Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Why We Love (and Hate) This $250K Porta-Potty Deal

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Could you handle owning a porta-potty business? We analyze a $250K San Antonio-based deal.Business Listing - https://www.bizbuysell.com/Business-Opportunity/Profitable-and-Established-Porta-Potty-and-...Septic-Cleaning-Business/2299096/🎙️ Sponsors:Acquisition Lab: Serious about buying a business? Join Acquisition Lab's cohort-based accelerator and expert community. Learn more at acquisitionlab.com.Viso Business Capital: Get tailored SBA loans for your business acquisition. Join a free SBA loan Q&A session at visocap.net.The hosts dig into a rural Texas porta-potty and septic tank business serving the San Antonio area. They evaluate its $250,000 asking price, operational challenges, and potential ROI, alongside the broader landscape of asset rental businesses. With humorous anecdotes and industry insights, they highlight the opportunities and pitfalls in running such a hands-on enterprise. Is this "crappy" business worth the price, or is it too rural and small to succeed?Key Highlights:- Deal Details: $250K for a porta-potty business with $172K in inventory and no disclosed cash flow.- Business Model: How portable toilet rentals and septic services generate recurring revenue.- Challenges: Labor shortages, customer retention, and cyclical risks in construction-dependent markets.- Growth Potential: The limits of a rural market and pairing with other site services like dumpster rentals.- Humor Break: Funny porta-potty stories and industry quirks.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 contact@acquanon.com

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 My first guess is they don't have tax returns. Question for me, if I buy this deal, should I expect that I have to be the person driving the poop truck? If I have horses, I'm used to poop anyway. Hello, another episode of Acquisition Anonymous. We don't have 100% here. Hey, Michael here. Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Internet's number one podcast about buying, selling, and investing in small businesses. Today, we had the whole crew here, all four of us.
Starting point is 00:00:30 And we dug into a deal that it's a listener request, people asking if we would do a Porta John business, Porta Potty business, and we found one. And it's here in San Antonio. So join in and listen in and see what we thought about it. Here we go. 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 Dybel, who's become a friend, the author of Buy, Then Build, How to Outsmart the Startup, game. So Acquisition Lab is an accelerator with a highly vetted cohort-based educational and
Starting point is 00:01:06 support community for people who are serious about buying a business. So a lot of our listeners like you, you turn 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 talking 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,
Starting point is 00:01:42 or you can actually email the program director Chelsea Wood directly. Her email is Chelsea at buy then build.com. Mills, how are you today? Oh, we're recording. I'm great. I'm great. How are you? I thought we were looking for a business. I did. I found one. I found one. I click record. Perfect.
Starting point is 00:02:02 I was getting on websites to look for businesses. And then you're like, Mills, how are you doing? Like, oh, gosh, we're on. Hey, Heather. Good morning. Michael just pulled, Michael just pulled a Michael and hit record without being known. Okay.
Starting point is 00:02:15 Yeah, this is, we got to start on time. Yeah, well, so listeners on social media have requested that we do a porta potty and or septic business. So those, it sounded like the opposite of a poopy idea, so I thought we'd do it. Of course it's in San Antonio. Oh, it's in San Antonio. Okay. There's so many shitty things about this business. That's one of them. So let's get the dad jokes out of the way and then we can talk about this deal.
Starting point is 00:02:47 So how's it be doing? Heather, are you surviving the blizzard and tsunamis there in California? I did survive the tsunami. I am trying right now to survive year-end closings. You know, that is the war that I am currently in. And it's almost over, but it's, you know, it gets a little rough at this point in the year, close to close to the end of the year where everyone's still trying to close and banks are moving. Their communication gets pretty poor at the end, you know.
Starting point is 00:03:17 You hear sporadically, you know, and everyone's kind of left in the dark most of the time. So it's rough emotionally. Do you guys want to hear my nightmare near? is Eve closing story. Heather was not involved in this, I should say. I didn't do it. This was before I knew Heather. Otherwise, I would have used Heather.
