a deal that we were not going to ask any stupid questions on this podcast.
Brad: So I’m going to go with yes.
Michael: Yes.
Brad: All right so who is your favorite college football team?
Michael: You did not just get my memo. I just said we all know that I’m a huge diehard, UT Longhorn fan.
Brad: All right. Fair enough. As a UT fan, let’s go with what was your favorite UT football moment?
Michael: Well, it has to be the USC game. I’m biased but it is a fact that it was the greatest football game in college football history. And I have to say this confession, because this is one of those top five regrets that I will take with me to my grave. I had a ticket to go to that game and I turned it down and I turned it [00:02:00] down for several reasons. A lot of them, all of them really bad reasons. You know, busy-ness at home, business at work, USC is going to be a big favorite. And so as much as I love that game, I kept thinking about, just think what if I had actually been there so much so that I did not hesitate to go just a few short years later when we were back in Pasadena and lost to Alabama in the next go round.
Brad: Yeah. Well, as you know, I went to Texas Christian University. TCU was in the old Southwest conference where UT was also there and a bunch of other Texas schools a while back.
Michael: Yeah. Most of those schools are now in the Big 12.
Brad: Yeah, that’s correct. So like you, I love watching football. I grew up in New Orleans as a lot of people know, and I was a huge LSU tiger fan. Except when the tigers play the horn frogs, I always cheer for them, but one of my favorite college football moments happened while I was attending TCU my sophomore year. [00:03:00] TCU back when I was there was not a very good team. At this point in the season, we had won a game, tied a game and lost basically six and of those five in a row. And the 20th ranked team in the nation was visiting Fort Worth, Texas to play TCU and that was your long horns. In 1992 TCU beat Texas for the first time In 50 plus years, 23-14, we all charged the field. It was awesome moment for TCU football. By the way, it was the first and only time I’ve ever charged a field. Because I did get billy clubbed by a cop, but it was a cool moment for me as a TCU fan.
Michael: I kept thinking I was about to hear another Brad streaker story.
Brad: That never happened.
Michael: We’ll move on. We could probably talk sports and college football the rest of the day, but this podcast is not about sports. Well, except today’s episode may actually [00:04:00] sound like it. I’m really excited because we are bringing in one of our buddies who has a great story to share. He’s another attorney, his name is Mike Lyons. Mike is a founding partner of Lyons and Simmons. He is an Old-fashioned trial attorney. You don’t meet many courtroom lawyers anymore and whenever we spend time with Mike we get to hear just some fascinating stories of real actual courtroom fights. He represents both plaintiffs and defendants. He has recovered hundreds of millions in judgements and settlements on behalf of his clients, successfully defended complex business and tort cases where his clients had been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. He has all the trophies, Super Lawyers, Top 100 Attorneys in Dallas, Fort Worth, Law Dragon 500, [00:05:00] Leading Plaintiff’s Consumer Lawyers in 2020, D magazine, and the list goes on and on. And one that is really cool is the Dallas CBS affiliate channel 11 recognized Mike as a Texan With Character for his philanthropic work in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with children who were victims of abuse or neglect. Mike is as good of a human as he is a trial lawyer and he’s a great friend of ours. He’s married to his wife, Jenny. They have three amazing kids. And if you hadn’t guessed by all the talk we’ve had, he is an even bigger UT fan than me. Every year when UT and OU play the red river rivalry, we call it Texas OU If you went to UT. Mike hosts a really cool party at his house and has Bevo [00:06:00] the Longhorn mascot among others at the game, Mike.
Mike: Hey, it’s good to be here. Thank you so much for the kind introduction guys.
Brad: Well, Mike, as Byrd said, we’re super pumped that you’re with us for today’s episode and obviously we have known each other for almost a decade. Now we first met through a mutual client and as Byrd kind of alluded to, we think the world of you in general as a human being, but we also always love hearing your stories about what’s going on in the courtroom and how things are being moved around. So we’re excited to have you today and before we really get into today’s story, we’d just love to understand what made you want to become an attorney.
