All right, welcome to the Adaptex podcast where we have conversations with individuals who are building accessible businesses, advocating for inclusion or excelling in adaptive sports.
Our intention is never to speak on behalf of those with disabilities, but give them a platform to share their work so we can work towards a more accessible world.
Today, we are joined by John and Mark Cronin, the father-son team behind John's Crazy Socks, a social enterprise with a mission to spread happiness.
They bootstrapped their business into the world's largest sock store with multi-million dollar revenue, which led to them being recognized with the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of the Year Award.
They are fierce advocates for inclusion and have testified twice before the U.S. Congress and spoken at the United Nations.
They are sought after keynote speakers, have recorded two TEDx talks, and are frequent guests on network television.
Their company's giving back program has donated nearly a million dollars to their charity partners.
John and Mark, I can't wait to share your wisdom with our audience.
Thank you for joining me today.
Thank you, Benjamin.
We appreciate it.
I'll be on your podcast.
We're excited to be here.
Did I?
Hopefully the intro did you guys justice, but we'll be talking about one of my favorite topics today, how inclusion is not just an altruistic decision, but a profitable one.
John, I'll go to you first.
When did you realize that you wanted to start a business?
I was trying to start a business and I want some crazy socks.
And why socks?
Well, when did you decide?
When I decided?
What year was it?
2016.
And where were you?
I was at a high school.
I was in a high school.
I didn't know.
He was in his last year of school.
Many of your listeners will know.
You can stay in the public school system until you turn 21.
It's the 21 year old cliff.
Because in school, everything's right in front of you.
All your classes and therapy and for many people, that's where they get their food.
And it's where they or some of their meals and it's daycare.
But once you turn 21, you're on your own.
And in states, you're in Massachusetts, where New York, there may be lots of programs out there, but you have to try to navigate them and figure them out.
And then in other states like Texas, Florida, Mississippi, there's nothing.
So you were heading for that 21 year old cliff.
I did.
Trying to figure out what comes after school.
Right.
And what were you looking at?
I looked at shop programs and school.
I can't find a program that I don't like.
He didn't say anything he liked.
Yeah.
And Brendan, you know what this is like.
Many of those programs are in essence daycare programs.
We'll keep you busy during the day.
John couldn't find meaningful work.
Yeah.
John here is a natural entrepreneur.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I saw online you quote from you saying that the best way to find a job that you love is to create one.
I love that.
That's the same thing.
Basically, that I did.
I started my gym in 2016.
So maybe there's maybe there was something in the water back there.
But how did you choose what product that you want to sell?
Well, let's see.
First thing was you decided to go into business, right?
Yes, I did.
And what did you tell me?
I want to go out there with my dad and I want to have a nice father and son together.
So and then he had a lot of ideas.
I do.
A lot of ideas.
What was wonderful?
What I mean a food truck, I have idea for the movie called Chef and I want to act out and jump out.
I eat a movie about a father and son bonding a food truck.
Yeah, actually, I've seen that.
A food truck.
I'm very cool, right?
Everybody loves eating at a food truck.
And we think of what could we make?
Where would we put it?
But we ran into a problem.
A witch haircut.
But then right before Thanksgiving, you had your eureka moment.
I did.
I was out creating socks.
White socks is fine.
It's colorful.
It's creative.
It always let me be me.
I want crazy socks my whole life.
We used to drive around looking for these socks.
In fact, I remember going to a place in Orleans out on the Cape where they had some crazy socks that you picked up.
So we figured, OK, John loved them this much.
Surely other people would too.
We can find those people.
Right.
Right, Dad.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know you guys have thousands of designs and I've never been in the in the retail product e-commerce space.
But how do you find that balance between?
I know the more skews you have, the more designs you have, the harder it is to scale and kind of make things repeatable.
So did you kind of make any decision like, oh, maybe we should narrow down our focus or do you like the plethora of different designs?
Well, you are right.
There is a tradeoff.
The more skews you have, the more space you need.
What we have found is that it's the choice that matters to our customers.
We don't really have any best selling socks.
There's no one or two pair that everybody buys.
Frequently in a business, and you may find this in your business, the 80-20 rule applies where 20 percent of your products account for 80 percent of your revenue.
Ours, it's much more balanced.
So there is a tradeoff.
We do monitor it closely.
And if things stop, don't sell, we don't get them again.
We'll get new items.
But the choice matters.
And how many different socks do we have?
