From Investment Banker to Mission-Driven CFO

Welcome to Second Life Leader. This show is for founders, operators, and executives rebuilding after the hit. Layoffs, burnout, failures, exits that didn't go the way they were supposed to. I'm Doug Ootberg and I've led inside the broken systems and rebuilt from collapse. I've learned what actually holds when the old playbook stops working. If you're done pretending that everything is fine and ready to rebuild with clarity, you're in the right room. All right, we have Scott Bowman with us today and he's currently with traditional medicinal which will come into play as we get into our conversation. But the point of today's or the topic of today's call is Scott's journey from mercenary to missionary. And that is because he started out as an investment banker on the East Coast and then eventually moved to the West Coast cycling through my hometown of Portland, Oregon on his way to becoming a medicinal CFO. But I don't want to skip to the end. Scott, talk us through a little bit of your background and kind of how this transition came about. Well, first of all, Doug, thanks for having me on your show. I'm super excited to talk to you today. You know, my between my first and second year of business school I started working with Ernst & Young in their corporate finance group, which was their investment banking unit. And I stayed on there through the second year of business school with Emory in Atlanta. And after I graduated from business school, the group that was the corporate finance group at Ernst & Young moved over to start the investment bank at Wacovia Bank in Atlanta, which then became first you didn't know how banks get acquired. But starting from there, I worked for about 15 years in investment banking with mostly mid-sized companies. And I was doing right, whole right side of the balance sheet recapitalization raising capital, M&A work, financial advisory in terms of like we had some public companies that we would help out with their messaging and their communications to the market. But it was really, it was fascinating because I got to learn a lot about a lot of different companies. But it really was a mercenary approach to a career. It was very much because it was middle market. It was very much kill what you eat. I'm sorry, eat what you kill. You got to get it in the right order for sure. And you know, it starts to, you start to wonder as you're on your third country of the month and away from your family and chasing the next, where the next dollar and the next deal is coming from. Isn't there something more to this? Obviously, you know, if you're good at it, which our team was good at it, you can make a fair amount of money and be successful. You're doing a lot of traveling, which when I was traveling through airports, people would say, "Oh, that must be so glamorous to travel this much, to all these places for work." And you just think to yourself, you know, some mornings I wake up and I'm, you know, I have to call somebody to find out where I am, right? You're just traveling so much that you just lose track of all of it and you're not enjoying any of it. Well, look, one of the things that I thought about traveling is like, for example, you know, say you're going to Pining, Malaysia, because until I had a site in Pining, it is super cool to go to Pining the first time. And a lot of times it is super cool to see new places, you know, the first, second, maybe third time. You know, after a while, especially if you're there for work, the inside of a conference room looks pretty similar like everywhere across the globe. The inside of the airport looks exactly the same everywhere across the globe. Absolutely. And I'm a food person. So one of the things that I always enjoyed going to new places were that, you know, I'd go out to eat with clients and experience different cuisines. But what I found is that's also fun for the first two or three days. Yeah. When you're in India in Hyderabad, they will feed you the same Briani dish because every restaurant that you go to will say this is the best Briani in the area. And so I had Briani literally three meals a day for about a week in India. Until my body just was like, no more please. And I had watermelon for the next week. That was about how I could deal with it. Yeah. My first trip to India, I made a critical, critical error. Because like everybody said, be careful about the water. And I was like, hey, I'm staying in a high region. So their waters probably filtered or actually, no, what I did was I avoided the water in my room, but they had like cucumber water at breakfast. And I'm like, well, okay, they must use filtered water for this. No, yeah, by about day three, I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, by day two, I think it peaked at day three, too. But yeah, by day two, I was getting sick. And by day three, I was just in bad shape. I think I was able to stabilize by the time we were going home. But yeah, they I got razz over that for years. Yeah. And it's never the when you're when you're working, it's never the this was awesome stories that wasn't funny how that sounds. This was a nightmare. And I never want to do it again. And people are like, yes, tell me that story. Yeah. Well, so yeah, in my case, I think it was. So the vendors, they they