Ep 106- Leading Through Company Transformation with Erin Gajdalo

Transcript

Transcripts are generated by machine learning, so typos may be present.

Chris Hanslik: Erin, good to meet you and welcome to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today.

Erin Gajdalo: Likewise, great to meet you.

Chris Hanslik: So let’s start. Why don’t you just kind of introduce yourself and your company Plurisite and tell us kind of what you’re known for.

Erin Gajdalo: Yeah, so Erin Gajdalo, I’m the CEO of Pluralsight. I have been the CEO now for a year. It’s been a wild ride since I’ve been here. But Pluralsight focuses on technology upskilling. So we work with Fortune 500 companies. We’re a global company really helping organizations upskill their talent assets so that they can really take advantage of What is usually the biggest investment that they make in their company, which is their people. So upskilling them so that they have the latest and greatest technology skills. And so that’s what we do at Pluralsight.

Chris Hanslik: Okay. So how did you find your way to Pluralsight?

Erin Gajdalo: So my career story is really one of transformation. And so my entire career, I have spent building or evolving or transforming organizations. And so that’s actually what landed me here in Texas. And so came here and we started out with a executive team with a couple of businesses that you might be familiar with. We were Bluecora at the time. We owned Tax Act, which is a tax filing company as well as Evantax, which is a financial services organization. And both of those businesses were in the midst of transformation. And so it was with them for about seven years and ended up turning around both of those organizations in partnership with the broader executive team and ended up selling those. We were a public company and sold it to two different private equity firms. And from there, decided I wanted to take a little bit of time off, but sort of given the nature of what the rest of our executive team was doing, opportunities came up. And so I only ended up taking off about three months and then landed myself at Pluralsight. And that is a very dramatic story. My first year here at Pluralsight, I don’t know if you’ve done any research on the company at all, but founder led business, private equity backed, Within the first three months of being here, the lenders took the business over, had an entirely new executive team. So the new executive team that had joined, then eventually decided to depart upon that transition, leaving us to replace an entire another set of executives to do a transformation on the business. So it’s been a journey. We have a wonderful business. We have wonderful customers. But like many other SaaS organizations, we lived through really high times during the pandemic and then struggled to really move from a business that had grown gangbusters to then being able to operate at scale. And so those are some of the challenges that we’re facing today.

Chris Hanslik: I think that’s a great place to kind of dig into for a little bit because I think a lot of startups and entrepreneurs face those challenges, right? Because they start with an idea, it gets hot and it starts to grow, but it maybe outgrows their capital, their revenue, whatever, maybe gets in trouble with the lender. But then you talk a little bit about how you believe you can maybe regulate or manage to prevent that from happening. as one part of the question, I think, and then maybe on the other side of that, talk about what you have done with your new team to kind of rebuild and overcome it.

Erin Gajdalo: Yeah. So first and foremost, understanding where you’re at from a market perspective, as well as understanding what your go-to-market opportunity truly is, as well as the performance of your people is key. So for us, We had to do an entirely new rebuild. We were struggling to grow. So annual recurring revenue is a pretty common metric that we use in SaaS businesses. And this business, like I said, grew dramatically during the pandemic, but then started to decline. And it was a free fall. And the business was really challenged to inflect that change on growth. And that’s what we’ve been really aiming to do. And a big portion of that is also getting the right people in the right seat who understand how to do that. That is probably one of the biggest changes that we made as a part of our transformation is resetting our entire go-to-market infrastructure. Um, and so getting that right and understanding, you know, not in an organization that grew this quickly, there wasn’t a lot of rigor. There wasn’t a lot of focus. Um, there weren’t standards of practice of how many meetings do you have to have? How many leads do you have to have? What’s your win close rate? How does that then convert from a pipeline perspective to actual dollars? And so doing all of that work was really challenging but is foundational for us getting the business back on track. And so understanding that was sort of component number one. Component number two when we think about scale is what is the right size of the investment that you’re making in the business if you think about every dollar that you have available to you. And that’s your operating expense. Are you using, if you were to take every single chip that you have or every single investment that you have today in your business, which for us is pretty significant, around $275 million. If you put all those chips on the table and you know you got to get this big business back to growth, where do you place those bets? And so figuring out the right balance of where you need to invest and what are some of the things you maybe don’t need to be doing anymore so that you can write the ship is core. And there’s a lot of hard decisions that go into that.