We have four thousand and two kinds of socks.
Well, and here's the cool thing, Brent.
That means John here.
He owns the world's largest sock store.
I was going to say, I didn't even come up with four thousand designs.
Well, everybody contributes.
You know, and that's a way where diversity is really important.
No one person can pick socks for every customer out there.
So everybody here contributes in picking different socks.
We track trends that are out there and we listen to our customers.
Customers always come up with ideas.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know I kind of glanced over it, but maybe for our listeners who aren't familiar, Mark, can you give me a little bit insight into the nature of the business, the inclusive practices of hiring, kind of the structure of the business?
Sure.
You know, we could.
You know, we told you where the idea came from.
We could always tell you the origin story, which, you know, just started with just the two of us.
But so John's crazy socks is a slightly different type of business model.
We're a social enterprise.
We have both a social and a business purpose and they feed off of each other.
And what's our mission?
A spread happiness.
Spreading happiness.
That drives everything we do.
That's the criteria for everything we do.
And what do you say are the keys to happiness?
It's gratitude and due for others.
Gratitude, due for others, that permeates everything we do.
And we've built the business on five pillars.
It's spirit and hope.
Give it back.
Find the price you can't love.
Make it personal.
Make it clear to others.
So, you know, quickly make it a great place to work.
If we're going to spread happiness, we have to start at home.
People have to be happy working here.
They have to feel valued and respected.
They have to have autonomy.
We want to put them in a position to succeed.
So that's really important.
Making it personal in retail, particularly in e-commerce, it's easy to go chasing transactions.
We're trying to build a community.
We're trying to build relationships.
So we're always looking for ways to make things personal with our customers.
And that affects everything we do.
You know, if you call here, you never get voice mail.
You're going to talk to a human.
There's no scripts.
We don't listen in on the phone calls.
You're going to have an actual human conversation.
Good chance.
Personal answers on that phone is going to be the mama bear, right?
Yes.
Our packaging, you know, we don't just send you signs.
When you get a package from us, it's got John's smiling face on the outside.
What do you put in every package?
Every package, yeah.
I'm digging new for me and I'm digging new.
Well, thank you, no, that John writes.
We put candy in every package.
And you see a picture with the name, the picture name of the person who packed your order.
And there's a discount code in there too.
So you're not just getting socks.
You get a little dose of happiness.
We're always looking to drive that connection.
I'll give you a little anecdote.
We sell socks for diabetics.
And one day one of our happiness packages comes to us and says, you know, we're sending socks to diabetics and we're sending them candy.
What's wrong with that picture?
So now we have a supply of sugar free candy.
And if you order socks for diabetics, we ship you them.
Fun products you can love.
Who has to approve every product?
I do.
It's got to spread happiness.
But there's another part to that.
We have to deliver the goods.
We have to have a great website.
We have to have great selection.
The products have to be great.
We have over 30,000 five star reviews.
And the service has to be great.
We do same day shipping.
We do better shipping than Amazon.
And Jeff Bezos over at Amazon, he's not putting a thank you note in candy in those packages.
I do that.
We'll do anything we can to connect with that customer and really delight them.
And then giving back.
That's part of the gratitude.
What can we do for others?
So we start by pledging five percent of our earnings to a Special Olympics.
And why the Special Olympics?
I am a Special Olympic athlete.
I will tell you, Brandon, if there was no Special Olympics, there'd be no John's Crazy Socks.
So we start there.
But we've gone on to create products that raise awareness and celebrate causes and raise money for those causes.
So what were the first awareness socks we created?
The very first sock is a Down syndrome awareness sock.
Down syndrome awareness sock.
And who designed that?
I did.
So we have a whole line of Down syndrome products that raise money for the National Down Syndrome Society.
In fact, we just introduced our World Down Syndrome Day socks because people celebrate World Down Syndrome Day by wearing crazy socks.
And we did that in conjunction with Down Syndrome International and the National Down Syndrome Society.
But we have autism themed socks, cerebral palsy themed socks.
All of these raise money for our charity partners.
We sponsor an Autism Can Do Scholarship.
It's open right now.
Julie, three scholarships, top prize is five thousand dollars.
What are you going to do?
Design a pair of socks.
Right.
You don't have to be a graphic artist.
None of the previous five winners were.
So it's sad.
But the most important aspect of our business is...
And how?
We want to show the world with people with different abilities.
So we start with John.
You have Down syndrome.