Starting point is 00:03:37 But so me and a couple people were buying an e-commerce business. This would have been in like 2021. And we were buying it from a seller. It was not a brokered process. It was someone we knew. And the seller really wanted to close by the end of the year. because she was worried the tax regime was going to change the following year. This was like right before the build back better thing, which ended up getting vetoed,
Starting point is 00:04:04 but it was going to increase the capital gains rate. So she was really hot on closing by the end of the year. We started to work on this deal in September. Like we were way ahead. But we had about 15 investors in it. There were kind of three main guys doing it and that we had a whole bunch of small checks. All of the small checks were bull. below 20% ownership. So nobody was going to have to personally guarantee. We had been super
Starting point is 00:04:31 upfront with our lender the whole time that there's that they're investors in this. Like we had even given them the cap table and they knew everybody. They actually made everybody verify funds. Like they had they had interacted with these people. Okay. Like they knew that there were 15 15 people. It is Christmas. It is the 23rd of December. I am at my in-laws house. in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania. Like this deal is supposed to be done. We get an email from the lender saying our compliance department has vetoed this deal. Our lawyer, bank counsel has decided, and this direct quote, this looks like a private equity deal.
Starting point is 00:05:16 This looks like a private equity deal, so it's not in compliance with the FBI or SBA. And we said, explain, because I don't agree with that. It's made up. And they basically said, oh, in long story short, bank lawyer had not looked at it until a week before closing. And had not looked at it and suddenly had all these problems with it. We had to call, we had Christmas. We had to call seller on like the 26. Tell her what's going on.
Starting point is 00:05:45 The other thing that's happening in parallel is the guy who's going to be the CEO lives in Las Vegas, the businesses in North Carolina. He has already left. he is driving cross-country to arrive on New Year's for closing and meet all the employees the following day. And so he's in Texas and he's like, should I keep driving? And we're like, okay, like I think we're getting encouraging noises from bank counsel. Like, you can drive for one more day. And so he's, oh, hold on. Hold on.
Starting point is 00:06:17 I have a joke. The answer is if you're driving through Texas and you call someone, ask, should I keep driving? The answer is always yes. Yes. So anyway, we eventually are able to strong-arm bank counsel to agree to it. They have to send a notary to my in-law's house on New Year's Eve. It's two feet of snow. And I'm at my in-laws kitchen table and they're looking at me like, what is wrong with you?
Starting point is 00:06:40 Like, I've spent the whole Christmas week like in my father-in-law's office trying to close this deal, like yelling at lawyers, freaking out. We finally do get it closed and it's notarized on my in-law's kitchen table. on New Year's Eve, and we did get it closed. The guy arrived in North Carolina on the closing day, and we got it done. But I will never use that bank again. Their counsel did not look at it until before closing. Can I tell you a secret? All the banks share several different firms for SBA closing counsel.
Starting point is 00:07:13 There's really only so many firms that do it. So they're all kind of rotating between those same firms. They are all on fixed costs. They are not on hourly. And that is the reason why in SBA loans, you don't find out all these things until the last minute because they all don't look at the deal until the last minute. And there's another secret. A lot of them take on too many deals at your end, especially. And they can't get to all of them.
Starting point is 00:07:40 And instead of saying I can't get to it, they make up fake problems that they then later accept. Maybe that's what happened to me. It happens all the time. It happens all the time. It was a fake problem. Because if you get through it, like you didn't really change anything and then they accept it later. That's a like, that's my hint that they made it up to buy time because they were too busy with too many deals. And I see it all the time.
Starting point is 00:08:05 His mind is blowed right now. Yeah. Mills, you remember that? Was I talking to you about that deal as it's happening? I remember it too because then it came back around. We looked at a deal probably in the first 100 or 200 episodes that was like a mobile notary service. And you were like, I've used one of these in rural Pennsylvania. They exist.
Starting point is 00:08:25 You're still having trauma. It's PTSD for Bill. Deals ruined Christmas. The lawyer's ruin Christmas. Remember that. You can. Yes. You can.
