Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Mills eyes on a $12M Steel Fabrication Business? - Acquisition Anonymous 296

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

In this episode, we found a South Carolina-based steel fabrication company business for sale. Making $12.5 million in revenue and a cash flow of $1.6 million. We then talked about company's potential for expansion, its reliance on cyclical construction projects, and the crucial role of relationships with general contractors and financing challenges, particularly through SBA loans, providing valuable insights into business acquisitions in the steel fabrication sector.Check out the listing here: https://www.bizbuysell.com/Business-Opportunity/Structural-and-Ornamental-Steel-Fabrication/2183028/?utm_source=acquanon.com&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ep-296Thanks 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 ;)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 02:57 How the Steel Fabrication Business works10:13 How to deal with the market?Revenue and Margin Potential in the Industry16:04 Financing for this industry22:39 Alternative Financing Options26:04 Who should buy this deal?28:48 Valuation and Interest in the BusinessSubscribe 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]

We have a good idea of who should buy this. I mean, obviously somebody with a beard in Columbia, South Carolina. This is heavy, heavy lift type work. And it's also, it's a difficult business to staff. This is not the kind of business you want to carry debt because the debt, you know, if it's an SBA loan, it's a 10-year loan and you've got to make a payment every month that's the same. If you crush it, your loan payment scales up and seller knows that he's got, you know, a $5 million target and he's going to get his $5 million bucks. It's just a question kind of how long it'll take. Welcome to you to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. I'm Mill Snell, one of the co-host. We have everybody all the hosts on the podcast today, and we talk about a deal that is near and dear to

my heart because it's in Columbia, South Carolina, where I live. I haven't signed the NDA on it yet, but I did talk to the broker who I've worked with in the past, and this company's pretty interesting. It's a structural and ornamental steel fabricator installer in Columbia, South Carolina, 12 and a half million in revenue, 1.6 million in EBITDA. We talk about the SBA components of doing a deal like this and whether or not it even, you know, is viable. Heather takes us to school on the SBA and some of the inner workings and the way that it works up market. It's a really fun episode. I think you'd learn a lot if you've looked at anything construction related or anything that's project-based. I'm a big proponent of those, and that's kind of a minority opinion. So hope you enjoy the episode and give us a follow.

Hey, everyone, this is Bill. I'm just taking a quick break from this week's episode to tell you about a longtime sponsor, a major fan of the podcast, Acquisition Lab. So a lot of our listeners that you guys tune in every week for our deal reviews, you want to get in on buying a business, but you're not really sure where to start. The cool thing about Acquisition Lab is they were created to solve that problem. So they exist. to help people buy a business and also to navigate all the complexities of the process. They provide a trusted framework, tools, resources. They kind of support you all the way from search while you're looking to buy a business,

all the way to close. So if you're serious about buying a business, you want to learn more about the process and you want someone to shirper you through buying a business, check out AcquisitionLab.com. Or you can email the labs director, Chelsea Wood, directly. It's just Chelsea at buy, then build.com. So how's everybody doing? I'm doing great because we have a whole crew. We got all four.

It's early here in California. I know. 30. It's early. And I have my espresso to help me. So Heather would get more interesting to the back half of the episode. Just hang in there. Okay.

Yeah. I'll wake up. Heather, you're always like when we recorded with Molson art. It was like an afternoon recording and he was in like a bedroom robe. So I'm impressed that you always come ready. Okay. Okay. I didn't understand those rules. So now that I know, maybe I'll change things. Now we do the podcast on video and we did not always.

I guess pants are still optional, but rogues were okay for shipping up to. All right. What do we got today? This is like a big iron construction one for Mills. Yeah. Mills got very excited. It's South Carolina. So it definitely. All right. Tell us about it. Let's get into it. Do I need to read it?

I don't have it up. So whoever's got it on the screen, I can bring it up here. I'll read it. All right. I'll fire it up. In case you didn't think the podcast was live, it is absolutely live. Okay. So here we go.

This is a structural and ornamental steel fabrication company in South Carolina. The asking price, the ever popular N.A. The cash flow is $1.6 million. per year on $12.5 million of revenue, and it's been around since 1979. So it's an age business. A strategic structural and ornamental steel fabrication company is for sale. It is a full-service steel fabrication business serving South Carolina, period, only apparently. They specialize in everything from ornamental steel to structural steel fabrication.

