For our subscribers, this is an expanded version of the Q&A that appears in the Winter 2022 issue of the Brewing Industry Guide. If you prefer to listen, we’ve also released a recording of this conversation as Podcast Episode 279: Tomme Arthur is “Growing Down” Port and Lost Abbey to Prepare for a More Sustainable Business Future. This version has been edited for length and clarity.
CBB // You recently announced that The Lost Abbey, Port Brewing, and Hop Concept are “growing down.” What do you mean by “growing down”?
TA // I wanted to give a reference point to what we were trying to accomplish, and I thought that a lot of people come out and say they’re “right sizing,” they’re “taking corrective actions,” or they’re “downsizing.” But “growing down” for us was an approach that says we understand that there could be growth in the future, but we need to get smaller today. And we need to be comfortable being smaller for an infinite amount of time. Then, if growth comes to us because we find the right spark or the pieces and the connective tissues that we need, then we can grow through that. The growing part’s important—you’re going down, but you’re still maintaining a focus on what it means to grow in the future. How can we go about that by getting to the right size—getting to the baseline—and then working from that to try to find growth in the future?
[PAYWALL]
CBB // It’s definitely a different way of defining it—it’s not giving up, it’s understanding that the scale of the business in the current environment needs to be different to be competitive, to be profitable, and to be sustainable.
TA // Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. There are a lot of different ways to talk about retreating and retrenching, and those words are all very associative. I wanted to frame it uniquely to what I see as being something that a lot of people in the industry have had to go through—or will be going through—but I wanted to coin something that we could latch onto as a company and be like, “We’re doing this for us.” But at the same time, we’re not using just a standardized naming convention for something that a lot of people will be doing, which is essentially just getting smaller. But there’s a reason for what we’re doing.
CBB // What are some of the broader market dynamics that have driven this most recent move? And what are some of the things you’re looking at now that are driving some of the decision-making behind this?
TA // The biggest one is that we have to start with the history of this company. It’s going to be 17 years old when we get into the new year, so that gives some context as to where we came from, where we grew, where we grew up from, and kind of where we are in our history. You know, a 17-year-old brewery is old by many standards even though it’s really not old as a business. But growth was everywhere when we opened our doors in 2006. If you were making good beer, good liquid, you could find growth very easily, even backyard you could get to 10,000 barrels quickly. I think we reached double-digit [thousands of] barrels in probably our fifth or sixth year, on what amounted to a pretty slow growth pattern for us.
So, we constantly approached every year like many breweries and businesses [that] were growing. Was the success that we’re up 30 percent, 10 percent, 14 percent—whatever it is, in our world—is growth what you were benchmarking your success against? We made a lot of decisions in the last 10 years to invest in the company. And by investing in the company, we didn’t take dividends, we put all the money in stainless steel—we own every tank in the building. Everything essentially is paid for, but now it’s worth pennies on the dollar. So, was that the right strategy? When should we have invested all of that? Or should we have gone to more … quality of life, [where] we didn’t have three shifts? … Much leaner with regards to all of our assets, but using them at a much higher rate? We’ve learned a lot over the years, and I think that what it really comes down to is that there isn’t one singular way to run a brewery. And especially one with some of the complexities that we have.
CBB // When I was out there last, you had this beautiful bottling line that you’d invested a huge amount of money in, and then a small canning line next to it that was taking over the lion’s share of the production. How much of this is driven by the rapid change we’ve seen over the past four or five years in consumer behavior? And at the same time, you have to be cognizant of where the market may be in five years, which could very well be different from where it is now.
TA // I'll tell you this—and this hasn’t been put out to there yet—in two weeks’ time, there will be a crew coming to start disassembling the bottling line because we sold it to a brewery in Florida because we don’t run it. Our last payment on that bottling line will be due in January. It will be paid off by the time it ships out of here. It’s crazy to think that we just spent more than five years paying for an asset brand new—it’s a Maserati, it’s a beautiful machine—it just takes up a lot of room and doesn’t run as frequently as it should. And it’s going to find a new home because the canning line runs three days a week, maybe four, and it spits out a lot more beer, and it’s time for the canning line to be front and center. That bottling line exists because we had a lot of square footage; it’s a 20-valve machine, and it takes a lot of space. Getting rid of that bottling line was the very first step in this process, getting out from under having excess square footage that we were paying for that isn’t generating revenue. That’s a big part of our growing-down strategy—to shed the excess square footage that’s very, very expensive in California.