had they were taking us in. We are getting off topic, but that's fine. But yeah, so the vendors they were taking it took us out to this really nice restaurant that was in an old British fort. And we were having drinks before dinner. And like it just started gurgling up. And I puked off the balcony. Like, you know, they had like the, you know, the wine and whiskey benches that I just I just project dial vomited right off that balcony. I'm like, oh my god, it's like, you know, because like I was literally making effort to try to not get anything on the port. Because it was it was such a nice building. So this is historical. It doesn't need my vomit all of the exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The plants it'll buy a degree. But yeah, this is historical ability. It does need my vomit on it. But okay. So yeah. So we're going. Yeah. Investment banking life. You're like, you know, jet, you know, jet setting, but not in the cool way. Yeah. And, and you know, ultimately you realize like I can go and and, you know, make money and then spend that money, obviously. And just kind of keep repeating the cycle and then try to make it up to my family when I get home, right? They don't see dad and, you know, dad works 12 hour days for the most part, lots of weekends, travels for months at a time. And it just, you know, after a while, it just, it just wears you out. And, you know, my my wife at the time, my ex-wife now, was was amazing about like, you know, trying to, trying to make me less of sort of this workaholic to try to influence me to be sort of better. I never, I never really got better to the point where she sent me, she said, where, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to learn how to serve. So she sent me to Nick Aragua by myself for like 10 days to learn how to serve just to get me out of, you know, this regular sort of thing, which was amazing. We finally ended up moving to to Portland. And the, the idea they are almost immediately was I was, yeah, right. I was looking for some nonprofit work. I wanted to do something that kind of cleansed my palate of the best banking experience. And a buddy of mine called me and had seen on Craigslist of all places, Craigslist, an ad for Dave's Killer Bread. They wanted the CFO and they were, they were hiring on Craigslist. And that's where Dave's Killer Bread was. Yeah, that is so, it's kind of funny. It is so, because you're telling me the error because you know, this is back before, before, you know, back when Craigslist was not just crypto scams and serial killers. But yeah, the Dave's Killer Bread putting a CFO ad on Craigslist, that's kind of classic. And that's where they were at the time. They were a family bakery, about $20 million. They just kind of, the bakery had been around for a while. Actually, Dave and his brother Glenn, who ran the company, their father had started the bakery and then turned it over to Glenn and Dave created this bread that was seeded all the way through and all the way around, right? If you've had Dave's Killer Bread, you know, how like, it's actually at the time, 2010, 2009, 2010, like how almost revolutionary that was in bread. And so I went to work there and there, there are two sort of highlight and mission, if you can call them that, their slogan was making the world a better place, one loaf of bread at the time, which even at the time sounded cliche and trite, but it actually was something that the company cared about. And it was something that could stop a meeting if someone said, hey, it's this actually going to make the world a better place, right? Is this, you know, we believe that bread made the world a better place. It's good for you. It's less preservative, it's organic, it's, you know, tasty, but the other things that you do when you're in a bread company, you build a little plastic trucks and you leave them and leave behinds for customers and like we didn't do any of that, right? Because it just got shut down. The second thing that Dave's really inspired me is they were all about human sustainability. They still are. They hot because Dave Dahl, who was the founder of the the brand at least. I'd been in prison for like 17, on and off for 17 years. - Okay, I was gonna say, I didn't know how long, but I think like the Cliff Notes version of the story that I'd heard was, yeah, was it David done time? And then, you know, that kind of Dave's killer bread was kind of like his, you know, his resurrection story or his reinvention story. - Yeah, I'll tell you this. The reason I went to work there, - Oh, this is about, the story's about to get interesting. - Well, the reason that I work with, I went there and decided to work with them was not because of David, it was because of Glenn. - Glenn was Dave's brother and Dave had been in trouble on and off almost his entire life because of untreated mental issues, right? - Yeah. - Untreated disease. And his brother kept giving him chance. Every time he came out of jail, he would give Dave a job and Dave would steal to buy drugs from family. He would do everything. And every time Glenn would give him another chance, and the last time Glenn gave him a chance, was the time that he came up with Dave's killer bread, which took that company from being about $4 million with the historical brand, which was called Major