Latest / The Ground Game / Scaling a Business: Part 1

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Scaling a Business: Part 1 · The Ground Game

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Ground Game for mortgage professionals built for the flight.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hosted by Brian Lovell and Mark Mylam.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for joining us on another episode of the Ground Game Podcast.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I am Brian Lovell alongside Mr.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Mark Milam, and our goal is just to add massive value to you and your business every single week, inside and out.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're here to serve you in that capacity.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Mark, I think uh something I want to talk about with you this week is scaling of a business.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: So um we're talking about essentially the start of uh Highland Mortgage or Boxcar is the parent company that was started in this very basement you and I are sitting in right now.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I've told people I'm I'm having the time of my life um working alongside you guys and with you guys.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And my only regret is I wish I could have the I started in the basement story.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I came along, I think, about two and a half years after you guys kicked it off.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: But man, talk to me about like I want to talk about scaling of a business because this business has scaled rapidly.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, October will be six years that the company has been in business.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're gonna do roughly 1.6 billion, I think, this year is where we're kind of trending to across across all companies.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a pretty quick runway in six years.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But it also wasn't easy, and it also wasn't without bumps and or forks in the road and some strategic decisions, man.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um talk to me about what have been some of the challenges with the scale, but what's also been like some of the big learns?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh it's almost like raising kids, I think.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like the first couple of years are really hard, like challenging, right?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: They don't you don't walk out of the hospital with the owner's manual, and you know, oh, this is exactly how you're supposed to handle every situation.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And every age has its like success, like like, oh, that's behind us.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a new problem.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: A new frontier, yeah.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I it is so like that.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I have twins, and so you know, the early years were really challenging, and then as they've grown, the challenges evolve and change, and then you have this sort of momentum going, and and things become a little bit easier with every single age, but there's always always new stuff.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: The the starting out in the basement with a handful of people part is what's really necessary there is that you it's almost like you have no executives, you just have a bunch of doers, right?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: You have a bunch of people.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Which I I love that.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me too.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Very little waste.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: You were the uh receptionist, the janitor, the loan originator.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: That you were all of that.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and Rebecca was the processor/slash COO, you know, and then underwriter, closer, and funder.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And all of that is great and not at all scalable and doesn't work particularly well when all these people have to turn into delegators.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: No longer doers.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now you have to delegate.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a completely different skill set.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in fact, sometimes a very much competing skill set.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so you start to realize, well, that person is just a really great doer.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're not going to be a really great manager.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Gotcha.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it can lead to some challenging conversations because you probably started the people you started the company with the people who are closest to you, right?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: That that knew you.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they got the positions de facto because that's what they used to do.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and so that has been an interesting evolution.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um having those hard conversations while still keeping those people in the company was probably one of the most challenging things.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: But man, you know, that just takes an enormous amount of financial backing to start a mortgage company.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not like you start the mortgage company and Fannie Mae shows up at your door and says, Hey, here's your ticket.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's got to, you know, you have to get some runway beneath you, which means you have to operate without those approvals for a while.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're trying to recruit or draw in people that you've worked with to a company that doesn't have those approvals and they're accustomed to having them, that can create its own element uh too.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: So, man, the the the benefit that we had, and that I hope any company, any you know, group that wants to start a company had is that we had an expert in operations, we had an expert in capital markets, and we had an expert in sales.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: These three legs to prop up a company.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, as much as I, you know, have been locking loans and dealing with capital markets my entire career, I don't know the first thing about the B2B side of having trusted relationships that you can leverage in capital markets.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Patrick was huge with that.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the same goes for the operation side, getting creditor credit vendor side up signed up, getting uh, you know, uh LOS system up and uh operating and functioning in in a short amount of order, enormous amount of effort and energy.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then you hit sort of this first thing that it's working.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I still remember closing the first loan, you know, locking the first loan, closing the first loan.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Her last name was Mencer.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: She came back to me this past year to do an investment property purchase, and I said, Holy crap, I need to tell you that you were the first client we ever closed at our company.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: She had no idea.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: How awesome is that.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was really fun to be able to talk to her about it.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: But as the company grew and we got an office space and all that, all of a sudden all these new things start appearing that are like non-scalable solutions, you know, that you and you find yourself having to reinvent who you are.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I I think that there's um um it was actually Austin, our marketing director, that was just telling the story about as a band evolves, you start to realize all right, we we got a little bit of traction underneath us, but how do we get from having 500 people follow us to having 2,000 people follow us?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah and then from 2,000 to 10,000.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And to so how how does that happen?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it always is if you've got something, if you've got some magic, the first 500 is the hardest.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the rest it will take off.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: But if you hit a stall point, you know, in the gestation of your whatever it is that you're devoting yourself to, if you hit a stall point, that's where it's incumbent upon you to look back at this this thing that that you're invested in and go, what's wrong?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: What's not working?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we did hit that stall point um, you know, early on.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was uh some of it was we didn't have the uh the Fanny Freddy tickets that are so important to people.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So at the in this season, like about how long has the company been in business, what kind of volume?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think it was, you know, around year two.