Leverage Beats Hustle: A Strategic Framework for Business Owners

• Amol Ghemud
• Leverage Beats Hustle: A Strategic Framework for Business Owners
• Published: October 1, 2025

Contributors: Amol Ghemud
Published: October 1, 2025

The Illusion of Hustle

Modern entrepreneurship glorifies the grind. Tech conferences lionize eighty‑hour weeks, founders boast about never sleeping, and social feeds are packed with performative hustle porn. 

It feels productive because motion appears to be a sign of progress. 

But the hard truth is that pure effort is a linear engine: you can squeeze out a few more hours, but the result is still one unit of output for every unit of input. 

Once you hit capacity, there’s nowhere left to go except burnout.

Leverage the art of compounding your inputs through systems, tools, and other people is the only path to non‑linear, sustainable growth. 

This guide argues that “leverage beats hustle” isn’t just a catchy phrase; it’s a fundamental law of scale. The goal is not to work harder than everyone else; it’s to engineer a business in which your efforts produce outsized results long after you stop working. Building such a business requires thinking in systems, not tasks, and focusing on the irreducible components that drive compounding.

We live in an era where artificial intelligence can automate complex tasks in seconds and where distribution pathways rise and fall in months rather than decades. Companies that align with this reality grow despite their imperfections; those that cling to hustle grind to a standstill. 

To harness leverage, you must deliberately cultivate assets, deploy amplifiers, design sound economics, and build robust systems. When these pillars work in harmony, growth feels like downhill skiing; when they’re misaligned, every extra push of effort yields little progress.

This deep dive explores why leverage matters, dissects each pillar, Assets, Amplifiers, Economics, and Systems (AAES) through the lens of leverage, examines how AI is reshaping the landscape, and provides tools and case studies for owners who want to design businesses that outscale their individual effort. 

This is not a manifesto against hard work; discipline and intensity are table stakes. But if effort isn’t invested in building assets, amplifiers, economics, and systems, it dies with you. 

Hustle burns calories; leverage builds engines.

Leverage vs. Hustle: Definitions and First Principles

Hustle is the direct application of your own time and energy to move the needle. It’s sending one more email, pushing one more feature, making one more call. In the early days of a venture, it often feels indispensable because nothing happens without founders taking the initiative. The problem is that it scales linearly and eventually reaches a cap. Working 10% harder only yields 10% more results until exhaustion drops that line to zero.

Leverage, by contrast, multiplies the impact of every unit of effort. You build or acquire asset systems, code, content, audiences, automation, capital, and those assets continue producing value independently of your personal input. 

Naval Ravikant calls leverage “permissionless multiplication.” Jay Abraham sums it up succinctly: most people sit on a mountain of untapped resources because they’ve never been trained to see or use them. For digital creators, this translates into repurposing content rather than reinventing it, investing in relationships rather than relying on cold outreach, building systems that automate work instead of manually hustling, and crafting unique frameworks instead of producing commodity content.

To see how leverage and hustle diverge over time, consider two growth curves. 

Hustle produces a straight line: more hours yield more output, but progress stops when you stop. 

Leverage produces an exponential curve: a well‑built system compounds, attracting new users, generating content, or earning revenue while you sleep. 

The exponential curve begins slowly, building systems takes time, then shoots upward as each cycle builds on itself. The linear hustle curve rises quickly at first but plateaus because it relies on finite human capacity.

The implication for builders is clear: if your default growth engine is raw hustle, you’re on a treadmill. The only way to achieve outsized outcomes without burning out is to redirect effort into assets that produce compounding returns.

The AAES Pillars for Growth

Enduring growth requires alignment across four distinct but interconnected pillars:

1. Assets – What you own that can compound. Content, code, intellectual property, relationships, brand equity, and unique knowledge are all assets.
   
2. Amplifiers – The mechanisms that spread your impact far beyond your individual efforts. These include growth loops, media, partnerships, network effects, and automation.
   
3. Economics – The way you capture value sustainably. This encompasses pricing, margins, cash flow discipline, customer acquisition costs (CAC), average revenue per user (ARPU), and overall business model.
   
4. Systems – The automation, delegation, and processes that keep everything running without heroic effort. Systems reduce friction, freeing up your time.
   

