Why Choose Ownership Over Being a CEO

And these businesses, well actually let's take your existing business, Women Travel Abroad. Leaving aside the, the, you know, the acquisition strategy, how big can it get? So it's a sub million dollar business.

You are, you're, you're actually, you're, you're about to be at a million and get it to, to be on that. But how big can one of these by themselves be?

There's not really any companies that we've been able to find that are like more than 10 million in revenue. Pretty much most of these niche group travel companies are in that. The bigger ones are in that like 4 to 10 million top line.

And then there's a lot in my space which is sub a million in top line. I would like women travel abroad to get to that, you know, four to five million dollars in top line of its own brand and then obviously be able to layer on additional brands that are each doing some multiple of low single digit millions.

And despite the fact that you're eager to use this back office tech that, that you've been, that you've built and bolt in other acquisitions, why distract yourself with other acquisitions and not just spending all of your attention to get to 5 million in top line?

So I think there is SEO and organic growth takes a really long time, especially in the D2C world. That's the number one learning I've taken from owning a D2C business. And so while we're seeing it increase how quickly we're growing every single month, it's not growing so fast that I see that in two years we would be at 5 million, right?

Yeah, we're going to grow on a 10 to 30% every single year top line. Which means that we're 5, 7, 10 years away from having, you know, a 4 or $5 million top line business. And the great news is that I'm down from working 60 hours a week on women travel abroad to working more like 25 or 30 hours a week on women travel abroad.

So with all that extra time, why not try to bolt on some other acquisitions to give us more, you know, profit also to invest, because I think that's the other thing is when we have more profits to invest, we can also start to do really interesting marketing and really interesting ad spend that right now, owning a single business, I don't necessarily have the budget to do, but I do think there's a…

There's not enough need for a marketing manager just for women travel abroad. That's 15 hours a week. I can do that myself.

But if I own three businesses, then I have a marketing manager who's running all three of those portfolio companies. So it's because I'm not having to work as hard a year into Owning this business as I was the first six months, I'm much more interested in how can I move back into a capital allocation role away from an individual contributor.

The other interesting thing here is that the companies Katherine's mentioning that are doing like 4, 6, even 10 million, somehow all of them seem to have extremely degraded margins. Mostly because they do rely on adding tons and tons of headcount to sustain the growth of their businesses. So our goal is let's get there.