AA96 - Stages of Company Decline, or When Companies Hate Their Customers

This podcast is grinding right up against our working agreement of never mentioning company names or people's names yeah. We'll do our best to protect the innocent. That's right. Or the guilty. I don't know what the real title of this podcast is gonna be but the subtitle of the podcast is How to Destroy a Company by Secretly or, or Blatantly, blatantly hating Your Customers, how to Destroy a Company by hating your Customers I'm sure everybody knows the company that fits under that bill. I wanted to start off with, from the Jim Collins book, how the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins gives five stages of company decline, and I want to run through them now just as a framework for, this podcast, what we're talking about. So just very quickly, I'm just gonna read the stages without any context so stage one, Is characterized by hubris, born of success. Stage two is marked by undisciplined pursuit of more. Stage three is the peak of ascendancy and characterized by denial of risk and peril. It's the the highest point. Yeah. That you'll ever, yeah. Stage four begins a precipitous decline with the organization grasping for salvation. He, he's, he's a little bit, a little wordy. With flowery. Yeah. A little flower in his language. Does he get paid by word? Stage five is the final capitulation to being irrelevant or accepting death. Those are the five stages of the company decline. and, , in order to better illustrate, these stages as we talk through them, I will give a purely hypothetical example of a company, , a completely hypothetical situation. Pulled from the headlines., any resemblance? The actual company is unintended and fictitious. That's right. And should be disregarded by everyone. I'm gonna start this example with our gaming company, the Lizards and Wizards llc Gaming Company. Cool. Right? Fantastic company. It is. We make a product line called Monsters and Mayhem. It's a game. have. Yeah. Been that for hours on hand. You can. And our, so the Lizards and Wizards, LLC that, that we own, we own this company and we, we, we have sold this company. We do this occasionally. We, we sell our companies I don't know why we do this, but that's what we do. We have sold our. To a larger company of Evil Toys Incorporated and Evil Toys Incorporated. Now, The Lizards and Wizards LLC and all of its products and product lines. Yeah. I can't remember if it was a hostile takeover or, or not, but they, they own it now. Oh, it doesn't really matter. I mean, we, we cashed out, so that's what I said I think in one of our previous podcast examples, like what we cashed out and then I took my money and left. And you tried to stay with the company and, and keep the ship floating or something? I'm stupid. Yeah, yeah, yeah.. Okay. So what happens is Evil Toys Inc. Takes over Lizards and Wizards LLC and all our properties. For the first couple of years, evil Toys Inc. Is very happy with Lizards and Wizards, llc, as they bring money in with a new streams of revenue that this, this very old school Evil Toys Inc. The majority of their products You have to go out and manufacture and then sell to stores so they can put on their shelves and stuff like that. They don't really have a product that is like a recurring stream of revenue like this, so they're very. With their new stream of revenue for a couple years, the owners of Lizards and Wizard's, LLC, who have stuck around and stayed with the company from the buyout, they understand that having a strong community, since their products are very niche in the market, they only, they only have the Monsters and Mayhem product line, which is a, a game that people play. And sometimes they'll license that product out for people to make video games off of their main product. but that's their main product. Right? Right. So they know that should that niche community cease to grow, there will no longer be a market for their product. So basically they, they are creating and expanding the market for their product. So they are creating the product market fit. That they're then turning around and selling to. So the executives at Lizards and Wizards LLC understand that and they're full speed ahead with community building. In pursuit of that, they've created a license. They've called the open publishing license, and then the open Publishing license. they have allowed third party creators, independent creators, people around the community to create and publish content for their system. Mm-hmm., because the people running the company know that, like the company's only a certain size. So there's, there's some things that are like not worth their size, and there's some things the community would accept, but there's not, there's not enough of them for the company to put their, just like any other product, right? Sure, you can develop any feature you want, but some features won't get used by a broad audience, but a very. Audience will completely go in on them. So they create this license and and they expand the brand and, and they expand the revenue for the company for many years. Yeah. 3%, 5%, 6% year over year growth. Very good. It's a decent growth. Yeah. over time , I'm gonna take us forward in time a little bit. Let's say 15 years from the buyout. Right. So 15 years is a good enough time where organically a lot of people will move on, stuff like that. Sure. over time, The Evil Toys Inc., has said, we see