Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Is This Hamptons Lighting Business Worth $1.25 Million? - Acquisitions Anonymous 293

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

In this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous, Michael, Bill, Heather, and Mills discuss a potential purchase of a landscape and architectural lighting company in the Hamptons valued at $1.25 million with annual revenues of $800,000 and a net cash flow of $375,000. They analyze its strong financials, 40-year history, and wealthy client base while also considering challenges like its dependence on local referrals for new business. Enjoy the show! Check out the listing here: https://synergybb.com/listings/premium-landscape-and-architectural-lighting-company/Thanks to this week's sponsor:CloudBookkeeping offers adaptable solutions to businesses that want to focus on growth with a “client service first” approach. They offer a full suite of accounting services, including sophisticated reporting, QuickBooks software solutions, and full-service payroll options.Learn how to buy a business.If you are interested in buying a business but unsure how to start, you should check Michael's Buy a Business Course:You will learn:• Build a thesis for the type of business that's right for you‍• Learn how to stand out in a sea of buyers• Create a working, scalable Deal Engine getting you leads• Maximize your chances of finding great dealsShow notes:00:00 intro 02:54 Reviewing the deal05:53 Challenges and Costs of Landscape Lighting08:04 Complexity of Lighting Projects09:42 Size and Structure of the Business12:12 Importance of Having a Growth Plan13:30 Risk and Debt in Business Acquisitions17:50 Who should buy this deal? 27:00 Structuring the Acquisition DealSubscribe 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]

All right. So here at Acquisitions Alonymous, we are definitely kind of bougie podcast hosts. So because we're so boozy, we decided today to do a deal that's in the Hamptons. And if you're not familiar with the Hamptons, that's where they have like $80 million homes for rich New Yorkers to go out on Long Island. And so we did a deal today in the Hamptons. Really not that intentionally. But it also made it interesting that it was in that rich of a neighborhood. And it was an architectural lighting business. And there's a lot we liked about it. And one thing that we really did not like about it. So stick around through. the episode and you'll figure all that out at some point and hopefully have as much fun as we did. Here you go. Hey, Michael here. Want to talk to you about today's sponsor for the episode, which is cloudbookkeeping.com. So cloud bookkeeping is actually run by my neighbor, Charlie. So I've met him in person and can attest that he's a real human being and a good person. And what cloud bookkeeping does is offer a full suite of bookkeeping services all in the cloud

for you around QuickBooks and other technologies that you're using as a small business owner. So if you're interested in getting the bookkeeping part of running a business off of your plate and focusing on running your business, Charlie and his team are one to call. They can put together a bunch of other stuff in terms of helping you manage and grow your business

besides just bookkeeping, sophisticated reporting, definitely helping you get your QuickBooks online set up in the right way. and a number of things around payroll as well. So definitely know them and recommend them. If you want to find out more about cloud bookkeeping, you can go to their website at cloudbookkeeping.com,

reach out to Charlie. I know many of you have and see if he can help you running your business easier and more fun by letting them help with a lot of the bookkeeping solutions. And when you call, mention this podcast. It would help us and help Charlie know that we're supporting him as well. So thanks a bunch,

and cloudbookkeeping.com as the sponsor for today's episode. So Mills, I've told my wife, I'm not getting rid of this beard. Would you like to know why? Like five ladies have called him a bit of me. They're like,

it looks terrific. She's never heard of this. And then my wife made a huge mistake last night. We were getting ready to go to sleep. And she's like, you know, your beard looks really good. They're like sold. Never changing it.

So never getting rid of this. Never getting rid of this. And today I'm wearing a hat. I bought this in San Diego, Heather, to celebrate the SoCal lifestyle. All right. You look like you come from here now. I can totally handle living in San Diego. It's pretty great.

You need a raincoat to be here now. It's raining again. Oh, it's nothing sacred. I know. What happened? Our son is gone. All right. Speaking of rain, I brought a deal.

It's an architectural landscape and architectural lighting company. So let me read this one to you guys and then you see if you hate it or not. The good news about this from like radio quality for the podcast is lots of people can understand what landscape and architectural lighting is. So at least it's, you know, it's not like mouse DNA or like what the hell they do. Okay, so this is from synergy business brokers. prices $1.25 million annual revenue is $800,000, Ned cash flow of $375,000.

So for those of you keeping score at home, they do like 40% cash flow margins. Is my math right there, Mills? Is that pretty 40, 45%? I mean, 400,000 will be 50%. Yeah, so 800,000 revenue. They're putting $375 in their pocket. It's all real.

