Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Buying a Recruiting And Testing Firefighters Business in Chicago

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

In this episode, we're checking out a firefighter recruitment business for sale at $830k that’s making $175K a year We'll break down how the business works, what the numbers look like, and why it could be a great buy. If you’ve ever wondered about the business side of firefighting, this episode is for you.Listing: Check out this deal here Thanks to this episode's sponsor:Acquisition Lab and their team have been longtime supporters of the pod.Acquisition Lab exists to help people buy a business and navigate all the complexities of the process, as well as provide a trusted framework, tools, and resources to support you from search to close.If you are serious about buying a business, check out acquisitionlab.com or email the Lab's director Chelsea Wood, [e-mail] and mention us ;) Subscribe 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]

No, I mean, I think that's one of the greatest things about this podcast. Like, I listen to it because I want to get inspired around business ideas. But I don't understand this in the context of thousands of applicants for three spots. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. My name is Bill Dallisandro, and this is the Internet's number one podcast on buying, selling, and operating small businesses. And today, Michael and I dig into a really interesting company in the Chicago land area that does applicant screening for fire departments. So if you apply to be a firefighter in Chicago, you have to go through a battery of written

tests, psychological evaluations, et cetera. And this company helps the fire department sort through all of their applicants. It makes about $175,000 Vibata per year. We talk a lot about what it's like to do business in Chicago and other what we would call highly regulated business environments to put it euphemistically and nicely, as well as a whole bunch of rants on the side this week from Michael, which I think you will all enjoy about non-sequenture topics. Which is why you listen to Acquisitions Anonymous. So without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. This episode of Acquisitions Anonymous is sponsored by Acquisition Lab.

Acquisition Lab and their team, they've been longtime supporters of the pod, and they provide a really great service for people who are looking to acquire a business. So it's created by Walker Dival, become a friend, the author of Buy, Then Build, How to Outsmart the Startup Game. So Acquisition Labs is an accelerator with a highly vetted, cohort-based, educational, and support community for people who are serious about buying a business. So a lot of our listeners like you, you tune in every week to our deal reviews, you want to get in on buying a business. You know, you're on this podcast because you're trying to learn how to buy a business.

But if you're not quite sure where to start, Acquisition Lab is a great place to start. So they exist to help people buy a business and to navigate all those, complexities of the process, everything you hear us talk about on the show. They provide a proven framework, tools and resources that support you all the way from search to close. They do it. There's a whole bunch of educational material and support. So if you're serious about buying a business, check out AcquisitionLab.com or you can actually email the program director Chelsea Wood directly. Her email is Chelsea at buy then build.com. Mr. Gurley, it's the Mike Stan podcast episode. I'm going to hold mine right here.

I, you know, I took my lavalier mic on vacation and I forgot to bring it back to my office. So I'm back to the sure 7MB OG. I want to be Joe Rogan microphone that I've been rocking for a while. But it blocks my hands, unfortunately. So it is what it is. Well, it sounds good. I hope our listeners think it sounds good too. You know, it's the, it's the tradeoff.

And as, you know, my fellow AV nerd for how to look good on camera, I can tell the difference. but most people tell me they cannot tell the doors between this and the lap mark. So I don't know. I do not know. Yeah. Well, so I have been, I just got back from a week in New Jersey at a family reunion. So I am tan, relaxed, and ready to talk about buying some deals. I don't think anybody's ever come back from New Jersey saying they feel relaxed.

So you're looking the first person ever. I am, so I'm, I did not have the heart to weigh myself this morning, but I'm probably plus five. pounds. So this is my New Jersey family. They are, I love them. They're a ton of fun. But they eat like nobody. I mean, they will order twice as much food for dinner as you need just in case you're hungry. Like this is the classic Italian grandma who is like, you look too skinny. Like eat. And you've, but meanwhile, you're like 10 pounds heavier than the last time she saw you. It is to a tea, like crumb cake for breakfast every morning, ice cream, Sundays for dessert every night, like full on, you know, cornucopia. It was great.

