When Sam started Storage Scholars in 2017, we never imagined where it would take us.
Sam was a freshman at Wake Forest University with international roommates who had a simple question: what should they do with their belongings during breaks?
I was working as an intramural referee, making $7.25 an hour and planning for medical school.
That simple problem-solving opportunity has now expanded to 152 campuses across 31 states, generating $7 million in annual revenue.
Along the way, we secured a $250,000 investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank for 10% of our business, created over 5,000 student jobs, and maintained nearly 100% year-over-year growth.
Our journey started with library-printed flyers, door-to-door sales, and a borrowed pickup truck.
Today, we have 41 full-time employees and thousands of seasonal workers.
We recently returned to Wake Forest to share our story with current students, and these are the key lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Table of Contents
Video
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Key Insights
Here are the key insights from our experience.
Start while you’re still in college
I can’t emphasize this enough: take advantage of the unique resources available during your university years.
We accessed free mentorship from professors, startup funding competitions, and leveraged the credibility of our .edu email addresses for networking.
With meal plans and housing secured, we had a safety net that disappeared after graduation.
I often tell students, “If you have to start a business at some point, there’s going to be a period of eating shit. Better to just get it out of the way when everybody else is in college.”
The risk of testing a business idea during school is lower than it will ever be again.
Execution beats originality
Our core service is remarkably simple: “picking things up and putting them down.”
We never needed a revolutionary idea to build a successful business.
Rather than chasing innovation for its own sake, we focused on operational excellence and superior customer experience.
When Sam worried that our storage business wasn’t as exciting as classmates’ tech startups, a professor advised:
“A business at any point, once you grow in its maturity, is just managing and hiring people… Who cares about what you’re doing? Just keep progressing.”
That advice proved invaluable.
Compounding only works if you stay in the game
Our revenue progression tells the story of compounding returns:
- 2017: $18,000
- 2018: $142,000
- 2019: $321,000
- 2020: $590,000
- Current: ~$7 million
Each additional year generated more revenue than all previous years combined.
I share these numbers not to brag, but to illustrate that each year you stay in the game is worth more than all the previous years combined.
Longevity transforms modest annual growth into substantial outcomes.
Fail fast, refocus faster
Not everything we tried succeeded. Side ventures like Magic Bag Laundry (a laundry service) and Moving Scholars (residential moving) distracted us and lost money.
After four months of door knocking with laundry bags on my back, hungover after nights at LR, going to the middle of Greensboro, we realized we’d made just $615 in lifetime revenue from Magic Bag.
Our lesson: when experiments flop, kill them quickly and double down on what’s already working.
In-person hustle still matters
Despite our digital marketing efforts and phone sales, many of our breakthrough moments came from face-to-face interactions.
When Wake Forest initially sent us a cease-and-desist letter about our business name, an in-person meeting turned adversaries into partners.
After 192 failed phone calls to insurance brokers, walking into a local State Farm office yielded our crucial first policy.
Being in person, being face to face, and selling yourself just as much as you’re selling the business is second to none.
Even now, we still fly across the country for two-hour meetings because that personal connection is worth it 100% of the time.
Trust and ethics are everything
Small integrity lapses can have outsized consequences. I learned this the hard way when cheating at a $5 poker game nearly cost me my partnership opportunity.
Sam walked into my house the next morning and said:
“Matt, if I can’t trust you with $5 card games, how the fuck am I supposed to trust you giving you a piece of the company?”
This seemingly minor lapse in judgment could have cost me millions in future value when we go to sell this thing someday.
Complementary co-founder dynamics work
Sam and I balance each other’s tendencies—he’s “all gas, no brakes” while I describe myself as the “risk chair” who sees “risk in how somebody eats a bowl of cereal.”
As Sam puts it:
“Without me, we wouldn’t have a business. And without Matt, we’d probably be in jail.”
Our partnership wasn’t immediate but developed over years of working together and building trust. It wasn’t a “we’re friends, this is cool, you get 50, I get 50” situation. Instead, I worked my way from employee to partner through consistent dedication over four years.
Creative financing beats early equity dilution
We’ve avoided raising capital whenever possible.
We collected deposits from customers months in advance to fund operations, stacked zero-interest credit card promotions during a cash crunch, and focused on pre-selling discounted packages.
When we needed bridge financing for payroll, we combined credit cards with small loans from friends and family.
There are always creative ways to finance growth. Raising capital would be one of the least desirable options unless you’re certain it’s the right person because it can screw a lot of people over.
“Big breaks” bring new problems
Our Shark Tank appearance seemed like the ultimate opportunity, but reality proved more complicated.
“Expectation: I thought we were going to be flying on Mr. Cuban’s jet… Fame, wealth, status, Ferraris. Reality: It was the worst year of our lives,” I’m not exaggerating.
The sudden growth led to 80-hour workweeks, legal challenges, difficult partnerships, and a $300,000 loss.
We had to deal with a lawsuit, insurance claims, and get out of a horrible partnership with somebody who took advantage of us.
The lesson: explosive growth without proper infrastructure can create more problems than profits.
Every big break presents a new set of challenges you need to be prepared for.
The journey never gets easier—so enjoy it
Despite our success, entrepreneurship doesn’t suddenly become simple after reaching certain milestones.
You think, “Oh, if I raise this money, or I hire this employee, or we get on Shark Tank and get investment from Mark Cuban, it’s just going to get easier.”
But in reality, it honestly just gets harder.
My advice: set reasonable expectations, give grace, and stay in a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency wins 100% of the time.
Would it be reasonable that any of us would be bad at anything if we did it every day, eight hours a day plus for nine years? That’s about where we’re at right now.
Success comes not from revolutionary brilliance but from consistently showing up, adapting to challenges, and staying focused on your core business year after year.
Don’t wait for the “perfect time” to start—it never comes.
Our Top 3 Takeaways
Here are our top 3 takeaways.
Just Start
Don’t be afraid to do something that already exists.
Consistency wins. 100% of the time.
Transcript
Sam Chason: What’s going on, y’all? Happy Tuesday. Excited to be here? Yes. My name is Matt. My name’s not Matt Gromberg. My name is Sam Chasen. I am from Mount Kisco, New York. It’s right outside New York City. Currently live in Austin, Texas. 27 years old, Wake Forest Class of 2020, which was the pandemic year for all you that are in the business school are familiar. I was a business enterprise management major with a custom concentration in venture scaling, which was basically just a way to take more entrepreneurship classes. And then I was an entrepreneurship minor as well. Between myself and Matt, I tend to be more of the all gas, no brakes, pretty much person. Matt usually says without me, we wouldn’t have a business. And without Matt, we’d probably be in jail. So.
