Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Buying a Quarry for $17M: A Rock-Solid Investment or Sinkhole?

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

This week, the hosts break down a first-ever for the podcast—a Massachusetts quarry generating millions in cash flow and loaded with real estate and equipment.Business Listing - https://www.bizquest.com/business-for-sale/quarry-gravel-and-wall-stone-in-new-england-municipal-accounts/BW2188901/Sponsors:Check out Capital Pad – the marketplace for small business acquisitions where operators and investors meet: https://www.capitalpad.comLooking to explore franchise ownership? Check out Connor's site and all his resources: https://connorgroce.comEpisode Description:In this episode, the hosts examine a uniquely asset-heavy small business—a quarry in Massachusetts listed at $17M with $2.7M in cash flow. With a 68-acre land parcel, $6M in equipment, and 5.5 million tons of stone still underground, this business comes with significant upside and risk. They dig into USDA loan potential, specialty product vs. commodity rock dynamics, the implications of fluctuating demand, and how this type of deal might appeal to family offices. There’s even a fun detour into San Antonio’s wild Fiesta tradition. If you’ve ever wondered what it's like to buy a hole in the ground that prints money—this is your episode.Key Highlights:- Why a quarry deal is a first for the podcast in 400+ episodes- Understanding asset intensity and CapEx risk in quarry businesses- Revenue mix between government contracts and private clients- How to use USDA loans for large rural acquisitions- Real estate as a built-in exit option once the rock is gone- The role of family offices and what financing could look like- A 53% YoY profit spike—explained or not?- Why it’s critical to hire a specialty buy-side advisor for niche deals- Bonus: a deep dive into San Antonio’s Fiesta and corny coronationsSubscribe 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]

I think the land is definitely included, which is why the multiple looks so high. And also, these are very, very asset-intensive businesses. This is a business that has a ton of CAP-X, maintenance, and any growth would be very expensive. And this business has been around for 26 years. So I'm sure they'd call the same trucking companies every single time. And the process to quote that out has got to be pretty structured and easy. This business, it's real estate and a lot of equipment, and it's probably rural. This is actually could be financed pretty well with a USDA loan.

Businesses like this can go very poorly, very quickly. So I've heard stories about mismanaged quarries not doing very well. We don't have 100% beard anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus. Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous, the internet's number one podcast about buying, selling, and investing in small businesses. Today, we did a deal that we have never done this type before, even after 400 episodes. I think you find it fascinating.

It was in Massachusetts. It involves a lot of rocks. And it's something we all liked, but I think you'll be surprised with why we all liked it. So stick around to the end and you can see how it all concluded. Thanks for being here. Enjoy the episode. Hey, everyone, it's Bill. And I want to tell you about maybe the most exciting sponsor we've had in a long time on the pod.

It's called CapitalPad. And it is the thing that I wish existed when I started my journey of operating and investing in small businesses. So CapitalPad is a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs. that is people who want to buy a business and need capital to list their deals and solicit capital from other people who want to invest in acquisition deals. So if you want to back somebody buying a small business, CapitalPad is a place to do it. And if you want to buy a business and need capital, you can go on CapitalPad to be introduced to investors.

So the really great thing, too, from the investor side is that CapitalPad takes care of all of the details that can get hairy with small business acquisitions. They handle standardized terms, standardized governance, standardized distributions all up front in black and white. Basically, Capital Pad professionalizes investing in small businesses. And the returns can be really, really good. I'm so stoked they exist. It's founded by my friend Travis, who is a phenomenal entrepreneur in his own right. So if this sounds like something that's appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital, or if you want to invest in small businesses, go check out Capitalpad.com and tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you.

And we're live. And we're live. This is the most quintessential acquisitions anonymous prep. Oh, man, it's getting even more quintessential. Heather just joined us. Just popped in. We're already recording. This is the most quintessential acquisitions anonymous ever, Heather, because two minutes ago,

Mike and I joined and he, Mike who goes, I found this deal. And I said, oh, cool, I've never even seen a business like this before. And then Michael just hits record. And we're doing it live. And then you popped right in. So this should be a great episode. Okay. It looks like an interesting business.