Each pillar represents both an opportunity to build leverage and a trap where hustle dies if ignored. Let’s define them and explore how they enable non‑linear scaling.

Assets: Build and Harvest What You Own

Definition 

Assets are the tangible and intangible resources you own that can produce value over time: content libraries, code bases, proprietary data, patents, brand equity, customer relationships, and even your own unique frameworks and insights. 

Jay Abraham notes that most entrepreneurs sit on a mountain of untapped resources; assets are those resources once you recognize and activate them.

Leverage vs. Hustle 

Without assets, your growth engine is purely a matter of hustle. You must create new value from scratch in each cycle. With assets, you can repurpose, license, or sell the same creation many times. 

A single video can become a blog post, a series of social clips, a webinar, and a course. A software component can power multiple products. A strong brand can open new markets faster than cold outreach. Hustle is necessary to build assets initially, but once they are established, assets continue to deliver value without your direct involvement.

Case Study

A solopreneur creator builds videos, newsletters, and custom GPTs. For months, she has been hustling to launch new products and posting everywhere. Growth plateaus. Following Jay Abraham’s leverage philosophy, she inventories her assets and sees that she has dozens of unused scripts, email sequences, and tools. 

She bundles three old GPTs into a “Pro Toolkit,” turns a webinar into a paid course, repurposes blog posts into carousels, and launches a subscription for exclusive frameworks.

 She partners with another creator to cross-promote and tap into their audience. 

The result: her revenue doubles without additional content creation. She stopped hustling and started leveraging her existing assets.

Amplifiers: Spread Your Impact Beyond Effort

Definition

Amplifiers are the mechanisms that magnify the reach and impact of your assets. 

They include distribution loops, viral mechanics, affiliate programs, partnerships, media coverage, search engine indexing, referral systems, and network effects. Amplifiers are how you get your assets in front of more people without manually showing them to each prospect.

Leverage vs. Hustle 

Hustle often takes the form of spray‑and‑pray marketing, posting everywhere and hoping something sticks. That’s linear. Leverage comes from molding your assets so they naturally plug into amplifiers. When you align asset design with amplifier mechanics, each user becomes part of a loop that brings in the following user. 

Pinterest’s user‑generated content loop illustrates this: new users add pins, those pins drive search traffic, new users sign up, and the cycle repeats. Similarly, open-source projects rely on contributors adding code, which in turn attracts more users and contributors.

Amplifiers can be free (organic word of mouth), earned (through press, partnerships), or paid (through ads), but the key is that they don’t require constant manual intervention once the loop is established. Amplifiers convert raw hustle into exponential reach.

Case Study

Pinterest exemplifies Amplifier leverage. Its core action is pinning images. Each pin becomes content that can be indexed by search and shared on social platforms. The loop is simple: users add pins, those pins drive SEO traffic, new users sign up, and the cycle repeats. Pinterest invested in tools that make pinning effortless and features that encourage sharing. As a result, the company built a user‑generated content engine that compounds with minimal incremental marketing spend. 

Hustle was replaced by a self‑propelling loop.

Economics: Capture Value Sustainably

Definition

Economics refers to how your business captures value from its assets and amplifiers. It includes pricing, packaging, revenue models (subscription, freemium, usage‑based), margins, CAC, payback periods, ARPU, and the total addressable market (TAM). 

Healthy economics ensures that the business makes more money from each customer than it spends acquiring and serving them.

Leverage vs. Hustle

Misaligned economics forces you into a hustle: you keep adding salespeople or raising marketing spend to compensate for thin margins or high churn. Leverage emerges when your pricing, customer lifetime value, and acquisition costs are aligned. For example, a self-serve SaaS product priced at $30/month can rely on low-touch viral loops; a $100k enterprise product can justify high-touch sales. If you try to sell a $10/month product through a field sales team, you’ll hustle to exhaustion.

AI complicates economics. AI features often carry significant per‑use costs, making freemium models unsustainable. Some industries view AI as a means to drive costs down, while others see pay-per-use costs increasing. Pricing models must adapt. Failing to realign can strand you in a “danger zone” where your ARPU is too low for human sales but too high for low‑touch virality.

Case Study

Replit began as a coding platform designed for hobbyists and students. With the rise of AI coding assistants, Replit expanded into a much larger TAM by enabling anyone to build software with natural language. It reportedly grew revenue 50 times and had 40 million users, with 175,000 paying customers. 