Starting point is 00:08:35 If we try and buy this profitable and established port-a-potty and septic cleaning business starting December 6, is there any chance that we could close by end of year? No. No, no, and no. What's the deadline that you typically tell people? Oh, go ahead. Oh, I tell people they should plan for 90 days from signed LOI and that it's very easy for a deal to go 120
Starting point is 00:09:02 and that they're not really in control. No one party is in control of the timing, and that's part of the problem. So if it's past September, don't get your hopes up. Pretty much right. That's right. It's always rough at your end. In light of the year in being kind of a poopy time of the year,
Starting point is 00:09:23 let me show you this deal. Here we go. By the way, Lister's asked for this, so we're doing it. So, all right. Man, we found one in San Antonio? This is amazing. I didn't know there were businesses in San Antonio. We just got electricity mills.
Starting point is 00:09:37 High quantity of bullshit. Us too. South Carolina will look forward to that in the future. Yes. Okay, so it's off BIS by Sell and is a profitable and established port-a-potty and septic cleaning business located in San Antonio, Texas. And then how do you guys pronounce these words here? Bexar County, right? Bexar?
Starting point is 00:09:59 I was, I already remember what I was told before, Bear. Yeah, it's Bear County. I got it. Wow. So it should be pronounced. A southerners, Bill. It comes from the Spanish Bayhar, but then all the gringoes have totally ruined it. And it's now just called Bear County.
Starting point is 00:10:17 So there you go. All right. That's, and that's my Ciottoio story for you today. All right. So the picture here on the listing is a line of generic yellow porta potty's behind a warehouse. So, yeah, that is what it is. So the asking price is $250,000 has N.A for cash flow. Gross revenue is $253,000. Inventory is $172,000. And they've been around since 2010. They do not have EBTA or furniture. or fixtures and equipment listed. So I assume here, Bill, inventory they were for-ing-ing- $172,000, $725 of porta-potties. I wonder if that's the depreciated value because I can't think of many things
Starting point is 00:11:01 that probably depreciate faster than a port-potty. How much do it cost? Do we know? How much does it cost to buy it like a new port-a-potty? No idea. I'm not buying a used one, that's for sure. I mean, it got to be like, yeah, I wonder if they're, I wonder who makes those.
Starting point is 00:11:19 That'd be really interesting to dig into that industry. There's probably only a few. Yeah, I've heard it's a shitty business. Okay. So business description, this is a huge growth opportunity. Pro Asset Advisors is proud to present this port-a-potty and septic cleaning service for sale. It has been in business for 10 years and is owned by a father and son and are a lifetime residents of Addisca County, Texas. So Atiscoza County is the county immediately south of San Antonio.
Starting point is 00:11:45 It's kind of a rural area. There's little towns like Potia. and Jordanton and Pleasanton down there. So pretty rural. They are family owned and operated small business that rent portable toilets, hand washing stations, holding tanks, and provide septic tank plumbing. The business is located, oh, here you go, 25 miles south of San Antonio. They provide service to Addiscosa, Wilson, and McMullen counties,
Starting point is 00:12:06 and occasionally other counties as well. These are super rural counties outside of San Antonio. On a weekly basis, they service anywhere from 100 to 150 portable toilets to their regular contracted customers. In addition, they also have special event toilets that they rent out for weddings, parties, FFA, 4-H, school, sporting, and many other events. They typically service 15 to 20 septic tanks per month. The company has always strived to provide excellent service to their customers to learn more about this business.
Starting point is 00:12:31 Go to pro-assadvisors.com to indicate the required NDA. Competition, the business is always in high demand. Inventory is included in asking price. They have very little competition. Expansion and growth are phenomenal for this business to its geographical location. their sellers are willing to operate and negotiated period of time for introductions to all customers, and they want to focus on other business interests. And it is listed by Brad Ellison from pro-asset advisors.
