Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Would You Buy a 30-Year-Old Book Bindery?

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

In this episode, the panel analyzes a profitable 30-year-old book bindery, debating whether its valuable equipment, repeat customers, and niche market outweigh the long-term risks facing the printing industry.Business Listing – https://www.bizbuysell.com/business-opportunity/profitable-book-bindery-fully-staffed-with-strong-repeat-business/2519816/Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.Looking to build a professional website in minutes? Try Wix: https://wix.pxf.io/c/6898629/3115214/25616?trafcat=templateHubSpot is the backbone for how businesses scale without chaos. Try them out here: https://go.try-hubspot.com/OeG9VrSubscribe for more episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@AcquisitionsAnonymousPodcast?sub_confirmation=1Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.acquanon.com/newsletter💰 Sponsored by:FRANZY - Thinking about buying a franchise instead of an independent business? FRANZY is a free platform built for acquisition-minded entrepreneurs who want to explore franchise ownership without broker bias. FRANZY matches you with franchise opportunities based on your capital, goals, and lifestyle—and includes free coaching from experienced franchise operators. If you're exploring ETA but want a structured, system-driven alternative, check out https://franzy.com/ Viso Business Capital — Get the right SBA loan tailored to your acquisition needs with Heather Endresen’s firm. Sign up for a free live Q&A on SBA loans at https://www.visocap.net and click “Zoom Sign Up” in the top-right corner.This episode explores a profitable Massachusetts book bindery generating approximately $1.05 million in annual revenue and $340,000 in seller's discretionary earnings, listed for roughly $1.1 million. One of the most intriguing aspects of the business is its nearly $1.9 million in replacement-value equipment, creating a unique acquisition opportunity that sparks a broader discussion around financing, depreciation, and deal structure.Key Highlights:- Massachusetts book bindery producing $1.05M revenue and $340K SDE, offered for approximately $1.1M.- Nearly $1.9M in replacement-value equipment creates unique financing and tax planning opportunities.- Discussion on how asset allocation impacts depreciation and buyer versus seller tax outcomes.- Debate over industry risks from print-on-demand services, digital publishing, and customer concentration.- Practical insights into SBA lending, equipment-heavy acquisitions, lease negotiations, and due diligence.Subscribe to  weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking hereDo 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]

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Acquisitions Anonymous. My name is Bill Dallisandro, and this is the Internet's number one podcast on buying, selling, and operating small businesses. We've got a cool deal today. This is a book bindery. They're asking a little over a million bucks for it. Book bindery in 2026, yes, is making 30% operating margins. One of the interesting things about this business is it is very asset-heavy.

They've got more assets than the purchase price. So we talk about some interesting financing and tax considerations when structuring a deal with heavy assets like that. So I hope without further ado, you enjoy this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. We'll say Acquisition Anonymous. Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory. One of the biggest risk in entrepreneurship through acquisition is buying a business with fragile systems.

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If you are exploring ETA and want to understand whether franchising fits your acquisition strategy, visit franzi.com. That's F-R-A-N-Z-Y.com. And thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode. All right. Acquisition Anonymous with a full slate featuring also Brad Wayland from Over a Quietlight. Thanks for being with us, Brad. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I always love Brad because you don't pull any punches. Brad has been in e-commerce and startups and all kinds of things for a long time and seen a lot of stuff. So I love it. I love having Brad. So glad you're here, man. I thought you were going to say he liked him because he has a better beard than Mills does. He's a better beer than Mills and better hair than me. So it's hard to beat.

If you're on YouTube, you don't need to join us on YouTube to see what we're talking about. I appreciate this. I was recently at a camp with my kids. and there was like a young cabin and they asked about the guy Brad and then someone that was their counselor said, how old do you think he is? And they said, maybe 60. Wow, you got great hair for 60. Very nice. That was very troubling. The beard has turned white. Yeah, my kids think I'm 80. So, yeah, well, there you do. Yeah.