Grandmas are the best. There's no doubt about it. Speaking of grandmas, let me tell you about the deal that I brought today that has nothing to do with grandmas. But they would probably, the people involved would probably save grandmas first if they had to save anybody. But there you go. I was driving over to the office. We're starting a little bit late today because we both had lunch issues. And my lunch went over. And I was like, I want to do a fun, fun deal today. And I think I found this one of my little repository here. So this one is from Synergy Business Brokers. And if you're watching us on YouTube, you can see that there is a picture of some hot firefighters on the thing here. And that is

because this is a job applicant testing service for police and fire departments. It is $695,000 in sale price. Annual revenue is $831,000. It cash flows $175,000. It cash flows $175,000. So price is $695, cash flow is $175. So basically it seems like Bill, they want four times net cash flow. Yeah, maybe not quite that much. I'll do the math real quick. Yeah, exactly four times. Wow, your math's better than mine.

Yeah, four times. So the reason I've actually gotten incredibly good at basic mental math is growing up as a kid, I worked in fireworks stands. And in fireworks stands back then, we had no calculators. We had no nothing because it was the freaking 80s. and because it was the 80s you learned how to do mental math. So my business partners and I, like I ran a stay with my college roommate.

And he and I got to where we could walk up and just like, it was like rain man. Like we could like walk up and look at a bag of fireworks and say how much it should cost. And we'd usually be within a dollar or two. So it would be like that's $73. Like it was freaking. That's pretty good.

So this is like the people at Costco on the way out where you got like 400 things in your cart and you're like they check the receipt count. Have you experienced this? you're a Costco member? Yeah. And they're like, you know, you've got like a hundred items in the car and they look at and they go, yeah, that's 100 items. Right. You know, and they mark it off their seat.

You go out. And I'm like, you didn't count. Like, how are you doing that? But maybe they're like an ex-firework stand alumni. There you go. Well, and because we figured out, like for a couple of years, we couldn't figure out why we were having shrinkage. We didn't know, like, we didn't think our employees were stealing because we would hire like high school, you know, friends of friends or friends of my brothers or whatever. And like, these were good.

kids. So they were not stealing. But like we realized some of them really sucked at math. So we had to implement a system where one of us, there were two of us like we're managing the location during the busy days. And one of us entire job was to stand on the outside of the stand. And every time we saw a transaction look like it was about to complete, we like would walk up and like supervise that. We would look at, we would look at the bag, look at their math. And then we would watch them take the money and then give change. Like, we would do all the mental math as they were doing it. And like, it saved us thousands of dollars because one out of every 10 transactions would have a mistake in it.

And sometimes more often if some of the people sucked it sucked at math. So it was, you know, anyway, entrepreneurship. You learn how to do stuff at a fireworks stand. Love it. You don't know other places. Mental math. Mental math. Worth more than just A is in school.

There's a reason you're learning how to do mental math. Let's go. All right. So this is located in Cook County, Illinois. So we should put a pen in that because that is Cook County, if I recall correctly, is Chicago. And we have talked about Chicago in the past. So this is a responsible or reputable Illinois testing service that has been in business for more than 30 years and is the main testing service for most police and fire departments within a 90 mile radius. Testing includes reviewing and processing internet applications, polygraph examinations, evaluations and assessments, and pre-employment psychological exams.

The new owner can easily market to additional police and fire departments in surrounding Illinois communities. Currently, all business is from word of mouth with no marketing. So they do, okay, so they do this job applicant testing service for police and fire departments. So the way I understand it, Bill, based on this, is police and fire departments located in the Chicago land area, hire this service to run all of their pre-screening and screening that they do for hiring of police and fire. Is that how you read it? Yeah, that's how I read it. So I assume that they are serving, they're processing the hordes that want to become firemen in Chicago and serving up the ones that aren't terrible, I guess.

Absolutely get through it. I don't know how it is in Chicago. I'm assuming it is much worse than other places I hear about. But by and large, at least here in San Antonio, for example, being a firefighter is an incredible job because they have a union and They've basically, like, police and fire in the city of San Antonio comprised, like, 60% of our city budget. So they get, like, amazing benefits. There was a while, and I think it's still the case, that the city of San Antonio, so the taxpayers bill, were paying for the union head, the head of the police union. They were paying that person's salary, like a captain's salary, to negotiate against the taxpayers.

Then there was a while also that the city of San Antonio, they negotiated with the union that they would have a legal defense fund for these people. So like all the firefighters got their divorce stuff paid for by taxpayers. I don't think the legal defense they were imagining when they created that fund. Yeah. So anyway, being a firefighter is like a really like coveted job in in San Antonio. Police is maybe a little different. But like it is a high paying like you can make 200 grand a year with when you put in overtime being a firefighter working, you know, being on call, say 16 to 20 days a month at most. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So my, my brother-in-law is ex-military and he's trying to transition out of the service right now. And he is trying to get a job as a firefighter. Right. Because, you know, they love ex-military guys. You know, he's, you know, med, train and all that stuff. And so he told me that he lives in Pennsylvania.