Chris Hanslik: So that sounds right. There’s a saying that boys used and that learned from others. is figure out what works and how do you do that better? What are you not doing that you should be doing and what do you need to stop doing, right? And at least three buckets of ways to think about as you’re trying to build and grow, try to answer those questions so that you can, to your point, invest your resources wisely for the maximum return. Yeah.

Erin Gajdalo: And you actually asked, so what did our team do in this last year? And it’s pretty astonishing when I look back and a big part of it is we moved the company. So this company was founded in Utah and we made the decision when you’re going through a transformation like this, the number one thing that you have to get right with no exceptions is culture. And for us, focusing on getting the right culture and placing us in a position where we had access to the best talent, that is the reason why we moved the organization to Texas. It was a huge pivot for us. I mean, me personally, I was traveling out to Utah. I had an apartment out there. I was out there every other week, but we had a core set of our leaders that were already here from the new team. So outside of resetting the entire executive team, we made a huge decision To separate the organization from its roots because we needed to really reset This is where the organization came from and that is a great history But now we need to be future focused and to that we need to have a really clear line of sight to the best talent in the world and We need to be operating in an environment that is is really going to set the tone for who we want to be in the future and so

Chris Hanslik: That was a huge piece of change that we made, that was super intentional, and one of the biggest changes that we had to make this last year.

Erin Gajdalo: Wow, I can’t think of a better plug for the state of Texas than you moving an entire company, right? Because you said this is where the best talent’s going to be. Uh, so, you know, I feel like I need to, you know, call some politicians in Austin or something and say, hey, you need to play this, uh, this part of the episode. That’s awesome. What a cool story. However, you know, so as you were saying that, I’m sure for you, it seemed obvious, but that’s a, that’s a pretty bold move to step into a company as a new CEO and say, you know, hi, uh, Good news, bad news, right? And we’re going to uproot. And if you want to save this company, you’re going to have to move halfway across the country.

Chris Hanslik: Yeah. And so, well, here’s what I would say. I came into this knowing that there was going to need to be a lot of big, bold moves. It was a requirement. I mean, when you go through a period of time where the business is declining, you then have one of the largest private equity firms having to exit your business and you’re being taken over by the lenders, you have to replace an entire executive team. At the end of the day, you have a team that is ready to go and everybody is here and ready for transformation. So the one thing that you can do is big bold moves. In my mind, when you do these types of things, you have about 12 months to get it right. And if you don’t, I mean, that is when you have your investors coming to you saying, what’s going on? We hired this team. This team is here to transform the business and get it back to growth. And we’re not seeing it. So that’s why there was such urgency around making these decisions. But yes, resetting the team. resetting the location, resetting our culture, making decisions about right sizing the business and where we wanted to place our investments. Those are really core to getting us back on the right track. And fortunately, we’re starting to see some really great green shoots from that.

Erin Gajdalo: That’s great. So you mentioned it more than once, and it’s my favorite word as far as business leadership goes and business growth and its culture. You’re not alone. I don’t know what episode wrong or maybe a hundred and seven hundred and eight episodes and. if not 108 of the guests have said exactly what you said, right? If not all, then 99.9%, the importance of culture and your people to success of any organization. And some founders, which are not get a chance to create that and some maybe don’t know enough in the first few years as they’ve said, but then they realized that it was there or that it maybe what was there needed to change. coming into this organization and to reset and the culture had to be a challenge. Talk about some of the things that you have done in the past 12 months and what do you continue to do to one, reset and then integrate or let that saturate and actually to where it is the culture. It’s not just you know, bullet points on a PowerPoint or something, right? That it actually is starting to be something within the soul of the organization.

