Kevin Tawil

We probably did that for six months.

And then we handed that off to our new CFO, who we hired a little bit later.

Jim and I were both happy to do it just so we understood the business.

As we got to know the managers, we learned in business school, it's good to delegate.

We attempted to do so.

We quickly found that that didn't work very well.

So we were trying to manage by objectives, set up objectives and scorecard and we'll measure against it over time.

Yeah, that didn't work.

What the team that the seller built was used to was executing orders.

The seller would tell the specific leaders what to do, and they would go do it.

But once they were done, that was it.

They didn't know what to do then.

So the idea of setting goals, empowering them to achieve those goals, and having scorecards and managing them along the way,

That quickly led us to realizing that the team that was there was not going to be the team that was going to be with us.

Certainly not the medium term and not the near term as well.

I think within a year, most of the team, if not all the team, was entirely replaced.

What do you remember about the first year?

Jim and I, we saw this engine that was growing rapidly.

And we had this sense that, okay, land grab may be not exactly the right term, but it was a sense of once we got in and realized, oh, this is big and growing, we knew that we wanted to spend most of our time on the revenue side.

So Jim and I, to the extent we have 200% of our time, 100 each, we probably allocated about 150% of the 200 to revenue growth.