The company has grown to a gross revenue of $10 million plus in 2022, growing in 2020, growing at a compound growth rate of over 30% the last four years. The purchase comes with a full complement of vehicles, equipment, and an experienced staff. I always love it when people quote, four-year caterers because that means probably that a great year of growth three years ago. It's been flat since then. We'll look at the end of that. The real estate is leased a 23,000 square foot facility.

They get 18 employees. The Crubbley is currently housed. This is a 29,000 square foot. Owner-occupied complex in the central Midlands area of South Carolina. The complex consists of multiple buildings, each which serve a different job function, structure of steel, stainless steel, office, robot, whatever that means, allowing for more efficient use of space. The company has two major competitors in their area, and the company has the ability to double their output in the Pregnac facility. The owner will train for four weeks at zero.

dollar cost. He is selling because he is retired. And this business is represented by Jesse Stone from Murphy Business and Financial Corporations. Jesse looks very nice, not touching his face or wearing a hat and wearing a jacket. Looks like a very nice person. All right. What do we think? So maybe Mills, what do these guys do in, like in dumb person terms? I'm super intrigued by this Because you can't tell in much detail. But I've worked with Jesse in the pack. We did a deal maybe two years ago on the podcast. It was a roll-off container business.

And Jesse was the broker on that. So I text them. It's actually under LOI, which is a little bit disappointing, intrigued by this business. I think structural and this is heavy gauge steel. This is not like replacing the siding on your house. or something like that.

But new building is getting built, and they're going to put concrete block up and then set steel trusses and metal deck. That's what they do. But those businesses can be kind of feast or famine a lot of times. They only make money when new stuff is coming out of the ground. New buildings are being built. And so they probably take on like this kind of quote ornamental work also, which might be, you know, hey, I need a new staircase on the outside of my building.

or a new handrail, things like that. Maybe custom gates and fences and stuff like that. But my guess is this is probably 80 plus percent commercial nuke. So these guys are a subcontractor, right? So they probably do all of their GCs. They might do some. We act like we've hired folks like this before. When you need, you know, for example, one of the things we procured like this was people

kept run to at a building and they needed some like heavy gauge steel bolted to the loading dock to keep people from hitting their concrete wall and would just hit the metal instead. Yeah, I think, again, 80% of it is they're a sub to a GC on new. So when you have a business model like that where you, it's like a B to B to C or B to B, to be, I guess, because you've got to go through the GC. How important are the relationships with the GCs? I mean, are you like, do you have a sales function in this business that is essentially cozying up to GCs nonstop? Is it like one or two GCs that send you your whole business or let you bid on all, you know, all your business, all your bids through come through those couple guys? And if you go sideways with them, you're cut out of market entirely. How do you think about that?

It is definitely that way. I would say the majority of, of it hinges on performance, like relationships, and then, you know, much more about performance. These businesses definitely can change hands, but if they change in bail to perform, like, they don't. So the, there's a small group of people who can actually do this work. And I would say this business is probably on a smaller medium size of companies you are capable of. there's one of their competitors, and this is in my backyard. I don't know exactly which many it is. I haven't signed the NDA yet, but there's one that is massive.

I mean, absolutely massive. And they have very, very sophisticated equipment. It's probably five to ten times this size in terms of revenue. We've done something like 800 foot long pre-engineered metal buildings where they rolled it huge angle iron and they use, you know, custom C and C&C. routers to pre-cut the metal and all kinds of stuff. I mean, this is, this is heavy, heavy lift type work. And it's also, it's a difficult business to staff because you've got welders who are not just standing around. They're, you know, 40 feet up in the air performing this work.

So do we think, speaking of FF and E, do we think that's all coming with it? I mean, Mills, is this the type of thing where there's legitimate startup cost? You've got to buy a whole bunch of machinery to even compete with you. So is there a mode here, a KAPX mode? I think there probably is. I mean, they say it comes with a complement of vehicles, equipment, and experienced staff. My guess is most of that stuff is, you know, fully depreciated at this point, but the cost of it would be probably pretty significant. Now, it depends on how sophisticated are if they just have a bunch of welding rigs on. That's different than, you know, custom CNC, you know, routing and, and, and, you know, later, you know, can you very complicated very.

Okay. Is this, most of the unions will be union or not union? Not in South Carolina. Okay. So that's good. Yes. Is it, so you see this kind of boom and bust and, you know, everybody that joke around here is, you know, one day I'm in a downstairs business.