So he's applying to fire departments in Pennsylvania. And he said they'll get like 500 applications for three spots. Yeah. You know, like just absurd demand, like lower than Harvard acceptance rates. So he's spent like the last year schmoozing the fire captains like in the towns where he's trying to get hired, you know, referrals like a whole. It's like way before you apply. it's like a country club like you're in and then you get in and then you apply right it almost seems it's like that for firefighter jobs because it is a six-figure job it's a you know with great benefits

occasionally you do have to run into burning buildings yep but you know overall it's a really good job yep um so i'm interested though about kind of why and how this business exists and why the the departments just don't handle it uh well let's maybe see I'll keep reading. Maybe they will tell us. So the owner is retiring. That is the reason for sale. Training and support. The seller is retiring and will stay on for a reasonable amount of time to allow for a smooth transition. The existing 38 employees will continue their roles ensuring operational continuity.

Wait, these guys have 38 employees? How many? It says 38 right there. I mean, I'm not wearing my glasses, but that's 38 employees. So basically, annual revenues are $831,000. and they have 38 employees. Let me do some quick mental math here. That's like $20,000 in revenue per employee, right?

Yes, it is, $21,000 in revenue per employee. Okay, so these people could not be full-time. No, they can't be full-time. But, like, what are they doing? I don't understand. You know, I would think you could assist, well, all right, maybe I'm about to accidentally make the case for buying this business. This seems like you could do this business with, you know, some software.

and one or two overseas employees, like, administer, or one or two employees in person, probably because you got to administer a polygraph and stuff in person. Like, maybe you could cut the overhead dramatically. Oh, let me finish reading this. And then I have a thesis about what's going on here. I know what's going on here. Let's come back to the theme. It will come back to the theme that this is Chicago.

And Chicago, if it is, you know, anyway, it's not, there's the Chicago way. And I think this is being done the Chicago. way. Okay, so the year established is 1988, 38 employees. So it says here again, it's got to be true. Square footage is 3,500, and they lease approximately 3,500 square feet somewhere in the Chicago land area. Very little competition, since they are the largest testing service in the area and very well-known, potential growth. The new owner can easily market to additional police and fire departments in surrounding Illinois communities. Currently, all business is from Mortarth with no marketing.

And then it is listed by John Myers with an 847 area code. 847 area code. Got to be Chicago. Northern suburbs of Chicago. Evanston, Schaumburg, Deplane, Woking, et cetera. Okay. Can I tell you my thesis of how this business works and how it's probably some of the above board graft that happens at in Chicago like crazy?

Okay. Conjecture Wild. I will tell you how I think this works. Okay. My suspicion is what works here, what happens here is this owner has relationships with the fire departments, has the methodology, has the polygraph machine, has all these like third party assessments and all that kind of stuff. And the psychological exams.

This person has all of these things. And then what he does is he goes to partner with the police and fire department and says, hey, does one of your officers or one of your employees who works there already need a side hustle, which these guys are all outside hustles? That's part of the thing they negotiated in their union contracts. Can I, can I get in on the side hustle? Do you have somebody who wants to get on the side hustle? I will pay them to run these screenings. And so basically the way it works is the, the actual folks who are running the firehouse can't go to their bosses and can't go to the taxpayers and say, hey, we're going to, you know, hire somebody additional just to do recruiting.

But they can't say, hey, what we're going to do is we're going to hire this third party firm. And then the third party firm turns right back around and hires the person who works in the firehouse to do it as a side hustle. And that way, everybody wins. Like, it's not on the books. It doesn't look like, it doesn't look like somebody's running a side hustle and getting paid for something they probably should do already, which in my opinion, if you're running a firehouse and managing and CEOing a firehouse, you should probably be building that team as well.

But this allows you, allows you a way to get paid for that, even though the taxpayer is not willing to pay you as the fire chief to recruit and build your own staff. So that's what I think is happening here. These are all these are all side hustle firefighters or police working for this individual gentleman. And so it's basically, so it says it's polygraph. Like this is not actually like a synthetic burning building that people are running into. This isn't like a hands-on exam. This is paper-based, for the most part, polygraph, evaluations, assessments, and psychological exams.

