Profitable Growth Over Hypergrowth With Aaron Anker

I think it's the, You use the word sustainable in your intro, and I often say to people, sustainability is like, and I'm not the only person saying this, I don't want to sound like a wise one here, but sustainability, number one, is to have a business that sustains itself.

I mean, you can go out there and you can do all the right things.

Let's use Patagonia as an example.

I mean, they just continually seem to do the right thing.

We try to do the right thing, but If you're losing money and you can't pay your people and you're freaking out, then I'm sorry, you're not sustainable.

And again, I'm not trying to be an arrogant guy because I've had the stress of it not being that way.

And I remember we created this, this is kind of a random one, but I created this product line.

I still own it.

It's called Organic Trails.

We've got the trademark on it.

And it was this delicious trail mix, like a one and a half to two ounce package and Didn't ultimately work for a lot of reasons.

It could be its own podcast, but it was like six flavor, which was like a bad idea because, you know, you call the store and they'd be like, oh, you know, there's three or four still on shelf and

like two out of the six sold.

Right.

And you're like,

oh, but you should reorder those two.

And they're like, yeah, these other ones aren't, you know, like don't want six years.

Right.

Like that's.

um but that's my good takeaway right big takeaway on that but um i before we even started the brand i was thinking about how it could be philanthropic and we had aligned with the american hiking society and how we would give money to them to help clean the trails um and and make make our trails more uh sustainable and and um and we were talking about you know we we do what we sell on the appalachian trail and a lot of the huts and so we were like thinking about all these things we could give back and ultimately the product line didn't even succeed and it's like dude you know don't like you know i have this line i use all the time i think others use it too but it's like success is a problem i'd love to have right so like be be sustainable in your business before you start figuring out you can just like

you

know

help other organizations too,

because ultimately you need to be most subservient to your, your, your team and the business and making sure you're making, you know, making, uh, making money.

Right.