CBB // How much does the product mix weigh into this? We’ve watched certain styles in the past five years peak and then potentially either stay static or decline—things like hazy IPA, which was once growing so quickly. How much does this kind of rapidly changing consumer behavior impact how you operate the business?
TA // It’s a great question because it’s a pretty diverse model. If I go back—and I think this is a great way to approach this—we bought the bottling line in November 2015, so we’ve had it for seven years. And seven years ago, we basically brought The Hop Concept online. So we had this hop-forward brand in 22-ounce bottles only. But in seven years’ time, that format has gone from 22-ounce bottle to can, and in reality, it shifted to can four years ago. It shifted dynamically, very quickly. The consumer doesn’t seem to have a lot of love or need for glass containers at this point. It doesn't matter what kind of beer. There really isn’t much that is in glass. You start to think about people wanting to sell their beers and stuff—and cellared cans of pastry stout 10 years from now, is that going to be an acceptable thing or not? And I truly don’t know where the market’s going, but right now aluminum is king.
CBB // When we look at the broader picture, there are so many financial challenges facing brewers. Rising logistics costs make distribution much, much more expensive. You need to be doing volumes, and you need to be very cost-effective about that distribution to even make it work. How does that figure into what you will do, especially on The Lost Abbey side?
TA // This kind of shifts the gears to what’s unique about our situation and what has made the big challenges for us. It boils down to a couple of things. One, on a distribution level, we used to ship beer at a much higher volume to the East Coast, and we would have half-truckloads and consolidated truckloads going to our distributors. And that doesn’t exist anymore in our footprint. Most of our stuff heading to the East Coast is anywhere from four to six pallet positions, and so now we’re on an LTL level—less than truckload—and that’s expensive. And it’s not as easy to make dollars and cents out of that. So that’s number one.
Number two, we’ve seen a much different distributor consolidation footprint. Even within the same distributor footprint, the way that they brought brands in kind of pushed brands to the bottom. There is not much love for selling hand-to-table kinds of stuff right now. You want to have the trucks go in and drop stacks of things. Walking in with a case of Belgian beer is not an ideal situation. Even the specialty-beer teams that used to exist at the distributor level have been consolidated or dropped out. That’s been a part of it. A secondary concern for us has been that even in certain cities, where we used to have very craft house–focused kinds of partners, those distributors were sold to larger entities. Then, at that point, some of the broader market conditions kicked in—more units, fewer stops, etcetera. So that’s been problematic.
And then one of our largest challenges in the past few years—and this is something that kind of flies under the radar—is that we’re on a commercial lease. And triple-net leases are very landlord-favorable and very not favorable to the tenant. So, we’re responsible for a lot of the upkeep. Within the past six years, this building was sold. And when it was sold, it hadn’t been sold for many, many years, and then they readjusted our property taxes. So now we’re on the hook for more building than we had five years ago at a higher tax rate at a time when things are declining. So that’s been part of our internal look at it—it made sense to be at 40,000 square feet, but we can’t afford 40,000 square feet anymore. That’s where these things are behind the scenes; they don’t really show up until they show up. And then, all of a sudden, when they do, they’re pretty massive.
CBB // How much has the rising raw-materials costs affected you?
TA // It’s so crazy. Hops that we’ve been contracted for over a broader period are basically the only thing that really hasn’t risen out of scale. We might have a 10-cent increase year over year on a variety, but that’s predictable. It hasn’t changed. Our two-row silo malt went up 60 percent last year. We’ve seen multiple hits on the corrugated-cardboard level. We just got a letter six weeks ago that the cost of CO2 is going up 20 percent. And then you take into account labor—labor shortages, labor retention. There hasn’t been a single place in our building—outside of our hop contract—that hasn’t gone past a very defendable level of inflationary pressure. I think that’s what we’ve really learned over the past six, eight, 10 months; the number of things that we’re being asked to absorb is impossible. You get out of bed every day, and you think you can find ways to absorb them. And then, at some point, they’re untenable. And that’s where we’re living.
CBB // Have you done any modeling on trying to solve the problem from the revenue side, in terms of price increases or finding ways to offset some of these other increasing costs?
