00:50:02 (someone): For any business, and also, let's be honest, spending the money before it comes in. It's the combination of being too dependent on one thing, not diversified enough, and quite honestly, putting all your eggs, so to speak, in one basket. So at the time, I think I thought to myself, first off, how could this happen? If I don't have my own business, who am I? We have to figure this out and sort our way through this. And I have to say, at first, There was never any question we weren't going to close, but we were going to have to cut expenses dramatically.

00:50:50 Guy Raz: And you had to declare bankruptcy.

00:50:53 (someone): We did. We went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But the right away we made the decision. We're not going to stop producing our collection. We're going to continue to ship it to the stores and we're going to continue doing business. Maybe we won't be able to have an advertising campaign. Maybe we have to cut staff. Maybe we have to, you know, no longer have an extravagant fashion show. We're going to do what we have to do.

00:51:23 Guy Raz: When that was happening, you're 32 and you're in bankruptcy. Was a part of you feeling like, I failed? Like, I might not recover from this.

00:51:35 (someone): Initially, I thought, even though I understood the circumstances, it's hard not to question yourself. What did I do wrong? What did I, you know, what mistake did I make?

00:52:03 (someone): Yeah, you know, I mean, we could have taken the position of, well, you know, here's the keys to the building. You know, you bankers come in and figure out how to work it. And we could have walked away and been OK. But, you know, we we also had 200 employees. And by the way, I grew up on a farm in the second poorest county of the state of Illinois, right next to the poorest county. And I knew growing up that, you know, the job that you get in that area, if you weren't farming, where you could be a teacher or you could work at the prison. And that was, you know, there was a few other little factories and things around there, but not much. And we had provided, you know, about 200 jobs for that area. I guess we were just thinking, you know, hey, we just got to get through this and everything's going to be better. I mean, I just kept that going and then 2008 comes, 2009, 2010, it just keeps going on and on and on. It certainly affected us personally quite a bit.

00:53:05 Guy Raz: You essentially get to a point where you can't, the banks are just not going to refinance this and you got to figure it out. And you got to the point where you had to file for bankruptcy, for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At that point, was the idea to restructure the company and come back to fight another day, or did you think it was going to be the end of the road?

00:53:29 (someone): Well, I always thought that Dippin' Dots would survive. It's such a strong brand, and we actually felt like, we're going to dig our way out of this.

00:29:34 (someone): We almost bankrupted the company. Wow. After 20 years of growth, we went from 119 million in revenue is what we'd hit at that peak at that time, and we dropped down to the 80s. What happened? Well, the recession hit, which didn't help, but I don't buy for a second that that was really the issue, because what really happened was my president's leadership and my vision weren't aligned. I needed an executor who could translate my vision and say, here's the vision, let's translate it into a plan, here's all the steps, let's make these things happen. I needed somebody that believed in me and where I could also believe in them. So I got that person out of the business. How close was the company to falling apart? We couldn't have been closer. I mean, I would have given us another 90 days if we'd continued down that path. We had overspent so drastically on big bets that didn't pay off. And I had to hunker down. I had to lay off 52 people. I needed to elevate another team, the middle-level managers up. And I said, you know, I know you might not agree with my decision. You probably think I'm crazy, but I need your help. And it was the hardest period in my professional life. While my middle-level management team who was elevated continued to run the business, I scoured the country for the right leader. I interviewed 75 potential president slash COOs.

00:48:13 Guy Raz: very quickly becomes the biggest driver of revenue.

00:48:23 (someone): what happened, the company that we licensed to, we were really their first great success with licensing a designer name. And I think they were so successful with us that they suddenly said, well, wait, this is easy. We can do this, you know, with other people. And they went out and they started gathering other designer names that they said, oh, well, if we did this with Michael Kors, we could do it with you. We'll do it with you. And they overextended themselves. And it turned into this sort of perfect storm where we were chugging along with the royalty checks and expanding and, as I said, really, you know, building up our infrastructure. Yeah. And the next thing you know, you've basically started relying on someone else. And they ran into complications with some of the other lines and collections that they were licensing. And the next thing you know, they went bankrupt. And they ended up owing us considerable amount of royalty money. And we, of course, had been spending all along. We knew the money was coming in, the stream was coming in, and we didn't think the stream would ever stop. And then the stream stopped.