Matt Gronberg: Well, after that good introduction. I’m Matt. I’m from Boxford, Massachusetts. I now live in Austin, Texas, alongside Sam. I’m a year younger. I’m 26. I actually came to Wake, and I had a plan to become a doctor. That was my plan through and through. And I joined Storage Scholars as a side hustle to try and pay my way through school. Turned out this became the main hustle. I fell in love with it. And I like to say I’m the risk chair of Storage Scholars. I would see risk in how somebody eats a bowl of cereal. I need to stop it as soon as I see it, and then I try and keep the whole asset protected.
Sam Chason: So, kind of some of the reasons why you might listen to us, myself and Matt, I’m just going through some of the kind of high-level stats about our business. So, this past year we did about $7 million in revenue that was across 152 campuses across 31 states in the U.S. We got an investment of $250,000 for 10% of our business from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank back in 2022. Up to this point, we have 41 full-time U.S.-based employees, another hundred, another 400 part-time, and then another couple thousand movers and college students across the country. We’ve created over 5,000 student jobs in the last eight years. And then, since inception, we’ve grown almost 100% year over year, showing that each year it gets, you know, better and better, better after the next. So, in terms of kind of looking at the main services that we offer, we service three major markets. Most of you are probably most familiar with the summer storage, but we actually service incoming freshmen for our ship-to-school service. We service current students, both freshmen all the way to seniors, as well as then to the point in which they are either transferring schools and they need shipping, or if they’re graduating and need some shipping to their first job. So, for ship-to-school, like I said, this is mainly incoming freshmen, where at any point over the summer, if you’re a high school senior, we’ll ship you a supply kit which has boxes, tape, bubble wrap, and labels. You can pack up anything from your home, ship it back to us, we’ll store it and basically save it until you arrive. As well as, you can order anything online—Amazon, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond—all those packages get received, and then we have them ready and waiting on your freshman dorm room bed when you arrive for the first time. Then we have summer storage. So, this is basically where at any point throughout the semester we’ll give you boxes, tape, and labels; you pack up your stuff, and if you’re living on campus, you actually can lock your items in your room and go home. Or, if you’re living off campus, you basically schedule a pickup appointment. You can put on a live cube, you come pick up your items, put them in storage either for four months, for the entire summer, for nine months if you’re studying abroad, or if you’re just between off campus and on campus, we can even store for two weeks for a short-term period. And then lastly, like I said, if you are graduating and you’re going to go work at your big finance job in New York City and you have some stuff here at your Winston-Salem house and you want to get that shipped, we can basically pick it up before graduation, store it for a couple weeks or a couple months, and then have it ready and waiting at your apartment in New York for the first time.
Matt Gronberg: All right, do a quick exercise. Can I get a show of hands? Who in this room wants to or is planning to be an entrepreneur? Hands up if you’re planning to be an entrepreneur. All right, keep the hands up. Raise them high, high, extend. All right, keep them up.
Sam Chason: Let’s go, Greg.
Matt Gronberg: So now keep your hand up if you’re already working on your startup. Okay, I’m seeing some shaking hands. All right, who already has revenue coming in? You got some revenue? All right, so now we’re down to one, oh, two. All right, so for everybody that had their hand raised at the beginning and doesn’t have their hand up now, I’m going to take a guess at your plan. I want to go, and I want to work a job for a few years. I want to save up some money; I want to get some experience. And then when I’m older and smarter and wiser, I’ll have a good idea for what I’m going to do and start my company. And you know who actually said this quote originally? Every single fucking person ever. So I’m here to try and convince you why that plan sucks and try and give you some alternatives and some guidance. I want to save up. That’s the belief. It’s something good. No parents are ever going to get mad at you if you say that. But do you really think it’s going to be easier to live broke right when you graduate or after you’ve had a six-figure salary and you’re 28, and now you have to give it all up? Maybe you have a girlfriend, maybe you have a husband, maybe you have kids. Do you think that’s easier? So that’s my first belief break. Second, I need more experience making PowerPoints or hammering spreadsheets. Which kind of experience are you looking for? Most of the entry-level jobs are not going to train you to run your own business, so keep that in mind. And last, I just need the right idea. Most people in this room should not try and innovate and start something new. We didn’t. You can actually just make a bunch of money if you copy an idea that’s been around since the beginning of time, like picking things up, moving them, putting them back down. Assume that this process will take a long time. Now we all constantly hear and cling on to the people that are crypto bros that invested in a meme coin a week ago, made it big. We hear about the guys that are day trading, selling courses, forex, trust fund babies. All possible, all happen, but I wouldn’t bank on it. We got rich slowly. And so we’re just going to talk about that in this presentation.
Sam Chason: So I encourage each and every one of you that had their hand up at the start to basically start now, start building now while you are in school. And kind of we’re going to go through a little bit of a story of how we got started so you can get a sense. For myself, entrepreneurship started very early. I was six years old, having lemonade stands outside my house, and like a lot of kids do, I said, hey mom and dad, I want to do this. And they go, great, but you’re going to pay for the paper, you’re going to pay for the lemonade powder, you’re going to pay for the markers. So, okay, if I’m going to be $20 in debt, I want to make this legit. So I was like, how can I market myself better and get the most out of this opportunity? I ended up buying a chef’s hat, stood out in the middle of the road, had lemonade, no price on it. And basically, if somebody pulled up in a Bugatti, it was $5. If somebody pulled up on a bike, it was 50 cents. It was just getting the foundations of how to market myself. So I was six. Then in middle school, I kind of realized the idea of buying low and selling high, kind of an arbitrage. When I would go to CVS, I would see that the Arnold Palmer Arizona Iced, which were legendary back in the day, were 50 cents. So buy one, get one free. But in school, no one had access to them, so I would sell them for $2. Buy for 50 cents, sell for $2. I would bring six in a string bag every single day of school for the entire year and sold six every single day before 8 a.m. Then at 12, this was one of my most favorite entrepreneurial experiences, even with doing storage galleries now, but it was doing garage sales. Anything from a 50-cent T-shirt that I was negotiating in Spanish to a $25,000 BMW M3, I was selling everything in between at these epic garage sales a couple of times a year, where at 5:30 in the morning, we’d wake up on a Saturday, put signs all around the neighborhood, put ads on Craigslist, put ads on Facebook Marketplace. I would make like $10,000 to $15,000 in a weekend. In terms of that experience, that was definitely how I learned to negotiate. Everything was live. Nothing had a price on it. Somebody would come up and say, hey, where’s your mommy at? Who do I pay for this item? Like, no, you’re talking to me. It would be like, okay, how much is this? It would be a live negotiation the entire time. And it was electric.