Bake, that one's ever heard of. Two, I mean, when I left, it was almost $250 million and getting acquired, you know? - And so, right. And so, - Yeah, so what that says is that, okay, maybe a few extra second chances can fit you out. Sometimes it pays off. - Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you know, obviously, there are challenges in small family owned companies. And there are personality challenges when there's multiple members and multiple generations and a family trying to run the business. And Dave, even with his mental issues under control, could be, you know, difficult, right? But the mission held up. We gave so many people, and I saw so many people, especially in the bakery, come out of prison for non-violent offenses and be given a chance to work hard. And sometimes it didn't work out, but so much more of the time, it worked out. And those people, the appreciation that they had for the family and the company, even when they would move on to do different, bigger, and better things, they know that that is the kind of place to give them a chance that, and again, before the ban the box movement, which Dave's Killer Bread was a big instigator of, you know, that was-- - So, you were getting a second-- - I apparently am not as cool as they try to pretend. I'm not at the speed on what that means. - So then the box is not illegal, but sort of a cultural movement. There's a check box on most applications about whether you've ever been convicted of a, of a cell phone, right, or a misdemeanor, or just different things on that. And so, there's a big push to get out of that. Obviously, you have to be careful when there's violence, when there's certain types, but for drug related, and those types of offenses, nonviolent offenses, we have found that if you give them another chance, there's a good chance they'll stay out of jail. If you give nobody gives them a second chance, they have no other option. - Well, I mean, and again, I'm not going on a bit of a tangent, but I think it's relevant here, which is that it's like, it is really hard to reintegrate when you're coming out of prison. It's hard to make it just like, period. - Right. - It's like, life is hard, period. Now, put it on like, okay, you've been out of the job market for an amount of time. Even if the box isn't there, most likely you have a gap in your resume that you will have to explain. So that means either you have to tell people you were in prison if they ask, or you have to lie, which can come back here, which might have to bite you in another way, probably come back to bite you even worse. And so, yeah, so getting back going again is not a small feat. - Yeah, and it was the person who ended up running our bakery was an ex-common. Like he ran the entire bakery and he works for Dave. He had worked there for five or six years before I got there. He was 10 years when I left, and it's probably 20 years now. It's just amazing because not only are you giving people a chance to have a job, you're giving them a chance to move up, you're giving them a chance to manage other people, you're treating them like another employee, not just somebody who can, we'll let them push a broom because they've been in prison. Right? It's full respect of the employee base, full respect of the company once you come in those doors. And it really gave me a sense of, I wanna work at a company that is about something bigger than itself. And that is looking to do some good in the world and not just do that, but provide an example for other companies that you can do well at business. You can be profitable, you can pay your employees well, you can pay your executives well, you can give your shareholders a reasonable return. - Reasonable returns, yeah. - Right? And still pursue a mission that is about something other than the company staying and getting bigger and becoming, you know. - Well, which because like the, and now I don't know that I'm, I don't know that I am qualified nor whether this line of thought is gonna get into practical, here is gonna get into a practical solution. But like, I think about like private equity, right? Because like the, the whole thing with private equity was that, you know, was it, there are, you know, basically there are non-public option investment options that can theoretically provide, higher, you know, can provide higher than market returns for investors due to the lack of liquidity. So you put money into private equity funds, they can go out, find these things, well, so then what the PE funds do is they start doing roll ups, they start doing hyper consolidation. And but then, you know, they start squeezing these businesses to where, you know, they either get loaded up with debt and some of them fail or they start, you know, like raising prices and then squeezing customers. And so, but now what's happened is like private equity returns have gotten to where they're like, lower than market returns. And I'm like, okay, well, I can't imagine how they're gonna raise more capital if their track record is, is trailing the market. Because like they're like, okay, here, I'm gonna give you something that has liquidity gates that doesn't bring you, that is going to produce distributions that, you know, that it's illiquid, produces distributions within IRR that is less than the SMP 500. All