00:49:52 Guy Raz: which is like, yeah, I mean, you were, sounds like, you know, 60, 70, maybe 80% of your money was coming from this one source, which is always dangerous for any business.

00:50:02 (someone): For any business, and also, let's be honest, spending the money before it comes in. It's the combination of being too dependent on one thing, not diversified enough, and quite honestly, putting all your eggs, so to speak, in one basket.

00:32:43 (someone): Wow. Again, I didn't have financial intelligence at the time. And what was happening was I was paying for the setup of the machines and bringing all the rural goods here. So I had to pay for all that in advance. Then I was paying for the salaries of the people that were working there for me. And that money was going out. The stores, when they receive the goods, they want to pay you for 15, 30, 60, 90 days. And my lack of financial intelligence was starting to just underline how this company was never going to go anywhere. And now I made $70,000 worth of the goods that I have a $300,000 order on. And the stores are starting to say, you're not delivering this in time. We're going to start canceling the orders.

00:33:24 Guy Raz: Wow. So this is like, what, like 95, 96.

00:33:29 (someone): Yeah, this is right around 95. Yeah.

00:33:32 Guy Raz: It sounds like you're you're you're close to like going bankrupt.

00:33:36 (someone): I'm close to going bankrupt and losing the house and losing all the orders that I had. Those stores are not gonna trust me again because if they're waiting six months for something to come in, when they give you these orders, it's the orders that they're not giving somebody else that they could be turning other goods. So now they're losing faith in me. And it got to be, it was a really, really dark time. And I see this a lot now in entrepreneurs who don't realize what they don't know.

00:34:03 Guy Raz: So were you panicking?

00:34:07 (someone): Yeah, I was panicking.

00:49:34 (someone): The local bankers were like, oh, yeah, we're familiar with your business. You guys are – you got $40 million in assets. And so they said, look, we'll – we know you just spent a couple million dollars on your plant doing some things. We'll look at all your collateral. Basically, don't worry about it. We'll just give you a three-month extension. The bank said this. The bank said this, but on the day that that three month extension was due, we got an email that said, you're in default because you have not paid your credit line down. This puts all of your term loans in default as well. Wow. And of course, again, being a little bit stubborn, I'm like, well, We'll just go to another bank. Well, that's when the banking crisis was starting to hit. So by the time we did all of our paperwork and everything and had one or two banks that were interested, all of a sudden, everything started going upside down.

00:50:26 Guy Raz: Everybody tightens up. All the doors shut. No money. Everything freezes. No one wants to give you money. So you've got this $13 million in debt. And I guess from what I read, your creditors kind of also devalued your assets. And so it meant that There was a point where Dippin' Dots as a company owed the creditors more than you actually owned in assets.

00:50:49 (someone): Yeah, and that's the sad part about the way that this all works because fear comes into the play.

00:02:57 Guy Raz: Things like cables and surge protectors, keyboards and mice, networking devices, you know, that kind of stuff. It's a company that was built around the PC boom, and then later, the smartphone boom. Now, if you think of launching a business as a marathon, where the starting line is the idea and the finish line is a successful company, I think we can all agree that not everyone starts that race in the same position. I mean, some of the founders we've talked to, they clearly start out with certain advantages. Maybe they've got money in the bank, or they know people who have lots of money because they went to a top business school, or they just start with valuable experience in a certain industry. But in Chet Pipkin's case, Chet launched Belkin when he was just 21 years old. He didn't have any money, he had dropped out of college, and he certainly didn't have a clear idea of how business even worked. But he did have one really important advantage, a good childhood and a stable family life. His parents were both blue-collar workers who moved to Hawthorne, California from the farms in the Midwest.

00:04:06 (someone): The Second World War brought them both west. My mom doing work in support of the war effort, my dad also. And then eventually he was drafted in to the Army Air Corps. And then they both settled in Southern California after that.

00:04:24 Guy Raz: Were your parents educated beyond high school?

00:04:27 (someone): Very little formal education, so I think my dad made it a little bit past the eighth grade, and the same was true for my mom. I think partially because my mom didn't have the benefit of a lot of formal education, it was really key to her

00:23:46 (someone): And with that, he wrote out a check for $10,000 on my signature alone.

00:23:54 Guy Raz: And obviously, I mean, you were really able to grow this business. I read that, like, at a certain point, you were doing more than, like, $300,000 in revenue a year. And you'd hired a bunch of people, you know, you had employees, but I guess it ground to a halt and eventually, like, went under. What happened?

