Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - $3mm Clean Beauty Skincare Brand / $4.7mm Diversified Pet Health Brand - e39

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

With special guest co-host of John Walsh of Elements Brands, we welcome guest Kelcey Lehrich of ecommerce brand holding company 365 Holdings.We talk two deals this week:- $3mm Clean Beauty Skincare Brand - $4.7mm Diversified Pet Health Brand (CBD for pets!)Enjoy!-----* Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.* Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show!* Follow us on twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations.-----Past guests on Acquanon include Nick Huber, Brent Beshore, Aaron Rubin, Mike Botkin, Ari Ozick, Mitchell Baldridge, Xavier Helgelsen, Mike Loftus, Steve Divitkos, Dzmitry Miranovich, Morgan Tate and more.-----Additional episodes you might enjoy:#62 Two Landscaping Businesses for Sale - Mike Loftus CEO of Connor's Landscaping#66 Analyzing Software Businesses for Sale with Steve Divitkos, experienced industry CEO#42 $900k Moving and Storage Company / $500k Rural Mini-Storage#61 Two Manufacturing Businesses for Sale - Brent Beshore - Founder and CEO at Permanent Equity#24 $5mm pool services and lifeguard staffing co / $2mm septic services business -  featuring baller @WilsonCompanies as a special guest!#45 $800k/yr cleaning business in Midland, TX / a $565k/yr window cleaning business in San Antonio, TX #48 Two Landscaping Businesses for Sale - Mike Botkin of Benchmark Group--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dealtalk/supportSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. After our summer break, we are back and ready to go again with a whole bunch of new technological innovations that hopefully will not let us down. And so we got to switch up for you guys today. I'm Michael Girdley, one of your co-hosts. I'm here all the time. But both Mills and Bill are gone this week. And so we get to have actually two guests at the same time, one who's our premier guest and one who is our stand-in for Bill. And so I will get to introduce both of them before we jump into our deals, which are both e-commerce brands that are for sale and pretty interesting.

And so if you're new to the podcast, just a reminder, this is the Internet's number one podcast about small businesses for sale. Each week, we get together, we look at listings for a couple of small businesses for sale, and then we talk about them. And that's the whole podcast. And it's going great, and we love it. And we're excited to do it every week. And so first we want to give an opportunity for, well, the guest co-host and our featured guest a chance to introduce themselves. So, John, John, maybe real quick, tell us about yourself and in less than a minute or so catch everybody out. For the record, John is that premier co-host? I'm the stand-in-law. John's the Premier co-host.

You're the premier guest, Kelsey, so it's perfect. Everybody's premier something. Good. As long as I got Premier in some point, we're fine. I was going to bring that up later. So a little high level of myself. I work with Bill. I run acquisitions for Elements Brands,

and previously was doing acquisitions, investments for a large digital marketing company, and then previously was in private equity for several years in the middle market. So spend most of my career middle market, investing in acquisitions. That's great. Well, thanks for being here,

and I know Bill's got stuff going on, so appreciate you making the time, maybe because he told you to say you had to come, but we're glad you're here. And then, Kelsey, this is my second time to be on a podcast with you, but this is the first time for you on this one. I think our audience would love to hear your background and what you do now. Thank you for the returning invite on the other show.

So my name's Kelsey Lerick. I'm a co-founder and serve as the CEO of 365 Holdings. We want to be elements brands when we grow up. We're friendly, friendly competitors in the e-com kind of roll-up space. I think for as many similarities as there probably are between our two businesses, there's probably also a lot of differences. I've had the pleasure of knowing both Bill and John over the years and kind of comparing notes on things.

