Russ Hawkins

We graduated from the venture world to the private equity world.

But prior to that, we raised several rounds of venture capital and put in debt also as we went along.

So the debt varied.

You know, we we paid things off and paid things down out of cash flow over time.

But, you know, probably at the at the height of it is probably only five million in in debt and about just a little short of 30 million total equity raised.

Okay.

Well, you mentioned earlier about being capital efficient.

So I'm a little bit different, I think, than some people running small startup companies in that I've always been very conservative.

I don't like to get ahead of my skis in terms of hiring.

Even though I am chasing growth, I try to keep a balance.

And I never want to be in a desperate situation where I have to raise money because I have to.

So we've tried to take a very methodical approach over time, raising money really before we need it on an incremental basis.

I made mistakes.

People do.

But lately, so the last 18 months, we had more debt.

We've leveraged up with debt because that's kind of part of the PE playbook.

And so the equity to debt ratio right now is about 60-40 in the plan, in the business.

It is.

So I pitched, uh, pitch AKKR at one point, uh, out on, out on did the, did the, you know, Silicon Valley road.

Yeah.