So they don't need a facility or any, you know, real infrastructure. I think it probably, yeah, it probably gets done on site at the firehouse, maybe while during downtime. And this is, this appears to be all the stuff that gets done, uh, remotely. It's the non-kind of practical, non-physical tests, none of that kind of stuff. basically the stuff you kind of have to do the kind of go through the motion stuff before you then do what really happens, which is, I don't know how it is where you live, but when you go visit these firefighter jobs or police jobs are so coveted that you go to the firefighter and you're like,

wait, like all nine of you from your family and cousins are working at the fire. How did you all get past this 3% screening thing? And it turns out like, then, then we, I assume what happens here is then, we do the first layer kind of Chicago. It's the Chicago way to allow these officers to moonlight and get paid for something in terms of recruiting. But then there's the real Chicago way where it's like, okay, yeah, those are the rules, but who do you know and whose uncle is going to be a fire captain and get you a job type thing? So what do we think the revenue model is here?

So they've got, you know, almost a million bucks in sales, not quite. Is it application fees being paid by the applicants? Is it success fees being paid by the fire departments? Is it applicant fees being paid by the fire departments? Is it some annual subscriptions being paid by the fire departments? How do we think they're getting paid? I mean, I would love this business the most if they were getting paid per test. Yep.

But I don't know. Yeah, I would love it if they were getting paid by the applicants too. Yeah. And they had some sort of exclusive deal with, you know, city of Chicago or whatever. that they had to be the only administrator. Right. I mean, it's possible this business is a great business, and it's also not transactable. Yeah.

Here's the thing I worry about. It's possible that this is like codified into Illinois law that fire departments cannot do their own recruiting and must use a recruiting company like this, in which case that's amazing, except that this is probably not the only one, and it's going to be entirely who you know and who you're willing. to kick back. So as soon as you, guy who's not from Deep Chicago, retired firefighter buys this thing, you're going to basically bleed contracts to the guys who know everybody else.

Can you buy any business in Chicago really safely, Michael? It just, I don't know that I would ever buy a business. It's a local business in Chicago. I mean, I think you and I have talked about Chicago businesses like a half dozen times. And every time we come back to like the reputation of doing business in Chicago and how we're terrified of it, right? It's kind of like it's kind of like people have pitched me on investing in businesses or buying businesses in France or are Brazil. And I'm just like, you know, it's really hard those places. Like France is borderline impossible.

Not going to name this specific EU company, but I've been involved in a company in the past that was located in Nordic region. and a guy decided he didn't want to come back to work anymore. Like he just didn't feel like working and wouldn't come into the office. So we had to pay him a year severance. He was like an individual contributor. We had to pay him like a year's salary to get him to leave the company because there was nothing we could do about it. Like the whole company was returning to office and he's like, no, no, I don't want to.

It's like, oh, it's like you have to pay somebody a year salary. Like at a certain point, like that just becomes an entire like, like, stranglehold on your, in your economy's ability to be a. efficient. And that's where you and I think come back to on Chicago all the time. It's just like, I'm so scared of Chicago. Like just all this kind of stuff. You just assume there's some sort of scam going on. And because you're not in Chicago, you're not going to be able to deal with it. Yeah. Well, you know, it's not just Chicago. I was just reading news today and a bank employee, a Wells Fargo employee in the People's Republic of California, the United States, Heather's not on to

defend herself. So we'll just let her have it. This guy was awarded $22 million. from Wells Fargo because he refused to return to the office after COVID because, and I'm not making this up, this straight from the news article, Wall Street Journal. This is not like, you know, Twitter or something. Wall Street Journal, this guy, $22 million because after COVID, he's not going back to the office because he has to go to the bathroom frequently because of nerve damage to his colon that happened in the 90s. So before COVID even at all. So presumably he worked in the office, you know, his whole career. goes home for COVID. Post-COVID, Wells Fargo goes, everybody back to the office.

This guy goes, no, like, I don't know, there's not enough bathrooms in the office, or I can't, you know, I don't know how he was in the office before, but I'm not coming back. Wells Fargo fires him. And state of California, $22 million to this guy from Wells Fargo. It's crazy. So California, Chicago, New York can be just as bad as well. But like some of these places, it's just too hard.

