Q Okay. And why did you, so there was something where you said, okay, now's the time to raise. Why did you decide to raise after being bootstrapped for almost 10 years?
A You know, it was an interesting thing because we finally met a partner that we really wanted to be in business with. Um, I mentioned private equity is a very different kind of a thing. We were highly profitable. We had a lot of money in the bank. We're expanding. Well, we did not need capital to grow. What we wanted was a partner to really help us expand our business in a way that we hadn't before. Um, we'd never had a board of directors, never had a board of advisors, been drinking our own Kool-Aid, so to speak for many years. This enabled us to sort of come to the table with our major holding company clients with an institution next to us and say, okay, we're ready for bigger deals now. We're ready, um, to, to move to the next level.
AI assessment note: “we finally met a partner that we really wanted to be in business with”