TA // I used to talk to my financial director a lot about this, and there was always this sense that sales will fix everything. And that used to be a thing: If you had the right mix, and you had the right margin, and you grew sales, then you would inevitably have more profit available, or more dollars available to dispense as need be. The problem is that sales are expensive. And if you aren’t paying attention to what you’re selling—or you’re selling the wrong, marginalized thing—then you don’t have money available to you because it’s the cost of the sale. The product itself isn’t going to generate any revenue. So, we’ve gotten away from a top-line, growing-sales-will-fix-everything view, to a much more in-line sense of tops and bottoms. And the bottom is more important than ever because there isn’t any money without really, really paying attention to the bottom-line inputs or where it’s going out. For us now, it’s where are you going to allocate the wins when the losses are bigger than they’ve ever been?
CBB // When we look at this overall equation, people are a big part of this. Human beings working in a brewery are expensive. They’re also facing the same kind of inflationary challenges in their own lives and family budgets that everyone else is. It’s very realistic for them to want to find this kind of compensation. How do you then focus on the things that can allow for efficiency—whether that’s within the product mix, whether that’s looking at automation—to find ways to lower the expense of that without burning out staff or creating an environment that people don’t want to work in?
TA // That’s a huge, heavy question. Let’s dissect it in a couple of ways. First, employee capital is incredibly important, and it’s not something that we have an infinite level of spend on. We can’t just burn people out for the sake of continuing a business; we have to be invested in their wellness. And that’s a very difficult thing to do—especially coming out of a pandemic. We are in California. We are currently paying almost five and a half dollars a gallon for gas, which in turn affects grocery prices. Minimum wage at the state level is now $15 an hour. In the new year, it flips to $15.50. There was a trigger in the system if inflation went above a certain percentage, and it went above that certain percentage this year. That wasn’t even in the budget at some point in ’22. But every time any of the minimum-wage pieces go up, that translates into more and more. So, we have crazy California pricing, we have crazy California rules.
We love making beer in the Golden State. It’s an amazing place to make and sell beer for so many reasons. And we don’t want to get away from that. But it’s a very different reality than a brewery in a state in the middle of the country. It’s something that we have to at least explain as part of our DNA in our daily business, that they don’t look the same. Of course, rents in California are off the charts, and in most places, commercial rents and even personal rents are way up.
To answer your question, every single thing that we have to pay on has been problematic. But there was a point last fall, sometime around August, where the entire operation here had to get paid more because it started to kick in that it just wasn’t enough. And my financial director said to me, “How are we going to afford to pay these people more money than we’re currently paying?” And I said, “If we don't pay them, we won’t have anything to sell.” And that’s Business 101, right? If you don’t pay them more, will you be able to make more—or not even more—make the product you need to make? Yeah, it’s a crazy situation. But ultimately, if you don’t have people, you can’t make products.
CBB // How do you think about what you make and how you make it in order to optimize around that? Are you pulling more work- or person-intensive beers and product approaches out of the mix? Are you rebalancing, so that while you continue to do some of those more hands-on things, they’re just happening at a smaller level, at a higher price point? How do you adjust for that, not to just extract the most labor out of people, but also make sure that they are producing in the most efficient way, so that you can afford this new reality that you’re facing?
TA // I’m most worried about our sour-beer program more than anything else, in terms of what we make. The cost to justify the space isn’t that simple anymore. A significant portion of our beer once was aged and sour. And those were at a higher price point, a higher margin. And that all translated into more opportunity, more building space, more free cash, everything you need to run a business. And that almost is like water in the West these days. The lakes are drying up, and that’s a reservoir. And we’re starting to see a lot of breweries who heavily invested in sour beer—mixed-culture sour-beer fermentation, not quick kettle stuff—really having to reevaluate how much land, how much landscape and position you’re willing to commit to something that doesn’t have a really high level of consumerism. There aren’t people banging on our door saying, “When’s your next sour-beer release coming?”
CBB // What do you expect to see, then, over the next three or four years in terms of product mix? Is that going to shift to some of those beers with shorter production times that you can find more profit in, especially on the hoppy side? How do you then start to think about what this brewery’s mix means to the customers you have and the customers you want to find you?