This growth was achieved by shifting its model from purely user-generated code to AI-assisted coding tools, unlocking a new market of non-technical creators. Replit’s lever was AI: a system that amplified user capabilities and scaled independently of the team’s hustle. 

It now pursues mid-market and enterprise opportunities, adjusting its pricing and acquisition strategies accordingly.

You can stress-test your economics instantly with the What-If Growth Modeler. Adjust CAC, churn, pricing, or virality to see how your revenue and user base evolve over six months, and identify the highest-leverage change.

Systems: Automate and Systematize Everything

Definition

Systems are the processes, automations, and workflows that allow the business to operate without constant human intervention. They include software integrations, AI assistants, operations manuals, hiring protocols, communication rhythms, and dashboards. Systems reduce friction, prevent errors, and free you to focus on high‑leverage activities.

Leverage vs. Hustle

Without systems, every new order, customer request, or project requires manual attention and oversight. You spend your days responding to emails and Slack messages instead of building assets or amplifying your work. With systems, routine tasks happen automatically. Automations handle scheduling, payments, onboarding, and support. Processes document how to deliver consistent quality. 

Delegation frameworks empower your team to act without waiting for your approval. Hustling may be necessary to set up systems, but once they are in place, they create time and mental space.

Case Study

Consider a small home‑cleaning company. The owner spent years hustling, answering every phone call, manually scheduling jobs, and driving from house to house to provide estimates. The Company’s growth was limited by its availability. 

To build leverage, he took three key steps:

1. Productizing the offer: he created tiered “cleaning packages” with transparent pricing. Customers could book online without consultation. This increased conversion and allowed him to hire and train staff easily.
2. Automated scheduling and payments: he implemented an online booking system that integrated with Google Calendar and handled rescheduling, reminders, and payments automatically. 
3. Built a referral loop: after each job, the system sent a follow‑up email asking for reviews and offering a discount for referrals. By productizing services and automating operations, the owner freed up time to focus on marketing and hiring. Revenue grew by 80% in a year, and he no longer had to answer the phone after hours.

The AI Era: Exponential Change and New Leverage

The AI era compresses business cycles and raises stakes. In the past, technological shifts, such as the mobile revolution, unfolded over years, giving companies time to adapt. AI capabilities are being launched monthly; developer ecosystems form instantly; distribution to hundreds of millions of users happens fast and cheaply. As a result, leverage thresholds don’t just accelerate; they inflect and collapse overnight. A growth loop that worked yesterday (e.g., Chegg’s curated homework answers) can be obliterated by an AI tool (ChatGPT) that solves the problem faster and cheaper.

Pathways are likewise volatile. SEO loses relevance, social networks tighten their controls, and new pathways, such as AI chat interfaces, create new discovery paradigms. This volatility is a double‑edged sword. Risk is obvious: collapse can be swift and unforgiving. 

Yet opportunity is equally present. Although risk abounds, windows of massive opportunity are opening. 

AI expands problem spaces (you can solve tasks that previously took eight hours in seconds), democratizes creation (non‑technical people can build apps and generate designs), and introduces new monetization models (e.g., usage‑based pricing for AI assistants). The question is whether you structure your business to capture this leverage or chase your tail trying to keep up.

In the AI era, each pillar evolves:

• Assets: AI can create content, code, and designs. But it also commoditizes simple assets. The value shifts to proprietary data, proprietary workflows, and unique insight.

• Amplifiers: AI agents become new amplifiers, indexing and recommending your content. Chatbots become a discovery pathway. Viral loops adapt to AI‑generated content.

• Economics: AI tools can massively reduce the cost of goods sold but may increase variable costs if priced per token or per API call. Pricing models should adapt to usage rather than the number of seats.

• Systems: AI automates support, scheduling, design, and even strategy. Systems now include intelligent agents and dynamic workflows.

From Hustle Lines to Leverage Loops

Leverage doesn’t emerge magically; it is engineered through loops. A loop is a closed system where inputs feed back into the system to create additional inputs, much like compounding interest, which fosters growth. Common loops include company‑generated content loops (e.g., curated knowledge bases or course libraries), user‑generated content loops (e.g., Pinterest), referral loops, and viral loops. When loops break, growth collapses despite hustle; when loops hum, growth compounds with little incremental effort.