Starting point is 00:12:59 I wonder if he's here in San Antonio. I don't know. My first guess is, oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. My first guess is they don't have tax returns. You've seen this one before, Heather, huh? that's awesome that's why it's all in a well well thanks everybody for being here for this week's episode you can tell the mood i'm in swipe gone heather has run out of F's to give at this point in
Starting point is 00:13:36 the year and she's just like it's true it's true i'm sorry okay so porta potty's and septic tanks yeah go ahead bill I think, so the crux of this, and I wish we had a real expert on instead of us, jokers, but I'm 99% sure it's the same piece of equipment, the pumping truck that is used to go, you know, drain and then refill portidon's on site that you're using for a septic tank, you know, in somebody's backyard. That's the, that's the common kind of ass mark between the rest two. Portadjons cost like, they cost like $850 to get a new port of john. But the problem is having a port-a-john doesn't help you at all. We spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on port-a-johns.
Starting point is 00:14:23 Having a port-a-john in and of itself, the unit economics are amazing from a rental standpoint because the port-a-john does no good unless you can clean it out properly. And the equipment to clean these things out is very, very well. I don't know if you know off the top of your head. What do you pay per week? I got it pulled up right here. I was doing this as we were reading it. construction toilet rental.
Starting point is 00:14:49 I think this is, I don't know if this is per week or per month. We have two on this job. We're paying $23 per toilet for $46. Then there's also a fuel surcharge of 14%. And then you pay, we're paying $56 per toilet twice a month for the service. So the equipment rental is just we're putting it on your site, but then it has to get cleaned out every two weeks. Each one of them does. And so call it, what does that end up being about $125 a month? You said it's $23 a week for a toilet for two weeks. I think that's $50 a month for the toilet to sit there.
Starting point is 00:15:32 Yep. Just to sit there. And they cost about $800. So you got all your capital back in under 18 months on a Port-a-John, which is not too bad as a rate of return. Although they get used hard, I would imagine. I don't know what the life's life spot. I know a life's fan of a poor John is. Hi, Heather here. When I'm not breaking down deals with these guys, I'm helping people get the right SBA loans for their business acquisitions. Because when you're buying a business,
Starting point is 00:15:58 the best financing isn't one size fits all. There's the best rate, fastest to close, the specific loan structure that you need, or a little of all of those things. That's why my company, Vizzo Business Capital, works with over 30 different lenders to find you the best funding in less time and with less friction so you can focus on the deal.
Starting point is 00:16:15 Sign up for a free live Q&A session on SBA loans at VisoCAP.net, then click Zoom sign up in the top right corner. That's V-I-S-O-C-A-P.net and click Zoom sign up. There is one of my like pet projects that I really, really want to do from a social media standpoint is memes from Port-Ajohns because the Port-A-Jon humor is amazing. It is so funny on these job sites. the drawings and the jokes that get written on them. My favorite one, and this will be my only tangent on this,
Starting point is 00:16:54 is that there's a plastic lock that just toggles up and down. It's very low, like low mechanics. But I was in a port of John once, and the lock, basically when it's locked, it says pooping alone. And then when it's unlocked, it says pooping with friends. But the things that you can find in Porta John do, They're incredible.
Starting point is 00:17:16 So it rents for 50 bucks a month. And then you said Mills, it's like 60 bucks every time it gets service. Service is, yeah. So call it like another hundred bucks probably. And then there's a fuel surcharge of 14% of the bill, which ends up being like $65. Just because they're servicing a couple of Johns per visit. So like if you've got, you happen to have two on this job site, but bigger job sites have more. So like the truck comes out once.