I like to say that Bill is probably a couple of years ahead of me and, frankly, influence a number of things and kind of our growth. So it's fun to participate in these conversations today with John. It's great. And I mean, when Bill tells me about his business at Elements Brands, like they specialize in, I think you use the phrase lotions and potions. So Consumer Wool is that way. But a lot of the brands you're in are,

are different stuff, right? I remember there's some survivalist brands and some other stuff, pet-oriented thing. So that's one of the differentiators there, I guess, between the two. Super cool. Okay. Well, good news. As I told you guys, part of our goal with this podcast is to get to a point where we're not losing money doing it. So one of the things that's helping with that is we have our first sponsor ever. So now I get to do a live read of that, and then we'll get on to the first deal if that works for you guys. Cool. All right. So the sponsor for this week and is a website called Tiny Acquisitions. So it's Tiny Acquisitions.com.

And so they have helped me with a script that I now get to read. And the idea that they have is you don't need an idea to start a business anymore. With Tiny Acquisitions.com, you can now buy proven ideas for less than $5,000, pre-developed and ready to go. All you need to do is do what you do best,

promote your business. Tiny Acquisitions is home to thousands of online businesses that sell for $500. With one click, you can buy and have one ready to generate cash in less than 24 hours. And you can go to tinyacquisitions.com right now to acquire a business and start cash flowing today.

So that's our sponsor. So I'm pretty excited that they paid us money. So it's $100 an episode and they're killing it. So very cool. All right. So I have the first deal today. So we'll go ahead and talk about this. And they're both e-commerce deal.

So I'll do the first one. And then John will do the second one. The first one is called Project Bork. So Project Bork is brought to market by, I guess, a broker called SDR Ventures. They are diversified pet health and wellness brand. And suggested company, subject company of Project Bark is a diverse-eyed pet health and wellness brand that provides CBD-infused pet supplements, pet care products, and grooming accessories directly to thousands of monthly consumers via several growing e-commerce platforms, as well as through national wholesaler relationships and regional distributor channels.

The company's durable and consumable pet products are thoughtfully produced from naturally-drived sources that are organic, safe, and great for pets in the environment. driven by a passion for the holistic health of all pets, the company has continued to innovate in the pet wellness sector, as evidenced by its continual release of new products. These releases have been supported by the company's tremendous BUSC, e-commerce, retail, and online marketing strategy, resulting in double-digit year-over-year growth. Okay, so these are CBD-infused pet supplements?

Yes, okay, good. Yeah. I'm just making sure. I'm not a CBD person, so I have no idea. Got it. So numbers-wise, last year, trailing 12 months, June 2020, they did $4.7 million in revenue, a million in adjusted EBAA. So EBDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

And then that number is actually adjusted based on some stuff. So maybe they talk here about what makes it adjusted. Business has been around since 2016. Revenue went from half a million to three-quarters of a million to a million and a half. and then $3.8 million in 2019. And I guess we're trailing 12 months June 2020. So this data is almost a year old in terms of this stuff. So the stuff here lists a number of growth opportunities,

growth of brand product lines, adding more retail verticals and international expansion, and that sort of thing. So some stuff that I definitely would be curious about on this, but interested in what you guys think about the CBD niche for B2C Pets up. So John brought this one. Can I just ask a quick question or two? Sure. John, did, is this actually a fresh one or just has dated sales information or did you pull this from the archive and we need to try and travel back a year? This is one that continues to exist. Let's put it that way.

Understood. So the first time I got the teaser is I have received many updates from this one over the last like nine months or so. Makes sense. It might make sense just given, so I have a lot of thoughts on the CBD space. I don't know about you, Kelsey, but when I see something like this, particularly in the pet space, it's one where you know, you look at the growth opportunities and you constantly run into this idea of, is it, is the expansion possible? Like, is there a risk around, you know, is CBD allowed in different retail?