Mike: Well, thanks again for the kind words and I can tell you the feeling is mutual about you guys. When I think about transactional lawyers and lawyers that have a particular emphasis on healthcare, you guys are at the very top of list top of mind [00:07:00] because of your extended experience and expertise and so I’m really honored to be on your program. I’ll tell you kind of a funny story and then answer it seriously. When I was a kid, my stepmother worked for one of the finest trial lawyers that you’ll ever meet. I spent weekends oftentimes up at the office when I was 7, 8, 9 years old, when she would have to go in and work. Initially what drew me into the practice of law, frankly, was the office supplies. I would show up to work with all of the best highlighters and pens and pads and be like, man, I’m the coolest person on the planet. This practice of law seems pretty good, but in all seriousness, the thing that drew me in and continues to draw me in is the stories and the people and helping people in what could be their worst moment. As you guys know, [00:08:00] my practice revolves around complex, catastrophic, personal injury and wrongful death litigation, and also big business disputes. Those people have a common thread, which is they’re all enveloped in probably one of the worst situations they’ve ever had to face. Those stories and those issues are what continue to compel me to do my best as a lawyer, but also it keeps me interested every day to come into the office and try to solve my client’s problems.
Michael: That’s great. And you know we talk all the time about how we love hearing your stories. And I think that that’s probably part of it is just they’re so compelling. They’re real stories of real pain that someone has experienced in some way. And just to [00:09:00] hear the thought and the strategy and frankly, the effort that goes into you fighting for those people is fascinating. I mean, we have had a common bond with you over doctor death. I know you were on their podcast and you were involved in that case for one of the victims and us as healthcare attorneys are intimately familiar with that while it was happening in Dallas. And then more recently, I remember checking the sports scores on ESPN in the morning and saw Mike Lyons show up on the headlines on ESPN. So you’ve kind of moved in recent years into kind of a new area of protecting people. And that’s in kind of the college football world and [00:10:00] we would love to hear how you got into that starting, I guess with Kansas, if I remember right.
Mike: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. I always have to tell people as a preface because I don’t want to get painted into a corner as being the guy who represents football coaches, but I really have become kind of the lawyer du jour for coaches. I don’t know how long that’s going to last for coaches and in particular, when they have contractual disputes with the institutions. And so as the dollar value continues to raise on particularly major power NCAA football coaches is what we all see the most, but basketball certainly as well. The stakes get higher and things get nastier and the need for trial lawyers to come in and help becomes even more important. And so, [00:11:00] that is kind of the backdrop. I handle cases that ultimately get filed and sometimes they get tried, involve the people that have been agreed, then that could be people who have been killed or people who have been injured, but also big business disputes. So when I first was contacted about the David Beaty case, which you guys have alluded to, which was the university of Kansas owed David some money under his contract and very publicly decided they weren’t going to pay him. To me again, not to diminish the work that’s done by people who on a day in day, day out basis, this is all they do. It felt more like checkers than chess to me to get involved in that dispute. I’m making a little bit light of it cause there were some complexity to it but I was contacted in part because I know another head coach who I also [00:12:00] represent, who is very close friends with David Beaty. And I won’t say who it is cause you both would know who it was if I said it. I was more than happy to talk to David, give him some advice and ultimately he wanted to hire me after I tried to talk him out of hiring me. So that’s when it happened. And now I represent somewhere at any given time between 3and 10 different major NCAA coaches who have disputes usually related to their contracts. A lot of them have remarkably similar facts but the reason that I think David got into this jam that he was in was part of it is perfectly obvious. He went 6 and 42 at Kansas, which I don’t think is a reflection on David as a coach. I think it’s a reflection on Kansas as a football team. They were a disastrous program when [00:13:00] David took over in I believe 2015, and Charlie Weis had laid waste to the football program. David was simply trying to bring it to the next level. He did that. He brought in some really talented kids that ultimately went on to the NFL were successful and as Kansas rounded third base towards the end of David’s contract, they brought in a new athletic director and his name was Jeff Long. And I’ll save the best for last on that but Jeff Long ultimately decided that he was going to terminate David and going a different direction. So that sort of kicks off how that dispute manifested.
Brad: So anyone that’s picked up a paper before and I guess we we’ve done these too where we get these executive contracts where if they get terminated there’s some type of guarantee [00:14:00] that’s there, or some type of buyout that’s there if there are some terms left. So since this contract sounds like he was terminated before it was over what was owed to David?