Starting point is 00:17:44 So there's basically like a route component. this, right? Where it's picking up a couple of Johns on your side. It's going another side until the truck is full and then they empty it. Yep. Yep, exactly. And the interesting thing about this business that I really like from a business development, like they mention it even in their transition is we'll stick around long enough to introduce you to the customers. But these customer relationships, there's no contractual revenue. There's no like, you know, but it's very reoccurring because I'll tell you, like at Aquasiel, the guy who calls these in, if you get on his bad list because you didn't call out a tool, you didn't come get that toilet when we were done with it quickly enough, or you didn't get one out there when we were starting the job or you weren't servicing it regularly enough and it started to like overflow, he'll never call you again. But if you're on that guy's good list, he's not shopping around for price. He's just like, I'm calling my guy at XYZ. I need two out there. It's probably going to be about a month. And then he never thinks about it again.
Starting point is 00:18:44 Like so many things, it's service. I pulled up, right? Like, it's the Port-a-Jont. Like, you don't want to think about it. As soon as I have to think about it, I'm mad. I'm willing to pay the don't-think-about-it-price for Porter-Johnson. Right. I pulled up to the thesis that this is like a dad and a son and a truck business.
Starting point is 00:19:08 I pulled up, like, some of the photos of what the trucks actually look like. I have never slowed down to actually study them. It seems like there's three types of trucks. You can get a truck that is. is like a combo of the tank where you suck out the effluent and put it in the tank for the kind of emptying of the port of johns and then it also has the ability to basically move the port ofjones with a lift on the back so you can put four or six portojones on the back of the pickup truck and then then there are trucks that are just solely the pump trucks that are just doing
Starting point is 00:19:44 the emptying of the poop and then they're the ones that just solely do the delay and pick up of the items of the porta potties. The nice thing about them is like when they're empty, these things are light. They're incredibly like one person can push them around and move them. So it's not a, it's not like you don't have to have a specialized piece of equipment to load and unload them.
Starting point is 00:20:06 These look like they might have a lift gate on them, these trucks. Some do, this one does here. This all on one from Portal Logic, which has a patented combo. truck, which is this kind of, you see the picture here that's either a pump truck. It's both pump truck and the delivery truck. And one important distinction that they call out, you don't have to have a CDL to drive these.
Starting point is 00:20:32 So it makes from a staffing standpoint, it's a little bit easier to find somebody who can operate this. The. And I think so I did the map. I'm scared about with this deal. I mean, obviously this is a small business for a reason, as our friend Brent Broussor says. But like the labor pool in Adiscoza, Wilson and McMullen counties, like, I think the biggest town is 10,000 people in those counties. Like, they are small. So trying to hire somebody who wants to do this job in today's labor market, like, not going to be easy.
Starting point is 00:21:06 They say they service 100 to 150 toilets. And I did the math on the 172,000 of inventory. If that's $900 a unit, let's just if that was the cost, that would be $19. 491 porta potties. So it sounds like they have about 200, I'm going to guess. So you're basically, to me, you're buying kind of a customer list, a territory, if you will, a truck and 200 porta potties of varying ages that you may have to replace. I don't know what the replacement cycle is on port of potties.
Starting point is 00:21:41 As we said, it probably depreciates pretty quickly and you don't have them to use maybe too long. And I think this is probably one, maybe two trucks max, if I had to guess. I don't think that it's much bigger than that. To do 100 to 150 toilets a week, you know, I like this. I mean, if you live in this area, there's never going to be a construction site without port of johns. I can't imagine in 20 or 30 years still. Like every job site is going to have. And what's interesting is like when we go to a job site, we have our own port-a-jones.
Starting point is 00:22:14 but there's also a general contractor who has their own port of johns and there's other subcontractors who have their own wait because you guys are too good to poop in the gc's porter johns and he's too good to poop in the architect's porter johns no it's more like if there's if there's you know 50 to 60 people on a job site there's not enough to go around and a lot of times depending on the job we might put it on wait wait what they make they make these cages that go around them that you can lift them with with like a forklift or a telehandler or a boom crane that we have and we'll set them up on the roof. I have learned something new. Man, did you guys ever watch Scrubs, the TV show?
