Q I was in Asia and I was stuck, you know, Vietnam had locked the borders, so I couldn't leave. And I was like, well, if I leave, where am I going to go? I have nowhere I can go. Vietnam was probably one of the safest places at the time. So you end up selling the business. Why did you sell this business if it was making so much money?
A Well, I think, you know, uh, first of all, when I got into the business, um, I was an advisor to, uh, to the two founders, um, and really thought about a new model in the recruiting space, uh, new as far as most of search business is commission-based, and, um, we decided to come at it more like a professional services business, you know, like a consulting business, McKinsey, or, you know, any of the big consulting firms, right? Time and materials. It is a service, but I just perplexed me why we, it was still based on commissions, right? Based off of the, the person you hired's salary, you know, and, and I had 28 years in corporate as a consumer of the executive search business. And so, um, we decided to, you know, I talked to them about changing the model. Let's approach it differently. Um, all my tech companies that I worked for, we hired internal staff, even at executive recruiting, because it was just a more efficient, better model, and so the idea was, well, why don't we do what, you know, I was at Microsoft, Yahoo, um, you know, we had big internal recruiting teams. Why don't we create that kind of, you know, world-class recruiting engine, and then give our services to these small and medium companies that really couldn't afford to build, You know, the type of recruiting engine that Microsoft and Yahoo could have. And that was the idea. And so that's, then I came on to be …
AI assessment note: “I think, uh, like a lot of people that build things, you know, you have a choice.”