Mike: Yeah. So historically college coach contracts in particular football coaches have been guaranteed money, meaning that if you get fired because you went 1 and 9, they’re going to have to pay you what the remaining term is on your contract, right. And that’s usually discussed in terms of liquidated damages. So you’ve been terminated and now you’re owed whatever remains on your contract. Now we’ve seen that in executive compensation agreements for many years in the non coaching ranks like executive compensation agreements. This is not something new, but when they terminated David, my recollection is that he was owed about $3 million on his contract, which by modern times it’s really not that [00:15:00] much money. I mean the $3 million, it’s not haircut money, so he wasn’t willing to walk away from but some of these guys are owed tens of millions of dollars.
Michael: Wow. Talk about what happened. I mean, if it was in modern terms not a substantial amount of money and the contract seems clear that it’s owed to him, what was the issue and why did you have to get involved and kind of talk about what you did?
Mike: Yeah. So this is where it gets more interesting. So David was terminated in November of 2018 and they told him they would like him to stay on. He was actually terminated in October. They have three remaining games of the season and they asked him to stay on until the season was over. And they told him in the same breath that they were going to pay out the terms of his contract. So he did [00:16:00] that. He performed, he finished the season and when the clock hit triple zero against the University of Texas, and his big 12 counterpart, Tom Herman and the Texas Longhorns at the time, he knew he had to go back into the field house and clean out his desk and office and move on with his life, which he did. About two weeks later, he receives a letter from the general counsel’s office at Kansas, basically saying, hey, after you were terminated and you were terminated without cause, it’s important for me to point this out, they held a press conference and they told the public, they told David, they told the team that he was being terminated without cause, and that they were going to honor the remaining terms of his contract. That all changed two weeks later. They sent him a letter saying we’ve conducted an investigation and upon talking to some people after you left, we believe some [00:17:00] NCAA violations occurred. And as a consequence of that under your contract, we are going to withhold payment and we’re going to see what happens with this investigation and we may not pay you pending the result of that investigation. So away we went and what enters is a trend that’s existing now in college football and basketball, which is that if you’ve got a coach that you want to get rid of who maybe wasn’t productive when he was there and you want to avoid having to pay him. You can try to trigger one of these provisions that are in just about every coach’s contract, which is either a morality clause or some type of rules violation clause, and say for some nebulous reason we’re terminating based upon that. And in this case, they did it retroactively. So they said post termination, we’re going to fire you with cause based upon the [00:18:00] belief that you may have committed to violation. So that’s when I got hired. And of course there’s a parallel proceeding involving the NCAA. The part that still perplexes me and I still sort of chuckle about is why a school or any institution like the University of Kansas, who at the time, your viewers or your listeners may not realize this, but in October of 18, Kansas was embroiled in a terrible and still is a terrible NCAA investigation involving a number of athletes who allegedly received payments the legal payments from a number of different Adidas shoe representatives. And it’s a little known, dirty secret that some programs have utilized their sponsored sports merchandising company. In this case, Adidas to sort of back [00:19:00] channel and recruit. And there’s a whole lot of things swirling around. We could spend a whole day on that, which I won’t, but in October of 18, two gentlemen, a guy named TJ Gassnola and a guy named James Gatto were tried alongside some other shoe representatives in a federal corruption trial in the Southern district of New York and they were convicted. They were convicted of wire fraud, allegedly sending payments through the wires to these players and to conspiring to do so in violation of federal law. So what happens in October of 18 is Gassnola turned state’s evidence for the United States attorney testifies against his co-conspirator and ultimately they get a conviction. Now that becomes relevant in a little while. I won’t jump to the conclusion, but I’ll tell you that one of the things that we did with Kansas very early [00:20:00] on was we told them, are you sure you want to climb over this hill? If you’re telling me that you believe David Beatty committed NCAA violations, which he did not. And you’re going to base that as a reason to terminate him post non causal or without cause termination and try to change the characterization then you better hope your house is in order because we’re going to go look through every other circumstance involving every other coach to see how you handled that. And in particular, your star who is their current basketball coach, still Bill Self, who is at the center of that controversy. So this sort of led to a philosophical standoff, Kansas on the one hand saying, no, really we’re not going to pay you and me telling them really, are you sure that’s what you want to do? And that coalesces in March of 2019, I [00:21:00] filed a lawsuit, which, you know, anybody can go Google. It was front-line front and center headline news on