I see that. So for the chit chat part of our agenda here, I do want to talk about right now is the peak moment here in San Antonio. And it's called Fiesta. Have I talked to you guys about Fiesta? What is Fiesta? It's basically San Antonio's version of Marty Gras. So think about Mardi Gras, but instead of Creole, it's like Mexican-American. Wow.

All right. So like here's the kind of stuff that goes on. Like we have parades and like every night people are drunk. Like it's just that kind of thing because this is kind of the last period of St. Antonio before it gets horrible for five months of weather right through August. And so the reason I wanted to talk to you guys about this is I was going for a walk yesterday through my neighborhood. I'm having a one-on-one with a CEO. And like I'm talking to him.

And I see out of the corner of my eye, this lady walking the other way. And she's got these, she's probably in her 70s. And she frankly looked like, you know that prancer size lady? If you remember that video where the lady does prancer size? She looked like that lady, very fit, very thin. And she had taken her two dogs who were both probably two and a half feet tall and big thin kind of, you know, dogs. And she had dressed them up for fiesta. So they were wearing like cute little vests and bells and all this stuff.

And she put little sombreros on them. And, you know, I paused the call with the CEO. And I was like, hold on. I got to put you on mute for a second. I went over a lady and I was like, Bravo. Like, this is awesome. I'm so happy for you because she was just so excited that she addressed her little dogs for our, for our city party fiesta. And they had cute little superiors.

She put so much effort to do it. And I just wanted to tell her, like, thank you for making the world a better place with these dogs wearing subarras because it was just so cool. Love it. You know, Michael, that's what they call the humanization of pet, right? It's a big trend in the industry. There's probably no money there, right? No money in dogs. Nobody's betting on that.

So, and now Mills is here. Mills, welcome to acquisitions and honors. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. It started off light, me and Michael, now we got the whole gang. So Michael is Fiasco. I came in late, so I figured we were doing like a Cinco de Mayo episode or something with the

sombrero talk. Well, Michael is totally wrapped up in Fiesta, which is like, apparently a week in San Antonio that leads up to Cinco de Mayo. Oh, cool. It's off topic for the podcast, but at some point I have to go detail for you, how crazy it is. Like people move to San Antonio and get exposed to Fiesta. And like, you'll talk to them, you'll be like, what do you think of Fiesta? They're like, it's so weird.

Like, because it's just so weird. Does it get more normal the longer you live there? You just kind of know what they're going to do. Like there's just there's just this weird. So they have like as an example, they have like this whole like coronation thing where they like spend $50,000 on these dresses to like kind of introduce a queen and princess and all this kind of stuff. And it's this big hierarchical like old money thing where everybody in San Antonio fights

to see whose daughter gets to be whatever. And so they have a big crowning ceremony and it's like kind of weird because there's like this like old school like guys like seeing how deeply they can bow and just kind of weird stuff. Sounds like something that would happen in like the old South, like in South Carolina. Oh, not going to lie. The San Antonio takes it even weirder, which is all the alternative people. So the theater they do the coronation in is downtown. It's this old ornate theater.

But then there's a smaller theater that's connected to it. And you can actually hear between the two theaters. So like the alternative crowd does an alternative version of coronation while coronation is going on called corneation, which makes fun of coronation, like 50 feet away. And like it's run by all the alternative lifestyle people. And it's just, I mean, it's a ton of fun. But it's just like, wait, what are you guys doing? And then they don't talk. Like it's just, that's just one of a billion things just that are just insane about the whole thing.

Maybe we'll do Acquis Anonymous Fiesta episode next year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A live episode. All right. Let me pitch you on this Corey thing because I think I think Corrie's are good businesses. And I'm excited about this one.

So I want to pitch you guys on this deal. All right. This I was fired up. I saw the teaser. So hit us with it. All right. So this is a quarry which offers gravel and wall stone in New England. And it has municipal accounts. So it's in Hampton County, Massachusetts. So the seller is retiring. They have great products and reputation. And since 1999, the company has been engaged in the wholesale of high quality stone and aggregate materials. The high quality natural are crust and processed gravel products are sourced directly through the company's quarry.