Well, speaking of being old, I feel like this business is a blast from the past. Like, how's that for a segue? Oh, yeah. So this is a cool one. Who's reading this one? I could do it. All right, Gards, let's hear it. Because you found this one.

You, the Gurdly Claw found this one. In true gurdly fashion, we don't actually have to look for deals anymore. I have a bot that every night spends 20 minutes to find us a cool deal. And it found this one. And it is a profitable bookbindery, fully staff with strong repeat business located in Massachusetts. and the photo appears to be, I guess, Heather, this looks like book binding machines, like a bunch of paper

printers. Yeah, paper books. Yeah. And they're big machines. Big printers, like production line dial printers. Like we're going to print 10,000 copies of your book and bind it type things. Yeah, with little knobs and dials, and it's like old equipment. It's wild.

All right. So asking price is $1.1 million. Cash flow is $340,000. And gross revenue is $1.05 million. So they are making SDE, so seller's discretionary earnings, $341,000 on a million dollars in revenue. And it is an established book bindery with significant equipment assets and repeat customer base? So, Brad, what does a book bindery do? Do you know?

No, I don't, but I'm thinking that they put a binding on the outside of a book, but I don't know if they do the printing and the binding or just the binding. I'm actually not sure. Yeah, I think this is like you have a self-published book and you want a thousand copies of someone's got to do it. Like you can't do it at FedEx Kinko's, you know, and these guys do it. What I love, before you even scroll, shout out to future sponsor of the pod, Biz Buy Sell. we always give them crap for never doing any innovation, right? It's like the same website for 100 years.

I think I spy some Biz by Cell innovation. There is now an SBA loan eligible badge on the listing, which is probably the first code change pushed to Biz by Sell in 20 years. Thank goodness it doesn't say pre-qualified. It's just eligible. I'm just not even, I'm speechless. I'm just not even going to say. I can tell. Sorry to take the words right out of your mouth, though.

All right, let me see you reading about the company. This long-established bookbindery presents an excellent acquisition opportunity for a buyer seeking a profitable turnkey operation with meaningful, tangible assets, and decades of market presence. Operating continuously for more than 30 years, this business has built a strong reputation for quality, reliability, and customer service. The company serves a well-established base of commercial and corporate customers with a high-level repeat business, business that provides revenue stability and ongoing demand. The operation is fully equipped and includes furniture, fixtures, and equipment with an estimated replacement value if purchased new of more than $1.9 million. The facility is production ready and outfitted with industry standard bindery

equipment, allowing a new owner to step in with minimal disruption. Experience personnel and management are already in place, creating a smooth transition path for a buyer and supporting continued operational continuity after closing. Over 30 years of continuous operations, strong repeat business, and a lot of stuff we've talked about. They think it's well positioned for continued success under new ownership and a buyer could maintain the existing profitable operation or pursue growth opportunities. The business is located in approximately a 10,000 square foot facility. Doesn't say if it's leased or owned. The owners have not made any marketing or sales efforts in recent years.

Implementing marketing would be good. Every broker says that. It is SBA loan eligible, according to them. SBA financing with as little as 10% down may be available to a qualified buyer. And the owner is committed to a smooth transition. They are selling because they are retiring. And the real estate is leased and they pay $7,500 a month. So, yeah.

Did you, did you blow through the part that they have $1.9 million in equipment? Like if you were, it says to buy this equipment new, it will cost $1.9 million. And they want a million bucks, right? A million bucks for the business. Right. Right. Yeah, that's what it says. Well, props to them for not asking for, you know, 1.1 million for the business plus

1.9 for the equipment. Plus 400,000 in receivables. My, my buddy owns a pretty significantly sized C&C shop. and they have about 40 machines they're running. The average age of the machine is 40 years old. They've been running the same machines since basically the late 80s, which is pretty fascinating. So it makes me wonder, I'm sure this has gone through the bonus depreciation,

the full depreciation, and then they're like, well, maybe it will depreciate it again. So I'd be willing to bet these machines are sitting on their books at $0 value at those point. So, but tell me if I'm wrong here, but through the magic of accounting, you, buyer, get to depreciate them again. Do you not? Because you can allocate purchase price. So actually, actually this is fascinating.