right, formal line right over here. (laughing) Well, and I think a lot of companies are looking a lot harder at who gives them money. There have been a couple of downturns recently, the most recent, probably three years ago that, well, I mean, COVID, obviously, but even after COVID, there was another, when Russia went to war at first, with Ukraine, right, there's all this upheaval. And venture capital firms as well that had been pushing their customers, like don't worry about profitability, go get revenue, go get eyeballs, go get customers. It's all about customer acquisition. - Yeah, that's fine, right about that time. - 100%, and then you start, you know, you call to get your next tranche of capital, and all of a sudden, well, we're digging in, we're only reinvesting in companies that have positive cash flow. And you're just like, you spent two years telling me that wasn't important, and then one day it is, and now I'm out of business, right? Or I have to go get some sort of vulture capital that is going to be painfully expensive, and is going to cram everybody down. But once those VCs, you know, once they turn their back on you, it's tough to get them to turn around and come back. - Well, yeah, you know, and this is the reason why getting a burger from Grubhub costs $50 now. - Right, right. - Right. - So I'm currently a traditional medicinal, and we're the second largest tea company in the world. And while we're talking about investors, I have very patient capital. In some cases, maybe a little bit too patient. When I came into traditional medicinal, there wasn't a huge push by the board. There wasn't a huge push by the investors to generate a lot of profit, enough profit, to apply it back into the business, you know, really, really grow the business. And when I got there, what I quickly realized is one, we're capacity constrained because we had one facility, one production facility in California, and it was full, and we couldn't get any more out of it. And two, we couldn't afford to build another building without equity because we weren't profitable enough. - That's a bind. - Yeah. - That's a bind. So what we did is we went to the company and talked to them about what it meant, not just to ownership and the executives, but what it meant to our mission, to be able to build a second factory, to be able to buy more herbs from producers in Eastern Europe, to contribute more to communities in areas where we buy herbs, and to make sure that there is continuity, right? So many wild collection, so many communities that do wild collection, those children, the children of those people doing the wild collection now don't wanna do that, right? That's not about money, it's not exciting. So working with those communities to like pitch an agricultural life that is meaningful, that makes sense to a younger generation as something we're starting to work on as well. And the company's been working on it for quite some time. So we have shareholders that are patient and our viewers. You know, they get a dividend. It's pretty small for where we are. But what they haven't done is push the organization to be profitable, right? So we came in and said, we wanna do more of what we're doing. And to do that, it's gonna take us increasing profits. And over the course of two years, we tripled EBITDA. We went from about seven to over 20. And that was, I mean, there's growth in the business. You know, we squeezed every bit of productivity. We put out of the plant, the plant responded because the people there knew what we were fighting for. And fighting for a new factory in, you know, a business doesn't seem like something that a whole company would get behind. But we have been showing videos, a live video with every staff meeting showing the plant going up 2,000 miles away. We talk about hiring. And it has just been such an engaged company and staff with what, you know, the biggest thing we're trying to accomplish over the course of a couple of years, which is build our second plant 2,000 miles away from our own base. - Well, I like that, especially because like the, I feel like there is a, you know, I, I don't wanna say middle way because that's, that's trading into, that's trading into, into trademark Buddhist territory. - Yeah, that was a good place. - trademark, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was this guy, I don't know, about 2,500 years ago who talked about that, you know, around a Bodhi tree. But like I'm, it's like, you know, on the one hand, you can have, be like, okay, you know, profit is all that matters. That's your, you know, VCP, then you can be like, okay, well, profit doesn't matter at all. But like you said, well, you know, even if you are not like profit first, you know, profit, you're profitable also means sustainable, you know, and so, you know, because like what profitable really says is, okay, can you offset your cost of capital so you can't continue making the investments necessary to grow because like you said, if you have one factory and it's at capacity and you wanna grow, but you don't have the numbers to support an equity round or a, or a debt round to be able to finance another factory, you're kind of stuck. - For sure. - So I think that's a, I think it's that, you know, like even with the most altruistic and people forward version