Is it going to be accepted and then what the competition looks like for something like this, right? Like, is there any differentiation? That's the biggest concern I have with something like this. Do you have any insights you can share about the channel mix here? Yes, so the vast majority of this business is their dot com sales. So Shopify sales. I will say a few things. This business is the grooming accessories line item there.

on the top, the business actually got started with as a grooming accessories brand. So think combs and other types of products. And then that bump in 2019 is when they really launched the CBD line. Do you feel like the business is well branded as a CBD business or is the broker trying to position it maybe in a bit more of a faster growing market by attaching the CBD label and the product mix isn't really representative there? Exactly. This is the type of business where if it was just selling some of the grooming accessories, I think it would have sold much quicker because they've now commingled a pretty sophisticated and if I memory serves patented grooming type products, right, with now a fast growing, let's call it sexy CBD line.

right so i think they're trying to get a higher multiple by launching the cbd or just capturing growth where now you've got almost two businesses that don't really work together right like i don't know about you michael but when i think CBD i don't think grooming products for my dog like they're they're not really complimentary it's not like a toothbrush and toothpaste so now you've got almost two businesses and the marketing for that is got to be quite difficult from a brand position standpoint. I've not looked deep at any CBD business. I've always kind of put them in the two hard pile between the regulatory stuff and kind of private labeling price pressure and just kind of all those topics. But what is the main use case for pets? Is it around anxiety, high, high activity dogs?

Like what is the reason why a pet owner wants a CBD product for their pet? Yeah. So my knowledge, so we have some stuff in the pet space and we've definitely looked at quite a number in the CBD, not because we're necessarily interested or hot on the space, but more just because it exists and it's good to know about. It seems to be the vast majority of the marketing or the value prop to customers is around Kelsey, like you said, which is calming the dog or anxiety, that type of thing. I don't see it as like a use. I haven't seen a compelling use case outside of that. So if you've just got a dog who's happy go lucky and running around but has a lot of energy,

I don't know if CBD is the right solution versus separation anxiety or stuff like that. I think the CBD space and just, you know, Kelsey, what you said is the dog use case is really around the anxiety piece. There isn't anything that I would say is outside of that, which again goes back to how often as a dog, user, are you using this? And what's the addressable market? My dog personally has a ton of anxiety. And I've tried CBD and it didn't necessarily work for him. So now you've got even a secondary space where if you're giving CBD to your dog, it generally means your dog has anxiety. So it's a smaller portion of the dog market. And then it needs to work for them. And then how often are you using it to have like this replenish rate and a consumable nature to it? And that's not even addressing

brand loyalty, price points, all this other type of stuff where what is differentiated about your product versus anyone else's? It just makes it difficult to really create something

with lasting value here. Yeah. But on the positive, it seems like CBD in particular or like it's kind of got that deter, what I call it kind of the detergent factor and you guys are the BTC guys, not me, but he's got that detergent factor

or once you get comfortable with Tide, like you just stick with Tide or that, because you know it's working for your pet. I guess your question is, does it actually, does it actually do anything for the pet or not, you know, in order to create that, that return and turn them from transactional to something that's much more of a reoccurring revenue stream for your business? Yeah. I think the piece with pet, particularly some of the stuff we've found with some of the pet businesses that we've owned is, you know, as an owner, you want to do the best for your dog, right? Like, I don't know if you guys

have a dog, but generally speaking, for my dog, I like to, you know, do it. best for him. But it's very hard with a supplement like CBD to know if it's actually helping. And so it's almost like a placebo effect for the owner. Right. Like a mental thing like, oh, this is good for my dog. I'll give it to him. It'll help. Whether or not today or not he's anxious, I might just attribute it to giving him this supplement or not, right? Like it, there's no way for your dog to give you this feedback loop of does this work for me on a consistent basis. It's very hard. Yeah. And so that, that, that, I think, affects loyalty quite a bit too. Whereas with humans, you get the automatic placebo effect because we're hugely successful to it. Exactly.

You take those gummies and immediately you feel better. Yeah, whether it's placebo or real, you can at least make the decision yourself, whereas your dog usually isn't going to bark back to you if it's helping or not. Right. So really, you know, The big problem here, even beyond the CBD aspects of it, is that they really have two different businesses that are agglomerated into this one thing. And it's, as you're saying, it makes it hard to transact a business like this. I think the other thing when your internet went down, Kelsey and I started to talk about was, this teaser is just not very good.