this 3% growth, 5% growth, but could we be doing more? Could we be growing faster? Right? they have these Lizards and wizard's, exec executives that talk about gaming. They talk about the community., but they don't really talk about revenue creation that often. They don't talk about reducing cost of their overhead. They don't talk about, uh what they're gonna do to double the size of the company. They don't talk about the same things that the, the board members at Evil Toys Inc talk about. They don't speak the same language. It's typical of holding company, though, right? That hold a bunch of diverse companies, right. That they are always looking at the bottom line saying can we, can we get. Can we get more right out of these companies that we hold? Can we optimize our operations? Can we do this? Can we do that? Right? We just want more out of it. So along the way, along the way, and as, as, as people get tired of, being in these arguments and, and back and forth, as different executives leave, they get replaced by people vetted from the holding company and they get replaced by people who think more like the executives at Evil Toys Inc. Rather than the people who originally founded and, and, and maintain the community and the products from Liz's and Wizards, llc. And then over time, what you end up with is you end up with now two companies where there really is not a, a diversity in thought anymore. There's just kind of this drive towards Financial metrics and financial measurements. Basically the, the measurements about the community and growth and stuff like that are fine as long as it lines up with the financial metrics that Evil Toys Inc. Cares about. Right? Any other measurement is either no longer valuable and isn't brought up at board meeting. Or not even, not even observed probably right at that point. Right. So you've got the situation. executives for Lizards and Wizards are basically descendants from the mothership, so to speak. Right, right, right. Okay. So, so slowly over time, the holding company has sort of eroded the culture and changed it and morphed it into a culture of Evil Toys Inc. Which I can't even be angry about them eroding the culture because that, like that, of course, the larger company that absorbs a smaller company is gonna make the smaller company like them. I would not expect the opposite to happen, of course. All right. Yeah. So over time now, the executives have changed. The, the leadership has changed in the company. This license that they, they put out that arguably allowed their company to flourish to be as profitable it as it is now the executives at Evil Toys Inc. They're saying, your product line. The way that we're measuring it, it seems to be under monetized. It seems that you aren't going out with as aggressively to bring , revenue into the company as you could be doing. We think you should make some changes that they give. Maybe they give them some goals. Maybe they give them some, maybe, maybe somebody's read a book and they give them OKRs and their objective is increased revenue. I don't know, 20% a year for the next five years. Not aggressive at all. It's not, no, no. It's, they should be able to do it because their brand is under monetized. I mean, you have to think about it. Not only do they have the gaming lines, but also they have, there's licensing that basically the company does almost nothing. Licensing Sure. They say this other person can use, can make a movie off of our products, and they basically, the Evil Toys Inc. Pays nothing outta pocket for that. So that's free money. They're, they're like, why are we not engaged in these things? We don't understand. So they start pushing here and there, and one of the things they push on is to revoke this, this publishing license because maybe they see uh, over the past 15 years a large community has cropped up of publishers who publish under this license and, and their game systems are compatible with the Lizards and Wizard's product. And Now the executives from Evil Toys Inc. And also the executives from Lizards and Wizards, cuz maybe some of them are the same executives, right? Or Sure. Came, worked in the same places as other executives. They start saying, Hey, why did, why did we allow these other companies. To make to run a $2 million Kickstarter and we don't get any of that. Why are we allowing that? Because that's the only in executive thinks. Sure, of course. One of these ex not every executive, I'm not attacking executive. No, it's just these ones. Yeah. So, so now there, there are conversations like that and that the board meetings are getting a bit more contentious. Why are we allowing them to make$2 million off of our product name? So now the company comes out with a new license and their intent is to retroactively revoke all content made on a previous license. They want to take a, a percentage of money from everyone who publishes under the new one, under the new one under their system, which is, let's, let's just say it's 25%, for example. Could be any number I'm picking outta the air. Yeah. But we'll just say 25%. Mm-hmm. Which, which in order for them to know that you qualify to give them, like, let's say they don't want 25% of like every single individual person on the internet. Only if you're making serious money. So if you make like$750,000, they're gonna. 