So they have a hole in the ground where they're pulling these rocks out of. They boast nine employees, including drivers, general laborers, equipment operators, administrative assistance, and foreman. They prioritize quality and on-time delivery, and the company declines new orders when overbooked, ensuring customers receive timely service. They adhere to rigorous safety protocols and provides comprehensive employee training, demonstrating its dedication to effective rest management. The quarry itself is on 68.5 acres plus or minus owned and included, currently amounting to 5.5 million tons of rock that is estimated to be. still able to be extracted. They have strong customer loyalty, unique product value, strategic location in the vicinity of development sites, and they remained operational through COVID-19 pandemic.

There are growth opportunities to expand the operations team, processing capabilities, and all that kind of stuff. And then they could also add a wash plant to wash stone, and it could diversify its product portfolio and generate additional revenue. They offer all these different types of stone, gray and tan wallstone, different types a wallstone that I've never heard of, flagstone, et cetera, et cetera. And then they have 10% of sales revenue that comes from government contracts. And then in 2023, they out of 53.4% surge in net profit compared to 2022.

It's been around for 26 years and they have nine employees. And did I skip all the numbers? Asking price is $17 million. Cash flow, STE is $2.7 million. So what is that? And $6.25 times. 6.25 times. They did $2.7 million in cash flow on $3.6 million in gross revenue,

$300,000 inventory and $6 million of equipment. And then they don't talk about the real estate. So it's got to be included. Yeah. Hope so. Yeah. Mainly because these are, you know, they're permitted mines. So you end up getting like in South Carolina, it's de-heck,

but whatever the, you know, the regular. authority is in Massachusetts, they give them a permit to say you can go this deep on this amount of acreage and, you know, there's a lot of stipulations around mining safety and stuff like that. But it's to me, it's very similar to like owning a, like a cemetery where you just kind of know, hey, we have X amount of spots to sell. Like we have 20, you know, we have 20 over here and 100 over there. like we have we have 200 spots left and here's how much they're worth and it's just kind of a present value of that future stream of inventory very similar in the mind yep and the the cemetery analogy is an interesting one two mills because i have always i learned a little bit about the

cemetery business because i said you know what happens when the cemetery is full like they sell the plots right you don't like rent the plots so there are a whole bunch of regulations requiring cemeteries to have like a perpetual trust to provide for the ongoing operations of the cemetery. So even when it's fully booked, you know, they're selling those plots as the net present value of the expenses to maintain them forever, which is really interesting. But that gives me the idea on this one is, you know, there's however many tons of rock in here.

When you're done with that, you have a basically a perpetual liability, right? I mean, what does that handle? So I sold a Sanmon years ago. What you can do a lot of times is they, they really. regrade the entire site and it's expensive, but you regrade the entire site and then you sell the land. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, it's totally usable. Now, it depends on the type of, you know, quarry that it is and how deep it is. Like, you can imagine that we have some here nearby that are like, you know, 400, 500 feet deep. Those you can't just regrade. But the sand mine that I'm familiar with, they, once it's depleted, because it has certainly, point, you, like, lose the economies of scale as you have to go deeper and deeper, but you can even see in this picture. They have heavy equipment. They regrade the site and then they sell it to,

like, you know, a track home developer or, you know, a Walmart or whoever wants it, you know, at that point. Wow. That's, I mean, it's interesting, right? Because it's not toxic. It's just rock. Like, there's no reason you can't live on top of it later. I would imagine the seller here has got to have a plan for that already. Like you've got to know if you buy this, you got to know exactly what you're going to do when it's depleted and how much it'll cost and what you got to put into it and then what you'll get out of it. You've got to have a complete plan for that and it's got to factor into your model. Yeah. And a lot of times what happens is they just start acquiring adjacent pieces of land and just add to their permitted, you know, site because it's really difficult to like go

into a new neighborhood and be like, hey, we want to open up a mine, you know, three parcels down, you know across the street that people these are hard to to break ground on so at a certain point they just kind of grow and then they kind of implode on themselves and you know they become something else well is that great though i mean is that because you're not your competition's not coming in you're not permitting new holes in the ground it's like a it's like a trash it's like a trash dump like that's part of the genius of owning a trash dump now is nobody wants to permit a trash dump So if you have one, it's kind of a gold mine, well, an inverse gold mine. Yeah.

