00:02:46 · Jim Belosic
[00:02:46] S1: So I... I'm trying to show people like what the path is. I hope that we're a template for how to do this. My belief is you have to figure something out, you know, a very small scale, prove it, get the customers, understand what customers want, understand what your capabilities are, scale it using profits of the company. My thinking is very, very old school. You know, I've said before, I run this company like a lemonade stand. I buy lemons for 50¢, and I sell them for $1 I take the extra 50¢ and invest in more lemons, right? So my concept of running a business is you have to be profitable from day one. Now, not everyone has, you know, a million dollars laying around to go buy equipment or whatever, neither did I, but you can get a loan on it. So, to anyone listening out there, like make sure that you have good credit, leverage credit and debt to get your business off the ground and then put your head down and grind. You know, it's yeah, we're eight years in. People are looking at us and going, oh my gosh, you're an overnight success. It's like, no, you haven't seen us get punched in the face for eight years. Now is the time for us to like really add rocket fuel and go to the next level. So the challenge that we have is we've gotten to this big scale where it's very difficult to continue bootstrapping. Like for us to in the old days to open up a new facility, you know, maybe it was like a million dollars or something like that. Now for us to open up a large facility, it's $50,000,000. And it's... I can bootstrap that, but it's on this timeline that I just... I'm very impatient for.
00:04:30 · Ty Morse
[00:04:30] S0: Yeah. I know there's also this like dynamic of you don't want to be turning away customers, but you also want to make sure that the products and services that you're providing are of the quality and standard that you care about. And so if you want a twenty four hour, forty eight hour turnaround from someone asking for a part online and then having it show up at their door, you know, you can deliver that at small scale. But then if you scale too quickly, maybe suddenly things like slip. And so how do you kind of think about making sure that the product service experience that you create scales with the company?
00:05:03 · Jim Belosic
[00:05:03] S1: That's really hard. It's it's culture. So because we've scaled, I mean, we've scaled fast by some measures, but we've scaled slow by others. We've scaled fast for, you know, a self funded or mostly self funded company. I did raise a little bit of money. Shout out to Mark and Sandy. Thank you. We we didn't take, you know, this massive amount of money right at the beginning when we had no idea what we were doing. So it forced us to go at a certain pace and build the culture, without getting too far over our skis and and falling over. So what I'm concerned about is, you know, with some money to spend, all of a sudden you go 10 x faster. Do we start hiring people 10 times faster and there's, you know, 50% of them aren't the right fit? Luckily, we have this really deep culture, already ingrained. So everyone new gets to learn from the people that have been here. They understand how we operate, what our quality standards are, how generous we are. So doing that at scale, yeah, you need about 400 people in order to like serve everyone the Kool Aid, you know, it's because we're gonna have another thousand people coming on. I couldn't I couldn't go from 10 people to a thousand. I can probably go from four or 500 to a thousand.
00:06:17 · Ty Morse
[00:06:17] S0: Even with money, you can only scale culture so fast. And I think Sam Walton, one of the things he did was he would fly to different Walmarts and basically just see if everything, you know, worked and was... Or what was amiss. He would go to the, like, distribution centers at 5AM and bring donuts and talk with the truck drivers to see... You know, get a pulse for five different stores at once. How do you kind of scale yourself while you're doing that if you can't be walking the floor every day?
00:06:42 · Jim Belosic
[00:06:42] S1: Yeah, you can't. So I I run into that every day. Just walking around this facility, I see new faces all the time. Right now as we're filming, this is C shift. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I'll come in on a Sunday and see 10 new faces. And you know, some people will be like, Hey, know, where do you work? What department do you work in? I'm like, I don't know what department I'm in. So I can't be everywhere at once. And thank God, because that's exactly how you put a ceiling on your business. If you think that you're the only guy who can go around and make sure everything's working perfectly, you'll be limited by how many hours you can be awake. Very early on, I knew that I wouldn't be able to do that. So having, you know, an incredible staff as my direct reports, They are my eyes and ears. They go around, they understand what I want. They understand the vision of the company. And I understand their vision too. Like the office of the CEO is, it's not just me as CEO, it's like five people. The CFO is five people. The president is five people. You know, everything is kind of like a group of us that are all additive. And then that way, no matter if someone's on vacation or traveling or whatever, it's basically the same answer to any question that happens across any facility. So hiring great leaders that are a culture fit, and then just doing it time and time again, that's the only way that we can do it. We spend a lot of time traveling now. Our travel budget is through the roof. We're gonna have to address that at some point. I don't know how, but especially when we start a new facility, you have to be out there for weeks at a time in a rotation with myself, with other leaders. So they understand like the background, the history of the company. They can be a really incredible operator. Maybe they came from some massive manufacturer and they're gonna run our facility, but they don't know SendCutSend. And so it takes weeks and weeks and months of us going out there, them coming out here, blending it all together. It's it's hard. It's fun, but it's hard.
00:08:43 · Ty Morse
[00:08:43] S0: Yep. I know you just raised a 110,000,000 or something like that. Yep. And I know for a very long time, you were very conscious and thoughtful about not raising money, and you had some good reasons for doing that. But at some point, I think things flipped, and there was so much demand that you just could not scale fast enough without external capital. So what kind of made that flip in your mind?