every major sports reporting network about the fact that we had uncovered evidence that the general, or excuse me, that the athletic director then Jeff Long was openly telling people while David was the head coach and after that, he was quote, looking for a dead hooker in a closet so that he could terminate David for cause. He didn’t locate that. He then gaged up alleged rule violations. And the way he did that was he had these meetings with various quarterbacks that he claimed had received Improper coaching from a consultant or a non countable coach. And I guess this requires me to tell you a little about the [00:22:00] NCAA rules, because it’s relevant. Under NCAA rules you could only have 10 countable coaches. Those are coaches that can actually give instruction to a student athlete and instruction being tactical football instruction. If you’re a no countable coach, like a technologist who handles the video or these analysts that you always hear programs hiring, which are usually ex coaches, they’re not supposed to coach the players. And so what they were alleging was the database was using a no countable coach to coach up the quarterbacks, which was a bunch of malarkey, as it turns out. Ironically, if you were to look at every single football program across the country, that employs no countable coaches, what you would find is evidence that it’s fairly widespread, that those people are misused under NCAA rules. I’m not saying that that happened to Kansas, in fact, on the contrary. [00:23:00] But that’s sort of, you know, teeing up what the dispute was about. And we said, here’s the deal, and this is actually relevant for your listeners, if you’re going to change somebody’s termination, whether it’s an executive compensation agreement or a head coach, you want to change the characterization of their termination. Host’s termination it triggers a body of case law. There’s a case called McKinnon from the United States Supreme Court that says there’s three elements of what you have to prove if you’re going to do that. Number one, you have to show that this was a prohibited action or conduct on the part. If any employee had done this, this would be grounds for termination. Number two that this particular employee engaged in that behavior or conduct. And then number three, you have to show causation. In other words, had you known about this before you terminated them, you [00:24:00] would have terminated them for cause. This opens all sorts of trap doors. And what it leads to is discoverability of other incidents, other circumstances where an employee has engaged in unlawful or improper conduct. Well, applying this back to Kansas, their basketball coach was at the head of a massive and still is massive NCAA rules violation investigation, and they never suspended him, fired him, and obviously never withheld pay. So this became a major factor.
Michael: Wow, that’s amazing. I want to hear what you did to get Kansas attention. So let’s take a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we can talk some more about this and get your perspective as a trial attorney and hear what happened with coach David Beaty and his [00:25:00] lawsuit with Kansas.
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host Brad Adatto with my cohost Michael Byrd, and we’re still here with our special guest, friend and trial advocate, Mike Lyons.
Michael: Yeah, man. Mike, I want to hear, kind of picking up where we left off, what did you do to get Kansas attention?
Mike: Yeah, that’s a good question. So three things and [00:26:00] the first thing was that we compel them to produce all of the communications by and between them and the NCAA regarding the basketball violations, which they didn’t want to give. We ended up having to get a court order to get all that information and we did. And so they really didn’t want anybody outside of Kansas knowing about that. We got it. The second thing is we took the deposition of the athletic director and other people under the athletic director. To my knowledge it’s the only time that a major power five athletic director has had to give a sworn deposition in civil litigation ever. In fact, many people said you’ll never be able to do that. They’ll never let you do it. They’ll settle the case before it happens. Well it happened. The deposition then became public. It’s publicly available and it was quite embarrassing, both for the [00:27:00] then athletic director and ultimately the institution. And then the third thing we did was I said, when I took the athletic directors deposition, I got him to say over and over again how terrible these alleged violations were against David. That he had allegedly, through another staff member provided improper instruction to student athletes. And I got him to say that that was grounds for termination for cause and then I went and demonstrated that the current head football coach, a guy named Les Miles, you know Brad, since you’re an LSU fan. Remember Les replaced David at Kansas. I hired a former staff member for an NCAA committee on infractions to review all the game tapes for the entire [00:28:00] season during Les Miles initial season. And I found about 45 instances of no countable coaches providing tactical football instruction to student athletes in plain view on the broadcast. I also found analysts that were providing in game strategy to Les Miles directly, again in full view on camera which is also an NCAA violation. And then I showed that to the athletic director. It was quite compelling so that got their attention. And then I guess there was a fourth thing. I subpoenaed these Adidas guys for deposition, which became public and Kansas was not about to allow me to go connect the dots back to their basketball coach and so they ultimately relented and resolved the case.