Matt Gronberg: And a little bit. When I reflect back on my childhood, I think about the skills that I have in the business today. And so the first is I’m the details guy. So it all started with literal car detailing as my very first business. So at age 11, I would go to the different parishioners in my church. I would offer to wash their car for 10 bucks the first year when I was young. And then, as I grew older, 12, 13, I leveled up the service. And then the next year, I would add a wax. And then the year after, we would vacuum the carpets. And so really, I would have my dad come out, and he would coach me a lot because he was an entrepreneur. And he would say, you know what? You missed a spot. He’s the most anal OCD person on the planet. But he would look underneath the car and he would say, right there, you’re missing something. The customer won’t be happy. And so that customer obsession served me well for the rest of my life. Two jump rope for heart. So I don’t know if this was a unanimous childhood experience, but did you ever get those fundraising packets at some point in your youth where you had all the prizes if you sold a certain amount of charity raising, anything like that? So I was hooked, right? I saw the ability to win AirPods or Beats headphones or whatever they were at the time, and I was like, all in. And so my parents, instead of just sending a work email to everybody in their client list saying, hey, donate to my son’s thing, they made me cold call. So I cold called every afternoon for four weeks, and I became the top fundraiser at my elementary school. And I believe that that served me later in life in how to raise capital for a good cause over the phone. And then came the next time I had to fundraise. I was 14. I was a little sharper. And then, this time I was doing door-to-door. So door-to-door for football, we would sell these $20 booster cards, which were a bunch of compiled coupons, discounts. Mostly it was junk, but at the same time, if you have a kid who’s 14 show up, knock on your door and say, hey, will you spend $20 to support the football team at Maskanamit High School? People are kind of buying into you, right? And so I started, and I would go door to door every day from 5 to 7 p.m., and then I realized if I took my white practice jersey that was covered in dirt and blood, my success rate would go up through the roof. So then I would really doll it up. I would put dirt on my face, I would rub the eye black, I would cover it in fake blood. I would do whatever I could to get sales. And I also became the top fundraiser in this, which served me a lot in how to sell in person. And finally, we had this concept called Relay for Life. It’s a cancer fundraiser in which basically we host a big event for the Tritown area. Maybe other high schools have this kind of event, but the main job of growing that program when I was in high school was to get local businesses to sponsor. So approaching a local business and asking them for sponsorship is much like forming a marketing relationship. Hey, if you pay me a couple thousand dollars, we’re going to throw the ice cream social at the event in your business’s name. You’re going to get a bunch of goodwill from the community. We’ll give away discounts. It’s going to be a great cause, and it’s going to be good for your business. And that has served me very well in forming a lot of our university partnerships as an adult because it’s the same type of relationship. So we tell you this story because all these skills started young for us. And so for the rest of the presentation, we’re going to tell you about how we started Storage Scholars. But think, if you’re starting a business, think about what skills you automatically developed as a kid and how you can leverage those in your first business. Just kind of keep that in the back of your mind.
Sam Chason: So starting back in 2017, 2016, I was a freshman in South Hall 303B. I had a couple of international roommates. One was from Ethiopia, one was from China. And they kind of looked at me as their resident American friend and said, “Hey, Sam, what the heck do we do with our mattress topper, our bike, our plastic bins?” At the end of the semester, I go, “I’m from New York. I have no idea. But we’ll figure it out.” So in the first year, I ended up printing out a ream of flyers in the library, went door to door, and spoke to every single freshman on campus. I don’t know about you all, but I don’t know how many door-to-door interactions you guys have had from a sales perspective as a college student, but it was kind of unique. And then you skip to the next one. But for us, it was definitely about just using the resources we had available. So fortunately, my brother used to build websites, so I was like, “Hey, Keith, can you help us build a website?” That’s how the first website was made. And then in terms of like, “Okay, how are we going to pick these things up?” Right. Well, at the time, you had to be 21 to rent a Penske truck. So I had to then get a pickup truck that I had from home in high school and drove it down. And that’s where we picked up all the items. And then it’s like, “Well, where are we going to store it?” It’s like, “Okay, well, there’s a Cube Smart down the street that has first month free. Let’s use that.” And on the club soccer team, we have a bunch of athletic kids. Can they help us move this stuff? Great. It was not really overthinking it or overcomplicating it at all. It’s just like, “How do we get, how do we pick things up, store them, and put them down?” And that’s just kind of how it went. So in that first year, we did $18,000 in revenue and was like, “Okay, this is revenue, not profit, but top line. Okay, this is a serious opportunity because the goal was not to make some beer money or have some money for fun. It was truly to pay our way through school.” So we had to think big very quickly. So in the first year, I was at Wake Forest. Second year, we expanded to three campuses and kept growing. So what’s kind of important too, though, especially in the virtual world that we all live in? We do a ton of marketing online and paid social media advertisements. All of our sales are cold calls over the phone. But it’s really important to once again take a step back and think about the simple things. And this was our first interaction of how this happened to us. But back in 2018, the company used to be called Wake Storage to, you know, hopefully people would think we’re affiliated with the university. That was kind of the point. So got a cease and desist letter from the residence life and housing office, which is basically like a shut down your business. This is a legal letter telling you that. So I got called into the office prior to that, a couple of weeks before it changed the name of the company to Storage Scholars. So I called in the head lawyer from Wake Forest, the head of residence life, and they’re like, “Hey, kid, like, shut this down. You can’t do this anymore.” But because I was in person and we had tried calling them the year prior, months prior, like, “Oh, can we partner with the school?” And they’re like, “No, no, no.” Never even responded. But we were in person, had an opportunity to share exactly what we were doing. And they go, “Oh, actually this is pretty interesting.” And then eight months later, I ended up signing our first partnership. So being in person, being face to face, and selling yourself just as much as you’re selling the business. And the idea is second to none. Which is also why right after this presentation, I’m flying out to Vegas to meet with a client in person, even for a two-hour meeting, like it’s worth it 100% of the time. And then the second example as well, in person, we were looking for $2 million in commercial business liability insurance. And when we were calling these insurance brokers, I have a list like on an Excel sheet in Davis Hall, went through 192 insurance people. They’re all like, “So you’re 18 years old, you’ve been in business for zero months officially, like, you just got incorporated. You want $2 million in insurance? You’re moving college student stuff, renting trucks, like, basically, fuck you, I don’t want to take your business.” And then I ended up driving down the street three minutes on Coliseum Drive to Nick Tatima, State Farm. And he’s like, “You guys are crazy, but we’ll make it happen.” So the in-person interaction, selling yourself, Nick Tatima, that’s the guy. Nick Tatima from State Farm, he gave us our first insurance policy and that allowed us to actually buy a truck to get into commercial insurance and launch the business. And another friendly face up there. So similarly in that year, I remember standing on actually this stage right here as part of Startup Lab, giving our final presentation. And in that entrepreneurship class, I think it was 201. Everyone had these really cool, fun, and exciting business ideas. It was not picking things up and putting them down. It was like an app. It was a portable blender. It was a dating site or whatever it was. So I remember going up to Greg and be like, “I don’t really want to be the storage kid.” Like, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t sexy. People honestly made fun of me for it. But he’s like, “Dude, you’re kind of an idiot. A business at any point, once you grow in its maturity, is just like managing and hiring people. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling wrenches or selling storage, you’re still going to kind of be doing the same thing. Who cares about what you’re doing? Just keep progressing, put your head down.” And that ended up being very sound advice. So thank you. And then in the second year, we expanded to three campuses at $142,000 in revenue and was like, “Holy shit. Yeah, this is actually legit. Let’s keep going.” That was the perfect time to switch it up, right?