I have Down syndrome.
Down syndrome, I never hold me back.
We don't hide you in the back.
You're right up front.
Right.
I am a face of the business.
And what a face you are.
We hire people with different abilities.
So more than half of our colleagues have a different ability.
And that's not enough.
We want to show the world.
So we'll create content that we share in our social media platform.
We host tours.
We've had more than two thousand people come through our facility.
And then many more coming through virtual tours.
We host work groups.
So two work groups here today.
Yes.
That come in once a week for an hour to two hours to get some work experience.
They come from high school social service agencies.
What's really important is somebody with a different ability to see someone who looks
like them working.
It sends a message of encouragement and hope.
Yes, there are jobs out there for me.
And then we do speaking events.
So we're really appreciative of you having us on your podcast.
How cool is this?
We travel the country giving speeches.
Right.
You like doing that.
You do.
Across the U.S., Canada, Mexico.
We've spoken around the world virtually.
And then the last part of that is advocacy work.
You've had some great leaders on your podcast, right?
People will listen to us because of the business.
And that creates an obligation on our part to speak up.
So was it last week we had Congressman LaLana in?
Came for half an hour.
We spent an hour and a half.
We wanted him to see what our colleagues do.
And then we were able to talk to him about legislative changes.
Like changes in the SSI asset limits, eliminating the subminimum wage.
We're going back to Capitol Hill on World Down Syndrome Day.
Yes.
You know, you mentioned we testified twice before Congress.
We have to add we were not subpoenaed.
So you take all of that, you roll it up, and you get John's crazy socks.
So when people buy from us, they get great socks.
They get socks they can love that let them express themselves.
But they help us hire, employ people with different abilities.
They help us give back.
Most of all, as having them spread and happy.
A lot to unpack there.
Let's see. I had several questions pop into mind as you were speaking.
If a business is resistant to adopt a more inclusive workforce, what would you tell them?
They're going to hurt themselves.
You and we're in agreement hiring people with different abilities is not altruism.
It's good business.
We never make the moral argument when we think that's self-evident.
But we will show how it will help a business get ahead.
Here, I'll give you, you can start with our business.
So we run our own, we do our own fulfillment day.
If you sell online, you have to be able to fulfill orders.
Many people outsource that.
You got to have a pick and pack warehouse.
What is come in, you pick them, you pack them, you send them out.
Well, that's a boom industry.
We do our own.
There is a growing labor shortage.
So there aren't enough people to fill all the jobs in those warehouses.
We know we're on Long Island.
We know of places they've lost business because they couldn't get enough employees.
Meanwhile, we have more than enough employees.
We have a surplus of people applying because we tap into the population of people with different abilities.
And be really clear, we don't give jobs to anybody.
If you got to know us, you'd find out that John here is a very nice guy.
I am.
I am not.
If you're going to work for us, you have to produce.
So everybody here has earned that job.
But that gives us a competitive advantage.
But you know, okay, we're a small business.
Let's take a larger business.
You've probably heard of this software company out of Redmond, Washington called Microsoft.
So they're in fierce competition to hire technical people and programmers.
And they start asking, geez, how come we don't hire more people on the autism spectrum,
many of whom are very good with technical challenges?
Well, that's an easy one to answer.
You work with people with intellectual development disabilities
because maybe that person didn't look you in the eye.
Maybe that person didn't give you a firm handshake.
But they're pretty smart people at Microsoft.
They start asking, what the heck does a firm handshake have to do with programming?
So they change the way they hire people.
Now they hire lots of people on the autism spectrum.
That gives them a competitive advantage over other tech companies.
So that's why you want to do it.
You want to do it for what people bring to the table.
IBM hired, what was his name?
Dylan Ratliff, I think was his name.
They sent him to a site, a client site that's working on programs for quality assurance.
After two weeks, he gets his, you know, he's got his team.
He comes together with them and says, would it be okay if I made some changes?
He overhauled the software they use, got new patents, and was named employee of the year.
Why?
Because he looked at things from a different perspective.
And that enabled, gave him like special powers to improve an existing product.
So there are lots of reasons to do it.
Absolutely.
Can you shout out maybe some other organizations or businesses that are kind of set the standard with that?
Sure. There are really fabulous places.
So down in Florida, there's Sunshine Car Wash.
Most everybody works there is on the autism spectrum.
In Atlanta, there's Ventures ATL.
They do data entry.
They do assembly projects.