To move from hustle lines to leverage loops, follow these principles:

1. Identify your core action: What action creates value in your solution? This could include creating content, referring friends, completing tasks, and more. The loop begins here.
   
2. Amplify via a pathway: Make sure this action is surfaced through a discovery pathway that reaches new users. If content is your value, ensure it’s indexable by search or shareable across your chosen pathways.
   
3. Reward participants: Incentivize users to repeat the action. Reputation systems, rewards, or network effects encourage continued contributions.
   
4. Measure loop strength: Track metrics like viral coefficient, retention curves, and time to second action. Adjust solution design to remove friction.
   
5. Automate where possible: Utilize AI, automation, and systems to minimize the need for manual intervention in each cycle.
   

Loops convert raw hustle into leverage. For example, instead of manually emailing every lead (linear), build an onboarding flow that encourages each new customer to invite three more people (viral). Instead of writing a new blog post for every insight, record a deep conversation and turn it into blog posts, newsletter issues, tweet threads, and YouTube videos. 

Instead of crafting bespoke proposals for every prospect, build modular proposal templates that adapt automatically to each prospect.

Diagnostic Tools: Assessing Your AAES & Leverage

To apply this framework in your own business, you need a way to measure alignment across the four pillars and identify where leverage is missing. Use the following diagnostic tools:

1. Assets Audit

• Retention analysis: Plot cohort retention curves. If users stick around and usage increases, your assets are valuable and sticky. If curves drop steeply, you’re relying on acquisition hustle to mask churn.

• Asset inventory: List all your content, code, data, IP, relationships, and frameworks. How many of them are actively used? How many could be bundled, repurposed, or licensed? Identify at least three assets you can activate next quarter.

• Engagement depth: Analyze how deeply customers engage with each asset. Do people complete your course, utilize your toolkit daily, or abandon it after the first use? Depth indicates asset quality.

• Case study: Compare the adoption of your assets with and without AI tools. If an AI tool replicates your content and customers switch, the asset isn’t unique. If your proprietary data powers a feature that ChatGPT can’t replicate, your asset is strong.

2. Amplifiers Audit

• Pathway concentration: Identify the pathways that deliver your highest-quality users. Are you designing features that take advantage of those pathways (e.g., SEO, social, AI agents)?

• Friction mapping: For each pathway, map the user journey from discovery to activation. Where do users drop off? Are you trying to force a solution built for one pathway into another (e.g., copying a web game directly into Facebook)?

• Loop identification: Document existing loops. Do users organically create content or invite others? Are there opportunities to formalize or amplify these loops?

3. Economics Audit

• Economics alignment: Calculate CAC and payback periods for each pathway. Compared to ARPU. If CAC > ARPU or payback periods exceed your cash runway, you’re misaligned.

• Model stress test: Simulate what happens if pathway costs double (e.g., SEO declines or ad prices rise). Does your model still work? AI is raising costs in some areas and decreasing them in others; plan for volatility.

• Pricing tiers vs. pathways: Match pricing tiers to pathway types (self‑serve vs. sales‑led). Consider usage‑based pricing for AI features.

4. Systems Audit

• Time audit: For one week, track how you spend every hour. Label activities as “hustle” (one‑off tasks) or “leverage” (building assets, amplifiers, economics, or systems). Aim to increase your leverage percentage by 20% next month.

• Automation opportunities: List all repetitive tasks. Which can be automated by off‑the‑shelf tools or AI assistants? Which require custom code? Prioritize automations that save the most hours or reduce errors.

• Process Documentation: Are Your Processes Documented? Could someone else execute them on your behalf? Documentation is a system that reduces reliance on tribal knowledge.

• Team empowerment: Assess decision‑making. Are your team members empowered to act without your approval? If not, you’re the bottleneck. Build governance systems that distribute authority.

Use these audits regularly, at least quarterly, and track changes. Misalignment tends to creep up; by the time you notice churn or shrinking margins, it may be too late to recover.

Instead of running these audits manually, you can instantly measure your leverage with the AAES Health Score Calculator. This 5-minute diagnostic quantifies your performance across Assets, Amplifiers, Economics, and Systems, and benchmarks you against 7-figure businesses.