Matt Gronberg: Yeah. So then in 2019, we thought we were really in our zone of genius as entrepreneurs. We said, well, we got this one business that makes money these months of the year, so we just got to spin something else up to make money the other months of the year. So being the brilliant kids that we were, we decided to start Magic Bag Laundry. This was going to be wake wash, but for all of Winston Salem. We thought we were so smart. After four months of door knocking, hungover after a night of LR, going to the middle of fucking Greensboro with bags on my back, we ended up realizing we made like $615 in lifetime revenue. We said, you know what, maybe it’s time to go back to the thing that was working and put a little time and love into that one. Ooh. And this is probably my biggest failure, but this was almost my failed reason for not even being in this business in the first place. So in 2019, I was at that point a very close employee of StorageGallers. I technically wasn’t one of the founders. So I’d been working for Sam really hard, trying to prove my worth. I was doing sales, I was doing moving, I was doing marketing. I was driving to Elon in High Point and doing whatever I could. And I was due to leave in a few weeks to go study abroad. I was going to study abroad in the fall. We thought it was a seasonal business; probably wasn’t going to hurt my position in the company. At least I didn’t think so at the time. And during that summer school time, I was here on campus. And if any of you guys have been here for wake summer school, you end up being friends with a lot of random people. You have all these kickbacks. People are playing cards, people are playing poker. You just hang out with all sorts of different groups. And that summer, I was really into poker. The problem is from when I was a kid, I was also really good at magic tricks. So I started realizing that with a quick distraction of my hand, I could load the deck. And then I was getting royal flush after royal flush after royal flush, which is statistically impossible. And the person who caught me was an 18-year-old intern that hadn’t even made it to college yet, who was interning and looking up to guys like me. And he pointed it out to Sam and he said, watch that guy. He’s drunk right now, but I know he’s loading the deck and he thinks that you don’t know. And so the next morning, Sam walked into my house. I had a nasty hangover. And he said, Matt, if I can’t trust you with $5 card games, how the fuck am I supposed to trust you giving you a piece of the company? And then I got on a plane to Denmark and I had to sit with that for six months. So lucky for me, Sam is an amazing person and forgives quickly. And so when I came back, he gave me another opportunity to work my way in. But that poker decision and that small break in ethics, again, $5 hands. This wasn’t about the money. This was about winning. Because of that, I might have cost myself today, still might have millions of dollars when we go to sell this thing someday. So an interesting story. All right. But we’re still cruising, right? So we have 2017 and 2018 sales. They had combined to about 160k lifetime. And boom, we got to 321 that year. And now you’ll start to see we’re putting all these up here not just to brag, but for you to see that each year that you stay in the game, it’s worth more than all the other years combined. Right. And so we’re really encouraging you guys to get started now, start building that story, get some time in the game, because it all kind of compounds at the end. So we’ll keep going. And then the pandemic year. So a lot of people think that the pandemic must have been good for us. I would say medium. I don’t know if it was good. It was kind of mid. Not on a personal basis, just talking business, right. So we were due to set up at 15 campuses. We had all the student managers lined up. Everything was going to be great. It was going to be our biggest year ever. And then he flew to spring break, I flew to spring break. We get the call that nobody’s supposed to come back. And we were like, holy fuck, we might not make a single dollar in revenue. Everything we just built the last three years might be gone. Because who are we? I’m a junior, he’s a senior. And now we have a business that moves kids and there’s no kids to move. So this is not good. So then we spent every single day living at an off-campus house at Wake Forest, trying whatever we could. We were driving to any college that would take a meeting with us and I’ll go here. Some of them loved it. We knocked on Wofford’s door, Sweet Wofford in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And they said, well, come on right in, boys, we would love to work with you. And we said, hell yeah. Furman said, how the fuck did you get on campus and never come back again? And to this day they won’t talk to us.
Sam Chason: We’ve never been there.
Matt Gronberg: But it’s better to ask for forgiveness, not permission. I learned that from Dear Sam. All gas, no brakes. Just fuck it, go for it. Doesn’t matter. All right, last. The reality of running a company. Not to over-glamorize it, but we always like to throw these tidbits in. Being a CEO or a founder means whatever the worst job in the entire company is that day. It gets handed to you at eight in the morning, and you gotta go do it. And so this year we were changing warehouses. We had a place up in Thomasville. We had outgrown it. We needed more space. We wanted something closer here in Winston. And so to get our security cameras out, we had to drive at night after classes, after business school classes, which was like 8 PM, and then we had to bring a big ladder. So we rented the ladder from Home Depot. We’re taking these cameras on. And Sam and I thought it would be fun, really smart, fun to play a game of how quickly can we get a camera down. So I would time him and I’d say, climb up the ladder. I wouldn’t hold it. I was filming him. Turns out the 15-foot ladder came crashing down. Shattered scaphoid. And that whole year, Sam was no longer able to be a mover. He had a shattered wrist. And he had to learn very quickly that his value to the company on all of our moving days is not moving, but it’s delegating. So it forced this new style of leadership that I think benefited us in the end. All right, so 2017 through 2019, we were at 481 in cumulative lifetime. And then boom, that year, even during the COVID year, changing the entire business to pack students up on FaceTime, ship them home their goods. We did 590.