Chris Hanslik: Yeah. So the first thing that we did was you have to understand what your culture is to begin with. And so we worked with a company called Spencer Stewart. You’re probably familiar with them. I’m sure most of your listeners are familiar with them. And we just did some measures on where we were at today. And there were some really clear things that when you think about transformation and what you need to do to move the needle, you have to look at where you’re at and where you need to go. And we had a huge theme of autonomy in our organization. We also had a huge, huge emphasis on friendliness and likability. And for us, that was great. And it’s a story of what got you here is not going to get you there. And so as we started to look at the business, it became very clear that this autonomy was getting in the way of our ability to get anything done. So we would say, these are our priorities. And then it would make its way through the organization. And then something would happen, and nothing would go anywhere. And it was because once you started to say, this is what we need to get done, the individuals and the teams who were brought into the organization were given the ability to use their own tools to be able to have discretionary decision making, to do the things that they wanted to do. So when we as an organization said, we want to go do this, they would just go, nah, it’s not on my list of priorities. That was point number one.

Erin Gajdalo: See, that being a problem, yeah.

Chris Hanslik: That is definitely a problem. And then the other thing that was a real challenge, and it’s lovely to have wonderful, nice people, but we want people that want to compete and win. And so to be able to move from this culture of being very nice and making sure you hear everyone out, like we actually went and reset our culture pillars. And so we took some of those capability or those measures that we experienced and then we reset it to our culture pillars, which number one is being customer first. We want to be direct and respectful. And we want to be always learning. And so these things are really core to what we do. And there are things that we talk about throughout the organization. They’re how we align our goals. And then separate from that, we’ve got really clear focus. And I’ve had to. I’ve had to pivot my own leadership style because I do like to hear people out and I want to give them autonomy. But knowing that this was sort of really loosey-goosey here, I had to take a step back and get incredibly focused. And so we have what we call our placemat today, which is one page. And it shows our core KPIs. There’s one core KPI that matters to us and our five top priorities. And we true back to that every single week. We talk about that as an executive team. We talk about that throughout the layers of the organization. And that’s what continues to remain true in order for us to be able to bend the curve on this transformation.

Erin Gajdalo: That’s great. What I love about that is, and I think it’s true, every organization has to have like its core, right? And it’s the, these are the goals, this is what matters most. And when you align on that and keep it simple, right? The one sheet, the placement you said, then every decision you make, is it advancing that or moving us closer or not? And it starts to make what could look like maybe gray area or confusion, much more clear because you’re so focused on purpose, right? And this is our purpose, this is the why. And it helps in all aspects of the business at that point.

Chris Hanslik: Absolutely, absolutely.

Erin Gajdalo: So you mentioned this transformation has challenged your leadership. Let’s talk a little bit about that. You mentioned kind of wanting to be maybe a little more collaborative and open door to listen. Sounds like that was your leadership style or maybe your preferred style, but this situation demands something different. And so how have you adapted as a leader to kind of maybe go outside your comfort zone?

Chris Hanslik: Yeah, I am very much a person that loves to roll up my sleeves, and I will solve the problem. I will get into it. I also love to brainstorm, so it’s very common if you come to my office, you’ll see, and I’m in my home office today, so you wouldn’t see it here. But we do a lot of whiteboarding and brainstorming on ideas, and I’ve gotten very rigid on who I will engage with, those individuals that

Chris Hanslik: Understand brainstorming for the sake of brainstorming and not for the sake of Erin now said this one thing I’m gonna run and go do it that’s not the point. So I have gotten really rigid on that and then when we actually talk about what we’re going to do narrowing the time spent. as a collective team to be focused on those priority areas, frankly nothing else matters. At the end of the day, we are still very deep in the midst of this transformation of this business and every quarter matters. And so while we would love to talk about all of these other great things that are happening through the organization, as it relates to the ELT and the work that we’ve got to go do, there’s only five things that matter. And so for us, it’s just really narrowing our focus and me getting, you know, narrowing in to say, as much as I love these things and these other things do matter, they’re not the needle mover. And until we are out of the woods, this is where I need to maintain my focus.

