Brian Smith

And so finally he said, look, Brian, I have an associate.

He's a CPA.

If he can come into the business and look over your shoulder, I'll invest.

So as much as I really disliked this person when I finally met him,

My option was to keep the company alive and bring him in or refuse him and the company probably would have folded.

So I opted for the devil that I knew by bringing him in.

Chuck Kaiser, yeah.

But keep in mind that the new money dies.

did never ever want the old money in the company so that's why each iteration was a new version of the business a new a new entity was formed and i had to make a deal with the previous investors to pay them back so i i would do promissory notes to pay them back their capital with a little return right so that i could move forward with the bigger financier yeah

Yes.

In fact, it was around about that time that the owner of the UGH company came to us and said, look, we're desperate.

We're not making any money.

That had sued me, yeah.

And the woman who sued me, she'd been taken out of the business by investors.

So it was the investors now I was talking to, and they just wanted desperately to get out of it.

So we ended up doing a deal where we purchased the UGHS company.

And we maintained that factory for a couple of years.

Not a primary supply, but it did end up making significant dents into the production for us, yeah.

But again, then we had to finance the factory.

That's the year where we started to get traction in the stores, yeah.