Sam Chason: Once again. We thought we were kind of untouchable in a sense. Like, okay, we have this business; it’s still seasonal. We tried magic bag, but, you know, let’s do something that’s actually correlating to our core business. So we had people reaching out to us asking for general residential moves. So, like to move from Faculty Drive to downtown. We ended up actually kind of purchasing a moving company from a retired old Wake Forest alumni. And it was kind of a nightmare, to be honest with you. It was because during the pandemic, all the moving companies that were making a ton of money were getting the big jobs at these universities. So there’s a moving company that basically packed up every single one of you guys on campus. It was a couple thousand students and probably made a couple million dollars, whereas we made like 50 grand doing the video packing appointments. So we tried a moving company called Moving Scholars. Once again, about a year went by, and it was a big waste of time. So once again, focus back in. Let’s focus on the things that are actually working. No shiny object syndrome.
Matt Gronberg: Sam. Razor volume.
Sam Chason: And then another thing, upon graduating too, a lot of people will say college is the best four years of your life. And honestly, it probably is for those four years. But I think a lot of people don’t have the foresight that, at least for someone like us, where we did kind of put in the time a little bit earlier on, we moved to Austin, Texas, outside of Winston. I would say the next four years were the best four years of our lives. And I would say the next four years have even been better after that. So kind of putting in the time early has definitely paid dividends for us. And we’ve had more fun both in life and in business after college than we ever did during college.
Matt Gronberg: So hold on tight just to tie that together back to the beginning. If you have to start a business, at some point there’s going to be a period of eating shit. Better to just get it out of the way when everybody else is in college. And that’s kind of the message we want to keep hammering home.
Sam Chason: So then in 2021, once again, you see we had essentially in that one year, we did about a similar amount of revenue that we did in the four years prior. So compounding effect, compounding effect. So Shark Tank, the thing that a lot of people know us by. So the real story is that I actually applied to Shark Tank two times. So the first time was in 2020. I was a senior. We had basically applied, got a phone call in the middle of business class, stepped out, and they’re like, yeah, you passed a certain round. And we thought, oh wow, we’re on the show. This is amazing. They’re like, please don’t tell anyone. So of course we went to LR that night. And we’re like, we’re probably on Shark Tank, crazy, but don’t tell anyone. And then the pandemic hit, and they went zero dark dirty for six months. And we obviously didn’t get on the show then. So nothing happened the year after. And then the following year, feeling kind of nostalgic, I was at my family’s home dining room table. It was a Friday night, and the family was watching Shark Tank again. I was like, let’s apply again. So I went online, applied again. The same process happened in December, applied in February, got a call, and they’re like, hey, you made it on to the next round. But from that point on, it ended up being a part-time job for the following nine months. So probably 20ish hours a week we would get literal homework assignments in the mail, like in email. It’s like homework number one, homework number two. But it was electric. We basically said, you know what, if we’re going to put this time in, we want to make sure we get the most possible value out of it. So we’re going to drop everything else, focus on this, and then also, by the time we get to the show, we want to make sure we’re 100% prepared to make this the best commercial possible for our business.
Matt Gronberg: All right? So the aftermath, the biggest moment of our lives. We had the show air on my birthday, October 14, 2022. It was a big night. We had all of our friends and all of our family come over. They all flew down to Austin. We had a whole venue. We had the projectors. It was due to be awesome. So we’re standing there watching the portal, watching the computer like a hawk, waiting for the Shark Tank effect. We got three signups that night, three on a national airing. And we were like, fuck, come on, man. Again. But we didn’t get too discouraged. We said, you know what? It’s October. Who thinks about summer storage in October? What else can we get out of this experience? Well, when you want to get ranked higher on Google, when someone types college storage, you need really big websites to link to you. It’s called SEO. So when CNBC writes an article about us because we asked them to, that’s a win, right? So now we’re going up on Google, and then you have local newspapers writing about us. You had local news coverage. You had different, like all these different outlets started to write. And then our ranking on Google is soaring, right? Our SEO is getting through. So by the time we hit that spring, our organic search volume went from literally nothing. It accounted for 0% of our sales, effectively, to about 20%. So that’s a huge win. And now at this point, this is leading into the Shark Tank year, right? We air in October. We have a lot of momentum. We are ready for the explosion. We’re going to get the most out of this year. It’s going to be the best year of our lives. Big year. So expectation. I thought we were going to be flying on Mr. Cuban’s jet. We thought we were going to be best friends. It was going to be dope, fame, wealth, status, Ferraris. That was the plan, the reality. It was the worst year of our lives. And I’m not even kidding. That growth literally had Sam and me working 80 hours a week. We had to deal with a lawsuit. We had to deal with insurance claims. We had to get out of a horrible partnership with somebody who took advantage of us. We worked every hour of the day for so many months. And the worst part is we looked at the P and L, the profit and loss, and we paid to do that. We carried a $300,000 loss that year we had to pay to suffer for that long. So every time we thought we had it figured out, we did not, unfortunately. And so what did we say? We have to take this partnership, we have to break it with this bad vendor. Long story, can’t talk about it. And we got to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps a little bit. We got to get this shit back on track and we got to take this seriously. So now no more games, no more partnerships, no more vendors. If we’re doing this, we are doing it in-house. We’re hiring every single person. I’m going to look them in the eyes and I’m going to offer them the job. We’re not doing anything outsourced.