And then they, you know, each one little policy, you know, business hostile policy, or look the other way or corruption, you know, isn't the thing that does it. But eventually you have a reputation as a place that's not friendly to do business. Yeah. All right. Well, that was depressing. Okay. So actually, while we were talking, I Googled, okay, I want to be a Chicago firefighter. It looks like Chicago does their own firefighter applications.

But what's different is the Chicago, the MSA is not only just city of Chicago, but it's also Chicago, like all the little towns around there. And I thought back to our broker and his 847 area code also references all those little towns like Champlain and Schaumburg and all that kind of stuff. So one of them was Elgin, which I looked up, Elgin, Illinois, the city and the suburbs. And they had a firefighter application process sheet that I just pulled up here. and it basically talks about how you can go through and do these entrance exams, public safety answers, interview study guide and stuff like that.

And that may be this company. It's called Public Safety Answers, which administers their entrance exams. And I know we're trying to do less to the figure out what the business is thing because it makes people really angry. But I just, I can't help it. Like, this is not, I'm just doing- This is why we have, by the way, a strict policy that we do not sign NDAs before we record these episodes. So that is why the pod is called Acquisitions Anonymous. We do not, the deals are anonymous.

And we don't know that this is the company. We are Googling just from the publicly available information. Okay, disclaimer over. Yeah. Created by firefighters for firefighters. So, yeah. Man, these guys look like, great. If you had to pick up, like, I have a.

of on the screen now, the two guys who appear to own this business. If you had to pick, like, what, uh, what they would look like if they, you're like, pull up older firefighter in the dictionary. It's these dudes. They got sweet mustaches. I want this guy to be a fire captain in my town. He looks like he knows what he's doing. He looks legit. Oh, man. Um, I have a buddy who's like a, a long time Houston area firefighter. Uh, first of all, they're crazy people. Like you hear him tell stories, but they end up, because they sit around the firehouse so often and spend so much time just doing nothing, the amount of banter and like jokes and like wordplay these guys can do is unbelievable. Just unbelievable how funny this guy is because he's had 40 years of training in the

firehouse and figuring out how to make jokes. Sounds great. Well, it's, you know, lots of making jokes punctuated by sheer terror running in a burning building. Yeah. So this may not be, this may not be the doing it because this place not only does the, uh, runs the entire firefighter recruitment funnel for the fire for small fire departments. They do online applications, online testing, online interviews, but then they also do social media advertising to broaden applicant reach. So it looks like they're running kind of the top of funnel, entire top of funnel for folks to come up with, okay, here are your finalists. Um, but this particular company called public safety answers.com appears to be run by Mr. Tramer here,

who is a retired Phoenix Fire Battalion chief from back of the day. But yeah, so they always go ahead. It's cool because this also seems a little bit like recruiting consulting. Like they're helping the fire departments get their brand out there and their reach and then also handling all the inbound, customizing interviews for the particular fire department the way they want it to be done, tweaking the questionnaires, you know, all that stuff. So like, I guess what I'm the.

having trouble squaring is I understand this completely, like, as a regular recruiting firm, but I don't understand this in the context of thousands of applicants for three spots. Right. Right. Like, if you have thousands of applicants for three spots, you don't need more top of funnel. You need to just pare down the 1,000 to the 3. Right. So it's interesting that I imagine what they provide would have to be very, very different

depending on maybe there are rural places that don't have enough firefighter applicants. But in the big cities, I know that they're swamped. Yeah. Well, this is all anecdotal, but historically I've heard that small departments often struggle, especially rural ones are ones that are in the excerpts because they don't have the tax base to pay as well. And the work hours are potentially worse, right? Because you have fewer people around to do scheduling and fit it all together. So, you know, I recall, you know, I grew up in a tiny little inner suburb of San Antonio that was totally surrounded by San Antonio.

It was like a thousand people. And like, like, I remember talking once to one of the firefighters. And he's like, yeah, we actually get, we don't, we don't work as hard as the big city people because there's not in many calls. But we don't get paid nearly as well. And it's like, okay. It's kind of fair, I guess. So, yeah. So this firefight, back to the Elgin's firefighter stuff, they, all the entrance exams are done by this third party.

group and then you do some work in advance you put in an application then i think it looks bill like there's just a lot of boxes to check like when somebody makes the application you got to see do they have a high school diploma do they have a driver's license do they have an EMT basic or paramedic license that's something we haven't talked about firefighters don't really fight fires that much anymore they actually are just basically 90% of the time paramedics that's most of their work yeah which they're really good like here in san Antonio but like it's they're still most paramedics. So that's one of the downsides about being a firefighter, in my opinion.