Erin Gajdalo: That’s good. Well, another great point because this is another leadership lesson I’ve learned along the way. And it’s asking yourself and your leadership team, what is it time for now?

Chris Hanslik: Yeah.

Erin Gajdalo: Right. And so I think your answer to that are those five core things. And it’s not that these other things aren’t important. It just may not be time for them right now. And we can always circle back to them. If we do these things right, we got to get this right first. That’s right. So beautiful. So let’s go back to just the business of Pluralsight. You said you technology upskilling. So what are some of the things that you do that you think are kind of innovative in your product offerings or how you approach and offer services to your clients?

Chris Hanslik: So there’s really three key things that we deliver. So one is content. And we have experts across the world that focus on technology. They are the subject matter experts in tech. And so we work with them to build our content. Second, we have what is called Skill IQ. Skill IQ is an assessment that allows organizations to then have their employees go benchmark themselves against other employees around the globe on specific tech skills. So I think if you were to train your team on what it takes to do Python coding as an example, they can go in and test their proficiency and understand where they are as it relates to other individuals that have taken the test. And then third is hands-on experiences. So as I think about the future and the future of learning itself, This world of assessments is gonna matter, but at the end of the day, being able to put hands on keyboards and illustrate that you have the competency and the ability to do the task at hand, that is core to what we’re doing. And so that’ll continue to be a focus for us as we work with our customers who are really looking to upskill.

Erin Gajdalo: Now, I love that. You have to be able to apply what you learn, right? And I think you see a lot more in that. I think at all levels of education is that experiential learning or being job ready. I mean, I just left a lunch with a university president today and talking about not just how education and academics are important, but you have to create people that companies want to hire, which means they have to be able to apply what they’re what they’re learning into the real world and not just be academic. We say the same thing here at the law firm. I mean, we want to hire law students that they need to know the law, but they needed to learn how to apply it to real world situations our clients are in and be able to interact with the clients and, you know, you know, exist in the business world, right?

Chris Hanslik: Yeah. I mean, and just using your law firm as an example, like think about the models that Anthropic just launched that essentially called the SAS, created the SAS pop collapse. And these are the things that large organizations are looking at, and the pace of technology changes happening at such a rapid pace that we have never seen before.

Erin Gajdalo: It’s scary.

Chris Hanslik: It is terrifying and so organizations are struggling to keep up and they want to know what is this mean for me and how do i make sure that i’ve got the right skill sets on our team to be able to address some of these needs and reduce the risk associated with some of these new capabilities that are being deployed. And then how do I make sure that I continue to have the best talent in the market so that I can compete in our business and deliver against the strategies and the priorities that we have as an organization?

Erin Gajdalo: Yeah. So I think we’re talking around it. But so let’s use the latest and greatest word everyone talks about. And that is AI. So how is that? It seems like you’re on the front edge in this business of dealing with the impact AI is having in the workforce and on companies. So share with me some of the things that either how you’re using AI in your business or how you are using it to, I guess, help your customers deal with it in their business.