So we have, Bill, to your point about this being somewhat of a covered land play, we have here in San Antonio, like, we have a mall that's in a former limestone quarry. We have a golf course that's in a former limestone quarry. We have like a museum that's in a former, like people dig holes here. And then they're like, let's put some buildings in it. And that's exactly what it's been done multiple times. Wow. Yeah. One of them is actually called, one of the malls is called the quarry.

Because it was literally a limestone quarry. Yeah. So for all those reasons, going back to my original kind of offshoot of this tangent, I think the land is definitely included, which is why the multiple looks so high. And also, these are very, very asset intensive businesses. It's, you have heavy, heavy rolling stock. Heather is already getting excited. And not, not just the equipment to, you know, actually.

break ground and, you know, get mine all this, but it gets sorted. And so the sorters and the conveyor belts and the processors for this stuff are really cool because when you sell loose aggregate, you're selling it by the like dimensions and the size of gravel. And some of it ends up just being like, you know, fill dirt or fill sand. So you've got to separate all that out. And it doesn't happen, you know, manually. It happens on these conveyors. So I'm not surprised that they say six million of FF&E, which is almost two times their revenue because this stuff is big. It's dealing with a very abrasive product. It breaks down a lot.

Like, this is a business that has a ton of CAPEX maintenance and any growth would be very expensive. Yeah, I had a client look at a deal that sold the equipment to Quarys. And it was fascinating. Some of it has to be even custom equipment to your point. Like you're sorting certain types of rock and stone and a lot of the equipment they were selling had to be custom, customized in some way. And it was replaced a lot to your point, meaning lots of CAPX because it gets worn out when it's chewing up rocks. So yeah, very, very heavy CAPX business.

So you got to adjust that for any maintenance or replacement CAPX. Yeah, it's got to be, it's got to be a big chunk. So I did look at where this is located. It's halfway between what's basically due west of Boston, like two hours in Springfield Mass. So it's like, yeah, Western Mass. So it's kind of like 40% of the way from Boston to New York City. Probably pretty seasonal too, right?

I don't, I mean, if the ground is frozen, are you still mining rock? Yeah, I think they still are. It looks like, so there's, there's, There's kind of two different categories when it comes to mining. You have commodity goods, which is gravel and crush and run and sand and things that are used in like general construction, paving, road paving, you know, concrete filler. There's just commodity products. Those end up staying really close to where they're originally mined because it's so, sand is like the heaviest thing that you can move. because it just fills every, you know, crevice of a dump truck.

So it doesn't, you're rarely moving it over large distances. The other category of mining and quarries is specialty products like granite, marble, slate, flagstone, certain things where it actually matters where it comes out of the ground. But when people want that look, when they want blue slate tile roofs, you can't get that in South Carolina. It does it. It's not in the ground here. So people will go kind of anywhere to get it. I looked at this really awesome business years ago that was a specialty like monument. It was like this bright white monument marble or granite or whatever it was. And it was used in like all the best, you know, statues in the United States. And you kind of could only get it in one place. And so it was really small

Tam, but it was a very stable and secure business, like as long as we keep putting up statues and monuments and stuff like that. But those are the two kind of sides of this. And I think based on this description, this is a more commoditized business. So it is, nobody from South Carolina is buying stuff from this business. Nobody from Texas is buying stuff from this business. It's all probably within a, you know, hour and a half to two hour radius. Hey, everybody. If you've listened to the show, you've probably heard us talk about franchises. While franchises can be a great path to business ownership for the right person, like there's a lot of pitfalls. And it's important to be really careful as there are certainly good franchises to be in and bad franchises that you don't want to be in.

