60% Concentration That Killed an Exit

Plus a staff that still calls me on my birthday and, you know, franchisees that came to my wedding years later, you know, like, yeah, I think I still got the win. Like, it just didn't. I didn't get the financial windfall that people expect.

I got a bunch of other intangible benefits that I think have made me a better operator, leader and person generally.

At this upcoming liquidity event or what they thought. And so they encourage you to put some of these kind of the learnings, your learnings, down on paper. You shared that with me and we can link to that in the show notes.

So I want to. I plucked a few of those off of your list that I just want to ask you to elaborate on. But this was written before all of this horrible drama that happened then happened with Regis and in fact, the liquidity event didn't occur. And so on what we just finished hearing.

So I'm going to ask you for a part two of this, of this document or just a thought or two, like, what should be on this list after having gone through all the, you know, the pain of the last few years. First, a couple of my favorite things that you'd written down back in 2019. Value of the board. We've heard you touch on it. It speak to it directly.

We, the board and I didn't always agree and we had a healthy, and we had healthy debates across, across the time. Like, whatever it was strategically what we were going to invest in. I would, you know, like, maybe some decisions I made, they were kind of questioning or whatnot.

They did give me some freedom to make some mistakes, which was good. They didn't carry things with a heavy hand. Also, we were growing.

Right. So revenue cures all sins. And so if you're doing that and like things are going well, they're going to leave you alone. But then when things got hard, I was actually, it was hard because, like, there was a lot of Truths that I didn't want to accept.

Meaning like settlement didn't want to accept it, but they had to coach me into those. There were times where, you know, they'd read my emotional body language and be like, I can see you don't agree with that, Raj. And I was like, is it this?

The flames coming out of my ears? Like, what part of you can you not see? But really working through it and like being able to address it in an open way that helped me get better and then being able to take a beat.

They taught me lots of different things about how to manage the situation and making sure my blind spots are covered. And there were definitely times where I was like, you know, not having fun with board meetings and I talk and I, and then like, I'm always very grateful, despite how hard it was that I had board members that I talked to once a week for almost 27 months.