TA // I think the biggest challenge that we’re under right now is that we’re about an 8,000-barrel-a-year brewery. And most of the volume of beer that leaves this building is in a very hoppy land. Port Brewing Mongo’s our best-selling beer. It’s 30-plus percent of our total sales. And we have Hop Concept brands, which are all IPA-focused. The Lost Abbey as a brand is only about 1,500 to 1,800 barrels of beer a year. That’s a really small operation by many, many standards. So, for us, how can we be an 8,000 barrel-a-year brewery with a sour and a non-sour component? Just one of the challenges that comes into play is what you mentioned earlier, that we have a bottling line, we have a small canning line, we have a sour bottling line, we have a sour canning line. So, even under my one roof, I’ve got four different packaging lines to do some of the product mix that we do. Seemingly, if we sharpen our knives a little bit differently, we might look at it and say that’s too much at that size. Maybe at 30,000 barrels, it makes much more sense. But at 8,000 barrels, it’s probably too much. But that’s our current reality. And maybe next year we’re at 4,000 barrels, and we’re way differently positioned against what is possible. To be very clear, what does the market want from Port Brewing? What does it want from Hop Concept, and what does it want from The Lost Abbey? That remains to be seen, but I can tell you that The Lost Abbey brand will continue to want to be experimental—Belgian, sour, things like that. And even at 1,500, 1,800 barrels, we think there’s plenty of room for us to do that and not need a super wide and shallow footprint.
CBB // Cantillon is still only 2,500 barrels a year. If that’s the production of the best of the best, I think it’s a safe assumption to make that 1,500, 1,800 barrels is actually quite a significant amount of production for that style of beer in Southern California, especially given how many producers are making it. Not that everyone’s making it at the quality that The Lost Abbey is.
TA // And that’s really important for us. We’ve wanted to be a world-class brewery, and that's been on the whiteboard since Day One. We want The Lost Abbey brand to be recognized for being world-class, even though, aspirationally, we want to make sour beers and wood-aged beers and unique things. And some of what we do clearly has had peers over the years, but at the same time, we just want to be us. And we can do that if we keep true to what we aspire to be. But it’s getting to be more difficult when you start having conversations about where you’re going to find those sales—not because there’s been a lack of consumers. There are just more people making them, and therefore the slice of the pie is much smaller.
CBB// You currently have a 30-barrel brewhouse, which was the original Stone production brewery. What’s your next production step? What do you intend to replace that with to maintain your 8,000-ish barrel production—or whatever the next goal is, as you grow down? What’s that system size going to be, and how are you envisioning that?
TA // When the [San Diego Beer News] article broke on November 1, we came out and stated that the brewery assets were available for sale because we wanted to see if there was a way to “horse trade.” And that would be like, “Hey, we want to walk away from this 30-barrel brewery that was built to do 25,000 barrels, but we don’t need that level of capacity.” When we were growing up all those years from 2006 until now, every single time that we bought a new fermentor and bolted it to the floor, it was at a minimum a three-batch tank. Nothing less than 90-barrel was installed in the brewery. The 30-barrel system is not the problem. It’s that the tanks in the building are nothing less than 30 times three, times four, times five, times six. And now that causes problems with pure volume. We are not brewing many 150-barrel batches of beer. Every time I need to clean that tank, every time I need to purge that tank, CO2, drain it, redo it, I’m spending a lot of extra money in things that we’re calling “soft costs”—stuff that doesn't really show up. Our chemical costs are higher, our CO2 is higher. The chillers on the roof are more expensive because they’re larger, and they run more.
We’re going to continue to operate now. We’ve spent almost a month kind of kicking the tires on the 30. The 30 is not the problem; the larger tanks are the problem. So we’re going to turn our attention to being much smaller on a footprint level. We’re probably going to put a couple of the larger tanks up for sale, and then hopefully kind of horse trade from that to smaller 60-, 90-barrel kinds of things, which give us a lot more flexibility.
And then the last part of it for us is that every time we make a large batch of beer, we have to put a chunk of it into the cold box. And then we’re holding more inventory than we really want to on a turn level than on a cash-flow basis. We then become incredibly sunk with the amount of beer we’re holding that isn’t sellable for at least another 30, 90 days. I think it’s important to be reminded that when you make a batch of beer, you buy ingredients, and you can’t convert some of that money back into your pocket for 90 to 120 days. If I make a batch of IPA, and I sell it to my distributor, and they have net 30, net 45—by the time it gets to them, it might take 90 days for me to put that money back in my bank account. That’s a long time.