Like, it's just missing a lot of deal, a lot of aspects of it that are just like, oh man, like, I'd love to know which channels they're actually doing. Like, that fundamental question that Kelsey asked, like, it's not on here. and it could be 100% at Amazon FBI and you have no idea. So it's really interesting. It's also something we've started to see as an interesting pattern is

the quality of the teasers or the quality of the listings, public listings for these deals varies hugely. And we've seen some that are like this, not very good because there's not enough information to tell you if you're wasting your time or not, and then there's some that are great. And believe it or not, buy biz sell, pretty darn good.

Like, who knew as revival? is that site is, those are actually pretty good teasers. We learn a lot and you know you're wasting your time signing the NDA or not to go look at the deal. John, I don't know about you, but if this was me and I was interested and I got the SIM, I think the first thing I would probably do is just run some cohorts on like one of the acquiring customers on what product, through what channel, and start to get my arms around whether or not the three of us think there's placebo effect or efficacy in the product. I would just start to look for evidence of like product market fit through actual customer loyalty

and probably come to my conclusion through the data of repeat purchase rates and customer values and try to segment it out. And then depending on why that tells me, that would probably shade my desire to transact at all or at least the price I'd be willing to pay for the quality of the business. Yeah, 100%. I think the other piece I would add to that would be, you know, on top of the cohort, the repeat purchase is some factor around AOV just because, you know, We talked about, you mentioned earlier around CBD in particular, and some of this space, it's a price battle constantly.

And I haven't particularly looked at what the CPAs are within this space, but I have to mention that they've got to be high. So I need my AOV to be quite high for every order. So, guys, real fast, sorry, a lot of our listeners are not, are new to the space. So aOV is average order value, right? Yes. So think of like the per cart purchase that you make. And so when you're trying to assess a business, you want to understand how much is my customer spending per transaction, which is their AOV.

Because I need to assume that my CPA or cost per acquisition or cost to acquire them through marketing is the AOV far enough exceeds that that I can still make money. You don't want to be losing money on each sale unless that is the game you want to play, which if that's the case, go raise some VC money and you can manage your cash burn. But if you want to play in the space that Kelsey and I play or a lot of the people in the e-commerce space play, you need to make money on that first transaction. Making money on the first transaction is a rapidly shrinking place to play. Jill's like. Yes.

So the other question I have for you about this one is, is this, what about this makes it not appealing to the roll-up guys? And is it because it's not, not, not- When you say the roll-up guys, do you mean the newsworthy ones like the Thrasios? The Thrasio, every FBI roll-up that's happened so far. So this isn't an FBI, this is not an FBI predominant brand per what John said earlier, is D-to-C-first. And I mentioned wholesale. As much as it, those FBA roll-ups, I've heard them talk about diversification into other channels. I think that is going to be very, very tricky for them to do. And these will go to the bottom of the pile on which list of deals they're looking at this week.

Yeah. And I will say I am not 100% on this, but I do believe CBD is still not an allowed product on Amazon. So you'll see a lot of hemp extract on Amazon. but I believe CBD is not technically allowed on Amazon. So you're going to run into that. You've also got no Facebook and I think no Google, right? So I'd be really curious how they actually grew this. If they were growing it through influencer or through emails to the customer base or affiliates

or how they got that initial cohort. Yeah. That's definitely to your point, a good thing to understand. And I will say, Michael, on your point, also around the acquires, when you think of a business like this or anything else that is just heavy regulatory, is it worth the time? Like, if you're seeing 10 of these that are the same size and have a similar growth trajectory,

this is going to go, like Kelsey said, right to the bottom just because of the regulatory risk or any type of, like, all of a sudden, my legal team and my marketing team is going to have to jump through 10 additional hoops just to grow this thing. Is it really worth it? Well, and to your point about if you've seen 10 of these,

which I have, and I'm sure you have as well, I think I've seen a number of, of Sims that kind of look and feel like this, you wonder how much of it is the zeitgeist of CBD in society's mindset today? And is there going to be a pop in that total dressable market? And then it's going to dry up with substitute products, white labels that are cheap at the grocery store

and there's no real brand value. Like that whole segment might pop and then shrink dramatically in two years. Right. I might argue it already has. Everybody I know the susceptible to the placebo effect thinks it's fantastic. And I guess it'll be there until the next

the next placebo effect thing comes along, which I'm sure there'll be one. Very cool. All right. Well, I think we've concluded this teaser is kind of meh and the deal is kind of meh. Any other conclusions on this one? All right, super good. Well, we'll move on to the second deal if you guys are good with that.

