So Much Fun: The Buyer of Choice in a Fragmented Industry

That was exactly how uninformed I was. No disrespect to your college roommate when I got out out here. Yeah.

Now talk to us about the what we'll return to the pain of operating. We've heard a lot of the good stuff in, in staffing in particular, you, you said you called out. Talk to us now about kind of work us toward the end of your ownership or your CEO ship of the business.

So this is not some big insight. You know, when I was doing diligence, everyone said, gosh, the staffing is really hard. And, and it is. So you have to adhere to very strict student to teacher ratios and the cost to being out of ratio is not a slap on the wrist.

It can be up to and including your license being revoked. So these are grave consequences to being out of ratio. And to boot, to be in ratio in, in most jurisdictions you have to have a teacher with a certain credential and the teacher with that credential earns a wage.

That is a true, I think many would consider it, I don't know technically if the following statement is true, but not a living wage. It was a very low wage industry and the challenge was, and I believe this remains in the industry today, that for many, not for all, there are some who are truly passionate about the youngest of the children.

But for many it is a stepping stone to the public school district where your comp roughly doubles, you get state benefits, you get summers off. I mean all sorts of things make it a much more pleasant place to work. So yeah, it was always like for many a short term way station.

And that just has the effect of needing to constantly be hiring and training a lot of folks. And you know, like we had a whole call center full of recruiters. I mean we, we had a pretty well developed machine.

But even still, especially as you know, if you think about the, let's see, like the 13, 14, 15 era, really strong economic climate and unemployment at, you know, all time lows. It was just a very competitive labor market and we struggled to attract and retain teachers. And I had such a good team that I, I myself was not like fully tip of the spear on this.

But Sarah, who I've mentioned previously, Melissa, who is my colleague that I actually the sister of the founder that I mentioned, who was a leader of the business. I mean it was a go to sleep every night thinking about it and wake up every morning thinking about it, not thinking about it, like panicking about it. I mean there was a call every Morning to figure out how we're going to plug the…

Wow. And. And, you know, the school's open at 6am so it's like it was a. This is very, very taxing. And, and the truth of the matter is we never solved it.

They may have solved it in my, you know, after I left, I don't know, but during my tenure, we never solved it. And yeah, it was just, it became really, really taxing on all of us, truth be told. Yeah. Well, you are aware of other people in the industry, other colleagues in the industry who, who don't have the problem.