It should be installed. It's all that cash flow is real, unadjusted. Unadjusted. Okay, the location is in Suffolk County, New York. Here's the description. It's a best-in-class industry-accredited Hamptons-based landscape and architectural lighting design and installation company offered for immediate sale. So correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Hamptons like the fanciest stuff?

It's like on Long Island, right, where it's like a really fancy place to go? Fancy neighborhood. Yeah, I end. It's outside of New York City. Yeah, okay. So this is some like 50, 75-month. million-dollar home-type people here. So the company has over 40 years of experience serving affluent residential and commercial

clients with a robust referral pipeline. The business has posed for significant growth due to several factors, increased demand for LED lighting solutions, innovations, and lighting technology, smart lighting, and IoT technology internet as of things. A continuous rise in demand for appealing lighting options, growing necessity for energy-efficient lighting devices, a projected market worth $9 billion. I love when they do that. The total LED lighting market is 10,000, 100,000 times larger than our current business.

That's the stuff that gets put on like slide three of the deck you submit to your bank for the loan and nobody looks at it. But if you don't put it, you don't get the loan. Right. That's got to be there. The total addressable market that makes no sense to this business should be there. Sure. Yeah. Equipped to the team of specialized experts who are passionate about the reputation at the top of the game in the industry, new ownership has an incredible opportunity to scale this business to two new heights of success.

Localized lead generation marketing and targeting high-income residential and commercial communities represent incremental growth opportunities for this reputable firm, a fleet of younger trucks and all equipment needed to handle any size job, complete this prime add-on or startup opportunity. It is an entrepreneur's dream called Raj Seth, who works for Synergy business brokers and has a 516, area code. I guess that's upstate New York. And yeah, so what do we think about this landscape and architectural lighting company? Well, first of all, let's make me define what do we think they do. So I just did this. Have you, have you guys done outside lighting on your house? I have something like this. Yes, I have my trees lit up and my bushes and all the,

anything that's landscaped is lit up outside and the lights go on at night. Yeah. So I wanted to do that, Heather. I'm sure yours looks great. I got quotes and like about fell out of my chair. I mean, you're talking a five-figure job easy to light up the outside, like the yard and the outside of the house. And then I go on Amazon and like I ended up buying like four or $500 worth of stuff and just doing it myself. Like the markup was insane. Like the lights cost 30 bucks on Amazon and they want $2,300 like per placement. It's, it just, it got so expensive. If you have big trees like I do, I have palm trees that are very tall and other big trees. It's kind of a dangerous job, you know, to go up there and put the lights up. In fact, we've had them up. Now,

the tree trimmers have messed them up and we've had to have the guys come back out and fix it. So I think there's a little bit of repair and maintenance that goes with this kind of installation. At least there is for me. So I imagine there is for other folks because the lights don't stay where they're put for long. But I think that's what this is. It's like, you know, come in and light up the new landscaping. It's project-based because you're not going to do this, you know, you're going to do it when you plant some new landscaping. It's going to be part of that kind of project. So there's that aspect of it.

I do always like these kinds of businesses when they are in a very affluent area because there's not, you know, the cyclicality just isn't there. People will always spend. But it is the kind of thing you put it in once. Unless you're going to relanscape or just kind of fix a few things like we just did, you know, it's one and done almost. So you've got to always be, you know, filling your pipeline with new projects. That's kind of icy.

I think the challenge with a business like this. I would love to know the average ticket because, you know, I don't live in the biggest house and they wanted tens of thousands of dollars. Like, can you imagine what it costs to light up the acreage of like a $20 million Hamptons estate? I mean, hundreds of thousands of, like huge projects. Well, and these things get increasingly sophisticated, you know. I mean, some of them, like, Bill, what you got, you know, is kind of plug and play.

But if you've got to run, you know, a light to that tree, that huge oak tree that's in the middle of your yard and you're burying cabling and, you know, hidden wires and, you know, putting it on sensors and like coordinated lighting with different areas, I mean, it can get very sophisticated, very fast. You underestimate me, Mills. I did all of that. You buried the lines, Bill? I did. I did. Did you bury them appropriately or did you just dig a trench and lay them down? You didn't lay, you didn't lay conduit in the ground or anything.