00:24:17 (someone): Act of God. I don't know how to explain it other than the Chicago blizzard of 1979. Look it up. You will see snow that goes over the roof of cars. The mayor of the city of Chicago could not clean city streets for three months. Because of that blizzard, that snowstorm, that just created a gridlock in the city of Chicago, a lot of businesses went bankrupt. And in the flower business, I had a whole bunch of floors that could not pay me at all. And then for months, no orders.

00:24:52 Guy Raz: At that time, you were in your 20s. Were you married? Yeah. Did you have kids at that point when you had the terrarium business?

00:25:00 (someone): We just had one young son, James. And, you know, a lot of people don't realize When you can't pay bills, you know, back then I was digging through seat cushions to find change just so I could buy my kids milk. It was tough. It was just so tough that because of the snowstorm, I ended up going bankrupt, lost everything because of that.

00:09:03 (someone): And so we were all ramped up to grow 50% and we only grew 25 or something, which doesn't sound bad, but when you've built all the inventory for that and you don't make it, it's pretty rough. And then there was a recession then and the banks wouldn't give us any more money. In fact, I had to lay people off, which was really hard because we were a family style business. We knew everybody working there. That was really tough.

00:09:32 Guy Raz: Did you have moments during those periods, the ups and downs, where you thought Patagonia might fail?

00:09:38 (someone): Oh, absolutely. We didn't know whether we were going to make it or not. We couldn't get any loans from anybody. In fact, my accountant introduced me to some mafia guys who wanted to loan me some money at 18% interest, which I turned down. What saved us is we got some personal loans from some friends and pretty much fired some management that got us into this problem and turned things around.

00:10:06 Guy Raz: Why do you think it happened? Was it just bad luck? Was it just the economy? Or was there a strategy that didn't align?

00:10:13 (someone): We were just going for growth. You know, not saying no. It's just growth can creep up on you. I mean, we were just opening more and more dealers. We were opening our own retail stores. You know, nothing goes forever. And in fact, that's why the faster a business grows, the faster it dies also.

00:50:02 (someone): For any business, and also, let's be honest, spending the money before it comes in. It's the combination of being too dependent on one thing, not diversified enough, and quite honestly, putting all your eggs, so to speak, in one basket. So at the time, I think I thought to myself, first off, how could this happen? If I don't have my own business, who am I? We have to figure this out and sort our way through this. And I have to say, at first, There was never any question we weren't going to close, but we were going to have to cut expenses dramatically.

00:50:50 Guy Raz: And you had to declare bankruptcy.

00:50:53 (someone): We did. We went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But the right away we made the decision. We're not going to stop producing our collection. We're going to continue to ship it to the stores and we're going to continue doing business. Maybe we won't be able to have an advertising campaign. Maybe we have to cut staff. Maybe we have to, you know, no longer have an extravagant fashion show. We're going to do what we have to do.

00:51:23 Guy Raz: When that was happening, you're 32 and you're in bankruptcy. Was a part of you feeling like, I failed? Like, I might not recover from this.

00:51:35 (someone): Initially, I thought, even though I understood the circumstances, it's hard not to question yourself. What did I do wrong? What did I, you know, what mistake did I make?

00:18:28 Guy Raz: So what happened? How did you guys, why did you decide to grow so much faster?

00:18:33 (someone): Well, we reached a different era where it was important to have scale to do the things we had to do with buying merchandise. So you had a guarantee to a factory you'd buy a certain amount of a product to make sure we were the only people in the United States that would be carrying it. And you got a sense that you needed scale to get there, and that's what we started doing. In 1990 we built a flagship store in Chicago which really helped launch our expansion because then every landlord, every shopping mall wanted a crate and barrel building. And we were a big attraction because we drew in a lot of customers. And what happened starting in that big expansion was landlords started paying for a lot of the build out of the store or the building of the building and whatever. So we didn't have to take as much of our financial risk ourselves because the landlords built these stores, a lot of these stores for us.

00:19:30 Guy Raz: So it sounds like things were going pretty well for you without having any outside investors. So what made you decide to eventually bring in outside money? Like what was your thinking when you made that decision?

00:19:42 (someone): I had thought by the time I was 65, I was then about 60, I said I'd probably want to retire. And some intelligent guy had said, you know, if you're going to sell your business, do it five years before you retire so you can help the transition and whatever. And I owned the responsibility to both my family and to my staff to make sure the company was well financed and could take risks and could go through trauma and survive.