CBB // So, making the next 30-barrel chunk can be a better way to manage cash flow through that entire process?
TA // Yeah, we identified that our three biggest needs as part of growing down were occupancy costs, labor costs, and then cost of finished goods—it was more about level of finished goods, not necessarily the cost. Everybody’s fighting the cost of the finished goods, from barley, input, corrugated, and shipping—all that stuff. But it’s a matter of how much finished goods you have on hand. How many days of inventory do you have? And if you’re running lean, you have 15, 20 days. And if you’re running fat, you’ve got 100 days. There’s a big difference in terms of money in your hand between 20 days and 100 days.
We’re lucky that some of the beers that we make have incredible shelf life. So that’s not necessarily the problem. The problem is now found in how much money is sitting in your cold box. More than it should be? And what does that look like, if right now it’s $50,000 a month in cash flow, that $50,000 would go a long way to being able to pull through in different places.
CBB // It’s money you’ve spent, and then it’s also money that you’re spending on footprint, on real estate, and on utilities—all of those things to keep that beer cold until you can sell it. It’s a triple whammy in that sense.
TA // It becomes a quadruple whammy when the distributors don’t pull it, and now you’re destroying it. It’s just one of those things where you have to really sharpen the pencil right now. And even if you sharpen the pencil, you still could have a 10 percent variance, and even that 10 percent could be worth a significant amount.
CBB // At the same time, we’ve watched you open yet another new direct-to-consumer location. You have the original taproom at the brewery, you’ve got another location out in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and you just opened last year another location [The Church] closer to central San Diego. How much do you see selling beer directly to consumers via your own retail and on-premise locations as one piece of improving the economic picture and increasing the amount of revenue you make per beer sold?
TA // We’ve always been a pretty highly distributed beer company. In our heyday, we were probably 85 percent distributed to 15 percent on-premise, back when we had only the tasting room here in San Marcos. Nowadays, our distributed brands are probably 55, 60 percent of our sales, and our hospitality has come up to about 40 percent. So, on a lot of levels, that seems amazing. But at the same time, the brewery was built to be efficient for distributed things. So, the high-speed bottling line, the high-speed kegging line, beer leaving the dock on pallets… You send a thousand cases of an IPA out, you don’t have to build orders and pack it and do things. It’s pulling pallets and one guy on a forklift—there’s a lot of efficiency in that.
Now that we’ve become a hospitality-facing company, on some levels, there’s a possibility that distribution dollars and hospitality dollars could flip in the next year. But that doesn’t come with the same margins, necessarily. Even though you have your on-premise margins, and you’re getting full retail, you have to remember that each one of those comes with a commercial lease, triple net, rising utility costs, rising hospitality, minimum wage. So, I used to be very cautious—and I think maybe on some levels, we nearly failed ourselves here—and that is, opening additional tasting rooms will not fix your business model. It’s just the possibility of cheaper money because it creates cash flow daily, right? You’re now in a situation where I get to open and I can do $1,000 in sales, and that money goes right into my bank account. But you have higher costs of hospitality-service wages. You have higher occupancy costs because you’re paying for more buildings and the insurance and all those things. So, opening an extra satellite tasting room will not fix the business model. In fact, I’ve seen a number of small breweries look to a secondary tasting room, and it basically put them out of business because they didn’t meet their projections. So it’s not a pure solution.
CBB // The additional thing that comes with new locations, on top of all those expenses, is complexity and management. And that also directly impacts your own quality of life—and the quality of life of the executive leadership, who are then having to shepherd an additional group of staff and be in more places all the time. From an executive leadership standpoint, how do you make decisions around some of those things that you are going to undertake, versus the things that you’re not? I think that’s something that a lot of younger brewery owners and operators certainly don’t consider, as they look at opportunities around this—the overhead in terms of personal time and your own quality of life is pretty significant with some of those.