No, no. You're young. You're young. People, my age would never do that. It's just like, no, this is too much word for hiring something. And, you know, it is kind of, and so I learned about it when I was doing it, it is sort of an art form. Like, all these different types of lights and the angle at which you light different types of trees to create depth in the yard. Like, there is some skill to this.

like this isn't just like mow the grass. You know, you have to, and that's why they call it architectural lighting, because you design the lights to complement the structure, to complement the trees. And it really does make a really big difference to the appearance. And it's for safety too. So like at night, if you're out there, like you don't want to be under like this bright spotlight. But if it's lit right, it can feel kind of like dusk, even at night and it's safer. I love that this picture is like a tunnel.

It's like a lit tunnel. with like pavers. It looks like it looks like a parking garage or something a little bit. But I mean, who knows? My biggest question for this business is how do they get customers? And the fact that they're at $800,000

a year in revenue tells me that they probably get customers just in a kind of incidental word of mouth. We have a reputation, you know, and people call us. They don't have a real pipeline for customer acquisition.

which is the biggest concern, but probably also the biggest opportunity for growth. They seem to highlight exactly what you're saying here. It stands out to me that they're like, we get all these customers with a robust referral pipeline. It's like, oh, okay, like Jim, Jim or Jane, whoever owns this goes to the neighborhood coffee shop every morning and everybody knows them.

And it's like, oh, you need architectural lighting called Jim. Unless you're working with a big New York G.C. or something like that to build your $50 million house in the Hamptons, in which case they're probably importing like a super high-end professional for that. So my suspicion is this kind of fills that middle gap of kind of the smaller to mid-sized projects that are not the highest-end stuff happening in Hamptons.

But if you do the math, let's say $800,000 in annual revenue in each project averages $20,000. That's 40 projects a year. So one per week. Yep. Yeah, that's maybe my rough guess there. That tracks.

Which makes me believe maybe this is a small, whole company, you know, Jim or Jane and one or two. Yeah, this is like one crew. This is not, you know, a fleet of vehicles. But, you know, I actually do believe these margins, given like I priced it out and, you know, the labor doesn't have to be expensive. I think they probably could push 50% margin. Yeah, I agree with that.

The margins are great. But customer acquisition is sort of the key to any business like this. And at 3.3, I think, is the multiple they're asking for if that's the real cash flow, like to Mill's point earlier, you've got to grow this business for that to still be worth it. So I think that would be the challenge here is sort of how would you grow this business? It's serving sounds like one neighborhood and maybe sort of one price point within that neighborhood. So where's your growth coming from? Are you going to go to another neighborhood nearby? And what kind of marketing expense are you going to have to throw at that? I think that's

some of the things that I would think about if I bought something like this. And is this a buy yourself a job situation? Yeah, that 375 is definitely owners' comp included. Yeah, I agree. You know, Heather's comments kind of it highlighted something for me that I think is worth mentioning, which has changed in this interest rate environment. It used to be that you could buy a business like this with a 10-year SBA loan at, you know, interest of nothing.

and you could probably do okay if the business just stayed flat because your interest costs are under control, you know, we're in a bull market, et cetera. But now you really need to have a plan to grow a business. You know, if you're going to buy a business for three to four times, you need to have a plan because there is so much randomness that could occur to you on the downside. Your base case cannot be flat and hoped not to get hit by a meteor, right? you need to have like a deliberate plan to grow the thing if you're going to take on millions of dollars of personally guaranteed debt at pushing 10 percent so that if you do get hit by

some meteors at least maybe you'll still be flat and your growth will have offset it. And I think there's a generation of business buyers that is still wrapping their mind around that over the last year or two. You've got to go into this with a growth plan. Yeah, absolutely. The cost of capital makes a big difference and especially when it changed that much that fast. It definitely has to change your game plan when you're using debt. And yeah, growth is the key. The smaller the business also, the more it doesn't even take a meteor to your point to mess up things.

It could be like a little, you know, pebble. You could really get into trouble without very much happening. And lenders kind of know that too. Most of them do anyway. There actually is a higher default rate risk in smaller business acquisition loans than there is in larger. And that's kind of the reason why. Do you know how different it is, Heather? In numbers? I have it on my blog post on my website. I don't remember the actual stats, but the original blog post I did last year, we stratified it by dollar amount. And it was pretty significant different. So every few months, I take another cut at that data and put it on my website. But it is very fascinating. Smaller deals do fare a little bit poorer than larger.

