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?
00:09:07 · Jim Belosic, Ty Morse
[00:09:07] S1: In my perception, I thought I was disappointing my customers. The only way that we can control demand is by increasing lead times or raising prices or saying no, you know, put a banner on the website and it's like, sorry, like stop ordering. We we're not going to hit our deadlines. Right. That's super painful. It's incredibly expensive to the brand. Like we built our brand for years and years on speed, quality, good price, incredible service, you know? So as soon as that starts to slip, I think you can grenade the entire company. So we're like, okay, we gotta go faster. We gotta go faster. But demand was always outpacing our budget, outpacing our bank covenants. You know, we have great lending partners. People give us a loan on our machines all day long, but there's a lot of stuff that you can't get a loan on. You know, I can't get a loan on tripling the size of my software development team. You know, I can't get alone on these crazy R and D projects that we need to go and experiment with, and we don't know what the outcome is gonna be. So what I'm, what I'm happy that we did is we waited so long to say yes to taking on money that I didn't have to give away the farm. I didn't have to give away 50% [00:10:24] S0: of the business.