Brad: Before we get to the result of that case this season’s theme is Zoom Out, Mike and you [00:29:00] know, if buyouts and guarantees are the rage now for all these professional and college contracts, and even as you mentioned with the executive agreements, what are some of the pitfalls that employers are starting to use in these contracts to help nullify these sections?
Mike: That is a great question. I don’t care if you’re the head coach of the University of Alabama or you are an executive for a publicly traded company that is a big healthcare institution. You need to be worried about anything in your contract that you have guaranteed comp or guaranteed term that is squishy or gray on what constitutes misconduct. Here’s how it comes up for coaches. If you violated NCAA rule or anybody within your supervisory role, as a head coach violates a rule then you can be terminated for cause, well that’s [00:30:00] tricky for coaches because under NCAA bylaw, I believe it’s 13.1. You’re effectively vicariously liable for the conduct of your subordinate. So if a subordinate, without your knowledge violates a rule, you are presumptively responsible for it. So they can virtually trump up whatever they want to terminate you for cause. Now you’re in a vortex trying to get your money back. I’ll tell you how it comes up if you’re an officer or director for a publicly traded company. it comes up a lot of times with morality clauses, we see them in college football, but something along the lines of anything that would bring public embarrassment to the institution and the things that we commonly see are things like, well, this guy got a ticket for jaywalking, or this guy had an affair on his wife or this guy got caught with a misdemeanor amount of marijuana on vacation or whatever. Anything like that that’s in your contract may trigger a trap door where you have an [00:31:00] out. And so when I’m advising clients and lawyers like yourselves that have these kinds of clients, is to take a look at those provisions and to redline the heck out of them so that they’re favorable to your client. There’s a second thing. The other thing I would think about doing is I would contract a way this whole after acquired evidence docker, I mentioned the McKinnon case. I would put right there in the contract that your decision to terminate is final and you do not have the ability to change the characterization of the termination based upon after required evidence. And I would contract that away. Those are a couple of examples of things I would think about doing, Brad.
Michael: Wow. And you mentioned it a couple of times, you brought in what was happening with Bill Self, you brought in what was happening with Les Miles and talk just a little bit about the importance of how an [00:32:00] employer treats other employees to our current situation in this example.
Mike: That’s a great question, Michael. That’s called disparate treatment. And what it goes to in the case of an after acquired evidence case, it’s material because it goes to whether or not under that third prong and McKinnon, you can show that you would have terminated based upon the alleged conduct. So it’s relevant in that regard, both in discovery, but also in challenging that element. The other thing it’s just a good old, I mean, back in law school, we learned about material breach. Like you have to establish that the breach was material. Well, one of the things I think you can always attack if you can show, hey, this other employee over here or this other, you know, the volleyball coach is out there violating the rules and you knew that [00:33:00] and you didn’t do anything about it, or this person engaged in conduct that was embarrassing to the institution and you didn’t do anything about it. That would be an example of clearly you didn’t think that was material. So why is this material? So either way it makes it discoverable. You can put pressure on the other side. But strictly from a tactical standpoint, that’s why that stuff is important.
Brad: Yeah. And I think two points to take away from that, which are important for anyone to hear whose listening. This is if you are the employer and you know something bad is happening and you’re not doing anything about it and you terminate someone for a lesser cause that you, as the employer can get in trouble down the road. If you try to enforce a non-compete non-solicitation clause they can say, hey, you did something, they did violate it. Already, you did nothing about it, but you know Mike, we’re kind of winding down as far as the time that we have left today. And we’re, again, we’re super appreciative that you could be with us, but for our audience, you kind of already noted that you’ve put Kansas in a pretty bad position and they’re ready to figure out what to do [00:34:00] with you. So I believe in the beginning you might have mentioned there was about 3 million that was owed. So what ended up happening?