of, you know, of corporate governance, there is still an extremely important place for profitability and it doesn't have to be mercenary at all. - No, it is certainly about taking those profits and you know, what we would consider maybe it excess profits, right, profits, everybody there, you know, go to a war chest within the business or go towards shareholders via dividend, taking that money and spreading it a little bit more around all the stakeholders rather than just focusing on the shareholders, right? I keep telling, you know, my, the company, like our shareholders aren't trying to win capitalism, right? They're just, they want us to do good more than they want another, you know, another couple, 10 feet on their got or whatever, right? - Yeah, well, yeah. - It's funny, you're like you're talking about try to win capitalism because it's funny how that, that seems to be the thing when it's like, you know, again, this is a part of my like, you know, midlife, midlife reinvention, so to speak, is, you know, I've, I've come to this with this, you know, at some point I'm gonna die and then like, however much crap I have really isn't going to matter. - Right. - So it's like, you know, the point isn't to become a full tilt nihilist, but it's like, don't take it too seriously either. Yeah, you need to be able to pay to live and ideally, you should be able to do a little bit of good, but like, you know, the, the chips all get pushed back in the middle of the table at the end. - For sure, and all, and you know, not just the money, but all the things that go into doing things you hate for money, like that's your, that's your life, right? That's everything it is. So when, you know, when we're sitting in a meeting and things get too stressed, they're traditional, but this one, we can say, like, hey, this is important, but ultimately it's just tea, right? We're gonna get tea in people's, in people's cups, you know, we're not making medical devices, we're not, you know, we're not having to make insulin, we make a great quality product that does a lot of wonderful things. - Only you were doing something socially valuable, like sports gambling. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, and it just, to me, I can, it's not about going to sleep. I just feel better working with people that aren't just trying to build a resume to go do something where they can make more money. - Yeah. - You know? - Yeah, I mean, and let's see, cause, cause I kind of would explore the nuance here, because it's like, there's not, I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with wanting to make a good amount of money. I think the, I guess the thing that I think is that, it's like there's, I think there are, I think there are value creating ways to make money, and there are extractive ways to make money, and typically the extractive ways to make money are where like these cartoonishly huge amounts come from. It's like, you know, like, like, you know, all the internet bros who like, you know, all of a sudden went from like, you know, a thousand bucks to like their mansion in four years. - Yeah, they're running scams. - Right. - It's like you, the fastest way to make a lot of money is to steal it. It may not be directly, but you know, the fastest way to make money is to steal, a whole lot of money is to steal it. And so. - You may not, you're not impressed by 15 agentech AI, outreach messages in your LinkedIn ever. - Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a part of me that feels like that, that there's gonna be countermeasures that are, you know, that are gonna shut that thing down. What was it like? Was it like, I think, I think, what was it? Like I think I was scrolling Instagram. And, you know, like, you, you, now you see these things where it's like, you see these ads where people are saying that you know, to do like an AI only fans. And I'm like, isn't that against the terms? So I put it into GPT and they're like, yes, it is. It gets the terms. These are most likely scams. And I'm like, and yet meta is perfectly happy to take their money. - Oh yeah. - I mean, that's a thing. Meta is perfectly happy to take their money. Right, that's the difference. They are perfectly happy to take money from people who are scamming, right? And then, you know, I'm not. - Yeah, exactly. That's what I think too. Yeah, it's like the, you know, I think there's a, you know, I suppose maybe a part of this is the, the a little bit of a curse of being at least mildly intelligent is that, you know, you can, you can unwrap the onion and figure out whether what you're doing is scamming people. - Right. - No, I, I believe that the, the, the product that we put out is like a hugely successful and valuable product, but I also believe, I think our chief marketing officer said the text that said she was in India visiting some of the communities that we work with and she said that the most important thing we produce is change, right? So when you can take that, that was right. You know, you get that in the text and you're like, okay, but then you really think about it. You're like that's something. Um, you know, you were, you were, you were saying yes, but our EBITDA was to it was 14 basic points below guidance. Yeah. Um, I was actually, we've, uh, we've over performed the last few years. I haven't developed a ton of bad news where I am right now. But it is, uh, I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, man, man, that's like the, um, what was you know, that, that, that's like the quarterback who gets, gets picked in the, in the fifth round, uh, like the starter goes down and you know, you're, you're playing for like a top level talent team. It's like, you know, the, like, man, you know, you don't even have to do the hard part of it quite yet. Right. Right. And the bad news is always the hard part. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah. For sure. And I haven't, we haven't had to deliver a lot of bad news. But even then, right. If you believe in the mission, if you believe in the vision of the company, if you believe in what the company is doing, not just from a, you know, great pro, I mean, that's enough, right. Sometimes a great product, something that's really valuable to people. But also taking some of that, some of, you know, our winnings, right. And plowing it back into the communities that, that serve us and digging wells and communities so women don't have to walk three hours to go get water. Right. It's just simple things like that. Not only, you know, drive our mission forward, but it's critical to us from our supply chain stand. Right. If we want to continue to source, um, herbs and, uh, flowers and all the ingredients in our tea, we have to take care of the places that produce those. Well, and, and like, you know, you're also, and I'm going to finish kind of where I was going before we went on a tangent, but like, um, my thought is that I think there is nothing. I think it is very lozable to do very well by producing a lot of value. I think it is bordering on or bordering or outright despicable to make a lot of money through by extraction because, right. I think a, there's the ethical part. And then b, I'm just like, okay, well, any moron who has money and power can exploit people. There's no artistic creativity there. You know, it's like it takes intelligence and creativity to create a product or service that create that, you know, generates legitimate value above and beyond what's existing in the market today to where it is meat it, you know, meets with meaningful financial success. And you know, that is, that is literally art because it is hard to do. Um, but anyway, kind of where I was getting with it. Yeah, if that was my preamble to kind of comment with, with medicinals because I'm thinking, you know, since you are having like wild gathered tea, right. that you're just going to put on an industrial farm and have like you know to you. 500 acres and be like, okay, I want you to just plow the exact same tea plants in here for, you know, every season every year, you know, you're, you can, you are a premium product, which is, you know, wild gatherer, which I'm sure that is, that's probably supply chain craziness because you have inconsistent yield, you have inconsistent deliveries, all kinds of stuff. But like you said, you know, it is, you know, it is a means where you can help people who are at probably, in a lot of cases, toward the bottom rung, kind of take a step up. Yeah, I mean, we, we, not all of our herbs and botanicals are, are wild gathered, but the ones that are, you know, we have to project those community, right? Because if that land gets damaged, if people start using that land for other purposes or, you know, industrial, whatever that is, then it affects our supply chain, and it could affect those communities that we've been in for, you know, in some cases, 20, 30 years, that we've been working with those communities. But you're, you're right. And most people think when they think extruded industries, they think, you know, minerals, mining, those sort of things, oil and gas. But, you know, the whole dust bowl, the whole grapes of wrath is because agriculture done wrong is also extremely, extractive. And it leaves the land barren. And even if you pump petroleum-based fertilizers and those sort of things back into it, it's never, it's never the same. And that's, that's what sort of industrial agriculture has, has done in a lot of cases. I think we're learning more and more about it, but it doesn't take much to backslide when the government decides that's not something that they care about anymore is regulation around pollution and, um, extricative practices, coal. You know, all those things, right? Like, you know, it's, it's a little bit dicey for people who understand that you can't just continue to pull things out of the earth and not, not replace it with anything, not care about it. Yeah. Well, it's, so like, I have this, it started out as a joke. It's, I don't know, I think it's, it's kind of become an apocryphal, a thoughtful thing. But my old joke was that, you know, when people had asked me, "K, well, well, you know, what's money?" And I said, "Well, money is an accounting entry. It's an accounting entry that supposedly says how much control you have over resources, but the same resources are being extracted and turned into waste for the purpose of generating more accounting entries." So yeah. So the question is, "Okay, well, people say, well, well, okay, well, they're doing all this to make money. That's literally just an accounting entry. That's all it is. It's an accounting entry. We all