25% of all your revenue above your initial $750,000, and in order for them to know how much money you're making off to whether, whether you should be paying them or not, now you have to report all your revenue to them. So there's some serious. overreach happening here, which is, it's admittedly, it's kind of ridiculous for me to even say like, I, I threw any one of these could have been enough. Yeah. Right. So now there's a revolt. all the fans are up in arms and all the creators are looking to protect their own companies and their own interests. So now there's a huge situation, big blow up. How did we get here? How did we get here? In this example we've gone through a couple of the stages of how the mighty fall. So let's back up a second. Back to stage one. Characterized it by hubris, born of success. So, The game company who was successful, I would even argue because they were suc, they were bought by Evil Toys Incorporated because they were so successful. And then the early publishing and the license that allowed the community to grow up and for them to be successful was because they were allowed to build a community in the way that. thought that they needed to build a community. Yeah, yeah, definitely. They experienced some success there, right? To put it mildly. Yeah. so that, that was stage one. Mm-hmm.. And then what happened after that? I would argue that all of the changes in leadership over time happened potentially in stage one, maybe in stage two. So stage one characterized by hubris, born of success, we can't fail.. Sure, right. Oh, all. Well, we've got all these competitors, but none of them matter cuz we're, we're the big dog. What we. matters, right? Maybe you have some leadership introduced at this point that kind of that they don't need evidence-based management. They know where, you know where the money is gonna be. We gotta get into movies, we gotta get into this, we gotta get into streaming, right? We gotta we gotta extend the brand into this. Just do what I say, you know. stage two is marked by undisciplined pursuit of more may, maybe stage two or so. Undisciplined pursuit of more here looks. I need more revenue out of this company. So how do we get more revenue, the simple, the simplistic MBA approach here is, I'm going to fire some people. Cut costs, trim costs, produce more product, and charge more for that., that that would be the right, the simple way, right? Sure. That would be the simple way at, at Lizards and Wizards, llc, but at the Evil Toys Inc level, they don't necessarily care how the gaming company is bringing in more revenue. They will just come out and say, listen just through the financial numbers and through the metrics, the financial metrics we are tracking, it seems that this is your bottom line of what it costs to pay all the employees. This is how much it costs to, you know what I mean? Print your books or whatever this is. So basically this is your inventory. This is your labor cost and this is what it took cost per unit or whatever, like you. Why don't you start raising prices until the market pushes back and then you know what your new price point's gonna be. Or a recession rolls around and they say, look, All the companies are raising prices now. Why don't you raise prices too? It won't be noticed. Cause everyone's doing it now. Yeah. The other factor might be that we go into a global pandemic and they say, well, people are at home now they're playing more games. Yeah. Just raise your prices. Yeah. So there are many, many factors there. Yeah. Well it's, it's a shame when all those factors like collide and coincide with a, like a global recession. Like you happen to raise your prices cuz you think your customers can not be price sensitive or whatever. And then you do that. In the same month as a global recession really kicks in, right? What a, what a terrible like we, we like characterized by hubris, borne of success, right? We can raise our prices. Our customers aren't gonna complain. What, what are they gonna go? Where are they gonna go? We got all the great products. Where are they gonna go? Right? And then the second is undisciplined pursuit of more. Why? Why raise your price? Why, why 20% growth a year for five years? Why do you need. Why is 10% not enough? Like Yeah, I agree. I think the undisciplined may also be the fact that they say we're just gonna come out with a new license. We're gonna revoke the old one, stop it all working. Right, right. And then we're gonna charge people. From the new one onwards. Right. undisciplined also encompasses the fact that they say we're going to take a cut of everybody who makes a more than a certain number in revenue, no less not profits in revenue. Right. Which is crazy. Right, right. That's undisciplined. well also it's, the peak of ascendancy of his stage three characterized by denial of risk and peril. I like, I would have to, I would have to think that any normal person that works at the gaming company may, maybe somebody who works on a product line, or maybe somebody who works in their digital tools or whatever when they see stuff like this. Being mandated down from the, not even the top, the, the, the top of the top, the, the holding company basically. I wouldn't expect a, any serious product manager to be sticking around for this. No. These kind of dictates, I mean, this is like feature factory type of work, you know? Yeah. They're gonna be disappearing like rats off a ship. Yeah. Yeah. I would also argue if all of your third party publishers flee your company as well and all of these bets, this bet with the license and the be