you've done at Fireclay on employee ownership?

yeah absolutely i told a little the story about when i first met the founder here and we shook hands i was frankly more interested in ownership than i was a salary and partially at the time i didn't have a family i didn't have kids our rent was like super cheap so i could live on very little and again coming from the venture capital industry where so many of these great companies have created so much wealth for their employees through employee ownership and through stock option plans and rsus or whatever it might be part of my ethos and i always felt like if that was how i was going to be motivated then it made sense to motivate other people that same way.

And always just kind of felt like if we could focus on expanding the pie and creating more owners within that pie, that would lead to success.

So we first introduced employee ownership in 2013.

I mean, we were barely $3 million in revenue.

We certainly weren't making any money.

Company wasn't really worth very much, but it just was a philosophical belief that I had that I was able to convince the founder to embrace.

I would love to hear a little bit about that acquisition, why that's an important part of the overall business that you have now.

[laughs]

That didn't quite work out.

I had this, you know, vision that we would, you know, take this to our other showrooms down in LA and elsewhere.

Tried that.

That didn't quite work out.

You know, so, you know, plenty of failures, but, but, you know, just kept, kept hammering and, and improving technology, improving-- Starting to think about how we train people, um, how we bring technology to, to the forefront, uh, how we sell it, and that led me to realizing, okay, this is really cool, but right now this is pretty small.

We got up to about 17 people.

And you're going, "Well, you know, is it, though, complicated, really?"