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we we came out in the middle of the pandemic, so tons of tailwinds, lots of refines, everyone we're locking everybody at two and seven eights, you know.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um here we go.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Come back, have 10 contracts, yeah.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it was one of our big Herculean efforts at that point in time was just getting warehouse lines because all the warehouse line providers are trapped, you know, they're they're completely tapped out.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And taking a chance on a startup, yeah, you know, when we got a five million warehouse line, I thought we'd landed on the moon, you know, like, oh, we can finally, you know, fund some loans.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then we had to find an investor to sell them to uh so we could clear them off the line.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that's just the fun, the fun slash anxious part of getting started.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: But then all of the scalable stuff, the um, you know, the the people who have to learn how to manage a department versus just being the department.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Being the department, yeah.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and getting, you know, coming to an agreement on different technology platforms and what's going to be automated, what's not gonna be automated.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the interesting thing is once you really start growing, once you really start taking off, if you're not super thoughtful, you can begin digging pretty deep holes that you're going to have to find your way back out of.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because the volume is there.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and we we started down that road a bit and uh with some technology platforms that didn't work particularly well that we had to back out of.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: One one was a point of sale system where we wound up having to eat about thirty thousand dollars to get out of a contract because there just wasn't enough due diligence on the front end because we were all so busy running.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: But all that to be said, like if you have those three pillars, people that you can count on, capital markets, operations, and sales, I think uh, you know, it's not for the weak, you know, it's not for the the meek, it's not for the faint of heart.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but um, you know, the that is the the place to start.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously a labor of love, right?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: For really all three of those people.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we're talking about Rebecca and and Patrick as part of that, as well as you on the sales side.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um what were like, were there any like first signs of like distress, maybe?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or were was it like you'd already mentioned like there was a euphoria of like, hey, we're doing this.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Was it always that, or were there some bumps in the road?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, the the the one reality of it is is it a growing company needs capital.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you know, simple, simply put.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you need to fund more loans and you need bigger warehouse lines, then you need to show more assets, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which means every bit of profitability that you're making, you're plowing back into the company.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can't take it out, right?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and so it became vitally important.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the reasons why I'm still in sales.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: And not only do I love it, it was necessary to stay in sales, you know, because I still have to feed feed my family while plowing the profits from the company back into the company.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it takes money to grow to start a company, but it takes even more money to grow a company.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not necessarily something that gets told to you up front.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: You almost feel like if I can just get this thing off the ground and we can start closing this much money or this much volume, I'll make this much money, and then here we go.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, no, if you want it to keep going, then you have to keep plowing the money back into it.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And and you're also growing at a pace where you need additional people to help do all of the work, is and for sure.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you know, payroll is probably one of the largest expenses that a company has, if not the largest, right?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably it can be up to 50% of your total uh revenue, right?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think, you know, interestingly enough, I think we're at a point right now where we're about to enter another stage of explosive growth.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was just having a conversation with Patrick the other day, and I'm thinking about all of the all of the hands and help that we need right now for this next stage of things that we're doing.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like obviously we're we're developing and creating our own technology.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: We need developers to help us do that.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we need another more hands in marketing, you know, we're looking for some other strategic, you know, put like all of that, by the way, costs money.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to put all of that really before you start getting the revenue.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so how did you walk through some of those decisions then?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I'm I know they're I'm not saying they're not they're not hard now, but maybe they're a little bit easier.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a lot of them were made with the three of us, um trying to trying to triage first the absolute must-haves.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then also trying to continue to to zoom out and broaden our scope on where are we going and what are we going to need six months from now, not just today.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think even today, I will say I can't look around any department at our company and go, we're overstaffed there.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're not.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: No, we we no we've almost always run a little lean on staff purposefully, um, you know, and and try to maximize what we can get out of each of those positions before we have to go in and add, you know, another human being to it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And some of this is just around two benefit costs.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: You want to have great benefits for your employees, and uh, you know, we're an aging workforce, the mortgage industry.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, nobody comes out of college and jumps right into the mortgage industry.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, their peer group is not buying homes yet, so it's hard for them to do that.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone finds their way to this industry, usually around in their 30s.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's typically when it happens, sometimes in their 40s.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you find your way into this industry.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the average age of this industry, you know, I think the average age is something like 53, 55, something like that.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, we're we're the average age, by the way.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, in this country, I never really thought about it until I was a business owner.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow the employer is responsible for medical benefits.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody told me that part of it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and really, honestly, like, and of course every company does it different, but here the employer covers the majority share uh of those benefits, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just talking medical.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're not even talking about yeah, things like um, you know, 401k and and other benefits like that.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so one of the things that you started to go down this road, we were talking about musicians, and like you you start to get some some uh some interest, some some the crowd is growing around what you're trying to do.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where like where was the volume at, so to speak, when it started to get a little bit easier?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And and I where I'm going at this is like I've long said as a as a sales coach in this business, like helping a loan officer get from start to say 12 million is a it's a lot of work.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: That LO's on the hustle, they're working harder than they ever have, they're on the grind.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: But to get from 12 to 24 million, I'm not saying it's less work, but the effort maybe isn't is dire.