And just how do you make sense of that space of just like, hmm?

That's good.

That's a good question.

I think that's the question a lot of founders wrestle with.

And Ian, I know you'll have a lot to say about that, too, because carbon's gone through iterations, I think.

I think it does.

It does start with feeling different.

I imagine it's a very tough transition as well, just not only from a skill set standpoint, but an identity standpoint.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

No, that's hard.

And I got myself in trouble with that early on.

And when you're a smaller company and you start to pick up the pace and you find your client base and the market knows about you and you start significantly bringing in money and cash, you're not yet investing in all of the structure and the labor and the non-revenue generating roles.

you have a lot of profit leftover and so you typically you can you might set yourself a salary but there's an additional amount distributions or dividends or whatever that owners have the right to pull out and what what we find and this is what i did and we find this very commonly that their their personal lifestyle rises to the level of not only their salary but the distributions they're pulling And so then when they get in trouble and they have to stop the distributions, their personal lifestyle is already high enough where they, they need the distributions.

So what I had to do and and I figured it out a little too late.

What would you want to see in place aside from maybe the banked reserves of four to six months before they ever applied for any type of debt instrument?

Yeah.

It was, it w- we were, we were trying to grow the business, and we were, we were having s- struggles.

I was...

I had some personal struggles and some business struggles, which are [laughs] true for most entrepreneurs.

That's kinda normal.

Um, and I, I think what I, what I figured out I was doing is, and we talk about this very openly in the book, I was trying to be a lifestyle firm, which is really to have a lot more control over what I wanted to do, to do what I wanted when I wanted to do it, but my actions were all very scaling oriented.

They were very expansionary, which is what I'm like.

So over to you, Jason.

Don't worry.

I'll try to keep this short.

[laughs] Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a big deal.

When...

The reason there's...

Ian's, Ian's talking about this scaling plateau around 8 and twen- 8 to 12 people.

Um, Ian wrote about something called span of control where, uh, you can, you can probably lead about six to eight people.

Mm-hmm.