00:30:40 (someone): So they start all paying $75 a week for the room that they would rent out of my house. So I have now six friends all living in my home. And all the furniture I couldn't sell, I took out in the backyard and we all chopped it up and we burned it all in the backyard because we wanted to make room in the house for selling machines because we weren't going to trust $100,000 of our money Overseas with somebody we don't know because we knew that we we just weren't sharp in that area Wow, so we get all these sewing machines. We get a cutting room We hire we hire a bunch of seamstresses and we hire somebody to cut the fabrics and trim the fabrics and we create a factory in the middle of in the middle of Hollis Queens my house in the house You decide that you are you are gonna be the factory to fulfill these these orders of $300,000 My house is a big version of Airbnb meets a factory.

00:31:33 Guy Raz: That's exactly what it is. How hard did you have to work to fulfill those orders?

00:31:40 (someone): It was hard. I think we filled about $75,000 worth of those orders until I turned around and I only had $500 left in the bank and I was about four months late on the mortgage. Again, I didn't have financial intelligence at the time. And what was happening was I was paying for the setup of the machines and bringing all the rural goods here. So I had to pay for all that in advance. Then I was paying for the salaries of the people that were working there for me. And that money was going out. The stores, when they receive the goods, they want to pay you for 15, 30, 60, 90 days. And my lack of financial intelligence was starting to just underline how this company was never going to go anywhere.

00:03:17 Guy Raz: Passersby would literally hand them 5 and 10 dollar bills and tell them to keep the change. In a span of just two hours, my then 8 and 6 year old cleared $150 in profit and donated 30 bucks to the Humane Society. That's 275% growth between Lemonade Stand 1 and 3! Now imagine doing this every day for an entire summer. Depending on how many hours and weeks you work, you could, at this rate, realistically clear about $5,000 by Labor Day, which is kind of what Kathleen King discovered as an 11-year-old girl. Except her cookie hustle turned into a business called Tate's Bake Shop that Kathleen would eventually sell for half a billion dollars. Tate's Cookies is a brand now owned by Mondelez, the huge food company that also owns Oreos, Chips Ahoy, and Ritz Crackers. But long before any of this happened, Kathleen started a small bakery in Southampton on the eastern end of Long Island in New York. For 20 years, she grew her little bakery into a sustainable business, until, as you will hear, she lost almost everything in a bad partnership deal. And so at the age of 42, Kathleen had to start all over again. And even though she grew up in the Hamptons, Kathleen did not exactly cross paths with the glamorous celebrities and rich financiers who go there in the summertime. Her mom was a nurse, and her dad ran the family farm where he raised chickens and cows.

00:04:56 (someone): When I was growing up, it was about 30 acres. And my dad used to sell the milk to Schwenk Dairy, which was a local dairy. And on the cows, we had maybe, I don't know, 30 or 40. So everything was small.

00:18:19 (someone): In Times Square, without anybody knowing about it. And we then turned the tanks on it. The Coca-Cola sign went up in flames, but, I mean, it didn't really, but, you know, it looked like it did. Anyway. We were now launched in America, and what was going on at Coke was they went to any country that we were doing well in, they started in the UK, and virgin cola just disappeared from all the shelves.

00:18:43 Guy Raz: Wait, what did they do? They just went to retailers and, like, how did they?

00:18:47 (someone): They went to retailers, they gave them offers they couldn't refuse, and, you know, Tesco's that had, you know, like, shelves and shelves of virgin cola, suddenly they just had no virgin cola on their shelf. It was a very systematic kneecapping job.

00:19:01 Guy Raz: Did you see it happen right before your eyes?

00:19:03 (someone): Were you watching this happen? I didn't know what was going on, except that I knew that retailers were suddenly delisting us. And it was a couple of years later that my new bank manager from Lloyd's Bank took me out to dinner, and she had just joined Lloyd's, and her previous job had been at Coke, and she proudly told me how she'd managed to drive us out of business.

00:19:29 Guy Raz: Wow, it's like the Godfather or like Goodfellas, all of a sudden someone, like something just disappears.

00:19:34 (someone): Exactly. Now, I mean, there's definitely a business versions of the Godfather. I mean, BA played it on us. you know, we were a much better quality airline, so we survived in that case. And of course, the court case helped.