TA // The Church that you referenced—which was the most recent project we opened a year ago—is the farthest from home. It’s 35 miles from the brewery. It is in downtown San Diego, it’s a long way from San Marcos. Reaching that location is not the easiest thing. The other satellite location, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and we have another satellite here in San Marcos, they’re seven to 11 miles away. They’re much easier to reach. I think that there’s a fallacy, and that is that you can find the people to do it. But you’ve got to remember, it’s almost like training a sales staff, right? You have these people who are forward-facing, they are the ambassadors of the company. You’ve got to have the right people. Every time you move a great manager from one location to the next, you have to backfill. There’s an enormous amount of emotional capital that goes into that. And then, typically, when you do this kind of stuff, you’re not really adding a lot of back-of-house, at-the-brewery level assistance, right? You’re just saying, “Okay, we’ll reconcile more paperwork, more cash, more deliveries, more this, more that.” So you’re bifurcating a lot of duties and a lot of energy, and you’re assigning it to another space—again, with the goal of potentially making more profit, and then that profit can be distributed. But not all operations—these days, specifically not all hospitality operation—are highly profitable.
CBB // Is there anything that you employ to try to streamline that?
TA // As every business is wont to do, we think that we’re great communicators, but we’re not. We never used to have monthly meetings for the hospitality side. But now, with four locations, we need that—you know, everybody come here, let’s talk about it. It’s really difficult. Our hospitality program is about 20 to 25 employees now, which is about half of our staff. We don’t have a lot of opportunity to bring everybody together, so what we’re reliant on is a lot of site visits and stuff—but that’s still not the easiest way to build community. So, for us, it’s really finding great managers and empowering them with the amount of information that they need and then hoping that the logistical system that we employ to get the messaging and the deliverables and things to them is great. But of course, every business could do better.
CBB // Looking at all the things that are now working against you, are you still happy to be doing what you’re doing? And where do you find the joy and reward in this?
TA // That’s a good one because daily there’s a lot of frustration of late. We’re still here—I think that’s a really big, important part of the message—we’re still doing what we want to do. I was really lucky to be in Chicago last week for the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beer, the 20th anniversary of that. Our Duck Duck Gooze won a gold medal for barrel-aged sour beers, then went on to win Best of Show. That’s why we do this—that’s the win. That was really bittersweet; I wasn’t able to share it with a bunch of my team members because we couldn't fly a bunch of people out. But if you want to remind people of what we do—that we’re a world-class brewery—it helps to have those moments. And those moments, as long as they keep coming along because of the work we’re putting in, the reward is there.
I’ve been doing this 26 years now, and I still have a lot of opportunity to take pride in the stuff that we’re doing because it matters. But at the same time, the internal part of running a business is very grinding. And for the past 16, 18 months, it’s been almost that sense of… we survived COVID, and then it got even worse. It was wild to think that that wasn’t the hardest part of it. There are still some pretty dark days ahead, I think, with regard to a lot of breweries—including ourselves—but we’re executing a plan. Growing down is a plan. And if we can grow down successfully, and we can do this openly—I think it’s more important to be open about it than to be closed off.
CBB // There are a lot of small breweries who, having launched in the past five years or so, only operated as a business in craft beer through a generally “up” economy. With 26 years under your belt, you’ve seen significant ups and downs in the craft-beer industry over that time. From an operational standpoint, as somebody who has gone through these cycles, what do you think are some of the most important things that those operating breweries now should pay attention to?
TA // Ah, that’s a heavy one. When I first started this journey, just making beer was enough. And making beer is an amazing thing. There are a lot of breweries, I think, that fall under the same umbrella that I’ve been under—that is, I’ve never run a company. This is the first time I’d ever been in charge of a business. That doesn’t mean that I hadn’t seen what it means to operate a business or how to go about that. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a great operator. And I don't consider myself to be a great operator, necessarily. I consider myself to be a great brewer and someone who understands what they want to accomplish with flavors. But the harder part of today is that the success of the company is driven by leadership. As you’ve seen, as a magazine editor, you know, point blank, that the quality of the beer is not the most important thing. I can tell you straight out—I don’t have to call anybody out for what it is. There's just a lot of bad beer that’s succeeding. And that’s okay, for them. But at some point, that won’t be okay. And if there’s a takeaway message, I think that everybody learns within their timeline that somewhere in the space from startup to wherever you’re at, ultimately, you have to find your future. And I think you’ve referenced that earlier in terms of what’s next.
What does our future look like? Our future looks like a company that’s not going to rely on growth to be successful. We’re going to—I don't want to use the word retrench—but we’re going to get back to being small. And then from there, we will strategically take our shots at what amounts to be growth, or not—and in that sphere, use our knowledge of the past to be successful in the future.