The big knock on the dumpster businesses, though, is they're super cyclical with construction. So you have very, very, very busy and you ton it. and then you can be slow for a couple of years. You said that's kind of the same. So I think a huge deal with points would be the local area, the market that they serve, the construction outlook in the area. I mean,

that is basically the bet. Like, almost nothing else matters, right? Yeah. I would say. In South Carolina. Yeah, that's Columbia. Where is the Midlands?

That's where I live. It's like the greater Columbia, Lexington, Irmo. Blythewood area. We're definitely a net population growth market, which helps. I would double click on not just, you know, what you're asking, Bill, like, is the area growing? But what specific project type of if they're doing, you know, multifamily, which they probably aren't because most 200 unit multifamily apartment complexes are wood frame.

They don't have structural steel like this. But if they, let's say like to their business is building. quick, quick oil change places. Well, those markets are getting saturated and you can only build so many more, you know, five-minute oil change or drive-through, you know, coffee places and stuff like that. It's getting, it's getting more and more crowded here. So it's kind of late in the game. Now, if they're doing a lot of, you know, K-12 school, new construction, which is what a lot of our business is, that's kind of evergreen in some ways. And it doesn't really matter what's happening in the broader economy because we have more people moving here and you need more school space.

Okay. So you've got to understand the types of projects they're doing but in the local market. So if they've built a ton of quick loop oil in a city, you just can't keep doing that forever. And there's a risk there that you're basically jumping to a new sub industry without a resume. Like, yeah, you can bid on off it. But if you've never done any office and the two local competitors have done a ton of office the whole time, that's risky. But if you're doing office or you're doing, you know, like you said, probably not multifamily, but if you're doing something that has to keep growing with population kind of either way, you feel better at it. Yeah, yeah.

And bigger picture on something like this, you know, it's easy for people to say, oh, I don't really like this. I'm referring revenue or it doesn't really withstand macro cycles very well. I think the counterpoint to that is you get paid for, you know, doing more project-based work versus working. I put as a possible on with occurring credit card payment, right? Because I want as little constant drag as possible. These projects are super expensive. And they may happen, you know, once every 20 years for this thing working on. But you get paid.

And in essence, you get, you know, a decade worth of margin out of one project if you're doing it right. Really? I mean, you can make millions of dollars on one project. On structural steel like this, I mean, we'll be on projects and they'll have huge crawler cranes out there. And, you know, they're multi-million dollar jobs, some of them. Now, this company being $12.5 million in revenue, their average job size is probably in the $250,000 to $500,000 range. but that's a huge, you know, average ticket. The problem is, but again, it's something I've grown comfortable with in our business.

They probably have six to 12 months worth of backlog just on a pure revenue basis, if I had to guess. But you have no idea where, you know, your revenue is coming from 18 months from now. There is a cliff potentially. But the counterpoint to that is this business has probably consistently made money for the past, you know, 25 years or whatever, 50 years almost. Yeah, it's been around since 1979, which I guess has been a good time to bet on the growth of South Carolina during that time. Yeah.

Now, the caveat to all that is this type of cyclical business that's project-based does not do well with a high level of... Yeah. Yeah, Heather's over there sweating. Yeah. Yeah. It's right out of my mouth that these are great businesses without debt. Like you said, you get a great margin because of what you're talking.

taking on. But this is not the kind of business you want to carry debt because the debt, you know, if it's an SBA loan, it's a 10-year loan and you've got to make a payment every month that's the same. And project work just doesn't work like that. I thought it was interesting. I had two questions that you just answered, which was one was average project size. So if it's, smaller like that, then this is like 25 to 30 projects a year, which is a lot. It seems like to me anyway. And then the revenue visibility. That's the other thing a lender would think about, well, it's project work. How far out can we see the revenue? And if it's a cliff in six to 12 months, yeah, there's another reason why debt doesn't want to go there.

Heather, I mean, this is perfect. Good. Heather, do you see a scenario like this where if the purchase price and the terms were right in the AM. If the EPA, like, it's 10 years or nothing. It's usually just 10 years or nothing. It really can't get too fancy with SBA loan structure like that, the amortization or the term. I'll give you the reason why is the loans really need to be homogenized to be valuable to the bank because they sell the guaranteed portion in a secondary market.

And if you make it too weird, it's not going to fit in these homogenized pools. And it loses its value to the bank. they're not interested in it. So you really kind of have a generic one size fits all 10 year. You know, maybe you'll get six months of interest only here and there, but that's about it. So that's, it's so interesting to me how the upstream markets for collateralization of these loans drive the downstream origination of the loans so much. I mean, you've seen residential mortgages. Like that's why there are only like three or four structures of residential mortgages that exist. And it's not because other structures are impossible.