It's not like you're rushing into burning buildings that often. Yeah, a lot of Narcan and drug OD. And that's why a lot of firefighters are disillusioned. Yeah. Plentys and everybody. It's just a lot of drug addiction. The whole thing is crazy. At some point, that will be a good rant for a future pot.

We should do like a drug rehab. It's just, yeah. Well, it's just, yeah. I mean, the 32nd version of the rant, it is just crazy that, like, we as a society have totally given up on, like, treating mental illness when they shut down all the, like, all the public mental health hospitals. And secondarily, that we keep treating, you know, criminalizing people who are addicts rather than realizing it is also a mental health problem. People are not choosing to go be addicts by and large. So anyway, that's just my rant about the whole thing. Okay, cool.

Well, then, like, here they also have, like, a. scoring system? Like you get points based on, you know, being. Yeah, if you're on YouTube, you can see. I mean, it comes down to like if you have 60 credit hours or more of college credit, you get a certain points. If you have, you know, four years of experience, you get a certain number of points. Because this is like a like very union and structured, like the process is very structured. The evaluation process is not as subjective or they're trying to make it not subjective, it seems, even though, as we talked about it earlier in the pod, somehow it still ends up being quite subjective. But there are probably a lot of, those are the most compliance

heavy processes here where you've got to jump through like a million hoops to assure everybody that there's no favoritism going on and to cover up the favoritism that is going on. So because like if you have a favoritism-based process, people just kept adding more and more and more compliance, and the rent seekers figure out how to outsmart the compliance over and over and over. This is a horrible loop. And before you know, you need entire companies to handle the red tape that it's created around applying for a firefighter job in the city of Chicago, which I think is kind of what's

going on here. It is such, I mean, it's like, you know, I'm a nerd about, like, culture and all that kind of stuff. But this is such a reflection of, like, a lot of the underlying way we do things in America, where like, we're like, we all know what's the message that's being sent or how it works, but we go through such hoops to kind of BS everybody about it. And like my favorite example about it is like super rich people. Like super rich people in Mexico, like you go to Mexico City and like all the rich people,

they tell you very quickly and they advertise to you how rich they are. Like you could just tell. Like you see it. Like they drive the car that shows you. Like it's all very flashy. There's gold and all that kind of stuff. But here in the U.S., everybody just kind of pretends like we're all equal. And like we're all the same. Like, oh, I'm super, like, there's that whole, have you seen this bill where there's

like that, that meme where it's like you look at, you look at a picture of two people and you're like, billionaire or homeless right from their attire. Right. Because of the way billionaire is dressed because it's like, oh, I'm just a name of the people, even though I'm better than all of you. So anyway, that's right. Yes. In America, the rich people want to believe that they are men of people, no matter how rich they are. Yeah. But then they refuse to live in the neighborhoods where those people send their kids. It's like, okay, send their kids to school. Like, whatever.

Okay. Sorry, I got a, I'm like three for three on rants today. So get us back on trying, Bill. So this business, $830,000 of revenue, $175,000 of profit, meaning they're probably paying out about half a million dollars a year in side hustle kickbacks, bribes, whatever you want to call them. He's still putting, he's making $175,000 a year. Yeah.

owning this business. He wants you to pay four times for it, four years of profits. Are you buying this business? Like, can this business be bought? Or are you just totally untransactable? I don't know how you're, I don't know how you're buying this unless you're a former firefighter or police officer in who's lived in the northern suburbs of Chicago land.

Like, I just don't know, I don't know how some random schmuck, like one of us does this job. Like, they see me walking up to a fire to firehouse in like, Seanberg, Illinois, like, I don't know how to talk their language. I don't know how to talk any, you know, I don't know how to do any of that kind of stuff. And I think that's, I think that's the fundamental problem with this business is it needs to sell to somebody who's a firefighter who has access to $831,000. But like, you're, who's that going to be some senior police captain or some senior like battalion chief for the fire department? That person in Illinois is getting like a monster like pension for the rest of their life. Why do they want to go through? They're getting

$150,000 for doing nothing. Why do they want to go through a bunch of work to go run a business and take all this risk and go find, you know, $700,000 to buy this company? So I think that's the fundamental problem going on here. It's got to sell to a firefighter, but it makes no sense for a firefighter to buy this. Like, I don't understand. Yeah, that's a good point. Because, you know, if I walk in or you walk in, we're going to, the organism is going to reject us, right, like all the firefighters. You know, we're not ex-firefighters.