So you could potentially allocate as much as seller will let you. And Brad, maybe you can help us up the negotiation here. But if you buy this business for $1.1 million, you could allocate all of it, if seller would let you, agree to, to the machinery. And then you could depreciate the full, functionally the full purchase price of the business. I mean, you can allocate a dollar to the goodwill or some nominal amount. And you could get a tax shelter from all of this. So your first million bucks of profits tax free.

But Brad, what's the rub? Sellers won't like it or they'll agree to it. And then they'll go to their lawyer and their accountant and they'll come back and be like, hey, I can't do that. We need to do a standard 80-20 or something like that. It doesn't always kill the deal, but I would say that it is a big risk if you're trying to like, use that kind of a little too favorable for the buyer as a way they'll probably end up saying. He called you a shark, Bill.

Well, you know. Brad, for the, for the listeners who are not accountants, can you kind of explain the push pull here and why buyer and seller want different things? Yeah, so in an asset sale is what we typically do at Gwaiolite and what a lot of business transactions are asset sales. There's reasons to not do asset sales, but most deals that we're. we do are asset sales. And that is mainly because the buyer doesn't want to assume the liabilities of the seller and because the buyer wants to depreciate the purchase. Now, a lot of those buyers don't realize that if they go resell the business in like three years, they're going to recapture that depreciation that they took. So they're going to get taxed ordinary income on all that

depreciation that they did if they go flip the business. But assuming that they don't flip the business. Having accelerated depreciation, like a section 179 or something like that, can be really beneficial because you go buy this business and in the first year, you might depreciate 50% of it. So you might pay zero tax on any of your earnings in that first year. So when you do the sale, you have to allocate the purchase price across the assets or the goodwill, and those are taxed differently. And so that's what we're kind of talking about there. So if you were to get it really favorable for the buyer, it would be where they could depreciate the whole thing, like we were just talking about. But a lot of times a seller would be told by their accountant, hey, that's not going to

be very friendly for me on my taxes. And so the bottom line, right, is like if I allocate it all to machinery, machinery has a short depreciation schedule. I can blow that all out pretty quickly in a couple of years. But the flip side of that is seller has zero basis in that machinery because it's probably fully depreciated. So he's going to get ordinary income. on all of that recapture, right? Versus seller has basis in his goodwill, right? Or the sale of his goodwill is taxed differently. So he'll pay cap gains if most of the purchase price is allocated goodwill,

but it will take me 20 years to depreciate the goodwill. Or 30, I forget what the latest guidance is, so much longer. So for me as a buyer, I want to depreciate all that really, really fast. The seller doesn't care. He wants to pay cap gains. he wants it all allocated to goodwill. That's the crux of it, right? Yep.

It is. Now, one thing that's interesting, not that it matters for this, too small, but when we do private equity deals, in every private equity deal I've done, they get the best of both worlds. They do a stock transaction

and an asset transaction all in one, and everybody gets what they want, and it's done by spending a lot of money on lawyers. Lawyers. Yeah. Brad, at what scope does that make? make sense. So, yeah, so we can't get private equity. I would like to work with private equity more because in the in the quiet light world, we have a problem of that there's not a lot of capital available besides the SBA. So when we get a deal that's above a million in an acquisition price and below, let's say, six or seven million, that's a big gap. If we don't have SBA, we have a hard time filling that gap with buyers. There's just not a lot of cash buyers that want to hang. out there. Private equity, they have mandates for what they're willing to take on. And so you can find

some that will stretch and some that we've enjoyed working with will do as little as $1 million for a platform investment. And then they'll do maybe something smaller than that for an add-on for a bolt-on acquisition. But a lot of them have moved upstream in the last couple of years. Some that I used to work with are now telling us, hey, we want to do $2 million or $3 million or $4 million, EBITDA. Well, we don't have lots and lots of listings that are at $4 million in EBITA. So private equity makes sense. Generally, I've been saying for a platform investment above $2 million, EBITA, for an add-on investment, it can be any size. If you find the right, why I say that is a private equity