And I will pull that up. And John, I think you have the honor of reading this one. Okay, perfect. So this is a business called Project. clear. It's brought to market by FTI Capital Advisors. It's a clean beauty brand. So doing skincare, but also color cosmetics. And I'll touch on that a little bit later. But the business is the current owners have brought together the world-class team. However, the owners have recently chosen to remain primarily focused on another core business that is outside of this. So they're looking

to divest. Unique pieces about this business, it has, it's focused on the Gen Z consumers. So that is the market even younger than the millennials. It's EWG verified, which for those of you at home who don't know, EWG is an environmental working group, a big player in the space just around the efficacy of ingredients. So when something says it's EWG verified, that means it is very all natural,

very clean beauty. It's not just a name that they will use. This is actually something that they have verified. It has had good growth. The unique piece about this business, it has grown and has been started by a social media influencer with 30 plus million followers across both Facebook and Instagram, who is the brand ambassador and basically has launched the line and is the main source of marketing for this brand. So customers are finding out about this brand through this influencer. The business has grown from being started in 2019, generating about 800K to this year projecting just around $3 million in revenue.

You'll notice on the teaser, Michael, if you scroll down a little bit, that revenue is mentioned. But Kelsey, is there another line item that is not mentioned here? I didn't even get to that. I was just, I don't think I've seen a SIM that has. more years of projected sales than actual, at least outside of venture. You got to fit that hockey stick in somehow. Yeah, I see that. But, you know, first takeaway, if you don't see EBITDA or profit mentioned, you can assume

the business is not profitable. Just a takeaway from a teaser. And then on the right here, you see a nice sales mix. So they're diversified from sales channel. You've got skincare about a little over 40 percent, color cosmetics, around 30. And then you've got sunscreen, face masks, and bath and body making up the remaining about 27, 28% in the business. Real quick. Is face masks the cosmetic or is it the PPE or fashion version of a face covering? I believe it's the cosmetic side.

So think like the little sheet masks and stuff like that. This brand, to my knowledge, they are, they do quite well from a channel mix perspective. they are probably 25% e-commerce, 25% distributor, and other marketplaces, so Amazon and a few other skincare distributor websites, and then 50% retail, retail being some larger accounts that are national chains, that are new relationships, but that ties into why that hockey stick is growing quite a bit, is they assume national distribution across all of those. So the thing you're really buying with this one is an undifferentiated brand for the most part except for this influencer, who I hope it's Parasilton, but I don't think it is.

No. They are too old. Did I just age myself? Let's put it this way. When I looked further into this, I had no idea who this person was. Absolutely no idea. And yeah, so it fits the Gen Z demographic apparently. Yeah, so it's somebody that plays Minecraft on YouTube all day long or so.

I don't know. I have seen the numbers for like the Jeffrey Star, like the guy on, well, I guess I think he's out as a male. I don't know. I don't mean to gender shame. He does really well. He's got all those collaborations with folks. But this is evidently not Jeffrey Starr. This is somebody in his broader circle, though.

I will say, think of that as an analogous, more popular person to who this is. Yeah. The easy first question here is, like, how do we separate the business from the face of the brand? Yeah. Was there any discussion of that? Do you have any insight on the follow on there? Are they making it the buyer's problem, or do they understand that they have to accommodate that in the valuation and structure? It was a piece of the diligence and it was really around how to retain that individual.