So anecdotally, do you think that is because of a difference in buyer quality or a difference in business quality or a combination of the two, right? Obviously, if it's a smaller business, you're going to get a different quality of buyer, like, not to be mean to broke people, but like you're going to get a different, then you are to somebody who's going to be doing a bigger deal. And obviously, a bigger business is going to be bigger for a reason, right? It's potentially more stable and has a more. more defined kind of future prospects around it.

Correct. I mean, I think the kind of person that will buy a job, because that's usually what the smaller deal really is, is usually, you know, just trying to dip their toe in maybe for the first time and feels like that's a little bit safer. But statistically, it may not really be a little bit safer. But yeah, I think it's a combination of things why the smaller deals don't perform as well as the larger. Yeah, that comes back to Gurley's thing. if you're going to buy a business

with a personally guaranteed SBA loan, Yolo into the biggest one you possibly can because you're going bankrupt either way. And it seems like there's less of a chance of going bankrupt if it's the bigger one. And I think the corollary of that is if you're going to borrow enough money to personally,

and you're going to personally guarantee it's enough money to bankrupt you, you should just borrow as much money as possible. At a certain point, you're just getting enough bankrupt because you can't go below zero, right? So just you, yeah, it's like, well, okay, it's like,

a $2 million debt is going to bankrupt, me as much as a $20 million debt is. So let's go. It's like making this happen. That like famous saying, you know, if you owe the bank a million dollars, it's the bank's problem. You know, if you owe the bank, like $200 million, you know, it's the bank's problem. Well, as a as a serial borrower, and I know people on Twitter are like, don't ever borrow

money. It's terrible. Well, the world is more nuanced than that. But as a serial borrower, it's also, and maybe Heather, you have a comment about this. It's as a former banker, it's curious to see how the dynamic shifts, depending upon the size of the bank, right? If you're dealing with a $700 billion asset bank, that's different than a $30 billion, which is different than a $2 billion, which is different than a $200 million. And like one of those, if you borrow $30 million from them, like, that's a huge deal for them. Like the $2 billion bank has

taken that really seriously. But the $30 billion bank is like, eh, that's Tuesday, right? And the $700 billion bank is like, we don't have time for that. So anyway. Yeah, absolutely. The size of the bank affects the size of their balance sheet. And then is your loan a really big loan to them or a kind of a medium size loan to them. I think you should always take that into consideration. It goes beyond that, you know, even what are the different, you know, business units within a bank? And are they, is that bank well suited to, to grow with you? And there's a lot to think about in choosing a bank. And a small bank with a very big loan loss, they will probably never lend to that industry again. And sometimes they'll even shut down an entire business unit because of it. Yeah. Yeah, it will

leave a scar, big one. Oh, are you referring to every, every mid-sized bank that opened up a tech practice in the past five years and the shuddering them as quickly as possible? Yeah, that's been kind of tough. Yep. Yeah, it's like, you look around, you're like, okay, well, we're all going to lend to SaaS companies down. We're like, whoa, whoa, just kidding.

Not doing that anymore. No. That idea. And it's funny how quickly the banks will cool off on an idea like that. And it doesn't take much. Yep, back to commercial real estate where we never lose. money. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. There's multi-family in office. What could go wrong? Yeah. So who should buy this deal? Somebody already living in the Hamptons. Somebody with a different service business in the Hamptons. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. If you have a landscape business in the Hamptons, this is a great tuck in. I'm thinking about these instances where somebody's selling a business that is a job. And once you put debt on it, your margin of safety is getting much lower. And then you have to move to a very high cost environment. And, you know, just trying to buy this business and go rent a house or buy a house in the Hamptons, you know, you're paying your purchase price also just to buy a starter home there.

So it's just a uphill battle. Yeah, I agree. Someone local who's maybe got a little bit of background in landscaping or something kind of mechanical, you know, hands-on. because it's going to be a hands-on job. This is not for somebody who's coming off of a desk job, I think straight into something like this is probably not a good idea. I think you've got to have some sort of earn-out structure on this thing, too. I mean, because it's project-based and it's so community and referral-based,

you know, I think it's pretty tough to pay $1.2 million, you know, three-plus years of cash flow up front and hope that the referral pipe down doesn't dry up or they've lit all the homes in the neighborhood where people know them. There's got to be some sort of risk share on this. Well, and to your point, an earnout makes a lot of sense, but the SBA doesn't allow earnouts. There are some ways around it, kind of, where you can use what we call a forgivable seller note.