believe. Now, if people stop believing it, that's, that's when things unravel, but it's an accounting entry. We all believe, but that is literally all it is. Yeah. And when, you know, you're, uh, your dollar is back by the full faith and credit of the US government, and the US government starts to, you know, the social fabric starts to unravel a little bit, you know, then you start to worry about what what money really is. Yeah, exactly. And it becomes, it becomes a sport, right? It is, I mean, we see it all over the place. It is, it is purely a, uh, money becomes a purely a way to keep score. And I think people that do that, people are missing something. I think you really miss something. If, um, uh, an important part of life, if you're not doing something outside of yourself, right? If you're not doing something, just because it's, just because it's the right, right thing to do, right? And working for a company that provides us those opportunities and your very work feeds back into the system. We tell those stories internally and externally about, you know, not just we sold another box of tea today, but we worked within a community to make sure that the lives of the people in my community were better somehow, right? That's a powerful story to tell that a company that's been around for 50 years and, you know, is experienced by most people with hot water and in the cup and that sort of thing is doing things all over the world, um, to protect what's being done there. Yeah. Well, and I think the one of the things that I like about kind of the way the mission is being executed is that it's, um, I think of it in almost like a first principles way. So like for like, you know, my background is in, you know, finance data systems, you know, and like I am very fond of saying that like the biggest improvement in any company is when you go from total chaos to not that bad. A lot of people think if we go from pretty good to amazing, but that that that's not the difference isn't that big. No, it's yeah, but yeah, but the difference between total chaos and not that bad is immense. And and it's really that is really a factor of size, right? Like yeah, traditional medicinal said been around for 50 years, but I would say the total chaos, uh, period did not end, you know, well, into those 50 years for sure, but you know, you get into 50, 100 million dollars and you realize, I mean, if I just make it a little bit better or not so bad, instead of breaking even, I'm making, you know, 10% EBITDA, right? Or I think you know, profitable and I'm sustainable. The difference between 10% EBITDA is worlds. Yeah, the difference between good and great is almost always captured by people who are involved. Yeah, right? The value created there is almost almost always captured by that investor class, by that shareholder class. Yeah. And they aren't involved in the day-to-day business. Yeah. They have been given money by people who've always had money. And, you know, to make more money of it, right? Yeah. Um, well, and because, but then like the the knock-on thought that I had was that, you know, because like you were talking about, say, the people who were either doing gathering or you have growers and things like that, which is that, you know, I think the people talk about you know, how do you improve people's life? Well, if you assume that you're a citizen of the world as opposed to, you know, America and, you know, or whoever your country is, assuming that you care about humanity in general. And, you know, and, you know, now I'm also a believer, I think that the, I think that can be the great virtue of capitalism is that it can, it can help people in a sustainable way. So if you can have an economically viable way for people who are very destitute to get to sustainability, even if it is not what they or you would consider affluence. Again, that, I think that is the, that is the global poverty version of total chaos and not that bad. Um, and, but for their life, it's, you know, getting to at least able to make it is a huge difference. For sure. I mean, I look, capitalism has pulled more people out of starvation, poverty, poverty, then any other, any other economic system for sure. However, right, you start to see where it starts to push people back down into poverty because it becomes again, again, when you have one, when you have, you know, one tenth of one percent of the population owning half the resources, right, or half the wealth, which, you know, is measured in resources or measured in resource gaining. Which is measured in, you know, in accounting entries that, yeah, that's not a, that's not a win for capitalism. That's a horrible horrible, that looks, starts to look like communism, right? That starts to look like a polar bureau or polar, yeah, or oligarchs. Yeah. Well, and so it's, it's interesting because, so like, you know, as a, as a, an econ nerd. Um, so Adam Smith, when he, before he wrote wealth of nations, he wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments and, but, and it was, that, that was all about human to human morality. And his assumption when he wrote wealth of nations because he was in an academic, that anybody who bothered to read wealth of nations would have also read The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And the other thing that I've