Surviving a 2-Month Revenue Freeze in Year 1

Okay, all right. So it didn't feel necessarily existential. It just felt like a terrible working capital burden. Yeah. And you didn't know how long it lasted.

That's the piece that you're uncomfortable with, right? Because you have no idea. It's out of your control.

One of the many key learnings I would say is, I talked about it earlier, which was kind of decision-making. Coming in, one thing I've learned is... you can't come in and change everything immediately, right?

So maybe there was a little bit of new toy, let me kind of leave my imprint. You know, business school teaches you, as soon as you become a CEO, you just restructure, right? You restructure your way to confidence and comfortability.

But in my case, it was really looking at our systems and And understanding what was important to people, it was, you know, my leadership style, maybe let me back up. My leadership style is empowerment, transparency, and accountability.

And for me to be able to do those things, I need to understand that those who I'm partnered with take what I call radical ownership. And that... term radical ownership I got from when I was at Duke, we had General Stan McChrystal come and teach a class.

And in his book, Radical Inclusion, he talks about radical ownership as a necessary element for that frontline soldier to be able to see front, north, south, east, west, everything that's coming to them. So that way he feels better of empowering them. So that's my style. And that said,

buying a smaller business it's a family kind of almost a kind of familial kind of structure so when you come in making many many changes it can upset the apple cart a bit right and in our case i just have to be cognizant of that one that's one of the early things i learned is think about the changes that you're making and quantify the impact and and say

The one with the most meaningful impact that's a necessary change, that's what we'll tackle first rather than, I don't like the phones. I don't like this. I don't like that. I want to change everything. So for me, that was the first thing was, what do I want to change that would have a sizable impact?

But that wasn't the way that I approached it to be fully transparent. It was, hey, I want to change this. I want to change that.

And then as you go, You kind of get feedback, right? And included in that leadership style is feedback. As you get feedback, which is a privilege to get, you have to kind of iterate.