I mean, at least how I would approach this, right, is if you got a brand that is incredibly tied to the founder, right? And you're trying to acquire from them. That in and of itself has a bit of risk because generally speaking, you don't want to change the ethos. You don't want to change how the brand is positioned. And the second if you, the second you buy a business from a very outspoken and forward-facing founder, you run into Kelsey, like you said, that risk of what happens if they go away or what happens if they no longer every day start talking about this brand. And when the brand is grown to 30 plus million followers, you know, or run by somebody who has that many followers who's talking about it, if they stop talking about it, does your marketing dry up automatically? right? And so the biggest piece of this diligence is really either finding a way to retain them and saying, okay, every week you've got to post this many times about the brand for this long.

We might pay you some type of earn out or retainer based on performance of that. Or if they go away, then you've got to really haircut the valuation materially. So do we think this is one that a third party came into this influencer and said, we're going to build a brand around you? And now the third party owner wants out, or do we think the influencer themselves started this brand and is now wanting to transition majority ownership to somebody more professional? Yeah, my understanding is this is very similar

to what you'll see with a lot of other celebrity brands whereby you've got an entrepreneur who partners with the celebrity and now that entrepreneur is looking to move on and the celebrity is sort of just, you know, I wouldn't say indifferent, but they've got a bunch of other things they're doing, this isn't, you know, top of mind. Yeah. Given how much nothing they appear to be selling, I can see where they want out on this one.

Yeah. Like, and they're losing money, best we can tell, that's tough. Like, how do you lose money on skincare at this size? Like, they've got negligible customer acquisition, and then these skincare products are like super high margin, right? Like, what am I missing? Why is this a money loser? So what you're missing here is the Gen Z consumer.

They're targeting that bucket with retail. And the price point you're sitting in Kelsey's head. If you think about it, go into a Target or I don't want to say Whole Foods, but going to Target, right? Like Gen Z mecca for consumer products. And look at the types of products that they're buying from a price point perspective. 10, maybe $12 plus or minus, your general range is like $7 to $15. So even add an 80 plus percent gross margin, which you should be hitting on the skincare space, when you're selling retail with buybacks and, you know, or billbacks and all these other

types of costs that those retailers have inherently built in, you're not going to make much money. Yeah. So that's the issue is, is that when you're playing in this space in skincare at such a low price point versus everyone else who's already at that space who's, you know, a hundred times your size and have been around for 50, 60 years. It's a volume play. And without the economy scale, you're not going to generate much income. So obviously, shipping a $12 product is sometimes expensive, but any insight into why they didn't push harder for D to C growth where you could at least make up, have a different battle to fight, I suppose, where it can be more in control of your future rather than store.

traffic. So again, my understanding has been that the brand did and just has grown and got several partnerships through, you know, networking, et cetera, into retail and is selling based on the growth of that, right? Like, they've done both and it looks like they did better on D to C. And if you carved out just the retail and looked only at the D to C space, it would probably be right around profitable, even with the same. Yeah, I'd love to see like contribution margin per channel historical and pro forma and understand what you're actually buying here. You're actually buying a CPG retail business

or an econ business or both or neither. Yep. And one of the things I mentioned at the top of this is around color cosmetics. And I think, I don't know your guys' opinions on this, but Bill and I think share, I'll speak for him just because we've spoken a hundred times about this.

But around the color cosmetic space, we are very hands-off in that market because if you think about it, we play in the lotions, the potions, the pet products, what have you. So we're in an very adjacent market to us. And we look at a lot of companies that do skincare and some type of color cosmetics. The thing is, is once you're in color cosmetics, you run into the fashion space more than anything, where now you've got, if you think every eyeliner that you have or mascara or what have you, you've now got 30, 40 different colors of all this type of stuff. And you have to prepare and do R&D for what is going to be popular, right? Like what colors are going to be popular with the consumers?

Place inventory orders based on this. It's not like you're just placing inventory orders for a product that you know will sell. Like you might place orders for some colors and now all of a sudden it's dead inventory and you've just wasted all of your money. Or you give it to the retailer and they bill you back because they had to trash it because it expired because no one bought it. So it's a very risky plus. and you have to be very certain that the inventory you order will sell through.