taken a lot of people, it's because it was, it's really subtle. You have to know the history to be able to read between the lines here, but the dominant economic force in Britain at the time, also nations was written was the East India trading company, which is basically the, the, the, the, which is the extractive hyper, you know, the extractive super monopoly of extractive super monopolies. I think it had like a standing army that was bigger than like any country in Europe at the time. And it used that, you know, basically to terrorize colonists in order to be able to extract labor and materials. For sure. But the, you know, a big part of what wealth of nations was written about was a alternate superior system to a government, you know, basically a government backed extractive super monopoly. You know, now it's an indirectly government backed super monopoly, but I feel like we're in the same kind of thing. It's just sort of come full circle. Yeah, so is that what you would call PG&E is a super monopoly? Yeah. Well, Pacific National Electric, not like that. Pacific National Electric, yeah. Like up here, up here PG is Portland General Electric, PG&E is a Pacific National Lip Electric. Yeah. I've always, I've always been fascinated by these, you know, by these privatized utilities because like, because I'm like, okay, well, because like, you know, my sister worked for a county public utilities. Yeah. And yeah, I part of me is thinking I kind of feel like utilities should sort of be public. I mean, yeah, could you theoretically do things more efficiently, privately, maybe, but, you know, is that more than offset by by the value extraction from a municipal monopoly that goes to shareholders. Yeah, I think usually. - Yeah. It's pretty extractive for sure. - Yeah. All right, well, hey, it's got. Man, this has been so much fun. - Yeah, it's been great. - Yeah, I've had a great time. - I've had a ton of fun. I think we're probably pretty close to time and I wanna give you the rest of you being back. - I appreciate that. - Give us your last few thoughts. And, yeah, I mean, I'm gonna put your LinkedIn in the bio. I don't think you have anything you're selling. I mean, unless you've got a bone out or something like that. - Well, Boston T, buy some of our tea. It's amazing. It's not only like very good for you in the herbs and everything, or especially selected by people who are like experts in it, but it tastes amazing. And I don't know if we talk about the taste so much because what we're trying to do is a little bit different. But maybe if you haven't had a glass of a cup of our peppermint tea and you like peppermint tea, you should try. - Okay. - Well, I mean, the ones that I would say-- - The ones that I would say as soon as we're done. - For sure, last thing I would say is that, you know, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the profit motive, right? And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to make more and more money and better your life. The issue that I think is, the thing that I think is missing when you focus so much on that is that piece where you're doing something for others, right? And there are people in the world that can't do things for others because they're so busy doing things for themselves. But when you get to my level, our level, you know, even before that within an organization, you can start to think about that. And you can start to think about the way your company, the way the place where you work 40 hours a week or more in a lot of cases, the way it shows up in the world, right? That not just, hey, people like us, 'cause we're profitable and make a lot of money, but also, is there something behind that? Is there some sort of approach to the world, approach to making the world better? That makes sense to you, that speaks to you, that you can really get behind. And your day becomes more than just about getting stuff done. It becomes about sometimes can read really about, hey, there's something bigger here in my work than just an Excel spreadsheet or another email. It is these people all over the world that are counting on us to buy their herbs and support their community. And when you remember that in the midst of a frantic day or, you know, when you're worried about quarterly earnings, that sort of thing, when you remember that there's something larger out there, it just takes some of the heat off of that, some of the pressure off that and makes you realize there's other stuff going on too. - Yeah, outstanding. Well, hey, Scott, I appreciate it, man, I have a lot of fun. - I get up to Portland every now and then, I'll go get a cup of coffee or something. - Sounds great. I'm looking forward to it. - Yeah. - Have a great one. - You too. - If today's discussion resonated and you're feeling friction inside your finance architecture, I've put together a short executive briefing at secondlifeliter.com. It breaks down why enterprise finance feels blind. And why fast growing companies outgrow their systems before they realize it. If you're a CFO, VP of Finance, or a founder scaling a complex operation, you can schedule a 30 minute assessment directly from that page. No pitch, no theater, just clarity about what's slowing you down and what to fix first. That's secondlifeliter.com. I'm looking forward to talking with you.