It's not because you can't do it. year arm or a three-year arm or whatever, but there's no market to collateralize and sell them. And then you start to realize that the, what you think are lenders are actually originators. And it happens in SBA too. Like the SBA banks, lenders are originators. I mean, Heather, do you know like what fraction of SBA loans get sold, get packaged and sold versus what get held on the bank's balance sheet? I'm going to guess it's more than 50%.

The bigger loans, the bigger banks do carry them on their balance sheet. And when they look at the math, they think it's still more valuable long term to hold, especially if they have excess deposits. You know, it makes more sense. But the smaller banks, which, you know, make up the bulk of, I think, what everybody knows is, you know, the main SBA banks. They sell. You know, it absolutely makes the economic sense for them to sell. The one thing to caveat there, when your mortgage gets sold, you're suddenly making a payment to somebody else.

When your SBA loan gets sold, you don't even know it. it because the originator has to keep the unguaranteed portion and service that. So the secondary market is invisible to the actual borrower. They don't know when or if their loan was sold. So to expand on that, you said the unguaranteed portion and the guaranteed portion. So to a bank, like to a borrower, you borrow $5 million like it's one loan and you sign a personal guarantee and you feel like you've guaranteed the whole part. But you're talking about the government guarantee, I think, on the back end. So you kind of break down from the back. Bank's perspective what a loan looks like as far as the guaranteed. I'm guaranteed part.

Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, your personal guarantee is on the whole $5 million, regardless of this back-end arrangement. So the arrangement that makes the banks excited about doing SBA loans, which is good for all of us, is that the government is guaranteeing 75% of the loan to the bank. So the bank has your personal guarantee. And they have the SBA standing in saying, hey, look, if this goes bad, we're covering 75% of the losses. of whatever might get lost. As long as you follow our rules, which is why banks are so focused on compliance, sometimes they're overly focused on compliance and not really on like the risk. And that's the reason. 75% of their risk is based on following the rules.

So if a loan defaults and they're, you know, the bank liquidates any collateral that it has, then there's loss that SBA is picking up 75% of that loss. And because they guarantee that 75% of, percent, that's the part that can be sold in the secondary market because it's got such low credit risk to investors. An investor can buy that and know there's no risk of loss of principle. There's only prepayment risk really to an investor when they buy those loans.

Interesting. So the bank eats the first 25% of the loss. And if there is excess loss, the government covers it. It's not first in last out. It's not first end. It's Perry Pesu or Pro Rata. So let's just say a million dollars is lost. The bank loses $250 and the SBA covers $750. But once they sell it, then it kind of becomes the bank holds the entire risky portion, right? Because they've still a- Nope. That's all. Okay.

So there's still risk of you buy a government guaranteed slice of an SBA loan. You can still lose. The investor can still lose 25% also. Nope. They can't. No, they are covered. When they buy that 75% piece, whatever happens, they're not going to ever lose principle.

So it trades just like government bonds, but obviously the interest rate on a loan is much higher than where the bonds are trading. And that's why banks make money on it because the investor pays a premium to kind of buy down the rate a little bit. The investor will still end up with a rate that is better than a comparable government security

and their risk, their only risk, is prepayment. And prepayment to an investor in that case would be either default or the borrower literally prepaying. It doesn't matter to the investor. Either one is kind of a potential loss of the premium they pay. So they're guessing how long, what the duration of this loan will be or these loan pools will be. And there are, you know, all kinds of analysis that's provided to investors that follows the constant prepayment rates, the CPR of the pool.

So, you know, when interest rates are fluctuating, prepayments speed up or slow down. And that affects the premiums ultimately that the investors pay. It gets a little complicated. A prepayment is either default, but also a refy or a sale. If somebody sells a bivirth, right? It all gets, it's all a prepayment. So, you know, that's the nice thing about spreading, you know, having a pool of loans. I bet it's relatively constant.

You know, as you said, the CPR, you can assume X per sec get prepaid every year and you can model that in to the price you'll pay for the loan. That's right. That's exactly how it's done. Yeah. And that's, again, all of the. that goes on in the background and it's what makes these great for banks. The other thing that makes it great for banks is the liquidity. If you, you know, the, the good old Silicon Valley bank crisis that we just had changed the game for deposit stability for all banks, especially small.