Starting point is 00:23:01 This reminds me of scrubs where they have the toilet on the roof of the hospital and they go up there to poop and it overlooks the whole city and they like relax pooping on the roof. They love it up there. Oh, my gosh. So question for me. If I buy this deal, should I expect that I have to be the person driving the poop truck? I think the current owners are operating. Yeah, because it says owned by father, son, which means, yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:30 That have been lifetime residents of this area. You could drive the poop truck. This would be easy. This is buyer business fit. And you poop, I assume. Right? This is perfect. Once every couple weeks.
Starting point is 00:23:45 Do you have to, I mean, do you have to operate? this business, that's a fundamental question, right? Or there's probably not a $250,000 of revenue, there may not be enough marginal cash flow to, you know, have somebody operating the business. It's an unoperating. We're making that assumption. I mean, down down in this end of the, this end of the county and stuff, right, like out here in these rural places, there's not a big labor pool. You're competing with the oil field. So Eco Ford is south of there, which is not as boomy as it once was, but like there's still a lot of oil field jobs down that way. And you're competing with people commuting into San Antonio for work.
Starting point is 00:24:26 But like my guess is you're going to have to pay, pay up for some. I mean, this is not a job that people are like, you know what I want to do, smell poop all day. You know, you're for a non-CDL driver, you're probably paying 70 to 80K a year at least in San Antonio to do this job to get a good person. So yeah. So I don't know if the math still works there. I think what this is illustrating is I actually really like this category. I mean, I like a porta potty business.
Starting point is 00:24:55 Like it's an asset rental business with a service component, which generally is better than just a pure asset rental business. Because the pure asset rental businesses is basically a financing business. And the big guys have cheaper financing than you. And it's so it's hard to compete on price. But something with service, it kind of makes it more of a real business rather than just a financing business. So I like this. But the problem is it's too small, right? So you have to drive the poop truck.
Starting point is 00:25:22 If this has $2 million in EBITDA, I love it. Right. The other thing that's interesting about these is they typically get paired with my other favorite white whale business, the dumpster rental business, right? And other site services, right? Because you're already going to the job site frequently to empty a thing, right? be it construction debris or poop. And you can service all your same stuff in the same visit. Assume you have the right kind of trucks.
Starting point is 00:25:54 Well, it's different pieces of equipment for roll-offs. But it's the same sales process. So it's the same customer. And you can kind of make, for us, we make one phone call and we get a 30-yard roll-off dumpster and two port-a-johns. And then we make one call to get them off the job site. But the roll-off truck is different. Good point.
Starting point is 00:26:14 So, I mean, and there are times where our provider, some of our providers will say, I'm willing to take you a container out to this remote job site, but I'm not willing to take Porta Jones because the math doesn't work for me to service. Interesting. And you got to find somebody else closer. And Mills, to your point, like, you're going to keep calling that same guy until he screws up, right? If he raises the price on you 25%, you probably don't care because you're billing it through to the G.C.
Starting point is 00:26:41 Right. But you're going to keep calling that guy until he doesn't show up with the, with the job. on. So I think that's basically what you're buying here. You're buying into the reputation of not screwing up. It is also your biggest risk because when is this business most likely to screw up when new guy who's never done it before in the first three months of his ownership, right? So I would be really focused on transition and execution in the first year of buying a business like this because you can destroy functionally all your enterprise value by screwing up. If you have one bad week, like your script.
Starting point is 00:27:19 And there's probably, you know, the thing we haven't talked about in this area, probably some significant customer concentration. I mean, I don't think there's, you know, a hundred or 200 different customers, maybe total. But I think if you, if you stacked it, you know, and looked at them proportionally, there's probably some, some power customers in there. And to your point, you answer the phone slightly differently, you know, 30 days in, or they expect you to invoice a certain way and you didn't get that memo, you know, in the transition process, all of a sudden you make somebody mad and there goes, you know, 15% of your business.
Starting point is 00:27:55 Yeah. I think the other red flag here is this industry has been rolled up and has big giants in it already. And there's a reason why they're not like either wanting to buy this or targeting this corner of the market. I think this is just for this rural kind of nowhereville end of Texas that I live near. It's just a tough business to run. And I think there's a reason. There's a reason why it hasn't been rolled up already. This is probably all the demand there is for Port-a-Potties in this area, and it's not worth owning if you're a strategic.
