5. Avoiding Debt Like the COVID Plague DFW Rockstars

Justin Shelley 
My concept when I started this podcast, DFW Rockstars, is around two things: 
I think all of us, every human on the planet, they have something to offer me. They're smarter than me at something. They have an experience that I can learn from. I believe that about everybody on the planet. So I'm a big believer in community and relationships and leveraging each other's experience. All right. So that's, that's one.  
 
 
Richard Gibson 
I would love to see that one, right? Yeah. 
 
Justin Shelley  
There's nobody that I know that came up with a business plan executed on it and went right where they projected, they were going to go.  
 
Richard Gibson 
No, everyone falls. They fall a lot. And hopefully if you fall on your face, you're at least going the right direction. It's when you fall on your rump and don't get back up, but you got to learn to get back up. And I think that's part of what you're helping do here is finding people to help you get back up and keep going, because you can't win every time in every business idea. Right. You know, you know, I hate to use baseball as an analogy to use it, but would you rather have someone that gets on base every time they get to bat or someone that hits a home run, you know, 20% of the time, which batting 200 for home runs is an amazing, right? Yeah. That's amazing. So would you rather have someone that gets on first, every time at bat batting a thousand to get on first or batting, you know, 200 to get a home run? 
 
Justin Shelley  
I mean, we want to, we want to get there every time, right? 
 
Richard Gibson: 
I think so. Yeah. You guys, that gives you, you know, cause that's the strategy you want to do and because you can't have every business ideas, a home run. 
 
Justin Shelley: 
And not only that, but the execution's never going to be perfect. The forethought, the strategy that you thought was going to work isn't I mean, hell who saw COVID coming, right? Let's beat this dead horse. 
 
Richard Gibson: 
Well, there are a few people that have been saying we were due another pandemic. They didn't see COVID itself, but they saw a pandemic coming true, you know, but you know it, but it's going to be like every other pandemic is going to circle the globe at least two times. Right. You know? And, and that's what we're going through as the second one we've been able to, as they say, flatten the curve, but at what cost. 
 
Justin Shelley: 
Yeah. Ooh. Now you're going to get me fired up. 
 
Richard Gibson: 
Well, yeah, me too. 
 
Justin Shelley: 
Cause that's not what we're here to talk about today, but that is my Oh, nothing gets me lit more than that. What the CDC refers to as excess deaths, suicide rates, you know, all this stuff that we're not even talking about. As we try to control something that is largely uncontrolled. 
 
Richard Gibson: 
Oh yeah. All's we're doing is mitigating. 
 
Justin Shelley: 
Right. Which is fine and mitigate away, but at the cost of what we've got to do a cost benefit analysis. And, and so few people do that.  
 
Richard Gibson: 
I'm not a real political guy, but poor governor Abbott. Yeah. I mean, try to make rules for a state this size. I mean, what's good for DFW metroplex. Doesn't work for Alpine, Texas. Doesn't work for Tyler, Texas. And so, you know, what he's doing is giving guidelines to the local ones to try to make the decisions. But then you have the problem, like when this was early on, you know, like you have a city, like Plato decides they're closing everything down and then the city right. North of, at Frisco, this is all we're not closing anything down. All right. And so I think that's where governor Abbott did actually an excellent job of saying, okay, here's the criteria. So like now with the hospital beds utilization over a seven day, rolling average being above 15% for COVID patients, we have to roll back. The, okay. That actually made sense to me, but going to zero and closing e