Mike: Yeah. So what happened was I told the University of Kansas that if they went down this road, that people were going to get fired. And I told the athletic director that, so what ultimately happens is this, they pay David 2.55 million instead of the full 3. And the reason that David was willing to accept that was because under Kansas law, you can’t recover attorney’s fees. So I told David, I said, that’s a better than If you go to trial, you can get the full 3 million, but it’s going to cost you a half million dollars to get there. So it gets a 2.55 million. Perhaps the sweetest part of the whole deal was a lot of these people got fired. Jeff Law and the athletic director fired. He’s no longer, I don’t know that we’ll see him again in college athletics and in large part because of his mismanagement and blundering idiocracy over how this was [00:35:00] handled. Maybe the sweetest part of the whole deal is that ultimately the NCAA determined, the IARP which is a division that the NCAA hands-off complex cases to, who is ultimately going to decide the fate of the basketball program. They took a look at what was done here with David Beaty and they dismissed a minute, the notice of allegation to dismiss all those claims. And to my knowledge it’s the only time in the history of NCAA sports where a coach has challenged the coach control violation successfully. So all of those things have happened here. I would say David Beaty can call scoreboard on all of those. He deserves it. He’s not only a fantastic coach, but he’s a fantastic man.
Brad: That’s great. Well, zoom out here for a brief second, throughout this theme and you’ve given us a lot [00:36:00] of things for our audience to listen to, you know, and so as we take a big step back, a big zoom out from a trial lawyer’s perspective. When you look into the future here, what’s happening now with these guaranteed contracts and termination provisions, what do you see?
Mike: Well, I think what it is, is that your antenna should automatically go up because they’re being used as a device to basically sidestep the intent of the parties in the contract. It is a way to drive a wedge between any opportunities for a person under a contract who thinks that they’re going to get the full measure of their term under a liquidated damages provision. It’s an opportunity for the employer or the institution to basically sidestep their obligations by time. What I see more often than not is these schools don’t have the intestinal fortitude to see it through, but they use it as a bargaining chip. And so if you want to [00:37:00] avoid that, you’ve got to take the squishiness out of the contract because that’s where it’s headed.
Brad: Yeah. Good points. Michael, give your final thoughts here as we zoom out. What do you see?
Michael: Yeah. I mean, I think you can extrapolate this to other executive contracts and Mike has done that a few times today and I find even in sophisticated contracts that there’s a human nature of particularly the employee side, not wanting to engage in these kinds of awkward discussions about termination provisions and kind of the, what if things go bad, they find it awkward. And this is just an illustration of where the stakes can be significant if you don’t deal with it and you can mitigate a lot of risk. If you using Mike’s words, take the squishiness out of it.
Brad: I totally agree. Mike, you said a great point and actually both Michael’s, Mike squared here that, you know, they think they’re [00:38:00] getting this great deal because they think they got guaranteed money, no matter what. And if there’s some squishiness in there, they’re going to use that against you and hold up money, and you’re going to have to go get someone to go to court for you and fight to get it. And that’s never the best spot. In this case it was worth it. But you know, we’ve talked about this in other episodes. Sometimes it’s not worth it when it’s the smaller dollar amount. Lyons, thank you again so much for joining us today. We always appreciate spending time with you no matter where that finds us. And in our case, we’ve been lucky and blessed to be with you in multiple different places over our lifetime. But thanks again for being here, Mike.
Mike: Always, it’s a pleasure. I’d love to come back any time. Thank you so much.
Brad: Well, thanks again. This is all the time we have today. Join us next Wednesday, which is going to be our last episode of season five. We will have the owner, the COO and founder of VIO franchise, Randy Stepp. He’ll join us to discuss developing a compliant med spa franchise in multiple states. [00:39:00]
Outro: Thanks again for joining us today. And remember, if you liked this episode, please subscribe. Make sure to give us a five- star rating and share with your friends. You can also sign up for the ByrdAdatto newsletter by going to our website at byrdadatto.com. ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney- client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by ByrdAdatto. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues.