firm, they make platform investment. So if it was book bindaries, maybe the book bindery is the platform investment. We're going to build a portfolio of things around this bindery. And then they're going to go add-on. So maybe they add-on commercial printers in some local town or whatever. I don't know what the add-ons would be. But those add-ons sometimes don't come with any minimums. They just want to build on more revenue and more profit so that when they go and sell it in three to five years, they're able to sell it for more. So they want to grow through acquisition as one channel. And so a lot of times where we can still find some value with private equity is the add-ons because they'll add on at just about any size.

So you sell something in aviation, any aviation listing you have they're interested in. And so they're coming in, you know, kind of asking for that. So, but for platform, which is where you're going to get your larger deals, you're, you know, for a quiet lie, like a $25 or $50 million deal, those are going to be platform investments. So for a business like this, heavy assets, now I've got to look at my lender here. Is as a huge amount of assets here, Heather going to affect the way I finance this deal, or is this is still kind of over home plate SBA 7A land? Because of the size, I think it's just a regular 7A loan where the equipment doesn't really help or hurt. You know, it's just too small to help.

If this was a larger company, this looks like equipment that you might be able to make the case for it being a longer than 10-year useful life. And if it was larger, the benefit there would be you could shift the equipment component of this deal into the 504 program because the SBA has now coupled the two. You get $5 million in each program for a combined total of 10. So like if it was bigger, that might make sense to shift some of the long-term equipment assets over into that and preserve more of your 7-A runway for future goodwill acquisitions or working capital. But it's too small for that to really make sense here. So I think this is just a kind of down the middle 7-A deal where the equipment is just kind of neither here nor there. It doesn't help or hurt.

Is the benefit of the 504 program purely freeing up more of your $5 million 7A limit, or are the terms more advantageous in 504? It's a little bit of both. So the 504 is a two loan structure where a bank does a conventional 50% loan to value first, and then the SBA has this direct program, which is the second. It's 40% of the deal. And that second is a subsidized fixed rate. So the rate, so the rate, rates are in the sixes. They're lower than bank rates. So you do get, you know, usually the blended average rate is lower than your typical. So you get that advantage. There is a prepay penalty on it. So that's, you know, there's things to weigh. But it's usually a little bit cheaper money, a little more hassle because it is a two loan system. But I think for most of our business buyer clients, the main driver to using it is keeping your 7A runway free for future acquisitions or more goodwill.

Interesting. Okay, and it has to be equipment with at least a 10-year useful life. It's two things. Ten-year useful life equipment or commercial real estate that's owner-occupied. So anytime you're buying the building,

you could use 504 for that portion or any time you're buying that 10-year useful life equipment. Those are the only two cases. Ah, real estate. A bank's favorite thing. Favorite thing. We love it.

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, 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. Sign up for a free live Q&A session on SBA loans at Vizoccap.net, then click Zoom sign up.

up in the top right corner. That's v-I-S-O-C-A-P dot net and click Zoom sign-up. Okay. So back to this business. Is this a good business? I mean, do you guys want to own this business? What I'm dying to know about this business is what have they done historically? Because Amazon was nothing in this business, you know, at a certain point. And then they started selling books. Well, we have an Amazon printing facility here in Columbia. Amazon publishing and you can kind of self-proclaim yourself an expert and write a book and hire out a third-party editor and print 100 copies if you want and you can be like, look, I'm an author, you know. And people do that a lot. And it is, obviously, as Amazon would be, it's incredibly economical for the author or the kind of wannabe author to publish that way. I imagine that a lot of the folks that they're binding from,

you know, probably are using Amazon as a, unless this is like, unless they sell to like K through 12 or they sell to like, you know, higher education who needs to bind a bunch of like research papers or something like that for, I just, I can't imagine that Amazon isn't eating into this.