Sam Chason: So the following year, we went national. We went from 72 to 152 campuses coast to coast. And as you guys can probably see on there, I guess the map’s not really showing up. But at a certain point, we’re gonna kind of run out of campuses, right? So campuses that are really good for us are like Wake Forest, it’s Duke, it’s the University of Southern California, it’s not, you know, Winston Salem Community College. Right. We’re targeting people that are living out of state, international students, people that can pay for a white glove service. So we’d say there’s probably roughly 250 to 300 of like those types of schools in the U.S. So this past year, we said, okay, well, if we want to continue this explosive growth, you know, we have a great brand, but there’s still a lot of schools out there that just want to go with different moving companies. So we’re gonna have to find a different way to do that. So we service the entire lifecycle of a college student from freshman year to when they graduate. But now how can we take advantage of these relationships that we have with these universities and get more out of those? So we found that maybe a school like the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, it was kind of like the big light bulb moment. We might do $12,000 there in revenue. Pretty crappy. But there’s another company that has a $300,000 five-year agreement to do move-in assistance for them. We’re like, okay, well, how do we take advantage of that? Haven’t gotten that one yet. But we started to say we can do move-in assistance. We can do, like, furniture installations. So when a new residence hall gets built, they need to install new furniture, remove the old stuff. We’re doing a ton of that right now. Emergency moves for students and staff. Members commercial storage. Like during the pandemic when they needed to store every single student’s stuff on campus, we do that but like usually for the unit university, from like a business-to-business standpoint, as well as bed lofting. So a lot of there’s, you know, a couple thousand beds on campus here over the summer. When summer camps and conferences come in here, there’s usually high school students, they have to lower every single one of those beds. Seems very trivial, but when you have to do 3,000 of them, it takes a long time. So we’re just kind of finding our niche in a different way to expand the labor and the people we have working for us and give them more consistent work throughout the summer and throughout the year. So this past year, like I said, we did about $7 million in top line. That was fortunately profitable for us. So it wasn’t the perfect 100% year-over-year growth for us. We took kind of a different approach to find a more profitable way to do that versus now this year as we’re expanding, we have a bit more confidence. You know what, we’re going to actually lower prices a bit. We’re going to go a bit more mass market, try to get more customers and not be as profitable, but really try to become that national brand. So we’ve said this many different times in many different ways, but the idea is if you can and if it’s your path and you are interested in starting a business, the best time, like the best time it is to do anything is right now. So a couple of like the key takeaways that you might not think of, but the reason why starting a business in college is very important is you have access to free resources. Right. When we were in Startup Lab, we got a couple thousand dollars in funding that actually has increased. Now you have professors that have literally been running and scaling and selling businesses that are just going to talk to you for free and take as much time as you want, utilize those free resources as much as possible because you won’t get that. Then you have the Edu email. I think this is the most lethal thing that you have. And this happens to us all the time. How many LinkedIn DMs do you get a week?
Matt Gronberg: 100 at least.
Sam Chason: And out of those hundred, if it’s like we want to sell you this service, you want to say no, no, no, don’t even respond. It’s like, hi, I’m a student at the University of Pennsylvania and I’m interested in chatting with you for 15 minutes. Anyone else says that we’re like, no, don’t waste my time. But for some reason, understandably, people want to give back, right? So that edu email, that being that kind of innocent, so to speak, college student, people don’t view you as a threat or as a competitor. They want to help you. So reaching out to shoot your shot and emailing or LinkedIn DMing 50 of your favorite CEOs, one of them will get on the phone with you. So utilize that because once by the time you graduate and now you’re 26 and you’re like, hey, U-Haul, I want to talk to your owner because we want to get advice on how to run a movie business. He’s like, I’m not going to talk to you. You’re a competitor. But when you’re a college student, they don’t care, as well as a meal plan, right? If all else fails, if you guys literally lose everything, like, you still have food to eat, you have a roof over your head, and more likely than not, you probably don’t have as many bills to pay. You don’t have like childcare to pay for. You don’t have a family to raise. It’s really low, low risk when you’re a college student because if it all doesn’t work out well, at least you have this amazing experience that you can talk about when you go out and get your first job post-grad.
Matt Gronberg: All right, well, our key takeaways, if you haven’t gotten it now, just start. It’s going to suck. It’s going to be hard, but you’re going to have to put in that time at some point if this is the path that you want to take. So why not start now when you have nothing to lose? You’re going to get made fun of. You’re going to be bad at something because you’ve never done it before. But that’s the game. You’ve got to be bad before you can be good. That’s kind of the prerequisite. Two, do not be afraid to do something that already exists. We pick things up and we put them back down. It’s not rocket science. The odds that your very first business—some of you in here maybe—but the odds that the very first business is going to be the Zuckerberg life-changing, world-changing, and that you’re going to be able to stay in that business and stay in it and ride it all the way to what, his age is now in his 40s? Unlikely. Just pick a business that’s existed since the beginning of time. Do it with a little bit of technology integration, you’ll be rich beyond belief.
Sam Chason: And something on that point that really was foreign, a foreign concept to me as a college student. When I was on spring break in California, there was this really amazing burger spot. And the idea that you could take that burger spot and copy every single thing about it and bring it to North Carolina. And that’s not illegal? It’s kind of crazy, but that’s what you should do. So a lot of people, like, there were competitors out there doing exactly what we did. And our first pricing model, our first website, our first service was like, okay, let’s find the best one and let’s just copy them. And like, that sounds crazy, but there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. You’ll find your niches. You’ll find the better way that you operate. But a lot of business is about being executionally excellent, not about having this crazy, fundamental, beautiful website and cool business idea.
Matt Gronberg: And consistency wins 100% of the time. Right? And so to reverse engineer this thing that keeps all of us from moving forward, would it be reasonable that any of us would be bad at anything if you did it every day, eight hours a day plus for nine years? That’s about where we’re at right now. And so when you ask yourself that, that really does push me at least to say, let’s take the leap. Let’s start the business. Let’s take the risk.
Sam Chason: Right?
Matt Gronberg: Everybody in this room is as smart as could be. You’re all Wake students, you’re all capable. So if you gave yourself a clock of nine years, do you think you wouldn’t be outrageously successful? I bet everybody in here would. Thank you.
Sam Chason: So we’ll definitely open up to Q and A. But once again, selling yourself.
Matt Gronberg: In person.
Sam Chason: Very much like, this is the genuine answer. Like, we flew out here so excited to be speaking to you all. But also, let’s make sure we can get an opportunity out of this. If you guys would be willing to go on and follow us on Instagram in the next two minutes, we’ll basically give away five T-shirts to five people that follow the Instagram account. All right, so we have four shirts. So this is Q and A. So if anybody has a question and they also follow the Instagram account, the4questions. The first four questions raise up your phone. We’ll pick one of you, you ask a question, you get a T-shirt front and center. I saw you from the beginning.
Matt Gronberg: Yeah.
Sam Chason: Hi. Throughout school, when you’re about, like, just all the workload and also, like, business, the first time, like, was there any, like, point where you had some doubts so you just, like, didn’t want to do it?
Matt Gronberg: Because I know you had a bunch.
Sam Chason: Of different side quests. Yeah, I mean, so I think for. I’ll answer this for myself. Yeah, Matt will give you a T-shirt. Yeah. Like, this business was very much a necessity. It was like, hey, college, you know, for you guys now it costs $90,000 a year. It was like $70,000 a year at the time. So the priority level went business school, social life. Right. So it was like kind of a horse and blinders. Like, this is what you have to do. So the doubt was never there. And then when we graduated, it was 2020, so there wasn’t even really a graduation. It was kind of just like, we just keep going. Like, there wasn’t a, okay, should we get a job? Should we not? But at the time, too, we didn’t pay ourselves for the first three, four years. And by the fourth year when we were graduating, we could pay ourselves like $40,000 to $50,000. And that was probably what a lot of the entry-level jobs were. So I don’t really think it was even a discussion, but it was kind of just like, this is the natural progression. If somebody was trying to buy us, maybe we’d stop. But no one was looking to buy us, so let’s just keep going. So really probably no would be the answer.