Super interesting. Yeah, I mean, this is like another industry where it's like there's aspects of it that if you get in the right kind of two or three characteristics, it's very attractive. But if you end up in the wrong corner of it, you can be really miserable. Super fascinating. I have. Hard pass.

Hard pass for Kelsey. Wait, part of this, Kelsey, you get to go ahead. hang out with an influencer at their influencer house somewhere in the expensive part of L. I'm positive. Yeah, I'm positive. I am not cool enough to do that. You mean there's no influencer houses in Ohio? Oh, come on. No, we're fresh out at the moment. So, John, sounds like this is a hard pass for you as well. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, this one, and I have yet to see, I've looked at, unfortunately, I have looked at probably

10 businesses that have a very similar to this, whether it's an influencer or some celebrity or something like that, almost all of them have yet to be profitable. And you're banking on this future profitability growth. And it's just, I'm not going to gamble on that. Yeah, totally, totally hear you. Awesome. Well, cool. All right. Well, at least the teaser was better on this one. We're cool with that, huh? Yeah, yay to this broker. When you've got three years of projected revenue and two of actual is the teaser actually better? It's a hockey stick. It's nice.

It goes the right direction. Well, I mean, I think that if you're an aspiring business broker, like, man, put a little more effort into some of these teasers. I wish people would have just looked at it from a buyer's perspective. And I mean, I know why brokers do it. It's because they want to get more inbound interests. So then the seller thinks they're doing a good job. But they're just wasting everybody's time by having, you know, ridiculous

negotiating of too many NDAs and running up legal bills and then having management meetings that just don't make any sense whatsoever. It's part of my continual challenge with the business broker industry for sure. Do you negotiate your NDAs, Mike? For bigger deals always. Everybody negotiates them. Yeah, term, scope, non-compete, non-poaching, that stuff comes in all the time. Based on, though, the look I have and John has, neither of us even read them. We just sign them and send back. Make sure you're not pledging your life earnings. You know, could be an ISA and you have no idea. I skim it, but I can't say I've read one recently. Yeah, I mean, it's one of my pet pee's. I think the world needs a standardized NDA, but seemingly the lawyers all want to argue about some aspect

of it, whether it's duration, what happens to the materials after the NDA, after the process ends? Like, do you have to destroy them? Do you have to give them notice that you destroyed them? you know, who are you going to agree not to poach from the other side's team? How long is that non-poaching last? Who is that? Geography of disputes? This sounds like some life experience that maybe you could share with us. Yeah, that sucks.

That's my life experience. I don't know what to tell you. But yeah, I mean, the lawyers seem to love it. You know, for small deals, I'm with you. You just look at it and sign it and they're all pretty standard. But when they start to get bigger, people, the lawyers get involved and things get screwed up. It's crazy. Cool.

Well, I have one more mention of our sponsor. And then I'd like to thank you both for being here and then give you a chance to tell our audience how they can follow along on your journey or support you. But again, today's episode is brought to you by tiny acquisitions.com. So it's a website for buying and selling small businesses and projects, most under $5,000. So thanks to them for being our first paid sponsor and getting us closer to the journey of not losing money on this podcast, which is my goal. And yeah, so John, thanks for stepping in. You're awesome today. How can people follow along on your journey or what you guys do or anything along those lines? Yeah, so make sure

to follow Bill on Twitter and other social media. He's much more active than I am. And always elements brands. We're constantly looking not only for hiring, but acquisitions within, like we said, the consumable space. So if you know of anyone, please let us know. Yeah, awesome. Kelsey, same question for you. Thanks again for being here, man. Thanks for having me. Active on Twitter at Kelsey Lerick, and our website is 365-holdings.com. There's an email opt-in there if you want to follow along with things that we publish or announcements we make or opportunities for hiring M&A, stuff like that, opt in there to keep up with what we're doing. Super cool. All right. Well, I will click the stop button and we'll see everybody next week. Thanks a bunch.