They did say here in the listing that the company serves a well-established base of commercial and corporate customers, which makes me wonder if this is kind of a niche thing for corporations that are preparing, you know, a thousand books for a con-price and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Maybe not so Amazon publishing.

And, I mean, that would kind of make sense on the repeat side, too. Yeah, this is probably more batch, right? Like, I need a thousand books for this thing

versus I want to make my books available for sale. Like, this is probably not print-on-demand. Yeah. maybe it's like, you know, the church vacation Bible school or something like that or, you know, things like that. The issue I have with a business like this, I'm looking at one like this right now. And Heather, it's the one I had mentioned to you that I thought was a potential 504 capability. And the problem I have is that, Michael, like you said in your friends, was it Tool and I?

C&C, yeah. So I go into this business and the guys like, you know, hey, we're just planning on, you know, selling the assets. And there's a viable business there, but the equipment is so old. It works perfectly for him. And he knows, like, you know, where you got like kind of bump it the right way or like tap it with a hammer or like do a little dance to make it work right. My concern is like if I move that equipment like 100 yards to the building next door, it's probably not going to work the right way for me. And so I'm kind of getting a great deal, the replacement value, in my case is probably four or five times, similar to this, right? The replacement value of the assets is incredibly, you know, many multiples higher than like what you're actually going to pay for it. But can you move it? Do you like have the wizard, you know, that comes with this business who understands how to make this equipment work right and where the like kind of skeletons are, so to speak?

Well, one of my, my buddy, like the nightmares that you're talking about, like those 40-year-old machines, he was potentially going to have a couple million dollars of exposure of CAPEX he was going to have to do because the company that he had bought the machines from had been bought and was deciding to sunset the version of the software that he had integrated everything into. And he was like super mad about it. And I said, well, you know this software's 35 years old, right? He's like, yeah, I can't believe they're discontinuing it. It's just getting started. Well, and the SBA, if you're going to get that loan, is going to want you to have a 10-year lease. So, to your point, Mills, you know, the SBA wants you to stay here. When it's anytime it's a manufacturing, it's got equipment like you're talking about where it's really expensive and scary to move it, they're going to want you to have a 10-year lease. So they didn't mention how much is remaining. And a lot of times what happens when the SBA has that requirement, the landlord can take a little bit of advantage. of the buyer. So they're saying $7,500 a month is the current rent, but you may not get that as your new rent when you negotiate that 10-year lease. Yeah. So, I mean, for me, I want to know,

not just the history, but I got to figure out who the customers are and how I go get more of them. Because, like, that's the thing I can't tell. It says established customer base with strong repeat business. So, you know, maybe these are books that are just in print, you know, and They sell a certain number and then they order more and you're basically their supplier. I would think that is great. I would be a little bit scared if I had customer concentration, you know, because if that book becomes unpopular, you know, all of a sudden, your business is going to dry up. So I would really want to kind of underwrite the customers, not just the companies that were buying for me,

but like even the titles, like if there was any title concentration, you know, to figure if I had risk there. But where, like, where do you go get new customers? do you want to bind a blade? It's not the self-publishing print on demand. Like, I don't know how to do demand gen for this. I'd have a lot of questions about that. And it's got to be somewhat geographically constrained. Like, I'm not going to print, you know, three pallets of books and ship them cross-country. There's a printer closer who can do it with less freight. So you're going to be somewhat geographically constrained. But there's something to say. I mean, this business has been around 30 years continuously. So, like, the Lindy here is really nice. Like, whatever they're doing,

Amazon's been around for like 15 of those 30 years. So like there, I think there's some staying power. Yep. The Lindy is strong with this one, although I am curious. I'm curious about the trend. Yeah. Were they a $20 million business and now they're a million? Yeah.

I mean, and not, you know, if it's declining at 5% a year predictively, I mean, there is a price where that's a great investment. Yeah. And I mean, Heather, is there, like, let's say it's declining 5% a year every year, but I'm paying one X EBITDA. You know, like, can I ever get a loan on this or just no way? I think you can with a few lenders. There's still most of your lenders are just going to say declining trend declined. Forget it.

