Tell ’em that it’s my birthday! How many times have you had to listen to that song?" He said, "Nineteen." In the first year, he had a record number of guests and did not give a gift to the employee of the month. That seemed fitting. You knew he was the real deal. He did give a gift to the manager. He bought the manager a car and said, "From now on, my gift is to you. Take your time and drive it around the parking lot until it is beat to shit. It's my gift to you." As far as the new hires were concerned, the first year set the bar, and they had to live up to it. So there was a lot of attention to detail in the early days. There wasn’t a lot of free time. We had to meet at seven in the morning. We went through the training and were there for seven to three in the afternoon, then we came back at night and were in the office for seven to three in the morning. I can’t begin to imagine how we managed it with the limited number of employees we had, but I do know that it seemed to be easy for us, because we were ready to be there for that long. We were hungry and ready to go for as many years as it took. He taught us, "This is no bullshit business." We were about making things happen and not spending time making things look pretty, like some companies do. No, we were in the trenches. We were doing this ourselves. We were living, breathing, sucking the funk out of every department. There were no fakes, no airs. It was as real as could be. The first Christmas we had, I think it was six of us. They told us that we had to send everyone home at four o’clock, and people started coming in all the time after four. It was so funny because there was no more overtime, so how could we get everybody back in time to start the shift on time? We just started letting them in the door. It was crazy! There was so much excitement around Christmas, because everyone could feel that we had done something. The enthusiasm was not just from one or two, it was for everyone. Everyone knew that they had been a part of it. They were willing to be part of it. You could tell that everyone was really happy that the opportunity was there to change things, but we still were making it hard. We made it as hard as it needed to be for the most part. It was like I said before: If you’re a good player, you’re a good player and people will want you. It would be like, "Man, you gotta quit it. You know, if I came and told you to quit it, you’d quit, so come on, I want you to quit it for me.” The environment at the company was definitely that kind of environment. There were people who didn’t want to be there and who thought this wasn’t for them. I don’t know how many people there wanted to quit but didn’t. They just stayed on the edge. There were always people doing that. He told us from day one, "If you want to quit, you can leave the company. It doesn’t matter to me. I only want those of you who want it and are going to make it happen." The energy was very much positive. If you left at any time, you always had the support of management. We would have some people on the team who were so excited to be there, even though they were so tired. If they had to get up for six in the morning, there was a lot of excitement to get the opportunity to be there. It was fun and hard at the same time, but every day you could tell that you were there for a reason. It seemed like the right place at the right time. The whole thing was real, real, real early. It was more of a team feeling and less of an individual, because you had to understand that it was not just about us. It was not about us doing it our way and about us owning the whole thing. If we’re gonna make it, then everybody has to have it, just like they would have it in real life if they were to grow. You just had to realize that it was about a team effort, and everyone has to buy in. It was an amazing feeling because we did it. It’s like you were the one who went into someone else’s office and were trying to change something, but it’s not your fault if they can’t. I think some of that came from having the first black president and seeing how all that went down. We were ready to break things down, break down the old things, break down the whole culture, and really build it up. We wanted to make a change. We wanted to go out on our own terms. At that point, we were a very humble group, very respectful. Our focus was very much on what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We had a lot of great support, and a lot of big things happened, but they were not because we were ready for them. They were because of what people wanted. I just never felt that we weren’t getting ahead. I think the key to it all was the opportunity that was there to make a change. There is a tendency for people to just sit in their offices and do work all day. You know, people have their work, and they sit in their office, and they do their work. They stay there. That’s it. There is no excitement there. You’re tired all the time because you’re getting no enjoyment out of what you’re doing. It’s like working in a hospital or something, or for the government, or for the government. It’s really hard to feel good about yourself when you have to do something that’s not creative and isn’t exciting. It wasn’t a fun thing to do. In the first three years, we had three key people leaving the company that we really didn’t want to see go. There were just so many things that we were going to do, so many things that we had to do. These were people who really wanted to be there and felt as though they were on a journey. We had people leaving every year, but for some reason they always thought that they were going to go somewhere else. Then they felt really bad about the position they had because they had made a mistake somewhere. So they went to a different job. This is why they didn’t want to leave, because now they’re going to have to feel like they made a mistake somewhere else. No one ever told them that they made a mistake because they were part of a process, because they were going to end up being leaders who were going to bring in a new process and new things. I think a lot of people didn’t understand that they were part of a process, or they didn’t know that there was something else going on. You can tell that that guy’s not going anywhere. He’s not going anywhere because he doesn’t want to go somewhere else, because he’s having fun and doing what he wanted to be doing, and because he had so much influence around him. When people saw that they weren’t doing their jobs, they started giving you these looks, like “What are you doing?” They don’t have the same enthusiasm anymore. They’re going to the office. They’re not here. The culture’s changed. So they start to feel like, “Man, this is no fun. I’m just going to go home.” So they start going home. There was a point when I realized that I was part of a real thing. It wasn’t some fluffy thing. It wasn’t that we had a good idea. It wasn’t that our people were doing a good job. No, it was that I was part of something that was so deep and so rich. It felt like people were