Even the rule on that is a little strange. Like some banks say you can't tie the forgivable seller note to growth. Other banks say you could as long as it was the purchase price appraised. But the SBA has this restriction on earnouts. So you can't get too creative if you're going to use SBA financing, unfortunately. I was just exploring Mills's comment that you would need to make this much money to buy a starter home. I think you need to make 10 times this much money to buy a starter home.

I saw the one that it looks like a single wide trailer for how much was it. Yeah, literally I pulled up. So cost of living always factors into how you think about this stuff. But here in Montauk, which is the next town over from the Hamptons, which according to Billy Joel, I don't know if you guys follow Billy Joel, Montauk has been taken over by rich New Yorkers that's the down-easter Alexa song, I don't know if he is.

Yeah, Michael, I know that's not because my dad used to listen to it. I mean, this place looks really nice on the inside, but it is a single one with a deck for $675,000. Yeah, this is a $700,000 double-white trailer. Wow. In Montauk.

Oh, single white. Oh, down here with the plebeians. Hey, down here in South Carolina. We know the difference between a single wide and a double wide. Oh, here's a double wide here. And for those listening to home, a single wide means it's basically a shipping container. Double wide means basically two shipping containers next to each other. But you're close to the beach.

Yeah. Yeah, you're in walking this as to the beach and 800 other double whites and single whites. But yeah, so the entry level home, best I can tell here, here's another one in Montau, which is a condo for $600,000 for $733 square foot. But Michael, right below that there's an $80 million house. How far away is the $80 million house from the single wide? Like a couple miles. Like here's the single wide.

Here's the single wide right here. And then right here, like, it's not even a couple miles. It's like. It's blocks. It's like 200 yards. But, I mean, to our point about this listing, that $80 million house, you could give them $100,000 lighting proposal. and they would be like, well, how does it compare to my neighbors?

Because I want to one-up them. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's crazy. Holy crap. Look at this house. Bill, will you give me $80 million?

Should I can buy this house? This is ridiculous. I would be roommates. That would be a fun podcast. Hey, there's a house next door, though. You could each have your own. The one next door looks like it's just as nice. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. They could be game store gamers. So have you guys noticed how every millennium, like their dream is to buy like a compound and live next door to their friends. Have you noticed this? It's like the, it's so weird. Like,

don't you guys what your own space? You guys are the resident millennials. Tell me what's going on with this. I think I kind of, I don't want to live like as a roommate. It would be cool. It's like, wait,

I want this. Yeah, wait a minute. So, so the thing that I want to do is buy like a 50 to 100 acres in the mountains and build a couple homes on it. And so like, people and have some of my friends own the other ones so we can all go up and have,

you know, like vacation with kids and stuff up there. I think that would be awesome. But honestly, I think it's because people are craving connection and they don't really know their neighbors. So instead of like, you know, it used to be older generations, wherever you moved in, you just got to know your neighbors. Your neighbors became your friends, right? And now millennials were, you know, everybody is too kind of socially crippled. And so they go, well, I moved to place. I couldn't possibly talk to the neighbors. What if I could switch out the neighbors with the people I already know that I'm not scared of. Yeah.

And there is the dream. Yeah. So one of the, one of the craziest things that I've, you know, you guys know, I'm a generational, like, trends nerd. And one of the craziest things is this, like, idea that Gen Z now, so the people that are slightly younger than millennials, they're in their, you know, they're in their teens to late 20s. Uh, the prospect of going up to a stranger and just like talking to them at a bar or church

or whatever like that is by and large seen as. kind of creeping. It's almost, they almost treat it like the same way that somebody like cold emails you or like text you out of the blue. It's just like, oh, why would you creep on somebody like that without giving them a chance to tell you it's okay to talk to them? The same thing you would do, like, in permission kind of stuff online. And it's kind of, it's just funny. Like for my generation and boomers, you know, we're just like, wait, why don't you just walk up and say hi and like to this girl you think is cute? It's just like, it's just, so anyway, it's just, it's just bizarre how much the internet has changed the behavior of all the stuff. And I guess you see that in the

millennials' desire for their exclusive compound. Hey, it's within reach if you're all willing to live in a single wide. Evidently. All right. So back to this deal. So we think somebody that maybe is a bolt on for another local services business, somebody that wants to live in the Hamptons and be part of the community there. We think they're kind of in this sweet spot of not too small, but not too big in terms of the types of work they're doing. I'd be curious, like, let's say you did own a landscaping business in this neighborhood. Can you just compete with these guys?