the bet with , expanding into other areas or whatever, all those bets now are gonna turn up as losses because, oh, your community is basically going else. Yeah. aka I say your community, what I really mean is your customers. So in, in this step, he's he's saying the denial of risk and peril. I would characterize denial of risk and peril as we don't need to test that idea. We, we don't need to check that with our customers. We don't need to worry about how our customers are gonna take this as a solid customer base. You know, we have so many, right? they've used our old version of our publishing license. They'll use the new one. Yeah. Where, where are they gonna go? Stage four. The, the precipitous decline with the organization grasping for salvation, and then stage five final capitulation. It would be way too early to call either one of these. So I I'm not gonna go off, I, but I, I, we can take these stages and we can call out parallel. To other organizations, uh stage One characterized by Hubris, born of Success. In the book, he talks about a chain of department stores. He talks about the Zayers Department store, which is bought out by the. The ames department. I think Zayers was a regional department source. I think Aames was like uh, up, up and down the East Coast. Like I can't remember how, where, where Aames where it was. I know they were in the south, but I, I don't remember where else they were. That example of the Zayers company was fine with small incremental growth and, and staying in areas., actually, I think, I think in the book, I think he says that Zayers business model was a lot like Walmart's business model. Hmm. But they got bought out by the Aames department store and the Aames department store's corporate goals were, were, were growth for the sake of growth. And in the book, he goes through some great examples of the, of them changing out their CEO and trying not to fail as they I believe stages three through five happened very quickly for them. He goes through detailing how, how they were basically grasping for whatever they could do to, to not go out of business. In the end, it didn't really matter, yeah. That's the, that's an interesting point. So the, the amount of time it takes for an organization to go through these stages is completely variable, right? Mm-hmm., it's not even like, okay, we're gonna just grasp for air for a while, you know? Right. You can go straight. Two very quickly to four. Yeah. Where you need CPR and then you don't get CPR in time and, and inevitably that happens. the interesting part of this is the how quickly you go from one to three because the hubris born of success and then the peak ascendency, like the, the, the highest that your stock will ever be. You know what I mean? The most stores that you'll ever have open that kind of stuff, like those two go very well together. Yeah. Because you could be ignoring your competitors and your stock will still be going up and up and up. It's funny that there, there is a complete stage in between this hubris and the highest peak that your company will reach. It's funny, there's a whole step in the middle of that because you would think that those two would be connected, you know? Well, I, I have the executives who have the hubris and they don't care what the customer thinks, and they don't care what the the market trends and they don't care about analytics. They only care about getting their way, and then it still takes a while for your company to hit its peak before the decline starts. That that was super interesting to me about this book... That is interesting. Yeah. I wonder how long that is. If you were to kind of look at a broad range of companies. I'd have to go back to the book. He does give time ranges in every single one of these. He gives time ranges in the book. I wish I could remember off the top of my head, but I can't. I would expect anybody listening to this, especially anyone in the agile field, the example they would think of immediately would probably be Blockbuster. Right. You know, cuz Blockbuster had, they had the chance to buy Netflix. So that was that, that risk and peril, that denial of risk and peril. You know, Hey, you wanna buy this company? No, that company's ridiculous. That's right. What would we ever do? That's, yeah, we need all, we need in person brick and mortar stores, you know? Yeah. We don't need people to be mailing out DVDs. Well, even, even Blockbuster, near the end, they tried to match Netflix subscription model. Sure. And it just didn't, it was too late. It's too little, too late. It's too late. Yeah. And that was stage four. He, I think he outlines that in the book. that last stage isn't just death, which is interesting. It's capitulation to irrelevance, irrelevance could be how you describe, say, Sears now, right? Yeah. In the market space, they're really not relevant anymore. Right. Even though they've been relegated, or they're relegated themselves, they're. Like an online presence. It's interesting and it's a, it's extremely short. The book is extremely short. We kind of talked through the stages. We kind of talked through the, this theoretical gaming company and, and their challenge. I had a CEO one time, they used to say, when you sub, when you optimize for one group, you suboptimized for another group. And I'm like, is that really true? I don't even know if that's really true but I can apply. To this case and think it actually is sort of true by changing the wording slightly and saying when you optimize your company for anything other than the customer, then you suboptimize for the customer that's about the only suboptimize it for yourself too. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. You sub optimize it for everybody, cause I think that's, that is clearly what's happening here. They're sub optimizing their company because, their, their holding company is telling them make the financial numbers look better. Yeah, that's it. Corporate greed, essentially. Well, you can say it's corporate greed, but they'll always be people that are they're like, well, the financial numbers are all that matters. But although I would argue like, 20% year over year is your expectation, cuz that that's pretty unreasonable. It is. Yeah. That's very aggressive. Yeah. I mean it's not just aggressive, it's, it's, it's crazy. It's unreasonable. It's, it's, go find the average amount that normal companies of this, of their, of their size and their market segment or whatever uh, increase and then tell me what the average is and then whatever, shoot for 2% above the average. But it's not gonna be 20%. No. You know, I agree. Most companies are, what, 3% year over year and that's great. 5% and they're doing back flips 20%. Yeah. That's that's very, very ambitious to put it mildly. But look these executives that are there with these companies that reach the fifth stage, , they're incentive to do something not necessarily for the longevity of the company or for the benefit of the customers or anything like that. I'm sure whatever metrics they're incented by they must be doing okay because you don't see any of those guys filing for unemployment, right? I mean, they, they collect., they're whatever, bonuses, et cetera. Yeah. And they move to the next opportunity. Yeah. Well that again, now, we're we're talking about stuff that Deming warned about yet on another podcast is that people in leadership positions, like they can't be coming in and staying for 18 months, two years or whatever. Right. And then moving out. that's not enough time to make meaningful change, deep, impactful change. It's also the, like the, the Amazon we, we didn't even talk about Amazon displacing brick and mortar stores. We didn't even talk about that, cuz that that should be outlined by these steps as well. People would rather stay at home. People would rather do whatever. You know, people only want one thing. They want it delivered to them. They're willing to pay a little more to what so they don't have to go out or whatever, or, or knowing that they got a cheaper price or whatever it is, right? I'm getting depressed. Look, it's all, it's all dark behind me now. Let's fix these problems, I would argue that fixing the problem, like, we're gonna start right at the top right. We're gonna start right at the top. Evil Toys Inc. Okay? Their bonus plans now are not gonna be quarter to quarter anymore. We're, we're gonna solve that, right? Any bonus they get is gonna be company stock. It's not gonna be a, a, a check and it's not gonna be dependent quarter to. So we're gonna get rid of that for the holding company. So second, now we're gonna step a level down into the game company and say, what, what can they actually do to expand their revenue? here I am now back in my expertise lane if you're gonna expand revenue , we have one product: Monsters & Mayhem. That's our, that's our product. People come play our game. There's a couple different ways to play our game. They can play our game online. They can play our game at, at a table, all get together, . Or they can play a video game that's based on our game. Video game is licensing. We already talked about that. People know how to make video games. That should be a, a stream of revenue. We'll put that over here. We'll have, we'll have a product manager. For licenses to make sure that when people make video games and stuff, they suit our brand and all that kind of stuff. Right? No problem. One person manages that. Right? Product manager licensing, we're gonna break down our customer base. Look could look at us focusing on customers, right? Customers who play video games, customers who play the game on the at the table. Customers who play the game online, like a virtual version. So you're stratifying customers. Now, I am classifying though, at least I am, I'm, I'm breaking up my. By the way that the customers consume them, yep. So the first thing I would do is I would say quick, well, people that wanna meet at the table, we're gonna have a person, you're gonna be the expert on those people. You're gonna run the product line for people who wanna meet at the table. People who do this stuff online, look, you might argue like, oh well it's basically the same thing. You're playing the same thing. It's all the same rules, except the technology is different. One has no technology, right? One has a lot of technology. Or maybe a little bit of technology or whatever. okay, fine. Then you guys seem to have the, a very similar product with very probably different roadmaps, but a lot of your stuff probably intersects, should be easy work together, plan together. Work together, plan together, win together. Yeah. I kind of see this as like group product manager type of stuff where maybe there's one, one product manager over these three different areas, and if the third party publishing is such a problem, or the community or whatever is such a problem, then maybe we get somebody