How We Grew Our Business From $30M to $120M in Revenues

Anthony had the foresight to know that he needed to bring some talent in to take everything up a level. So I came in as finance. There was a colleague of mine who came in as COO and another colleague, chief legal, chief regulatory. Okay. And we weren't. I can say this in hindsight, I can't say this was perfectly systematic. But what ended up happening is basically three things. One is we got the core business very stable, system wise, operations wise, and so on. And then that allowed us to continue an organic growth trajectory. Number two is we had the right people to start buying companies at much more size and putting them together in a much more cohesive way. So we went on an M and a kind of path. And then third, we actually, again, wouldn't have called it this at the time, but we created a little studio business internally where we would fund other telecom entrepreneurs who wanted to use our infrastructure. And they were very good at sales and marketing. And so we had these three tracks. Again, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't say it to you this way in that era, because I'm saying it in hindsight. And that resulted in a business in 2007, the year before wind, that got to 120 million in revenue, about 23 million in EBITDA. Very profitable. And I think if you go cumulative, total equity raised was sub 15 million. Wow. Yeah. And we used debt because these were all cash flowers that we were buying, restructuring, and then rolling in. So if you look at that business cumulative, which continued to exist during the whole run of Wind, run by a team that kind of had continuity, I would say it did over a billion in revenue cumulative and over $150 million in cash flow. Wow.