Here in New York, there's Spectrum Design.
If you want a logo on something, they will put it on a logo.
They do great work.
But, you know, take, you know, I mentioned Microsoft, IBM has a neurodiversity program that is now running in 11 countries.
Ernst & Young, EY.
You know, they have some initiatives in their Dublin office.
They work with Trinity College on a program and then they hire folks that graduate from a neurodiversity program at Trinity College.
The results of that, they've dramatically improved their retention rate.
So those are some of the places doing things.
It takes a real commitment.
You have to pay attention.
But there's so much misplaced fear and apprehension.
Here's an example.
You hear, you know, we hear from business owners, business leaders, that they're worried about the adaptations they'll have to make.
Fifty-six percent of people need nothing.
Most is minor.
At most, it might cost a couple hundred dollars.
So a staffing company like Wrangham is able to place people in jobs and fill more openings because of that.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great example.
As also you kind of glanced over the SSI levels.
That was something that kind of interested in as well, because Social Security, I think for individuals with disabilities in order to receive their benefits, they currently can't make more than what, $2,000 a year?
Well, here's the bigger picture issue.
Right.
But I'll drill down on this.
We are constantly forcing people with a disability to choose between work and benefits.
So you can qualify for SSI.
But if you earn too much, you lose your SSI benefits.
And there are two parts to SSI.
There's the cash benefit and the medical coverage through Medicaid or Medicare.
And it's really the medical coverage that matters.
I understand the public policy that says, wait a second, if you're earning money, that ought to offset the cash grant.
But Medicaid and Medicare pay for things private insurance don't pay for.
And it provides a constant support.
We know of people that have turned down jobs that would come with health insurance because they say, well, wait a second, if something happens and I lose that job, then I'm out.
But if I hold on to my benefit, they're afraid.
So you have to qualify for SSI.
You have to show you have a disability.
Your income has to be below a certain level.
And your assets have to be below $2,000.
That $2,000 limit was set in 1979.
I was still rocking out with long hair and Worcester in 1979 in college.
This is nuts.
Think about it.
Imagine somebody getting paid in 1979 and they haven't had a raise since then.
So there is a bill in Congress that would raise it to $10,000 and $20,000 for a married couple.
So there's no marriage penalty.
But that's an example where we're telling people, if you have a disability, the system is geared to say, we really don't want you to work.
And that's awful.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Is that one of the two times that you testified at Congress?
Was it related to that or something else?
Which more generally, we speak to them about employing people with different abilities.
And there are lots of legislative changes, big and small.
One of the things we speak about all the time is the subminimum wage.
So the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 is a great piece of American history.
Want to study political science or history?
Go look at it.
It established a 40-hour work week, eliminated child labor, created overtime.
It's a wonderful piece of legislation.
But Section 14C of the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 allows employers to pay people with a disability less than minimum wage.
So the number keeps coming down.
At one point, there were hundreds of thousands of people being paid as little as five cents an hour in what are known as sheltered workshops.
Perhaps in 1938, that made sense.
In 1938, John would have never made it out of infancy.
But now it shouldn't exist.
So we work with many others advocating overturning that law.
It's getting closer.
It's going to happen.
Yeah, I know Kim Nackstead, who we had on the podcast when she was President Biden's Director of Disability.
She talked about spearheading the subminimum wage bill and how that was some of the most meaningful work that she was doing during her time in the White House.
So I think that's an essential piece of kind of I mean, it lowers the expectation that people have for individuals with disabilities as a whole.
It's the same thing that we sometimes see in the fitness space when inclusion is perceived as a charitable endeavor.
It just marginalizes the population by lowering expectations.
I liken it to a great stain on the Constitution when it was originally passed.
It said that if you were black, you were only counted as three-fifths of a citizen, three-fifths of a person.
Well, that's what this is saying.
If you have a disability, you don't count as a real person.
And that's awful.
Yeah, absolutely.
You mentioned that the business wouldn't exist without Special Olympics.
John, what is your favorite event in Special Olympics or sport with Special Olympics?
What sports do you play in Special Olympics?
I play basketball, track and field, soccer, and snowshoes.
What's your favorite?
My favorite is snowshoes.
Snowshoes? You like that?
Snowshoes.
Awesome, not a great year for snowshoeing weather-wise.
But we train on the beach.
I think kind of like you guys, I don't think my gym would exist without Special Olympics
because it was Special Olympics that introduced me to the world of disability as a whole.