The smaller, the worse, it is. So their deposit inflows and outflows used to be much more stable than they are now. Now there's a flight to quality to big banks if you have a lot of excess deposits. So for a small bank to be able to make a million dollar loan, but take $750 off their balance sheet, they don't have to hold deposits against that now. That's another really big benefit to a bank. They don't have to have as much in deposits to cover those loans. So there's the ability to sell for premium and there's the ability to sell for the bank's own liquidity purposes that make it really, really attractive. But in order to do all of that, you need all the loans to be homogenous, 10-year term, you know, kind of standard, so you get packaged up so

the investors get the benefit of spreading risk across loans. So then bringing it back to this business, that's why SBA gets really tough for project-based businesses like this, because the standard structure that's been agreed upon is a 10-year amortization with equal monthly payments. And, you know, it's just a, it's a loan structure that's better for a stable business rather than a simple business. Heather, I have a question on that. Go ahead. Would this be SBA financable if you put 50% down or more?

I mean, is there a scenario where the SBA or would say, okay, yeah, I can push this through. I'm comfortable enough given the debt to equity? Low leverage could be the solution. Yes. I mean, you know, what a bank would do is go back and look at a 10-year-old. historic cycle and say, okay, what was, how cyclical does this get? And at its low point, you know, do we feel comfortable at this very low leverage? That could solve the problem. The other thing that banks will look to, of course, is the personal balance sheet of the personal

guarantor. And if they seem to have a little excess cash or assets that, you know, could fill the gap, that would be another way to get over it. That both of those could help. By the way, it was like a school. Seventy-five percent of government. and you've got 25% at least in buyer assets, you know, hard collateral. You're pretty safe from a life. You're getting there. Yeah. Yeah.

So bring it back to this deal. If SBA is not there, you know, we see a lot of these deals where they, you know, this is a good business. You got 15% margins. You know, let's assume they're in the right. As Mills mentioned, you know, the right types of construction. It's in a growing market. But it's not SBA finance.

Well, like, this is the recipe for. seller debt. I mean, because it's going to be tough, I think, for a new buyer to come in with all equity. But the recipe here is a seller note, which can be flexible. You can scale payments up and down based on the cyclicality of the business. It basically looks like, and I'm simplifying, but the structure that I kind of love, and there's lots of iterations on this, which is, I'll pay you X percent of revenue until, you know, for a certain amount of time or until X dollars are paid. And that X dollars is basically the dollar note. So like if you want to sell this business for what was asking price here, oh, N-A, this was N-A. But it's got one and a half million of you would

say it sells for five million bucks. And I'm not sure it would. But if it did sell for five million bucks, you would say, you know, I'll pay you 10% of revenue for 10 years or until five million bucks is paid. You know, and that is very, very flexible buyer financing where you can't get upside down. If you have a slow quarter, your loan payment skills down automatically. if you crush it, your loan payment scales up. And seller knows that he's got a $5 million target and he's going to get his $5 million bucks. It's just a question of kind of how long it'll take.

Yeah. And I give Jesse credit. Jesse did not play the SBA prequalified game here. So he didn't throw that out. He kind of hinted, yeah, that maybe you need to do something else here. So do we have a good idea of who should buy this? What in summary, who do we think is the right buyer? I mean, obviously somebody with a beard in Columbia.

South Carolina. What are the other quality? Somebody beat me to the punch. So there's somebody else out there. Maybe they also have a beer. I mean, I was curious if it's a bigger, you know, if it's one of the other competitors in the field, that would probably be the first choice. And they're, you could Google and find them, you know, and Jesse probably has done that.

The other option would be, and I've seen a lot of GCs do this where they try and insource, you know, one of their, one of their subcontractors. A lot of home builders do this with cabinet shops. And then they realize why they don't want to own a cabinet shop. You know, I've seen GCs in-source structural steel. And you think roofers are, you know, a rowdy bunch. Structural steel erectors are up there on the list, too. Yeah.

You know, potential also good buyer. I mean, this is harder with no SBA. But, you know, the most senior in-house employee, right? Like these types of things, somebody who knows exactly what's going on as well. worked here for 10 years and wants to be his own boss, you know, oftentimes this is a great transition. You know, the owner knows him. The owner is willing to do a flexible seller note and you kind of buy the guy into it over time as an excellent buyer for this. Mills, do you think the local competitor is actually a good buyer? So like if there's three bids for every project in this market

and you buy it as, you know, bidder number one and this is bidder number three, now there's still two bidders. You know, you're already bidding on it on every project anyway. You were would kind of just like this person to go away to go out of business and or to, I guess what I'm saying is this is more of a defensive play, right? So yeah, your revenue doesn't get more than the last to somebody already putting on projects, right? Yes. Yeah, it's a huge dilemma. When I look at other roofers for sale, if they're too close by, it kind of defeats the purpose because I want one less better in the pool and I don't want to have to acquire them for them to go away. It depends on It depends on the skill level, though, and the bench of employees.