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have that same experience as like the company was growing?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And where was that about at?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's hard to put a uh a number on the volume for me.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: But here's how I would I would kind of translate this.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: The first one of whatever was always the hardest.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Getting the first MI company, as soon as you got the first MI company, all the rest of them sort of make this assumption, well, the first one did their due diligence, so we don't want to miss out on volume.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: So now we'll all jump in and now you have all six.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, no different than warehouse line provider.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as you get the first warehouse line provider, all of a sudden getting the second, the third, the fourth one became easier.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: No different from investors.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I even think about, you know, here in the state of Georgia, we have the Mortgage Bankers Association of Georgia.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: We have our gold awards every year where all these producers show up to this banquet and we celebrate our volume, right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you're an M MBA member, which I hope everybody is.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we show up there to that table and there's like three of us, you know, and we we barely have enough of we we have to like invite operations people to fill out the table.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: To fill the table you sponsored, yeah.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next year is a handful more.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it just it's amazing how a little bit of that success leads to a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: And now last year, I think we showed up to that thing and we had I think we had four tables.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Four tables.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think this report just came out.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're the number two lender um in the city of Atlanta for 2025 uh as an independent.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think number one was Ameris, which is a much bigger uh operation.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's been around for uh uh you know a gazillion decades, it seems like.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I I measure it that way of remembering what those early days were like and how hard it was to get the first one.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then you start to get that second one, and and everything becomes a little bit easier.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's like that first year you have those twins.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: That first year, you're just like, God, how am I gonna make it through this?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then after you get done with year one, year two incrementally, very slightly, a little bit easier, a little bit more manageable.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: You've figured out some things about yourself, you figured out some things about your kids, you figured out some things about your company, you're starting to grow it.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it what all it really takes, I think, from that point forward is if you've got the right formula of products and interest rates and support is continuing to think bigger.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how are we gonna get this thing from 1.6 billion to 2 billion or to 2.5 billion?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then maybe even asking the question, is that even the right goal?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Is the right goal even two billion?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, our one of our um CPAs for the company said something great to me at an MBA conference going back a year and a half ago.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Please don't turn into one of these companies that all they do is chase volume and it doesn't lead to any more profitability.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I I I want to kind of stop you there because um we you and I had a conversation about this not that long ago where we were talking about, you know, I think a lot of folks when they meet us, they ask where our goals are and how did we do our hair so well?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's funny thing is like we were at this table last night, and that got question got asked of me, you, and Patrick, and none of us really had a dollar sign, yeah, right, in terms of what that volume looked like.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the pivot was for you, and I loved this was I I I want to continue to have success and I want to continue to grow, and we want to be good stewards of everybody's careers.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I had a file underwritten this week that I have no idea who the underwriter was.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what that said to me without you saying it was is it was important for you as an owner of this business.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you lose touch of all of the names and the families that are associated with that, have we gone too far?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I, you know, I'm sure any owner of any company that has more than a couple hundred people could say, There's no way I I can't know everybody.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh like I once did.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's impossible.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Be willing to let go of that a little bit.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is like letting go of something that's intimate to you and it's no longer intimate.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm sure there's people who work for us who have a completely different vision of who what our company is in their head than what I have.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you try to mitigate the effects of that with things like mission statements or company culture.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's only so much so far that can go, particularly in a remote work environment.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, I think the element of it for me is we created there there was this mission statement, and I wrote it, so it's important to me to say that hey, we're here to better the lives of three entities, clients, referral partners, and employees, right?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's our mission.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's my mission.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And if we ever start doing something that's not meeting that mission, if it's not helping one of those three entities, and what are we doing?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: What are we doing exactly?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, the the money that you make is a byproduct.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's a byproduct of running a well-functioning business.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: I witnessed this at Delta when I was flying for Delta.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Delta went through this really hard time post-9-11, and they were trying to get stock price up, and they were doing things like stock buybacks.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: They would go buy their own stock back off the street in hopes that less shares of stock would drive up the value of the stock.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: What does that have to do with flying airplanes and flying people around?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: That has nothing to do with it.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing to do with it, no.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a pretty dark time for Delta.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a great period of time.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the CEO wound up leaving.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: He got this golden parachute while everybody else was getting pay cuts.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a wonderful time to be at Delta.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't the airline then that it is today.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's one of the reasons why I left um the industry.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a wonderful airline now.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it was then.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because they took their eye off of the ball of the fact that you're going to make money from doing your core thing that you do and doing it well.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And they started thinking we're going to somehow make money by driving our stock price in a certain direction and we're going to get focused on that.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: No different than what we do, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: We have to make sure we we keep our core mission central, regardless of how big we get.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I what I love about that is like I've always kind of said about myself, I sometimes I'm like, I can't believe I get paid to do this.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, like I can't believe we're going to talk about that.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: I earned well, yeah.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's a conversation after this one.