who only serves all the third party people putting out our license to make sure that all the stuff that they're writing is in, or tracking trends with what they're, because what, there's nothing saying that we can't see something that a third party publisher is doing and say, that's really good. We're gonna make a version of. slightly different, but we're gonna make a version of that. Yeah. So, so that when you see these $2 million Kickstarters or whatever using your brand, you don't say, how can we allow, you can say, how can we piggyback on the success of that and do something where we can make money off of that too? Absolutely. So now I've got the, the creators over here that are creating for my system. I've got a product manager for that. I've got a product manager each for the different ways people play. I've got a product manager for video gaming and licensing, stuff like that. Maybe I wanna break into movies and TV and stuff like that. And I need another person from that business who knows the movies and TV and so, you know what I mean? Whatever movies. Let's just say movies. I don't know anything about making movies. I, I work at Evil Toys Inc. If you wanna print off a board game, I know how to do that, right? If you wanna write a game that he'll play at, at at home, I know how to do that. I don't know anything about producing movies, so I need somebody from the movie industry who also enjoys my products to bridge that. So, you know what I mean? So like, again, the movie goer is a different audience. So I've broken down by customer, almost by customer persona, that you probably can get deeper in like, like for example,, for Monsters & Mayhem, here's this new thing that helps you run a game. It tells you what to do or whatever. Most of the players don't care, right? They just wanna show up and throw, dice at each other and eat pizza, right? And drink Mountain Dew. Can I get a Mountain Dew?, . They're not gonna buy that product. Right? Absolutely. But the person running the game is gonna buy that product. So maybe now I subdivide the audience even further to say, okay, these are the products for the people running. These are the products for the people playing. Maybe the difference between the in-person experience and the digital experience. So maybe it's subdivides devised in like four categories. I don't know. I don't know how granular to get. The point is I would have to put signal. and try to feel out those metrics to figure out where my customers are and where they wanna buy. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is you, you are really examining your customer base and then segmenting that down, to the degree it needs to be. Right. a product focus is what I heard as well, right? As opposed to just. A blatant doubled the company in five years. Right. that kind of thing. And that doesn't work so well. It's not even doubling the company. That was the original goal. It was doubling the revenue. Revenue, the revenue. So again, when I hear double the revenue, I'm like, well, just double the amount of products you put out and fire half the employees And, and raise the prices. And raise the prices. Yeah. Like you, like you, you cut your costs to run the business in half. You've doubled the money that's coming in, and you've made sure that because you're putting out more product, you've made sure that you're gonna overshoot that. You know, it's like the old project management, like how long is it gonna take? Well, I'll just tell you twice as long as I think it's gonna take, and then we'll use that buffer of twice as long. You know what I mean? Like that's, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So like firing everyone is only half of it. That gets you half ahead, doubling the prices, gets you half ahead, and then you have a little extra budget A little padding. Yeah, A little padding. But that, but again, what does that get you right? I mean, it burns out all your employees, I guess. You lose good people very quickly. so in, in turning this whole thing around, right at Evil Toys as well as Lizards & Wizards, the leadership have to have that mentality that we're going to focus on our customers, right? Mm-hmm., which is kind of a, a 180 from before. Which, which we started off the podcast by saying how, how to basically die a quick death by hating your customers. Right? So you need to bring people in that actually care about servicing the customer. Yep. you can't. being obsessed with the customer. This is an Amazon thing. You can't fake being like you. Just Jeffrey Bezos also . Okay. He shows his head again on a podcast. You can't fake this. You can't fake empathy in this case. You've gotta have it. You can drive out empathy pretty easily by just optimizing for metrics that, it's, you don't care about empathy. It's all these, none of these metrics are based on anything empathetic or anything that requires empathy, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, hopefully Evil Toys Inc. Can pull it off and have a cultural shift in revolution. or go down the road, the route of I relevancy or die? Yeah, yeah. Or die of death. Well, probably what would happen in this scenario in, in real life would be at some point, the, the, those bean encounters over at evil Toys, ankles, just say, we're just not, we're just not getting what we need out of Lizards and Wizard. So we're just gonna sell it. break up the company, do an Al Dunlap. that would be stage 4 I would think stage, stage