Matt Gronberg: Other questions.
Sam Chason: Did you follow the Instagram account, by the way?
Matt Gronberg: Yeah. Show us. Good shit. What’s your question? How did you kind of market yourselves to, like, the schools and newspapers that you wanted to during the Shark Tank era? He said, how did you guys market yourselves to the newspapers during, like, the Shark Tank era? To get that, we basically did a press release document and we had some people that were PR specialists, like friends and family, help us kind of draft that press release doc. And we went to top article places and we sent them the doc. And we said, this is under what’s called embargo. Embargo is like, hey, I’m giving you this story, but it’s super secret until a certain date. And we offered them all the ability to have the rights to talk about the story, essentially. And so we did that with a bunch of places and got super lucky. And CNBC ended up writing.
Sam Chason: What’s the relationship like with Mark Cuban after you met him and him helping you and investing in you guys? What is the day-to-day now and how does he care about now?
Matt Gronberg: Yeah, he was asking about the relationship between us and Mark Cuban now, so Mark is notorious for living and breathing through email. He’s probably the most responsive person on the planet. He treats email like a text message. But he’s asked us since the day that he invested to give a weekly email update of what we got done that week. He said, give me the good, the bad, and the ugly. And so when we’re doing well, right, we text him all the good stuff in a big formal investor update email. And he’ll reply with like, you know, Billy responses like, good shit. Like, way to go. Like, you know, nice exclamation point. But when we’re in trouble and we’re having really bad days, he’ll jump in and he’ll give serious advice and he’ll write out paragraphs for us and coach us on what he would do. And then if he needs to bring in one of his team members, he’ll forward the email chain and be like, hey, Q, Harrison, or Jimmy, or somebody’s going to basically take this to the distance and give you a couple hours of help. So his rule is, I’ve got 450 companies. If you write me, I’ll write you back, but don’t expect me to reach out to you. And we’ve taken that really seriously. And that’s why we have a great relationship because we do all the things that he asked, where most people don’t email every week, you know, got one more.
Sam Chason: Outside of Mark, did you ever use a fundraiser? And if yes, from whom and how? Never actually.
Matt Gronberg: Well, last year. Well, you got it last year when we were carrying that big loss. We had to take out a bridge loan to cover payroll for a month cash crunch. But generally, we haven’t had to raise capital.
Sam Chason: So actually, good point about that too. We needed around $100,000. And initially, you think, okay, do I go to a bank? Do you go to friends and family? Who do you get a loan from? At the time, you actually could open up credit cards that had 12 months of deferred interest. By no means am I recommending going into credit card debt. That’s not what this was. But basically, you take out a card, and it had a $20,000 limit on it, but you didn’t have to pay it for the first 12 months. So we just stacked up like five or six cards and got like $86,000 in credit and combined that with a little bit of friends and family as well. So get creative too. Like there’s always going to be a solution out there outside of just like.
Matt Gronberg: Walking into a bank, well, in the way that you started this business is, I think, not raising capital is our preference always, because there is generally a creative way you can do it. So to start the business, Sam collected $50 deposits from the students when he was marketing. In March and April, he took that lump sum of money and used that to put the down payment on the storage unit. You know, as an adult this year, like adult business, mature business, we’re selling prepay and save packages, and we’re giving a discount to people who prepay. And so that’s also funding our team’s payroll and all the things that suck about a seasonal business. So there are always creative ways you can generally do it. I think raising capital would be one of the least desirable options generally, unless you’re certain it’s the right person, because it can screw a lot of people over. What other questions back?
Sam Chason: How did you guys meet at Wake Forest? And how were you able to identify?
Matt Gronberg: The good partners for each other?
Sam Chason: Yeah, I guess we missed that story. So I was a freshman when this started. Matt was a senior in high school. So when I was a sophomore, I was actually pledge driving for a fraternity on Halloween. And I’d seen kind of in the back of my mind, like, the months prior. There’s this one kid in his yellow Wake Forest sweatshirt, hood on, tied in the pouring rain, working every single day as an intramural referee for flag football, just getting ripped on by seniors. But when he hopped in the car, I was like, all right, this kid’s a grinder. Let’s chat him up. So he was wearing his doctor scrubs because he was pre-med and was going to go to med school. We talked for a couple of minutes, and I was like, how much are you making? He’s like, I make $7.25 an hour. And apparently, I don’t remember this, but apparently I said, you can make more in a week working for storage callers than you could in an entire semester working at work-study. So he said yes. And then that winter break, basically, he started cold calling. I think he sold like 30 or 40 customers for, like, different Boston parents and stuff like that. And then he started pledging in the fraternity in the spring, so it wasn’t super active. But then once pledging ended, that was right when move-out week started. Worked like 100 hours that week, worked the entire summer, and never looked back. So how did we know that was the right fit? Candidly, it was a lot of time, right? There were a lot of students for both Wake Forest and other campuses that stepped in in both very part-time roles and honestly, very full-time roles with this business. And most of them, all of them kind of burnt out. And Matt from the very, very beginning was like, I’m not looking to make a couple of dollars per hour. More like, I don’t really care about that. Like, I want equity, I want in, I want in, I want in. And he really kept consistent with that kind of frame. So by the time he graduated, it truly was four years of building up trust. And there was the poker story and there was like time and time and time. I was like, okay, like, now’s the time. So it really, it wasn’t a we’re friends, this is cool. You get 50, I get 50. Like, hooray. It was truly a lot of time to figure that out.
Matt Gronberg: So I would say if you’re in the seat where you’re thinking about starting something, it’s really important to wait and watch what any of your initial, like founding employees do, and build trust with them and see how it works for a period of time would be my recommendation rather than just starting something with someone. But in reverse, because I got to watch how Sam led the company for three years. I was pretty rock solid. He wasn’t crazy, egotistical; he wasn’t a micromanager. He wasn’t like a lot of things. He wasn’t unethical. And so it checked all my boxes for me to commit as well. But I think it’s better to start employee, employer. Yep.
Sam Chason: So how did your day-to-day change, like throughout your four years at Wake? Oh, that’s a great question. How did it change? How did it change, you think, over time or in comparison to, like, you know, first year started sort of scholars and like the next year?
Matt Gronberg: Yeah.
