Meeting with Russell over a Zoom meeting. We ended up talking about this morning's group meeting. No special order, but here are some notes that I scribbled as we talked. Mostly, Russell was talking, almost consulting for me personally, and I was scribbling down notes.

- Russell would like to see us use more budgets and really stick by them.

- Russell just got done meeting with Marisa and talking with her about videos and direction. Small report there.

- If you get over extended, the stress level goes way up. Staying within that earning more than you burn ratio. Sometimes that is tough.

- If you choose the enterprise route, you are looking at a team of 50+ (most likely). If you choose the smaller to medium sized route, you are looking at a team of 5-15 people. Which would you rather have?

- Sadly, we may lose people either way we turn (corporate/enterprise or small/med corporations). That's not very fun to think about. Some of our team have completely different goals and direction.

- Eventually, you will need an enterprise level company to take care of enterprise level clients. Or you will need a mom and pop level company to take care of mom and pops (small to medium sized businesses).

- Sell what you have... We currently have a great transactional level core that has been built out pretty darn far...

- We talked about a whole new league. For example: moving from high school ball to college to professional ball. There are completely different leagues.

- Russell did a lot of drawing as we were talking. He drew a Y intersection on the screen. The upper road was enterprise level stuff. The lower road was more mom and pop (small to medium) sized businesses.

- Dealing with the Y intersection diagram... Russell said he thought that most of us will be happier on the lower route.

- Steve's main goal has always been to "feed his people..." - He always is looking out for our team and the relationships that are being built. I'm grateful that he does that.

- If we go down to the lower level, our team will be smaller.

- Living within a budget. It kept coming back up again and again. Currently, we don't have any real budgets, just some known values but no real budgets.

- The other crossroad, besides size of our company and who we choose to server (our client's size of their companies) is which vertical to choose. This has been a long standing debate. Our company is currently being very heavily pulled in the cannabis direction and space. That has been a huge blessing for us. However, we are seeing a polarization starting to happen as some of our team wants to pursue that avenue and others want to break off and into more traditional business verticals (business types).

- If we move away from the cannabis space, we will possibly lose clients, reps, consultants, revenue, and maybe even some of our developers. Having said that, we also lose some of the stress, pressure, and burden of the cannabis space.

- If we choose to stay as a smaller company, regardless of the business vertical, we may lose some clients. Sales could go down. We know that they will go back up, but things will definitely dip before they start raising back up again.

- Talks about life cycles and ecosystems. It is natural to go up and down and have different seasons of growth and decay. That is called life.

- Trying to become more stable.

- We would like to start saving and budgeting.

- Change is coming... we can be proactive or reactive. It is coming, whether or not we want to acknowledge it. I would love to have a choice vs being forced to do certain things.

- Cause and effect - effectual doors - choose your door and then deal with the consequences.

- Back to the Y intersection model - the upper road will require employees.

- The upper road also has more stress

- In order to service an enterprise level business, you will need to become an enterprise level solution.

- Our clients - seem to the ones that don't fit into a standard model and/or need that next step of custom or special functionality.

- Steve wants to help take care of his people. How can we help with that?

- Once we know were we are going, we will need to let other people know where we are going and heading.

- Idea from Russell - what if you sold a copy of the current adilas system and let someone else totally run the cannabis side of things. Basically, allow the company to split. We talked about some other ideas to go along with this, nothing super specific, just rolling ideas around.

- Y intersection analogy - upper road = bosses, stress, rules, employees, and more structure. Everything has to get bigger, more automated, and more structured. lower road = more freedom but also smaller size of team, revenue, etc. There are pros and cons to both. Or maybe a hybrid of sorts... ? Not sure what that would look like.

- Currently, I'm so swamped with meetings and putting out fires, I can't get to any of my goals right now. I sure would love to keep following my own dreams vs being pulled along in super fast moving current (minimal control - at least it feels that way).

- On the Y intersection, where do you want to go? Pick the general destination and then go for it! You have to choose a direction.