I don't think I had any exposure to disability prior to volunteering during high school.
And from there, I just decided I wanted to make a career out of it.
So, yeah.
So, without organizations like that, it doesn't only benefit people like John,
but it completely changed my life as well.
So, yeah.
Everybody is better off.
I mean, that's what we find at work.
Yeah.
Everybody is better off because it's a diverse workplace because, you know,
we don't have any original ideas.
We take the term from Special Olympics.
We refer to this as a unified workplace where people with different abilities
and neurotypicals work side by side.
Yeah.
That's probably why my gym was called Unified Health and Performance.
Definitely pulled from some of my Special Olympics stuff as well
when I was opening it initially.
So, no, that's great.
Do you pull from some companies like Bombas and other social enterprises?
I know Bombas does like a buy a sock, donate a sock.
Do you guys kind of draw inspiration from any other companies?
Well, they're a competitor.
So, we say their name, we spit on the board.
It's a big world out there.
There's socks for everybody.
Socks for everybody for sure.
We do look for collaborations.
We work closely with a lot of our charity partners.
And we like to promote entrepreneurs that have a different ability.
So, for example, every holiday season, we put together a Down Syndrome Superbox
that is made up of products from companies owned by or led by
or focused on people with Down Syndrome.
We've done joint packages and joint products,
including one from Boston with Coletti's Cookies.
Coletti Vito has a cookie company.
She's got Down Syndrome.
So, we look to promote and work with others there.
We work with businesses for speaking engagements
and consulting them on hiring people with different abilities.
Yeah, absolutely.
John, what's your favorite part of working at the company?
My favorite part in the company is speaking engagement.
I like to do home deliveries.
I like to do videos.
I like to do TikToks.
I like having a pick and order.
I like to have a good wrapping.
I like to own a good party.
I like to sign socks.
I like to talk to guys.
Sounds like you like it all.
You love your job.
That's perfect.
A couple of weeks ago, we were driving to an early morning
speaking engagement.
We were going to speak to this business group.
So, it's like 730 in the morning.
John is not really a morning person.
He's looking at his phone, going over his calendar for the day.
And he turns and he looks at me and said, Dad, I love being an entrepreneur.
I have something important to do from 8 a.m. to 9 o'clock tonight.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, Dad.
Yeah, John, do you ever, or Mark as well, do you ever just like kind of sit back
and realize how many lives you've impacted and how much like happiness
that you've brought to the world?
Well, what are you most proud of?
We're incredibly fortunate to get to do what we do.
And, you know, from the beginning, when we first tested the idea, it was just the two of us.
The thing that surprised us the most, caught us off guard, was the emotional response we got
from people that saw a young man with Down syndrome starting a business.
And we see it in the tours we have.
We hear from customers, families, people that after speaking engagement come up and speak to us.
That motivates us.
It's incredibly rewarding.
But also, we feel pressure of, we've made a big promise to people.
We've said you can grow, you can go and grow a business based on employing people with different abilities.
You grow a business in many ways based on love.
And we can't let people down.
You know, it's like that movie, failure is not an option.
So, and, you know, running a business can be tough.
We've started our eighth year.
Most businesses fail within five.
What are the biggest lessons that you've learned over the last five years?
Maybe are the challenges that you guys have faced running the business?
Fail fast.
Be willing to go out and take chances, learn, fail fast.
We've learned you need capital.
You want to grow. You want to be big. You need capital.
And that's been a struggle for us at times.
And it's because you were successful yesterday does not mean you're going to be successful today.
You have to keep doing it.
Absolutely. Was COVID a challenge for you guys or were there any benefits that came from that period of time?
COVID was awful for us, for our business.
So, you have to put some things in perspective.
We are a very seasonal business.
We, nobody buys anything in January because they spent all their money on holidays.
Then the spring we usually do pretty well.
However, much of that is because of events like World Down Syndrome Day and schools and businesses doing things.
And then Autism Awareness Month in April.
We've been fortunate with a lot of media coverage.
All that got wiped out by COVID.
And then you hit the summer and nobody buys socks in the summer anyway.
It's awful.
And you wait for the Christmas to come back.
So, but our response to COVID I think really shows who we are.
First, we had to make sure that everybody was safe.
Our colleagues were vulnerable.
People with Down Syndrome were not more likely to get the virus, but they were five times more likely to be hospitalized, ten times more likely to die.
So, there was make sure people were safe.