four here would be like GE cutting off entire swaths of its organization and selling it to try to get the capital to keep the company running. To make payroll basically. Yeah. while it tries to figure out how to pull out of this death spiral. Yeah. You know, Sunbeam is another example, Phillips. Yeah. There, there are quite a few companies that basically do this. Right. Yeah. Just trying to stay on life support. Yeah. Yeah. The software development equivalent of this. Is like firing everyone in offshoring entire products. You know, I've seen that a lot too. which, which is it's, I feel it's been rolled back, or maybe I just don't, maybe I just don't associate with those companies. I, I don't know which one it is, but I feel like the, the, the, the need to offshore is kind of rolled back as well. Uh, but that is part of this stage four. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm trying to think of whether I've actually fixed a problem. So I've, I've changed corporate incentives., for both the holding company and the gaming company. I, I guess I didn't say that I changed corporate incentives. I said I changed corporate incentives at Evil Toys Company, but I didn't say that I changed corporate incentives at Lizards and Wizards, llc, but I did You get company long-term stock and you don't get a, a big bonus anymore, and you don't get a Silicon Valley pay anymore, right. You know, you get no. And that, that right there will stop our revolving. X Microsoft, Amazon employee, you know what I mean? It'll stop that revolving door of people with the same mindset just being brought in and cycling in and out. You know, get getting their bonuses for two years and then cycling out. Yeah. And it's not just individuals here, right? People who come in that way bring in their, their posse with them, typically. So, cause they they, they know people they've worked with that they trust, so they're gonna bring in their right hand, left hand people. Yeah. Yeah. So this is actually quite significant. If you stop that revolving door, you should see a pretty good turnaround, like pretty quickly, at least in effect, very quickly be marked effect. I almost uh, shudder to ask would like somebody from Evil Toys Inc listens to this podcast? No. First of all, never gonna happen. But someone, people from a holding company looking for advice on how to, how to actually improve, like never gonna happen. But if they actually listen to the podcast and take all of the, you should segment your products this way, and you should figure out who your personas are and start breaking up your product lines by who they're servicing and actually running surveys with those customers and figuring out why, why they're not happy, and actually talking to them, talking to your customers. I almost s shutter to say, can you keep this taylorist holding company management concepts that these people have brought in and use this new sort of way of managing products and focusing on you. I, I don't think those two worlds are compatible. I agree with you. I don't think they are. I think people's mindsets are fixed on certain things at the holding company level. Mm-hmm.. And the minute those executives from Lizards and wizards say here are some statistics around our customer base. Right. don't wanna know about that, right? Yeah. Have we doubled our revenue? Have we increased it by you know, whatever it is that they want, right? That mindset is what got 'em into trouble. And unless that changes, they're gonna stay in trouble. Oh, the old fix mindset again, here it is. One more time. It rears his head fixed mindset. Yeah, it's hard to have a growth mindset when you're living in a culture where all your incentives are basically the opposite of that. That's it. That's the bottom line on that. Lizards and wizards. Yep. Oh, no. Dragons were slayed in the making of this podcast, They definitely were not like we're, we are a drop in the bucket. Of the rage connected to this podcast. You're welcome Liz and Wizards and Evil Toys Inc. We've solved all your problems. All you gotta do is change your culture and actually care about your customers and not try to just squeeze out all the money. We didn't even talk about uh, digital products or buying them buying other companies to, to bolster their digital products. Right? Which they, which they still don't do, which is ridiculous cuz have they., uh when they originally wanted to do it back in like 2007 or something like that but writing software was hard, so they didn't do it. Which is why they brought all these Microsoft people in in the first place. By the way, that's, that's how the Microsoft people got a foothold in the culture, right? They brought in a bunch of ex Microsoft people to build in software to have a digital experience. I was talking about playing at the tabletop versus playing digital. Mm-hmm. to build them a digital experience, and then all these people just failed. So of course, what what do you do in, you're a leadership and you fail at the. you get promoted. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Promoted to your highest level of incompetence, right? That's right. Well folks, thank you for staying with us so far, and let us know what you think of this podcast down in the comments section, subscribe and like, and, and, and more goodness come. And whatever you think of the podcast we reserve the right to republish your comments and take all your revenue . Oh boy. What a debacle.