Starting point is 00:28:25 Right. That's my guess. So they leave it alone. But, man, like, if you found something somehow, this business with one or two million of EBITDA, I would buy, I would fall all over myself to buy it because you know you could sell it in six months to one of the roll-up guys. Right? You just happened to have beat them to it. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Or if the area, if the area you're in suddenly has a development boom, and they're going to need a lot more porta-potties to support that great, then you've got a growth trajectory. But I agree. I think this is probably serving all the need that there is in that area at the moment. When I think a sign bill, we're like on episode 360, how many porta-party rental businesses have we run across and done on the podcast? This is the first one. Like, there's a sign.
Starting point is 00:29:12 There's a sign that they're good businesses when they're inside. The thing on this, to the side of them being not great businesses, they can be very cyclical because they are very tied to construction. Right. So like construction is a cyclical business. So like now interest rates have been low like great construction. If you buy this thing and we go into a construction recession, even if you don't go into an economic recession, but you're going to construction slowdown, you're going to hurt. And you've probably bought it with debt, which is scary.
Starting point is 00:29:41 So like this is, remember, this is. buying a cyclical business with debt. It is. And I've seen one before that was tied to oil production. So the port-a-potties really served, you know, another part of Texas. And that is also cyclical, very cyclical. And so, you know, yeah, there's a lot of tie to cyclicality in port-a-pottie. Which would advocate for using less debt.
Starting point is 00:30:06 Like this can be a great business. Just got to use less debt. You can definitely use, Heather, I'd be curious. You can use some debt here because there are hard assets, right? or they looked at as consumable and they don't really count. Yeah, these are not something a bank wants to liquidate. I mean, from a lot of perspectives, of course, but. Hey, oh.
Starting point is 00:30:29 There is a lot of liquidating going on in the business. Yes. I'm going to tell that. I'm going to say that to my way. I'm going to be like, I'll be right back. I need to go liquidates. There you go. There you go.
Starting point is 00:30:44 All right. Let's put a, let's put a bow on this one. Let's go around the horn. So Mills, thumbs up, thumbs down. Oh, two thumbs up. Two thumbs up. So you're putting an offer it on this? Two thumbs up is I'm flying down to San Antonio.
Starting point is 00:30:59 Okay. So one and a half. Yeah, that would be nice one of these days. If this was, if this was as close to Columbia, South Carolina as this is to San Antonio for you, like I would totally look at it. It's a not really a tuck in for us, but it would. We look at like the income statement and say we're spending X amount of dollars on this. Would it be worth insourcing it? I want to give it lots of thumbs up.
Starting point is 00:31:24 The problem is the size and the rawness of it. I love the business model. Love it. This one's too small and too rural. And which means the growth is capped. It's too rural. Yeah. Yep.
Starting point is 00:31:37 Heather. If I can go have a horse farm and this is just my lifestyle, this is just the way I pay for it, yes, I'm thumbs up. And no debt. Just going to pay all cash and live on my horse farm. I picture Heather hobnaving. If I have horses, I'm used to poop anyway. I hope the editors.
Starting point is 00:31:56 Heather's hobnaving with all the horse people. And it's like, what do you do? I own an oil company. Oh, what do you do? You know, I drive poop trucks to pay for this. Love it. Smart. Super good.
Starting point is 00:32:09 I like it. I'm with Bill. Wish it was bigger. Cool. All right, everybody. If you would, sign up for our newsletter. We went through, and I was with all the production folks for this podcast, and they were like, we wish more people on the newsletter. We have about 4,000 people on there, but we would love to have 40.
Starting point is 00:32:27 And we send you three deals every week that we run across and give you a little write-up on them. So I think it's a pretty good newsletter. I read it, though I'm biased. So sign up for the newsletter at at QAnon.com. And we'll see you next week.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.