We won't do it. But if it's, you know, if the declining trend is kind of slow and steady and we can kind of look far back and see that it has been constant, the rate of decline. and you are paying such a low multiple that what you want to be able to do is do a projection and show as long as we stay on this current trajectory of decline, we can still pay our loan off in 10 years. If in year six or seven, all of a sudden they're in to fall, right? They're going to say no.

But that's basically what you'd have to do in that kind of scenario. And still a lot of banks would have some unease and wouldn't do that. But there are some banks that would be more aggressive and would be a little more practical about it. So, yeah. To Brad's point earlier, And Heather, I think you and I've talked about this on the podcast and offline. I think there's like a huge opportunity here for folks to do kind of awkwardly sized deals that are, you know, maybe not perfectly in the SBA sweet spot and with an established lender. Like as somebody who's running an operating business, I'm amazed at the kind of, even if it's not an add on in the sense that like I own a roofing business and I'm going to add on another roofing business. I just have an existing relationship with the lender. And I can go to them and say, hey, you see my activity.

You see what's happened with this business since I bought it. I want to buy a small electrical contractor or something. And it's amazing. They're going to keep those loans in house. They're not going to go SBA. You know, they're going to have, I think, much broader bandwidth because you're an existing relationship. To me, it's like one of the few places where I actually see value in the chain overall right now.

It's not the $2.5 million. dollar EBITDA businesses, like those are so highly picked over, like for the reasons that you said, Brad, I mean, their platforms or their add-ons. And either way, the competition is so fierce for those right now. Well, and doing deals opens the door to doing more deals. And that's the way banks see you. You know, you're running a business. You've proven you know how to do that. You've bought a business. You've proven you know how to do that. Then getting debt and getting, you know, lenders behind you for small, medium, large deals gets easier every time. Absolutely. So I think the risk with this is, I don't know that you eliminate it, but I think you can ascertain the level of risk by

10 minutes of this post-NDA. You look at the trend of revenue. You ask for some very, very high level, even anonymized, you know, kind of customer concentration or industry concentration. You look at an org chart and understand, okay, they say there's experience personnel and management. Are they all, you know, as old as this equipment? And they're going to be seeing themselves out also. Like, you could answer those questions, I think pretty dense quick. All right. Anything else to hit on this one?

Or should we give a thumbs up, thumbs down? I want to hear thumbs up, thumbs down. I'm thumbs up in the sense that I really want to know more about it. And like, part of me is thinking, okay, it's like roughly three times multiple. There's got to be something wrong. Like, what do we not know right now that we sign the NDA and find out? I think there's some kind of stalking, you know, horse. Well, so there's always something wrong, right?

I mean, like, this is small-divis acquisition, like one, except in Brad's deals, of course. But otherwise, there's always something wrong. Like, that's why you pay 3x. Like, that's why the market is kind of where it is. The question is, is a deal breaker or can you structure around it or can you fix it? Yeah. And I think that's a point worth making because I talk to searchers, and they're like, they've been looking for a year. And they're like, yeah, just everything I see just has so much hair on it.

And I'm like, yeah, welcome to this is what you're signing up for. It's going to have hair on it. Like you've got to figure out what hair you can deal with, you know, bake it into price and go. Otherwise, if you're looking for a business with a million bucks, EBIT has no hair on it, good luck. there are a lot of rich people that own $5 million your EBITA businesses that are freaking hairballs. Like every business, every business has its horrible things. Let me tell you. Yeah.

They're all loosely functioning disasters. Until you try to buy it, that it's. It is perfect. Yeah. And it's very passive. And the owner works 10 hours a week. Yeah, it's going to be great. You couldn't go wrong.

