Sam Jacobs

And one of the great lessons that I would share with you as you're thinking about your own growth is not to invest in the future.

It's to size your bets, to size your investments so that they're proportional to your balance sheet and they're proportional to your ability to absorb them.

But what happened for Pavilion over the course of the last couple of years, really ending last year, was that we didn't really size those bets relative to our balance sheet or to our ability to absorb them.

So we built out a large, for us, large product and engineering organization, large learning organization, large sales organization, right?

And we didn't...

we didn't really have the data to tell us that we should.

And all of a sudden, we went from being extremely profitable.

And this was really, you know, I've talked about this on my podcast, Top Line.

I think it's pretty good.

So if you want to subscribe to it, you should.

But the point is, I've talked about how we took a business in 2021.

We did.

We had, I think, 30% operating margins.

Now, remember, a community business in 2021 and 2021

Not the same thing because we had no hard physical costs.

We weren't doing this.

Everything was on Zoom, very high margin on Zoom, low margin to come here, fly here, eat food, and hang out together in person even though it's much better.

really profitable immediately to burning significant capital in 2021, 2022, and 2023, right?

And all of a sudden we were in a very different posture and a very different position.

So what are the lessons that I learned?