Connor Gross is a friend of the pod and a resident expert on franchises. And Connor not only owns and operates his portfolio of multiple franchises, but he's also a franchise consultant and helps others work through while picking the right franchise for them. So as he's sponsoring today's episode, everyone should totally click in the show notes below to join Conner's newsletter and attend one of his Gateway to Franchise Ownership workshops. If you're ready to move and move quickly, schedule a call with Connor and his team today. Yeah, I knew a family that owned a brick factory and it's a total local business because the trucking can be, you know, more than the cost of the material at a certain point. You mentioned Mills that some of this

stuff is commodity. And it sounds like this quarry pulls a mix of commodity stuff and specialty stuff out because it says wallstone, slabs, flagstone, you know, that's the specialty stuff. And then you've got the commodity stuff, stone dust, aggregate, all that stuff. Does the pricing of this stuff fluctuate like a commodity? You know, I think about like oil wells, right? There are some, there's a price at which some oil wells are not economic to pull it out of the ground. So they'll, when the price of oil falls below a certain level, they just stop pulling it out

of the ground and they wait for the price of oil to be economic and they run the well again. Do you think you have that dynamic here with the stone? where they make more money in some years and less money in other years based on the price of this stuff, or do you think it's relatively stable? I think it's more on the stable side just because you don't have, you know, you don't have like an OPEC, you know, for example, that is totally moving the needle on production volumes. But I do think that one of the nice things about this and brick plants are the same way, your product doesn't go obsolete.

It doesn't spoil. It doesn't waste. It's not like growing lettuce. So you can keep making bricks, even if things are slow, and you just stack them in the yard. And you could have 20 years worth of inventory. You kind of need to keep the factory operating. Like in this case, you need to keep payroll. They only have non-employees, but you like, you need to keep everything running.

Even if you're just making bigger and bigger piles of the stuff, maybe you throttle it down a little bit. You don't allow overtime. But even if you were operating at a loss, you're at least building inventory that doesn't spoil. Interesting. Yeah, and their margins are incredible, right? Three and a half million in revenue and 2.7 of cash flow because their cogs are zero. It's just the labor to pull it out of the ground and the capax to keep it running. One of the fascinating things about the way these quarry's work is they will quote you the price to deliver the merchandise or the rock or the grappler or whatever.

to your construction site. And I'm speaking just how it works here in Texas. I don't know about other places, but I assume it works the same place, same way everywhere. And so here in Texas, they will quote you the delivered amount, but they have actually figured out how not to run trucks. They don't have, if you notice, there's no fleet here, none of that kind of stuff. So they basically quote you the delivery price, but what they do is when you call and say, hey, I want, you know, aggregate, I want, you know, 20 cubic yards of aggregate and I want it

delivered here on this day, they will go out to all the kind of independent trucking companies and say, give us a bit on what it will take to do at this particular day. And then they mark that up as well and incorporate that into their price. So it's pretty cool because number one, it shows you why being just like a trucking company sucks. You can see it from the bankruptcies that are going on right now. But number two, how they've kind of basically because they're the sole source for these types of stones and and rock, they can basically just own that whole component of the supply chain and delivery. I think it's pretty cool. And this business has been around for 26 years. So I'm sure they'd call the same trucking companies every single time. And the process to quote that out is

got to be pretty structured and easy. Yep. The one that I knew here, they, it was a family and one of the brothers ran the mine and one of the brothers ran their dump truck business. And, you know, they just they would they would haul for other people but the business started because they would haul for themselves down at the bottom of this listing in the kind of last paragraph there's this little footnote that says approximately 10% of sales revenue come from government contracts but then in 2023 there was a 53.4% surge in net profit compared to 2022 so if we if we do that math that means I think it was 3.6 million in revenue and a little over two million dollars and in EBITDA, right, or free cash flow. So the business was dramatically different in

