The Dream Outcome: From $300k to $5m EBITDA

But rather than, rather than holding on too tightly, accept that reality. And, and your threshold should be 80. 80% as opposed to 100.

That's right. I think that. And it's very hard, it's still very hard to, to accept that even, even once you've heard it.

I'm not going to say anything because I didn't do anything and I got 80% of the results. So, you know, what I do is, you know, if I've got, if I've got five people doing 80% and they're not doing the other 20, I hire another person to do the 20% that was missing from those five. Right. And so I just, I just do coverage, right, where it's like, you know, if you're not great at this, I'll hire…

Now, does that cost me more money? Yes. Does that cost me margin? Yes. But it keeps me completely out of the business and it also builds redundancy in the system as well.

Right. Where, yeah, I'm not beholden to, you know, when I started my career, I would say that the hardest thing for me to do was to not have terrorists working for Me, right? Like, and what I say by that is it's like when you're a small company of 10 people and one person leaves, that's like, that hurts your business, right? And so to get to the point where you've got coverage everywhere, right…

I call it like a fantasy football team, right, where you know, you don't want to only have one quarterback because if that quarterback gets hurt, you know, you need to have a backup. So you need to really build your bench. I'm really, really kind of purposeful about building that bench and that next next group of people that can move up.

And I always tell people that you don't want to push that button and be the only person that can push that button, because that means you'll always have to sit here pushing that button. You want to be able to grow out of that spot. And I think that's probably another reason why our companies are so successful, is everybody has a clear.

At least in my head, they may disagree, but a clear pathway to get to the next level.

And. But just to be clear on your own trajectory here, Linh, because what you're saying now is that was not how you were in the early days where you were working from 4 to 10, 4am to 10pm so what it was was you were just pouring yourself into your business, giving it everything, giving it too much time, in fact, and you kind of, through force of will, got it to 2 and 3 million dollars of…

And it was, it was at that point where you. And frankly, you had the earnings to play around a little bit. To me, probably to, to, to have some mistakes and to hire, maybe make some hiring mistakes and to really start.

Have the room to start building some of these systems. And then, and then that worked and you stepped out. And in fact, the business really started growing on its own.