If you're having trouble growing because of skilled labor shortage, which every single one of these guys is and, you know, every trade is, if you could say pick up, you know, 20 employees who are really, really good in the field, that helps catapult your growth. And maybe you can assimilate the opportunities as well savings by folding them in. But there's no, you know, there's no contractual kind of long-term, you know, revenue that is, is worth transacting over. This is just project-based. So, yeah, that's a huge dorm. I think about it. All right. So what do we think?

Let's kind of wrap this up. What do we think it's worth and are we interested in it? It's got 1.6 million of cash flow. It's been around for almost 60 years, 12 and a million in sales. Mills, what's your bit? I don't know enough. I'm hesitant to say because I know Jesse's going to listen to this episode, and I told him, hey, if you're LOI falls through, please call me.

Okay, so I don't remember cute. I think you're in the right ballpark, you know, but I don't know enough. You could get under the hood of this thing and go, wow, this is worth, you know, two times or less. Or, you know, you could, you could see, hey, there is some value here. It would, it would be, I would probably be more than most because we have some really been official overlap. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think this is probably a two to three times deal, depending on the quality of it, and you're going to need some seller financing to get it done the

right way, I would think. Yeah, I think 3x max. Okay. So probably transactable. You just got to have the right buyer with, you know, a reasonable or low amount of debt or the most flexible, flexible type of debt in order to get this done. But, you know, there's a deal. I mean, obviously this deal here. It's under L-O-I. I think this is a good deal. This is potentially up there with the worm farm for a good, like, wouldn't be good radio, but this is actually a good business to own for the acquisitions anonymous fund one for us to pile in and buy this business.

And then we could like live tweet, mills going in there and dealing with it. Be fantastic. Just saying. Install mill. I'm game. If you notice whatever Girdley. proposes a deal. It's always, yeah, we'll just buy it and then we install, insert other host name as CEO. I visited with a private equity professional 25 year experience person yesterday.

And he was, he, she was very clear. I'm not an operator, but I know how to hire them. I was like, oh, that sounds really good. At the end of the day, that's what Penny folks. I mean, they got to raise money, they got to allocate money, recruit the right people. Yeah. And I mean, the other thing is they often make the hard decisions that other people won't. Like having dealt with it multiple times on both sides, like there's a level of ruthlessness required.

And some of them manage to do that ruthlessness, I think, in a way, that is kind and some of them do it in a way that is unkind. But I think they all think they all think it's kind. Anyway, but I mean, there's varying spectrums and I have, I have friends that have been P.E. CEOs. And it's like, oh, wow.

Like, there's some stuff that happens. It's very, very sharp elbows. All right. I know how we got there, but we're buying us the Milton CEO. Yeah. We'll be nice to you, Bill. You'll be a great CEO.

By the end of this podcast, I'm living in the Caribbean. on a boat making pizza. Heather's digging worms in California. Mills has put up structural steel and Gurley's here by himself, just rambling into the airways. Hey,

someone, Sue's got to make these YouTube videos. They're not to make themselves. Oh, by the way, by the way, just so you guys know, I've been basically

like screaming into an empty room on video for the past nine months. And so we're, actually getting coached by the clips guys to actually make videos that work. So like we're actually recording their sessions, coaching us in terms of how to actually make good like videos that actually like how meta. Yeah. It's like there's always content in there. But we've had some success. My last couple, we've, we've, yesterday was the first one we've had that's broken 11,000 views for my shorts. So yay me. I'm, I'm huge in Japan.

Huge, four-dry shorts. All right. Well, thanks for tuning in. That is just anonymous. We'd really love it if you guys would follow us on Twitter, ACQU and on on Twitter, or recommend this podcast to a friend. We are trying to get more people interested in buying businesses out there.

And if you are buying a business, you're one of those people, and you need an SBA loan. Call our friend Heather at Vizzo Capital, and she would be glad to help you out. She's just started her business less than a year ago and is looking for more SBA borrowers. that's you. Give her a call, as you can tell, listening to this podcast. She's literally the smartest person in the country about FBA lending. So you should call her. And with that,

we'll wrap it up. Thanks for joining us for this episode of acquisitions and honors.