Chris Hanslik: Yeah. So I’ll start off with a customer and sort of share where we are at with the latest product launch and how we’re thinking about it for our business. So as an example, we work with Kimberly Clark, who is based out of Irving, Texas. They’re a huge customer of ours. They’ve worked with us for several years. We’ve partnered with them to create what they call their digital university. As a part of this digital university, I think they have something like 35,000 employees that now have access to digital university. And they go through plural site content as a way to make sure that they can upskill. One of the biggest challenges that they’ve had in the last couple of the years has been the ability to move to the cloud. And so they then had cohort-based learning and through plural site content upskilled all the people that were going to be working on that project. to be able to make sure that they were ready to then deploy and move to the cloud. And so that’s the format of which our customers engage with us. And so you can just imagine the pace that has really picked up as it relates to AI. And the question that customers are asking these days is more around, what does it mean to be proficient? What are the things that I should be thinking about? And AI is a very generic term. And so for us, the way that we’ve been thinking about it is, how do we answer some of these key questions that we know that our customers want? And the first one is, how do you ensure that the entire enterprise is AI literate? The second one is I’m now paying for all these tools. It’s either Gemini, ChatGBT, whatever the solution is. How do I ensure that my employees know how to use these tools, understand the risk associated with them, and know the difference between what good and bad results look like? And then the last one is for much more technically savvy individuals, engineers. How do I actually build an agent? To answer those three questions, which are the biggest questions that we have today, we just released our AI Academy. This is a launch that went live actually yesterday.

Erin Gajdalo: Wow, congrats.

Chris Hanslik: So this one’s been huge for us, but it’s really flipping learning on its head to be more oriented around what the solution is that you’re trying to solve for and us being able to provide our customers with those answers. And I anticipate that that’s only going to continue to grow. So what are engineers who are working along the software development lifecycle? What are all

Chris Hanslik: of the applications of AI. So we’ll have to continue to evolve in that way. And then lastly for us, we have to drink our own champagne. So the biggest thing you’ll hear is one of my five priorities is our entire organization is going through AI Academy. And everyone will go through all of our 1200 employees will be AI proficient. And then we will have those that are much more technically savvy that sit in our product or engineering organizations will do the entire Academy. So That’s the way we think about it.

Erin Gajdalo: I love that you use champagne and not Kool-Aid.

Chris Hanslik: I’ve heard others refer to it as a dog food, and I’m like, that’s just really bad analogy.

Erin Gajdalo: That’s terrible. I don’t know. No, no. Champagne’s much better. That last piece is so often forgotten by service providers like your company. The joke of the plumber with leaky pipes, right? for you to be an expert and have your people go through that what you’re, I mean, what a great marketing thing, right? So, you know, we put our entire organization through this university. That’s how much we believe in it. That, you know, we believe in it that much to put all of our people through it so they can be as efficient as possible. That’s why it can work for you, right?

Chris Hanslik: Yeah, absolutely. And it helps us understand how to be better and like, what are the other needs that our customers have? Because if we have missing gaps, we’re going to find it.

Erin Gajdalo: Yeah, yeah, has anything come up?

Chris Hanslik: Um, well, yes, actually. So a big piece of what we’re doing as a part of this academy is not just online learning. A big piece of it is actually delivery through humans. We believe that while AI is making everything digital and you interact with everything on a computer screen, learning also is dramatically improved when humans are involved. And so there’s a portion of this. It’s called instructor led training where we have different solutions that we’ll offer, whether it’s a capstone project or hackathon as an example. And so for us, the challenge we’ve had is pinning our team down to say, what are the services you are going to provide to us to make sure this happens. So that’s been the challenge to date.

Erin Gajdalo: That’s interesting. So it’s almost like a little R&D within the, yeah. Yeah, so from your perspective, maybe help, because you said earlier, AI is such a generic term, right? And it is, and I think a lot of people still are just so scared by it that they don’t understand it. Where do you see opportunities for humans to upskill themselves to be able to work alongside AI and not be replaced by AI?

