Ryan Bartlett (76:45)
Going. Yeah. So absolutely you can. I mean, there, there's. This could be just an hour in itself. I mean, we've made every mistake under the sun. I would say that we always have to burn every department all the way down before we figured out how to rebuild it back up. So I would say most of the challenges we've had in the early days were over betting on inventory, which is like the classic mistake of every E commerce company where they just over bet and now they have all these receipts coming in that they can't fulfill because the sales aren't there, there. And so like in year two, I made a 40 million dollar inventory bet because I just, I was like, hey, we're going to the moon, guys. And we're, and we're just going to keep going. So that was right after we had hit 100 million in year two. So we did 15 million the first year and 90 the second year. So right after the second year I was feeling really confident and I was like, look guys. And I'm sitting around the table with our executives and I'm just like, let's just make a bet. What do you guys think? And this is the. So after music, by the way, just going back, I, after I kind of gave up on music, I got into poker and that took over my life for a good amount of years. And I became a, I guess what you would call a pro is really just not having a job and trying to gamble. But that really built my risk tolerance and it showed me that what, what it feels like to lose and just getting numb to that losing feeling, which in hindsight was a huge advantage in entrepreneurship because as you know, you have to go from kind of failure to failure without with no loss of enthusiasm, which is one of my favorite quotes, I think that really sums up entrepreneurship. So what I did was after, you know, doing poker for a while and also failing at that, it definitely built up my risk tolerance. And one of my other co founders, it was also a poker pro at one point, which does not help us, by the way. In business. It just really, you know, we, we had no fear. For better or worse, we had no fear. But ultimately, even though we made that $40 million bet, I think what we were telling ourselves was, even if this doesn't go well, like, let's just play out the worst case scenario. Even if it doesn't go well, what's going to happen? We're going to have to go back and renegotiate with our manufacturers, right? Like we're going to have to hold some safety stock, we're have to pay some interest, whatever it is. We just believed in our ability to negotiate with these people and level with them on a really human, human to human basis and say, look, you see us going to the moon. Do you want the business or not? I know we overbought this time, but stick with us and you'll be our preferred vendors in the future. So that was kind of our pitch to them and it worked out. All the people that stuck with us in those early years when we over bet and couldn't pay our bills on time, ended up eating it for a short term for the greater good later because they just knew that we were going to figure out a way. Plus it was like inventory that it wasn't like I was, you know, holding yellows and oranges. This was like sellable inventory. So they all like could see that. They're like, okay, this is core product, they're going to get through it. But I would say that is a very easy way to sync the business. And that has been the hardest part. It's called demand planning in our business. And we still don't even have it perfect. And we're in year five, it's still a nightmare. We run out of stuff all the time. And then I would say outside of that, now in year five, what I'm dealing with in terms of, you know, what are the biggest problems I have, it always goes back to people, you know, and I love people to a fault and I'm overly empathetic, which is why I win in business because it really works for the customer. But where it doesn't really work in business is employees. And I have had to learn to put the business first in a lot of situations. And when you move as fast as we do and You're a startup, and you're scaling fast. One of the problems with people is that when you hire a person for a role, they quickly. The business outgrows them very quickly. And when we were at 100 million, that CFO is a different level than at 500 million, right? And now we're looking back and we're going, well, where do we put this guy? Like, we. We. There's no other spot for him to go. And a lot of times we will find a spot. Like, if it's wrong person, wrong seat here today, we will try to shuffle them around and make it work, ultimately, because if they're here, they're here for the right reasons, which is they have the right DNA. They're gritty, they hold all our core values. But, you know, we really try to now look and say, you know, I got a guy who works for kitsch. Maybe you can go over there. Let me just ask him if he's looking for a cfo. Cfo, because he's doing, you know, X amount of revenue, and you're perfect for that bracket. And so it's really tough, though, because you have to have insanely hard conversations with people, and people are going through their own stuff too. You know what I mean? Like, a lot of times it's not even about work. I mean, ultimately, there's someone that doesn't work out here. It's for one of two reasons. I always tell our employees. Because a lot of employees will come to me and they'll go, why didn't it work out with so and so? And I'll have to have these hard conversations. But what I always say is, like, it's two things. It's either wrong person, wrong seat, and they're just really not qualified for that job because the business needs them to really move at an absolute 10 to make it work. We don't have the luxury of having 20 people for one job, and they can just kind of chill and let things go. Like, this isn't that environment. Like, if you're here at True Classic, you are building legacy. You're working with an insane startup, and you better be providing real value for. For the business. So if you can't live in that world, we're just not a good fit. But people know that by now. They've seen enough podcasts or they've listened to us, and they know how we roll. So it's not a big surprise anymore. But it's been really tough to watch all the OGs of true classic kind of make their way out of the business because you start with one group and you end with a completely different one.