Sam Chason: My side of it was that candidly, this is a seasonal business. So in year one, yeah, we built a website and we did some marketing, but it wasn’t a full-time job. Right. It was very, very, very full-time for the week of move-out and then the week of drop-off. But then kind of the fall came. We were like, okay, cool. You don’t have to do anything. Right. And then after sophomore year was kind of okay. In order to get the most out of this seasonal business, you really need to put in the time early on. And that’s when it came to, okay, how do we get cheaper warehousing in advance? Right. So it became, I would say nothing in the fall, really freshman year, a little bit in the fall, sophomore year. And then it was more so like 20 to 30 hours a week for junior and senior year kind of and beyond.
Matt Gronberg: And in terms of what we were doing each year, 2017 was like door-to-door sales and you’re the mover, so just do it all. You’re kind of the only thing that exists at that point. The next year was how do you recruit your friends that you knew at other colleges to be a campus manager; that was the plan at that point. So we spent a ton of time calling these guys, teaching them how to do it. We weren’t good at training people, and we trusted them too much, and they stole $20,000 from us. So whatever. That’s another lesson that we just left out. 2019 was getting serious about marketing. How do you run an email drip? How do you do follow-up sequences? And then in 2020, we were basically full-time because of remote classes. So we were like, all right. We basically got to rebuild the whole business from scratch to accommodate packing and FaceTime appointments and all this stuff. So we both kind of let the classes go to the side a little bit. We still were taking them, but not as seriously about exit opportunities or not.
Sam Chason: I think if you wanted to buy the shirt for $200, I’d sell it to you, but right now, I think it’s kind of head down. Like, this is truly if you’re gonna bet on a horse, for us to start over in something new doesn’t really sound as fun and exciting. This is the best horse we have. And like anything else, it does take time. I think, at least for me, it’d be kind of like not an identity crisis, but you sell it. Drinking Coronas on the beach doesn’t really sound that appealing after like a month or two. So it’s like we both enjoy working, and we enjoy at this level being able to go out and talk to different people and build certain relationships that you can’t do in year one or year two of business. So, sure, I mean, maybe one day, but for right now, it’s very much focused on growth.
Matt Gronberg: Yeah.
Sam Chason: In the back.
Matt Gronberg: You.
Sam Chason: Yep.
Matt Gronberg: Oh, you first. All right, sounds good. Sorry, you don’t. No, that’s the honest truth: we pledged, and then we did the business. It was like very separate.
Sam Chason: The honest answer to you was I was actually there to make money. I was an RA my sophomore year, so there were a lot of different reasons, but I was an RA. I was also pledging too, so I missed certain events and that’s why it wasn’t like a very sexy thing to do. But yeah, pledging definitely takes first priority. Unfortunately, at this school?
Matt Gronberg: At this school.
Sam Chason: Yeah.
Matt Gronberg: Yeah. You had a question? What’s up?
Sam Chason: Our parents.
Matt Gronberg: Oh, you go first.
Sam Chason: Yeah, 100%. I mean, like, I had to pay for a certain portion of school, so they just knew, oh, like, this is Sam’s personality. He’s just gonna figure it out. Yeah. And every single year, we’d drive back to New York, we’d drive back to the Northeast after taking final exams, after doing eight days of move-outs, drive 10 hours back and immediately just get sick for like a week just because your body would just shut down. At least my parents, they always took good care of me, so they’ve always been big fans since the beginning. And my mom actually came down and helped sell during freshman orientation my sophomore year. So I’d say they’re big fans.
Matt Gronberg: My parents were pretty supportive overall. I think they had a small gap when I went from, like, I was like three and a half years into my biochem degree, and I was like, I’m going to throw all that away and just do storage. So there was a little questioning, but they ended up supporting me as soon as I was like, hey, look, it’s actually making money. They were like, all right, cool.
Sam Chason: One more. Is there a lesson you wish you had known before you started, or was there?
Sam Chason: Something particular that you’ve learned along the way? That, yeah, for me, there’s one big one. It’s that no one is going to do the work for you. I think at a lot of different stages of life, you think, oh, if I raise this money or I hire this employee, or we get in, go on Shark Tank and get investment from Mark Cuban, it’s just going to get easier. But in reality, it honestly just gets harder. So I think that was always the case. You get to this point, like, oh, finally, if I get here, I’ll be good. Right. And it’s a very cliché term. Like, the journey is not the destination. The journey is the destination. And I think once you realize that over time, that it’s never really ending and it’s just going to be hard work. If you just put your head down and just do it, you start to be able to enjoy the process more than just looking towards the goal. I want to get $5 million in revenue. Because that sounds cool. Because then we’ll sell and then, like, be okay, right?
Matt Gronberg: Yeah. I would say something to the tune of, like, it’s. You put a lot of expectations on, like, what it needs to be. And that’s where most of the anxiety comes from. Right. The only reason we ever stress out on a day-to-day basis is because we’ve decided earlier in the year this is the goal. And it’s something super aggressive every time. So, like, you can learn contentment along the way and find other balance. Because at the beginning you’re on a treadmill, you got to sprint. When you’re at the stage that we’re at now, it’s about how long can you keep doing this? Like, can you do it another year? Are you not burning out? Like, you know, because the longer you stay in it, you’re letting the compounding do its thing. So, setting reasonable expectations, giving grace, staying in a marathon, not a sprint. Yeah, that’ll be our last question.
Sam Chason: Cool. Friend center. Yeah. So like looking into kind of the future with a lot of new technologies coming out, like AI, how do you guys feel like that can maybe help or maybe hurt your guys’ business? Yeah. I mean in this like immediate year. So AI, the most common thing for us would be like customer service. Right. Like we’ll have 40 people in customer service during our peak season, which is a lot of people. It’s a lot of payroll, it’s a lot of training, it’s a lot of room for error. And I think the initial thought was like, oh, let’s build an AI chatbot and then like it will solve all of our problems, like somebody will do the work for us kind of thing. And I fully believe AI will get there probably very soon. But for now, for us, it’s like that’s actually the way we’re able to differentiate too, because if you call us, like a real person picks up the phone and actually speaks to you, versus if you call American Express, you’re going to get someone overseas and you’re going to wait online for 30 minutes or you mess. It’s just like not a good experience. So we’re actually once again trying to stand out by just doing the fundamentally simple things as opposed to looking for the silver bullet of like AI will cut our marketing and our labor costs in half. So we should just do that and we’ll solve all the issues. So very soon, I think we’re going to have to take advantage of all the different AI components. But for now, it’s kind of serving us well to stay in our lane.