60% Concentration That Killed an Exit

So it just kind of validates. Like again, it's like how you look at the problem or situation that you have.

It's. Did you have any doubt about that, Raj? That's a nice line. And the CEO saying that and, you know, rallying the troops. But like in the back of your mind where you're like fully believing that.

I knew everything. And I wouldn't say every customer because that'd be ridiculous. But I'd say like, we, a lot of our customers liked us. They wanted us to win and they didn't trust.

No franchisee likes the franchisor just by definition, because it's like every franchisor could do more for them. I don't want to give them my data because they're going to go market my south store and in Madison, Wisconsin to the guys in Milwaukee because they only care about total portfolio. They don't care about my little stores, you know, those sorts of things.

And like, you start to see these dynamics that you would never, I never really thought about. So like, for example, Regis did the sport. MLB sponsorship seemingly makes sense except for two really distinct facts, which is, you know, arguable, which is you're only helping 32 markets.

So you have customers or franchisees in, I don't know, 200 markets. So only 168 are getting ignored because it wasn't triple A, double A, single A. It was just mlb. And so that's a rub, right?

For the net, for the mat, for the marketing spend. And then the second is, is like your biggest competitor is sport clips. So kind of makes you think that it was sport clips when you think of them, not supercuts when you think of who's sponsoring a sports team or sports.

So, you know, things I wouldn't have thought about until they happen. But that said, there's just this general. So we're like, look, franchisees don't want to go over there.

It's a silly thing for them to want to do. Let's let them go and fail. And we'll just keep building and we can go back to these guys once we prove that risk out.

And we had energy and time. The part that it changed was in March of 2020. That's when it was like, hey, we've got a problem here.

So between December, it sucked. We lost the deal. And it's like, whatever, it's fine. We'll carry on. Because I'd only been in the business like four and a half years at the time, so it wasn't like I was super tired.