Chris Hanslik: The number one thing that people can do in order to ensure that they’re not replaced is to actually get hands on and learn how to use it. That’s core. It is a great tool to augment what you do and to make you more efficient. It’s interesting. We work with large global companies. And you constantly see in the press of how organizations are letting employees go because of the fact that they have AI. And all the customer engagements that we have had, all of them are reducing expenses and reducing headcount. None of them can actually tie that to AI. And so I think it’s interesting. I think we saw the most honest and open press release on this with Block in the last week where they were letting go 4,000 employees. But the story was actually, we grew during the pandemic. We had to right-size our organization, and we know we have a lot of opportunity where we can drive efficiency with these AI tools. But it wasn’t, we used this AI tool and found this magic thing that allowed us to eliminate everybody. And so that to me is the story that resonates more of, yes, companies are rightsizing. Things are challenging right now, but the best thing that employees can do is embrace these tools and understand how do you help your organization innovate? How do you help your organization be more efficient? Because as organizations are rightsizing because of many of these other macro trends, Those individuals that are using these solutions and skilled in this way are going to be the ones that maintain their jobs in the future.

Erin Gajdalo: Yeah. Don’t you think that some of it, I mean, it’s not that it’s fake news, but it’s, you know, with these articles online where Bombardy was so much, it’s kind of the clickbait, right? The headline has to get our attention.

Chris Hanslik: Remember, most of them are public companies.

Erin Gajdalo: You’re right. But it’s like if you really dig in, it wasn’t the day I did this. It was something else, but the news makes it sound that way.

Chris Hanslik: Yeah. What’s that? They had quarterly earnings to make and expenses were out of control. And this is a great way to adjust that with a really good tagline that has zero implications and is a very common theme that we’re hearing in the market today.

Erin Gajdalo: And it makes it look like you’re innovative and staying up with the trends, right? Well, what you’ve said confirms everything I’ve heard and that is, you know, embrace it. Obviously it’s not going anywhere. And I just think about the conversations, you know, maybe starting two years ago about it and where we are today. And it’s like light years. I mean, it’s just gone more speed. It’s only to get faster. All you hear about Yeah, with I guess was it open claw now and the speed of which it can program and Gary side of it as well. You need to contain it. So I just you see also things about now universities and other places offering uh courses and prompts and yeah that how to how to you know be prompt engineering prompt engineering right so instead of computer programmer now we’re gonna have prompt engineers yeah until we don’t until everybody becomes so in a few years so second nature then that will go away that’s right i mean at the end of the day i kind of look back on this um i used to work for a really large

Chris Hanslik: financial institution. And as a part of that, I was tapped earlier in my career to start their data and analytics and business intelligence function. This is back when machine learning was just starting to make its way into organizations, which is now AI. And we started doing a bunch of analysis. And what really matters is how the human Interprets and actions. Most of those things and the thing that’s different about AI is the autonomy of these solutions. And so being able to apply thought understand what the models are doing and making judgment as you’re using them. is so key to ensure that before you start running away with sort of the autonomy and the decision making that’s taking when you’re out of control and you don’t have the ability to influence that then is another reason as to why people should be really focused on developing these skills. And we’ve been doing this for a long time and at the end of the day, the human is still going to continue to be there to be able to provide that oversight. And the only way you can do that really effectively is if you have the knowledge on how to use these tools.

Erin Gajdalo: Right. I understand the fundamentals of what’s really going on and what it’s How it’s thinking and what it’s what information is it processing to make decisions, etc. Right. Yeah. So you mentioned in what we started the move to Texas was key to the transformation of the company. Anything else that you know about the state of Texas that you felt

Chris Hanslik: like was important, you know, other than I guess the kind of the cultural aspect and talent pool to make you want to relocate the company’s headquarters here.

Erin Gajdalo: So I’ll just tell you my personal story. I’m not from Texas. I was not born and raised here.

Chris Hanslik: But you got here as soon as you could.