See what we can adapt.
How do you have to adapt to it?
So, those tours, we moved them online.
The speaking engagements, we moved those online.
We made healthcare superhero socks to say thank you to frontline workers.
And those raised over $50,000 for frontline workers.
And then you look to say, what's new?
So, we made masks.
Yes.
And what's our mission?
Spread happiness.
How do you spread happiness if everybody is locked down and isolated?
Well, here's one way.
John started an online dance party, which he runs to this day and you're going to run this afternoon, 3 o'clock Eastern time every Tuesday.
What better way to bring people together than a dance party?
So, yeah, we adapted to COVID.
What would you say are your primary goals for the next few years from a business standpoint or a personal standpoint?
We want to reach more people. We want to reach more people.
We got to sell more socks. Yes. Right? Because that lets us hire more people.
So, we already sell direct to consumers or a website.
We are selling to other businesses, right? We make custom socks.
Everybody from Microsoft and IBM and bottom to.
Local attorneys and accountants and small businesses and membership organizations and nonprofits.
We're offering more services there, so now we can offer fulfillment services.
Yeah, we have a special new customer welcome package we can put together for businesses that want to thank a new customer.
We have a membership package.
For membership organization, nonprofits, if they want to send that to new members.
We have a charity fund raising program, so there's a lot more that we're offering to the businesses and nonprofits.
And we're starting to sell into the wholesale channel.
So, if someone's out there, they have a store and would like to carry our socks.
We can make that happen. That's awesome.
Yeah, hopefully, hopefully we'll reach some people that are that are interested with this and will definitely share.
Share all the relevant links and social media channels and websites, et cetera.
But one of the, I guess, main themes of the podcast as a whole is how we can make health and fitness more accessible for people with various disabilities.
Do you have any insights? I know a lot of the stuff that we've talked about is applicable to the fitness industry as well in terms of best practices with hiring,
but maybe maybe etiquette language expectations. What do you think needs to change to have people like John more well immersed within their communities?
Be more welcoming. Let's show that we welcome people with different abilities into our gyms.
If you lower expectations, people will live down to those expectations.
If you set expectations, you can perform. You've been working to get in shape, right?
So you're running at lunchtime, doing exercises.
Yeah, sir. You're going to help dad get back in shape, run marathons again.
Yes. Go back to when I could run the Boston Marathon.
That was a lifetime ago. But I, you know, so I liken it to jobs.
I used to think we needed to create more jobs for people with different abilities.
I think that's wrong. The jobs are there.
We just have to recognize that people with different abilities can feel them.
And it's kind of that way in the fitness industry.
That somebody come in, you know,
participate or join the gym accommodations. You make accommodations for gym participants all the time.
Yeah, that's one of the main things we try to communicate is that there's way more similarities and differences.
For some reason, people associate disability with injury and think that disability should be reserved for a rehabilitation setting.
But we've found so much value in just making it seamlessly integrated within our facility that it benefits the adaptive athlete.
It benefits our entire population. But yeah, I think it's it's been a very rewarding career.
I hope I'm able to promote more inclusive gyms in the same way that you guys are able to promote more inclusive workforces.
But I'm running Boston in April pushing Jacob, pushing Jacob, who has Down syndrome in a wheelchair.
So maybe I'll have to pick up a pair of Down syndrome awareness socks to run the marathon in.
Well, I have to send that to you. I'll pick it up.
That's a well, that's wonderful.
You're doing it by showing. And the more that people see that, right, showing is always better than telling.
So the more that people see you welcoming folks with all sorts of physical or intellectual challenges to your gym,
the more that people see us employing, the more likely they'll be willing to do it.
I think that's a good thing to wrap up on. John, Mark, thank you.
Really appreciate the time that you guys took today and sharing your story.
I look forward to sharing it with our audience.
Well, you want to tell folks where can they find us?
Yes, go at John's crazy socks dot com.
John's crazy socks dot com.
Where can they find you on TikTok? John's crazy socks as well.
Yeah, we're on all the social media platforms.
Just look for John's crazy socks.
And if you want to get a hold of me or John, we're both on LinkedIn.
I'm the only Mark X crooning on LinkedIn.
We don't want to be smirch the other Mark crooning.
Absolutely.
All right, John, thanks so much, man.
I appreciate you taking the time today out of your busy schedule.
Thanks, Brandon.
You're a great entrepreneur.
I'll talk to you guys soon.
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