Implementation Roadmap: Building Sustainable Leverage

Knowing that leverage beats hustle and understanding how the pillars interact is not enough; you must operationalize it. The roadmap below provides a step-by-step process to transition your business from a hustle-driven to a leverage-driven approach.

1. Inventory your assets: List all existing content, code, audiences, relationships, tools, and data. Jay Abraham emphasizes that most entrepreneurs are sitting on a mountain of untapped assets. This inventory becomes your raw material for leverage.
   
2. Map your amplifiers: Identify the core actions that generate value and how those actions could feed new users. Document your existing loops (or lack thereof). Define how each loop will compound (e.g., content → search traffic → more content). Use examples of successful loops, such as user-generated content loops, referral loops, or viral loops, as templates and sources of inspiration.
   
3. Evaluate each pillar: Run the four audits described above. Identify where misalignment is forcing you to hustle. For example, if your CAC is rising faster than ARPU, economic alignment is broken. If your retention curves are flat, assets need work. If your team spends all day answering emails, systems are broken.
   
4. Design for the dominant amplifier: Choose one or two acquisition pathways that align with your assets and economics. Build features and workflows specifically for those pathways. For a brick-and-mortar shop, the dominant pathway might be referrals or local search; for a consultancy, it could be LinkedIn and webinars; for a SaaS product, it could be programmatic SEO or partnerships. If your pathway is content, design the solution to encourage content creation and sharing. If your pathway is an AI agent, design it to integrate seamlessly with the agent’s interface. Resist the temptation to be everywhere, double down where your best customers discover you.
   
5. Automate and systemize: Invest in automation tools, AI assistants, and processes that remove manual tasks. This could be AI‑driven customer support, programmatic SEO, or content repurposing workflows. Systems > hustle.
   
6. Bundle and repurpose: Leverage isn’t just about new growth; it’s also about extracting more from existing assets. Repurpose webinars into blog posts, cluster old tools into a toolkit, turn internal frameworks into paid products. Abandoned ideas and unconverted leads are hidden gold.
   
7. Iterate with data: As you implement leverage strategies, monitor the metrics that matter (viral coefficient, CAC payback, retention, ARPU). Adjust loops, pricing, and solution design based on the feedback received.
   
8. Invest in relationships: Assets and amplifiers extend beyond technology. Collaborate with partners, creators, and communities who already serve your audience. Borrow credibility, traffic, or infrastructure instead of building everything alone.
   
9. Revisit alignment regularly: Since AI and markets evolve rapidly, conduct quarterly audits. Adjust your economics, pathways, or solutions in response to new technologies and behaviors. Leverage is not set‑and‑forget.
   
10. Optimize operations: Leverage isn’t just about acquiring customers; it’s also about how you deliver. Invest in systems that reduce operational busywork. Use AI scheduling tools to automate bookings, chatbots to handle basic support questions, or software to manage inventory and invoicing. Offload tasks that don’t require your expertise so you can focus on high‑leverage activities like asset creation, amplifier design, and strategic economics.
    

Case Studies: How Companies Embraced AAES Leverage

Case Study 1: Pinterest – Leveraging Amplifiers and Assets

Pinterest built its business on user‑generated assets (pins) and a powerful amplifier: the search engine. Each pin is an asset that can be indexed by search and shared on social platforms. Pinterest invested in tools (browser extensions, mobile apps) and features (boards, related pins) that encourage users to pin. 

The loop is simple: users add pins, those pins drive search traffic, new users sign up, and the cycle repeats. Pinterest’s content engine compounds with minimal incremental marketing. Because the assets (pins) are evergreen and the amplifier (search) is persistent, the business benefits from both asset and amplifier leverage. Its economics are straightforward: advertising based on attention and conversion. 

Pinterest’s systems include robust infrastructure that handles billions of images and AI that recommends pins.

Case Study 2: Replit – Expanding Economics and Amplifiers Through AI

Replit started as a coding platform for hobbyists and students. It built an asset: an online IDE and community. The amplifiers were word‑of‑mouth and educational communities. 

As AI coding assistants emerged, Replit integrated AI to become a code‑generation platform. This new asset (AI‑powered code generation) expanded its audience beyond coders to anyone who wants to build apps. Replit adjusted its pricing model from freemium to usage-based and introduced team plans. 