Erin Gajdalo: That’s right. And so it was funny. I personally made the decision to come here. I was recruited to the last organization that I referred to earlier. And I’m very intentional about managing my career. And what I saw when I looked at Texas was a lot more opportunity. And where are the places that I could go where there’s large organizations where I can have an impact? and that was one of the reasons. I came here and I was like, I don’t know if this company is going to be a company I’m going to be with forever. It turned out to be a really great move, but you never know. But what I did know is moving to Texas was where I wanted my family to be and where I saw the most opportunity for us to be able to live the life that we wanted to live as a family while also being able to achieve my career objectives. And so when I came here, the thing that was just really amazing to me is how much, how many people have come here and it’s such a melting pot of talent. And being able, there’s never a time when I would say, hey, I need to find this type of engineer or this financial professional, which is my past career. Did I ever have challenges finding the talent that I needed in Texas? And so that was really key number one. Number two, I just find that in Texas, people are always willing to help. and put themselves out there and be supportive. And that’s not something that you get everywhere. And whether that’s in business or it’s your neighbor across the street, I mean, we moved in and we had three neighbors come over in the first week dropping off bottles of wine and wanting to meet us and go out to dinner. It’s just a really unique place. And now that we’re here, I wasn’t sure if we were going to stay here forever. And now I plan to live the rest of my life here, so long as my daughter doesn’t move too far away.

Chris Hanslik: That’s great. Look, I was born and raised here, so it just seems natural. Everyone’s this way, but from what, yeah, definitely experiencing what I hear. It’s not, and I guess that’s okay. We like it, and we love that people continue to migrate. I mean, the number of companies in the last, you know, certainly five to six years that have relocated is astounding, and it is great. It’s a great place to do business. I think it makes the state economic scene more vibrant and resilient. And so very happy to hear that’s been your experience. And hopefully your daughter won’t go too far.

Erin Gajdalo: No, hopefully not. I mean, at the end of the day, if we have the ideal place, we plan to retire and we have 20 acres in Fredericksburg, which is where I would love to have my ranch whenever that might be. But if she ends up somewhere else, I don’t know how much distance I could handle.

Chris Hanslik: You can always fly to see her. That’s right. Well, this has been great, Erin. I mean, I love the story is remarkable. Congratulations on how you’re turning things around. I do want to ask a few personal things before we kind of in the episode. So what do you like to do kind of in your free time to kind of maybe reset and recharge?

Erin Gajdalo: So my daughter and I ride dressage horses. So we have three horses who keep us very busy. They’re always injured. You know, something’s always going wrong that don’t get into horses if you’re not into them already. And that’s where we spend our time. But that’s my, that’s my checkout and my reset. Cause once I’m on the back of a horse, I can’t think about anything else.

Chris Hanslik: Love it. And you can’t look at a phone, right? So there’s no screen time. I love that. All right. And so since you are not native, but sounds like you’ve been here a while, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue?

Erin Gajdalo: Oh, that’s a tough one. Um, It’s a tough one. I have to go barbecue. And mainly because you would never know this. But my mother’s side of the family is Mexican. And so traditional Mexican food is very different than Tex-Mex.

Chris Hanslik: It is. OK.

Erin Gajdalo: It’s been a mind shift to adjust. I love it. I appreciate it. But it’s not my kind of Mexican food.

Chris Hanslik: Well, that. Given your heritage and your history, that makes total sense, because it is two different things growing up here. By the way, it is the hardest question I think I ask everybody. You talked with ease and without hesitation about transforming a company that took a takeover by its lenders and asked you a simple food question and it stumped you. But you’re not alone. It happens. I’ve had guests turn around on me and I’m like, ah. Yeah. But I do love traditional Mexican as well. But I remember growing up on Tex-Mex and then like going to Mexico for the first time, I was like, this is not Mexican food. And back when I grew up, we just called it Mexican food. It wasn’t Tex-Mex. That kind of came into our vocabulary more recently. It’s all good.

Erin Gajdalo: It’s all good.

Chris Hanslik: Yes. So Erin, this has been great. I really enjoyed getting to know you and learning more about your company. Congratulations on the transformation. It sounds like you’re right on track where you wanted to be and no doubt that will continue.

Erin Gajdalo: Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it.