2022. And they don't really say why it grew like it did. The only thing I don't like about this is it feels like they're trying to top tick, you know, off of a really good year and get evaluation based on that to kind of help get out from under the, the hurdle of this big pile of assets. Yeah. And well, that was why, Mills, I made the comment about commodity pricing, because that type of net income swing feels like oil, right, in a year where the oil prices are high and boom and bust, right? So that did give me pause because if this is a stable, pull the rock out of the ground every day type business,

your net income shouldn't pop 50% in one year. Because if it, let me tell you, if it pops 50% in one year, it can drop 50% in the next year, easy. The only, I don't know, man. The only scenario I could imagine is if there was a really, big like site work or really big paving, you know, this can be somewhat lumpy revenue. You know, a bond referendum gets passed and all of a sudden are like a penny tax. And now, you know what?

The county is going to repave, you know, 100 miles of roads and they need a bunch of aggregate for that. They're not necessarily the person who is winning the job and bidding for the job with the county, although they do say they have some revenue like that. But, you know, whoever the, you know, the DOT contractor, whoever the road pay is coming to them and they may be there's it looks like just from Googling there's a lot of quarries in this area because there's a lot of natural stone it's not just unique to this one kind of site but you know it may be that it was something like that made their made their revenue and that income pop

you know this is a good sorry we all spoke at the same time this is a good uh potentially a deal for the USDA program which we hardly ever talk about uh but you USDA is kind of very similar to SBA, but the first thing you have to find out is if the property is in a rural location, which I'm going to assume this is. We said kind of two miles west or two hours west of Boston. So if it's rural, the other thing that the USDA program does, it does larger deals. It can go up to $30 million loan amounts. So it would actually fit within that based on this asking price. And the USDA program is really sticky about the amount of assets that have to be included. in the deal. So like regular business acquisitions, even if they're rural, don't usually fit because it's all cash flow. There's not much in hard assets. But this business, it's real estate and a lot of equipment and it's probably rural. This is actually could be financed pretty well with a USDA loans. USDA loans will go way out on the amortization, won't they, Heather? Yeah, 30 years, I believe. I'm not an expert in USDA because I hardly ever come across a situation

where the deal actually fits, but I think this is one where it probably would. Yeah, so the terms are really good if you can get it. So you can get a 30-year loan on this business potentially through the USDA program? Potentially. Yeah, as long as the real estate truly is included, it needs to be included here, which I think it is. Yeah, I mean, I think it would have to be included for anybody because that's your feedstock for the business. But there's six million bucks of FF and E, not including the real estate.

I have seen on Twitter a number of folks talk about the USDA program as one to, you know, basically that lower capitalized people can come in and do a covered land play outside of rapidly growing cities. Like you go figure out, like go use that USDA program to go buy 250, 500 acres outside of a Houston or a San Antonio or a Dallas. And you just plan on sitting on it for 20 years until it's worth $30 million. dollars as the city goes i don't know that you can just buy land with it maybe but i haven't heard that one i i do know you can do solar farms there's a lot of different initiatives within us d a that you can you can use the program for um and to be clear i wasn't suggesting land banking i was saying like there has to be an operating something on there tree farm or something sure right in cow or whatever hey worm farm worm farm i so one other thing that jumps out of me about this the

Business is listed by a broker, J.M. Inbar. And he is a certified merger and acquisition pro. I've never seen that designation before. I'm not sure who gives it, but certified pro. He's elite on BizQuest. He's been a business broker for 25 years. That's the small business awards. I mean, this guy has been in it for a long time.

Yeah, probably knows what he's done. It's like you focus on the Northeast. Do you guys think, I mean, this to me screams family office. It's like that this type of kind of long-term cash yield, you know, stable thing that family offices just love. I mean, I think you've got to either this goes to somebody who's figured out how they can bid with a 30-year USDA loan or a family office just takes it out all cash. because we initially looked at this as like a 6.25x multiple, but I flipped it, and this is more like a 16% yield on your capital. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's probably how people are going to see it.