It created new amplifiers: enterprise sales loops and mid‑market partnerships. Replit systematized onboarding, support, and training with AI tutorials. The result: revenue growth and a larger TAM.

Case Study 3: Chegg – When Amplifiers Collapse

Chegg built a powerful content loop around curated homework answers. More answers generated more search traffic, which in turn generated more subscribers, which ultimately funded more answers. The loop thrived in a world where human‑generated answers were the fastest way to get help. ChatGPT broke that loop: students could get instant, personalized answers for free. 

Chegg’s asset (the answer library) lost its unique value. Its amplifier (SEO) lost its relevance. Without a new asset or amplifier, the economy collapsed. 

The lesson: leverage must adapt to technological shifts. You can’t hustle your way out of a loop collapse.

Case Study 4: Solopreneur Creator – Monetizing Assets and Amplifiers

The solopreneur we discussed earlier illustrates asset and amplifier leverage. She inventories her assets and bundles them into new products. 

She uses email and social media as amplifiers. She partners with another creator, effectively borrowing their amplifier. Her economics shifted from one‑off product sales to recurring subscriptions. She systematizes content repurposing with templates and processes. 

She stops hustling and starts leveraging.

Case Study 5: Local Service Business – Systemizing Operations

The home‑cleaning company owner productized his offer (asset), adopted online booking and automated scheduling (system), and instituted a referral loop (amplifier). 

He also adjusted his economics by charging in advance and offering tiered packages. The result: revenue growth and time freedom. Even an offline business can apply the AAES framework.

Challenges & Reflection

Building leverage requires a mindset shift. Here are challenges to test your understanding and implementation of the AAES concepts:

1. Inventory Challenge: Within the next 48 hours, create a spreadsheet of every asset you’ve ever created, including content, code, tools, customer lists, and relationships. Estimate the potential value of repurposing each. Identify at least three assets you can bundle or reposition next quarter.
   
2. Loop Design Challenge: Sketch out one growth loop for your solution. Define the core action, the amplification mechanism, and the feedback path. Simulate what happens when the loop runs ten cycles; estimate the number of new users or revenue generated. Identify a friction point and design an experiment to reduce it.
   
3. Economics Reality Check: Plot your business on the ARPU vs. customer count graph. Are you above or below the $100m diagonal? If below, brainstorm changes in pricing, target audience, or asset scope to move above the line. Model the impact of AI on your customers’ headcount and budgets.
   
4. Amplifier Disruption Drill: Assume your top pathway (e.g., SEO) drops by 50% in six months. How will you acquire customers? Identify an emerging path (e.g., AI discovery) and list three asset changes required to fit that pathway. Begin experimenting now rather than waiting to hustle later.
   
5. Systems Audit: For one week, track how you spend every hour. Label activities as “hustle” (one‑off tasks) or “leverage” (building assets, amplifiers, economics, systems). Aim to increase your leverage percentage by 20% next month. Replace at least one hustle activity with an automated or delegated alternative.

Reflect on these challenges. Leverage beats hustle, but leverage requires deliberate design. When your time is invested in building assets, amplifiers, economics, and systems, the payoff is not immediate but compounding. Embrace patience and systems thinking.

The Future Belongs to the Leveraged

The myth of hustle tells us that success is a grind. The truth is that pure hustle is a treadmill that eventually throws you off. Non-linear growth stems from leveraging assets, amplifiers, economics, and systems that continue to produce value without direct effort. 

The AAES framework provides a roadmap for building that leverages: ensuring your assets are unique and valuable, design amplifiers that spread those assets efficiently, aligning your economics so that value capture scales with audience size, and building systems that free up your time. In the AI era, these pillars evolve rapidly, with risk and opportunity accelerating at an even faster pace. 

Companies that adapt quickly by investing in leverage loops will ride exponential curves; those that cling to hustle will drown in quicksand.

“Leverage beats hustle” isn’t an excuse to be lazy; it’s a mandate to think like an engineer and a strategist. Build engines, not treadmills. 

When your systems, content, and networks work harder than you do, growth becomes inevitable and sustainable. Start today by taking inventory, aligning the AAES pillars, and designing loops that compound. 

The future belongs to the leveraged.

About the Author

Amol Ghemud

Optimizer in Chief

Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.