00:01:23 Guy Raz: From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how an 18-year-old named Marcia Kilgore moved from a small town in Canada to New York with just $300 and turned herself into a serial entrepreneur, the founder of five companies, including Bliss Cosmetics and Fitflops. According to the Small Business Administration, there's a 50% chance that your business will fail within the first five years. So there's some things that entrepreneurs do to maximize the chances that their businesses will succeed, like plan and research the marketplace, the way Arthur Blank and his partner Bernie Marcus did for nearly two years before they launched the Home Depot. Or the way Jen Hyman from Rent the Runway did tons of market research and proof-of-concept testing long before she went to investors. All of this raised the odds that these companies would make it past five years. Which brings us to today's show, because this is truly a story about someone who never had a bigger plan. Marcia Kilgore didn't set out to become an insanely successful serial entrepreneur. She never sat down and said, hey, I'm going to start a day spa and a line of skincare products called Bliss and then go on to start four more companies. She was a personal trainer who had a side hustle giving facials. And what happened to her happened organically. It just evolved into something bigger and bigger. Marcia actually grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Go ahead, find it on the map. It is a very cold place, even by Canadian standards. Anyway, a pretty middle-class home.

00:35:03 (someone): They were having problems too. They couldn't even pay their bills and they were late paying their bills. And so we struck up a management and purchase agreement which said that, hey, Well, we'd like to take a look under the hood, but if we like what we see, we have the right to buy the business. And as we spent more time with her, she kept coming to us saying, I can't pay my bills. I can't pay my bills. And the answer is that she's like every entrepreneur on the surface. She seems like a swan cruising across the water, but underneath she was paddling like hell.

00:35:36 Guy Raz: In fact, I think when you did buy the store, you found out that the owner of BFX was like in a ton of financial trouble. It was pretty bad, right?

00:35:47 (someone): Yeah. We realized they were in default of their bank debt. Every week, I was writing more checks to the company, $20,000, $30,000, $50,000. We were just writing checks to pay the company's bills in what was like a seemingly endless sort of reservoir of needs of cash. And so we went down to see BB&T Bank, who essentially really owned the business, that she was in debt to them and the business was essentially insolvent. And we went down to see BB&T Bank and the vice president of the bank, John Ryder in Alexandria, Virginia. And I remember walking into the room and I said, John, you've lost all your money. And we said to him, your only hope of getting a return on your money would be to double down.

00:01:46 Guy Raz: Then comes YouTube and then Facebook and then Baidu, which is China's biggest search engine. And finally, coming in at number five, Wikipedia. So imagine for a moment that you are the founder of one of these big websites. How much are you worth? Well, Forbes puts out annual lists, and here's what we found. Larry Page, founder of Google, sits on about $50 billion. Mark Zuckerberg edges him out with about $70 billion. Each of the founders of Baidu are worth around $15 billion. And the founders of YouTube walked away with half a billion each when they sold to Google back in 2006. And the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, the fifth most visited website in the world, His personal fortune is estimated to be not much more than $1 million. He is, quite possibly, the least rich internet titan in the world. But unlike a lot of famous founders or entrepreneurs, Jimmy Wales' legacy is likely to live on for centuries because he is, in some ways, like a modern-day Johannes Gutenberg. And just like Gutenberg's press made it possible to spread knowledge beyond a village or a town, Wikipedia made it possible for every single person on Earth with an internet connection to gain access to probably the biggest collection of knowledge ever assembled. And like a lot of the entrepreneurs we interview on the show, Jimmy Wales' story starts with influential people and important events that happened pretty early in life. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where his uncle owned a shop that sold early personal computers. And his two big hobbies were tinkering with computers and reading, reading just about anything he found interesting.

00:03:42 (someone): I read basically anything I could get my hands on, including I spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia.

00:19:49 (someone): And some intelligent guy had said, you know, if you're going to sell your business, do it five years before you retire so you can help the transition and whatever. And I owned the responsibility to both my family and to my staff to make sure the company was well financed and could take risks and could go through trauma and survive. And I also realized that at that time the company was relatively very strong at retail, but relatively weak in direct marketing, which at those days was catalogs. And we actually spent a year and a half looking around the world for a partner. And we finally found the Otto Group in Hamburg, Germany. And they were the second largest mail order company in Europe. And today, after Amazon, they're the biggest internet company in the world. And in 98, we sold them about 2 thirds of the company. And 10 years later, and the contract was for 10 years, we sold them the rest of the third.