So I do know a family office who did just this with a quarry here in Texas. It highlights the challenge with this business, which is there's a significant amount of operating leverage. And by that, you can tell here their profit went up 50% year over year. Because when you have a high fixed cost business like this, you can swing very quickly to one way or another. And if you don't operate it well, if you don't have the hustle and the sales, if you're not watching your costs, businesses like this can go very poorly, very quickly. So I've heard stories about mismanaged quarries not doing very well. So that would be my one concern. and like if you're going to be a family office getting into this,

you better make sure you're, it's not just mailbox money. You got to be on top of make sure it runs well. I've heard of bad glory deals too. Tell us, Heather, spill the tea. Well, I can't say too much, but I do know, I do know one where the loan defaulted and it was a Corey play.

And it was a special stone that you, you know, would think, you know, it was a special color and it had a lot of uses. I don't remember what all the problems were, but I think it had to do with CAPEX and exactly what you're talking about, fluctuating demand for, you know, you've got a quarry, you've got one product, you can't really change it. And if nobody wants it that year, you've still got all that cost sitting there. So I think it had something to do with what you were just mentioning. And that's why I mentioned family office money. Like I could see, you buy this with no debt and you're looking at kind of the yield over 30 years, not the debt coverage this year.

Right? Because eventually this is all going to come out of the ground, right? And it's going to get smoothed out and you're looking at, you're not looking at fluctuation. But as soon as you put debt on it, you got to make coverage this year. And that makes it scarier, especially in a business that apparently than an income can fluctuate 50%. Right. Anything cyclical, whatever causes the cycle is not well suited for debt, to your point. Yeah. Speaking of that, do we want to talk about how this deal could go wrong? We've talked a little bit here about mismanagement. but the macro environment is going to affect this business significantly. Yeah, I imagine this is cyclical to construction. I mean, this is sort of a construction business, right? It's an input to construction, which is famously cyclical. I think it goes back to Mills's point about them top picking. I'm very thumbs up on this, though. Like, I would be very curious to, you know, sign the NDA and have a conversation with this broker

and try and get face to face with the seller. They want to retire. They probably have, you know, somewhat limited options. I mean, I don't know. It says it's a hot listing, but this is not an easy business to, you know, transition and transact on because of the limited. You just have this.

There's no air ball when it comes to the assets. It's just more that you probably can't service the debt associated with such a high level of assets and such a high purchase price therefore. So you've got to figure out, Is there some way with the seller that you help them, help themselves? Yeah, I don't, I'm actually as, you know, as competent as I'm sure our broker here, J.MR is. I'm a little surprised that this is not listed with a specialty broker, uh, who understands

quarries and mines and things like that because this is the type of deal. I mean, if you're Joe searcher, you can't buy this deal the same way that you buy a industrial fencing company or, or anything else. Like this, this has deal structure considerations, financing considerations. So many considerations are going to be unique to quarries. And if I don't know anything about it, and if Jay is not a specialty broker, first thing I'm trying to do is hire a by-side advisor that understands how to buy these and structure them, right, to protect my risk and finance them.

I mean, structure against to protect downside, finance them. I mean, maybe it's USDA loan. Maybe there are other specialty financing sources that finance quarries. all day long. I would want to talk to a lot of people, but you're not going to be able to take your kind of standard SBA loan, small business buying playbook and bring it to this thing. Before we rate this one, I would add a data point that this has been on the market for a while. It was something I'd found a while ago and I popped it up this morning. So it's been, it says it's a hot listing, Michael. Yeah. I was going to ask what qualifies for hot listing here.

I'd describe myself as a hot listing, but other people, I will tell as someone who is in online advertising, I will tell you exactly what qualifies is a hot listing, an extra $100 fee when you pay BizQuest to list your listing. Oh, good. That is good. Got it. All right. So Mills, you said your, your, your, your thumbs up and you're going to be getting

to know more. Yeah, I'm dying to know more. I have not started my family office yet, so I'm thumbs down. Meaning Heather doesn't have $20 million to sink into this thing, just discretionary. I think this is thumbs up and worth a double click. But I think it could either be great or terrible depending upon the situation. This is thumbs up for me, but I'm hiring a by-side advisor who understands this immediately. Awesome.

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