Crisis, Leverage, and the Death of the Hockey Stick: Whyte CEO Nikki Hawes on Surviving the PE Cycle

So initially the Zyro was family owned when they purchased Fisher.

Okay.

But there's something that's bothering me I wanted to ask you.

So you said that there was an initial bump.

And then when you were with Fisher, there was an initial bump of growth.

And then there was a bit of a stagnation or a little bit of a crisis in the middle.

Yeah.

And then it bumped up again due to some additional.

So there was like kind of two moments there you mentioned to go from the 15 million to the 35 million.

So it wasn't all kind of milk and honey.

It was a.

It was

challenging.

Yeah.

I mean, I would describe my time at Zyra Fisher.

So from being at Fisher and then Zyra Fisher, I think it was about 12 years, but it felt like I worked for four different businesses at

that

time because of the different cycles they went through.

So, yeah, Fisher was in crisis mode in around 2012, 2013.

And you mentioned that there was a lot of investments happening that maybe were not being realized as quickly as they wanted.

So maybe they saw some growth initially, pumped more money into it.

Then maybe it wasn't quite exactly the right investments, but then you were able to right the ship a bit before the exit.

Yeah, exactly.

So then we had years of writing the ship before the exit, turning it around.

I mean, I think it did get to one point where, you know, it did run out of cash.