We don't talk the language. We're not credible. We don't have moustaches. Yeah. No, we don't have any muscle. stashes at all. You know, we're not union members. We've never been, you know, like all that stuff. Like, no way. So it's this just, what's interesting, though, is that it is a good business. A lot of times there's these businesses that are not good business and are also not transactable.

Right. I mean, this seems like a decent business and probably could be expanded to some other fire departments, you know, around the area, but it's just not the buyer pool is so narrow. Yeah. Which makes it tough. I think to your point, those are tied, right? If you see businesses that very few people can own. Like, a lot of times that makes them really good business because it's really tough to get into it. We, you know, I loved you guys this episode that you did without me about the fertility clinics. And maybe that was why the episode was so good. I wasn't there. But like, first thing I thought was, how do I open up a fertility clinic? And then I was like, second of all, I was like, I don't know anything about fertility clinics. Like, like, go to metal school school and

become an endocrinologist. Yeah, like, okay, good. Go back, go back 40 years and rethink my life, You know, Michael, I'm flattered to know that you listen to all of the episodes that you are not on. So less you doubt that we eat our own cooking around here, listener, Michael listens to our own episodes that he misses because he knows they're going to be that good. Well, I had insomnia, so I needed some help. So you listen to us to go to sleep. Oh, I know. Bill talking about IVF. Knock me right out.

No, I mean, I think that's one of the greatest things about this podcast. Like, I listen to it because I want to get inspired around business ideas. I think it's, you know, the best way to think about new business and how you can succeed in it is by learning from what's worked from other people and replicating patterns. And, you know, I'm in the process of incubated business right now. Okay, I'm not incubating it. The person I'm partnering with is doing all the incubation. I'm just kibbutzing with she.

And, but like, it's a total, like, replicating a pattern that I saw, looking at another company that was for sale three years ago. And it's just like, oh, like this, there's something else that changed. So like, let's replicate that pattern and use that business model pattern. So that's, that's a lot of why I love what we do. Because like, I can look at and be like, oh, like this works for somebody else. How do I change that a little bit and be successful? Yeah, a different industry in a slightly different way.

But because a lot of business tastes like chicken, right? So, I mean, you could take this business and go, what other industries have very heavily red, tapified recruitment processes? they probably don't want to handle in-house. And how do I build a basically compliance funnel management firm to check all the right boxes for them? Yep. So this is basically, there's value there. Yeah, I mean, they don't say it in here.

But if you, this same business is something that tech companies, especially high growth startups hire for all the time called recruiting process outsourcing, where it's basically, it's called RPO, you know, our buddy, Jesse. And I'm totally like, I'm calling his last name. Jesse Poogee. No, no, not Jesse Boosy, different Jesse. Jesse Tensman. I get too many Jesse's there.

Jesse Tensman, that's where he got his start, right? He runs a, he's a Twitter guy as well. He runs basically a recruiting process outsourcing where he like basically brings in a methodology to like be fractional or outsourced recruiting for startups. And it's been hugely successful for him, total bootstrap business. But it's basically this, but targeting kind of Main Street style stuff, which I think is, you know, potentially genius as long as it's the type of environment. where they're hiring a lot, which firefighters are, and so are tech startups.

Yeah, awesome. All right. Well, this is a good one. Let's wrap it up. Thanks for listening. If you like this one, this is the first, I think, recruiting services, one we've ever done. But if there is an industry you are interested in, go on our new website, acqueu,anon.com, and we have almost 350 episodes of businesses that are for sale that we have analyzed on this show.

It's shocking, Michael, we've been doing it for that long. But it's all tagged by industry. And all the new ones are tagged by industry too. So you can go back in time and listen to 20 e-commerce deals. You know, or seven construction company deals or whatever it might be, whatever you're interested in. So check out the website and get on our newsletter.

We also send a newsletter out each week. It includes all the episodes we released in the week, as well as a couple cool links from each of the hosts, what we're up to and just fun things we found on the internet. Gustavo and the guys have actually started putting that together. And it's quite good. I enjoy it. Michael listened to our podcast. I read our newsletter. I really like it. So hop on the website,

acqueu and on.com, and you can find all that stuff. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time.