00:20:54 Guy Raz: So in 98, you agreed to stay on for a fixed amount of time and to continue to run the company?

00:21:00 (someone): Exactly. Their basic philosophy was to acquire businesses like ours and let the management continue running it. And our success was we tripled the size of the company, we quintupled the profits of the company, and we were able to grow. But more important, after we were with them a year or two, they said, you've got to really look into this internet. This was, what was it, 99-2000. And we said, what's the internet? And then they started telling us. And early on, then we started developing our internet business, which today represents about 38% of all the sales at Crate and Barrel.

00:26:57 (someone): And that was the case in my case. I continued to manage my team. As opposed to leaving them and empowering them and i think that the and i've been maybe talking about that for many years my career i think what the pandemic did is by the force of distance and working from home. It required that we give the control of all aspects of the business down to our senior people to our brand new hires and. Overstate this but almost without exception everybody rose and stood up and did just incredible jobs about taking ownership and pride of what we do and that was just a. It almost makes me emotional talking about it. It was just an incredible thing to be a part of, to see people throughout the organization step in and work hard and get things done that needed to get done in ways that were beyond what I think I'd ever believed was possible. So that has transformed the business in a really basic way. My management style now, I think, has totally changed. I think if you ask my leadership team, they would say he is way less involved in the day-to-day. We're running the business now. And he is really, he's thinking about high-level direction, but he's let go a lot of the day-to-day in a way that maybe I had a tendency to meddle and manage and get my fingers into the details. So I'm very grateful for that. It's been unexpected, but a totally positive change for me personally and for the business, I think.

00:28:27 Guy Raz: Yeah, I read an article in Inc magazine that was a profile of you a few years ago and I was surprised because your entire day was meetings and it seemed like you were really in the granular – you were into the granular side of things.

00:03:11 Guy Raz: Ken and his small team of producers and editors have built an unmatched documentary film archive, basically a storehouse of American history. The Civil War, the Brooklyn Bridge, jazz, the national parks, World War II, baseball, and many, many more. His company, Florentine Films, has brought to life American giants like Jackie Robinson and Lewis and Clark. In fact, it's hard to imagine an important American story without a companion film from Ken Burns. But it's also hard to imagine any of these films existing without a key ingredient, which is money. And so in addition to being a creative, Ken Burns had to learn pretty early on how to be a businessman. Partly to cut down on costs, he moved his business to Walpole, New Hampshire, which is where he still operates today. And even after he developed a close relationship with PBS as a producing partner, Ken still had to knock on doors of corporations and foundations to find a way to pay for each film he was inspired to make. But perhaps most importantly, Ken was uncompromising about intellectual property. He did not allow his work to be owned by anyone else. And as a result, Ken Burns oversees an archive of films and content that is enormously valuable. Ken was born in Brooklyn, but mainly grew up in Ann Arbor, in a house near the University of Michigan, where his dad was an assistant professor of anthropology. And once Ken's mom was diagnosed with cancer, he and his younger brother Rick had to face the sadness and uncertainty of a life without their mother.

00:04:54 (someone): Since I was two and a half, three years old, somewhere around there, I was aware that something was wrong. And it was obviously confirmed by many, you know, trips and time away to the doctor and then in the hospital.

00:29:34 (someone): We almost bankrupted the company. Wow. After 20 years of growth, we went from 119 million in revenue is what we'd hit at that peak at that time, and we dropped down to the 80s. What happened? Well, the recession hit, which didn't help, but I don't buy for a second that that was really the issue, because what really happened was my president's leadership and my vision weren't aligned. I needed an executor who could translate my vision and say, here's the vision, let's translate it into a plan, here's all the steps, let's make these things happen. I needed somebody that believed in me and where I could also believe in them. So I got that person out of the business. How close was the company to falling apart? We couldn't have been closer. I mean, I would have given us another 90 days if we'd continued down that path. We had overspent so drastically on big bets that didn't pay off. And I had to hunker down. I had to lay off 52 people. I needed to elevate another team, the middle-level managers up. And I said, you know, I know you might not agree with my decision. You probably think I'm crazy, but I need your help. And it was the hardest period in my professional life. While my middle-level management team who was elevated continued to run the business, I scoured the country for the right leader. I interviewed 75 potential president slash COOs.