I mean, like, $1.2 million is a lot of money. Like, can you just put a bunch of signs on the telephone poles? Like, hey, we do lights now? Like, call everybody, do, like, how much marketing could you do for a million bucks and just compete with them? Yeah, I think your big source is, and they don't talk about it here, I think your big source is actually going to the local architects and the local residential and commercial contractors and kissing their asses

and getting referred in to deals that way. I could also see you doing some like door-to-door-to-door hustling, just going and sending letters, hey, you know, here's a mock-up of what the lighting could look like in your house. Like, that would be one of the things I would consider doing. Go take pictures of people's houses at night and just like hire somebody overseas to do mock-ups of what it would look like. That's your creeper coming out.

Hey, I took a picture of your house at night. Yeah, hey, like, you know, I was walking down. Well, you don't say like that. No, I know. I know. Like, you make up, you make up some story so it doesn't sound creepy like, hey, I was walking my dog down your street. And I decided to send you a picture of what architectural lighting could do to transform the whole thing. I took a photo. Yeah.

Also, here's this picture of you dancing around in a diaper for some reason. I don't know. I will get, so I would say, like, owning rental property. You do it in a non-creepy way. owning rental property, I get all these like, you know, postcards and stuff where it's people like, hey, we want to buy your house. And they come up with the craziest things. Now, some of them, it did start to creep me out a little bit. And I know they didn't drive by and take the picture because it's very clearly street view. But it's very jarring when it's like a street view picture of a house that you own. And it's like, hey, would you want to sell your house? Other people will do things where like the envelope has like printed stains on it. Like it looks like a coffee stain. And then they do some creation. And then they do some creation. And it's like, thing on the inside. I got one the other day that was literally the paper inside had been crumbled up and then uncrumbled and folded up. And it was this thing like, hey, we know you just crumble these up and throw them in the trash can anyway, so we pre-crumbled it for you. And like,

I still threw it away and I'm not selling them the house, but it, I've thought about it after the fact. Like, that was stupid, but it was catchy. The direct mail game can get very advanced. Yes. Yes. Indeed. All right. So it sounds like TLDR on this. Cool business. Seems like there's something for the right person. Probably difficult to justify this price.

Probably, unless there's a pretty serious risk share. Yeah. Well, I think that's where, I mean, maybe double click on that bill. Like, how would you potentially go structure this if you require? I mean, I would need like an EBITDA split for three to five years, you know, stepping down EBITDA split. You know, say 50-50 year one. 60, 40, 70, 30, and then cap it, like, until $1.2 million has been paid, something like that.

So if you do it as, because if you do it as a percent of EBITDA, you can't lose money, right? If the business declines, you're protected. And then if you, if you do it until X is paid, then the payment period stretches out, which just sort of protects the lender, the seller as well. So you, both parties have protection because it's based on profit, but it also, it pays until a certain limit. My idea for this one would be potentially go do it, especially if you don't know anything about architectural lighting, potentially go do it as an entrepreneurship through apprenticeship model, like go and offer to work for minimum wage. And then after the first year, you would have some sort of agreement with them where you start to get a percentage ownership and they start

to go spend time on their boat. And then eventually they get their $1.25 million. It just takes them some time and you end up, you know, earning your way into the business. I like that as well. I like that too. Cool. All right, well, I will click stop unless anybody else has anything, any beard compliments you want to give or anything like that. No, Gurley, I just wanted to tell you that you are like hitting the DJ vibe right now with the blue lights and the big hands on your ears and the hat and the beard. It's like, this is amazing. It's perfect. Oh, I was on TikTok this morning. Look at that. At a stoplight. I was watching TikTok. And so the new thing on TikTok is all of like the,

Midwest and like Mid-South morning zoo, like radio shows have put themselves live on TikTok. And I'm looking at these dudes and I'm like, oh, this is why nobody listens to this crap. It's like, it's like nickelback and a bunch of 50-year-old dudes making like bad joke, you know, bad bathroom humor jokes. I'm like, oh, this is why this is dying. But they had this outfit on. It's exactly this. It looks great.

Thank you, Bill. You're pulling it off. Yeah. Thanks for knocking my confidence down again. You came in like 60 seconds late, but Michael started the episode by saying, I'm never shaving my beard because my wife and other women have complimented it. So we just evened them out. It's a ladies, man.

Roll with it. That's all it matters, Michael. It's all it matters. All it matters. Yeah. All right. We'll catch everybody later. See ya.