I'm a thumbs up. I'm thumbs up on this one for somebody who wants to live wherever this is because they're going to have to be on site. This is manufacturing, so to speak, printing. And if you can structure the debt in a way that you're safe, regardless of whether the business stays flat or even declines a little bit. So fairly low leverage someone who wants to live wherever this business is located, I'd be thumbs up for them. I'm going to be thumbs down on this one. Just because I don't like the industry, I think you got pressure from the print on demand.

You got pressure from China. I know people who sell stuff, sell printed materials, and it's so much cheaper in China, even with the freight. So you got pressure from China. You got pressure on print on demand. I think you got pressure from a whole bunch of scaled players.

I mean, this is kind of one of those things that is going to get cheaper, the bigger you get. You know, there's all the huge. huge, like, veritive and, like, all these huge roll-ups of printing, you know, stuff, and that it's down the street from everybody. So, like, I feel like you're just dancing with elephants

here in what is functionally a low, is I would say a low margin, but they got 33% margins, which is wild to me. But it's, like, basically a commodity. So I'm curious as to why I have such good margins, but it just feels to me like this, I would be stepping into a knife fight that I was trying to not shrink and to defend my territory, versus something that I could expand aggressively or excitingly. And unless there was something in here that changed my mind about that, I'm just not excited about knife fights. Yeah.

Brad, how about you? I'm a definite thumbs down. I'm pretty scared of this business. I feel like, number one, I kind of envision myself buying it. I think on day one, I'm going to find out that most of these customers are going to die soon. I think on probably like day seven, whatever that gigantic machine was that was in the picture that looks like about 40 feet long is going to go down and they're going to tell me that the Johnson rod is broken on it

and that I need a new $1 million machine and it's going to take eight weeks. And then I'm not going to know. We're going to get the orders out. And then I'm going to start using one of these print-on-demand people because for some reason the customers don't know about those. people already. And so now I'm just basically selling print on demand prints for no margin, you know, to these people. I think this would be interesting to me if it was like, because I'm kind of intrigued by books. We have a lot of books at my house. If it was like

unique binding or something like that, that would be really intriguing to me because I feel like that's something that would kind of rise above the print-on-demand commoditization. You know, if it was like, hey, we bind books with, you know, this special, you know, calf or this special whatever the thing is, you know, the material. Then I start getting excited about it, but it just feels like it's such a commodity business that I'm really just concerned about the risk. I feel like when this owner leaves, I'm afraid that a lot of those customers are going to somehow be tied to this owner or this staff that's there and that those people will not be around

in another 30 years to keep going. So I'm a definite thumbs down, although I was kind of intrigued by the title. But if you have a calf skin binding operation, Brad's your guy. That is awesome. It's funny. I can't really say all the details, but I'm getting ready to list a business that sells a certain kind of book. And one thing is interesting is they are at. actually binding across the world in a very unique shop and you have to schedule time in that shop because it's full all the time. Like that's pretty cool. That's a very unique like business. Now they're not the ones doing the binding. They're selling books. But it's just part of what they do. And, you know, so I, that's what made me actually go there in my mind was thinking about

that potential listing because I was really intrigued by that. I thought, you know, that'd be interesting to get into like I also bought an old book that my wife my wife collects old books for different classics and things and I found this one and the pages are good but the binding was terrible so I still have not bound the book I don't know why I never pulled the trigger but I researched getting it bound again and it was a very interesting process to kind of talk to the different people to do there's people that do it like in their house just an individual just binds books you know, where you can go to a place that does it with big commercial equipment stuff. Crazy.

So many businesses in this world. Gerds, do you give a thumbs up, thumbs down? I think it's worth digging into. I think it's super interesting that it's been around for 30 years. I think books are going to make a comeback. I think smoking is about to make a comeback. I think alcohol is about to make a comeback. I think beards are about to make a comeback, guys.

You know what I'm talking about on this podcast? So I think just... Half of us got them in the... Me and Heather are not paying attention. Um, so, have style. So yeah, I think it's worth digging into. There's something that has caused this business to be in its niche for 30 years. Pretty decent chance that's going to be in a niche for the next 30 years and you get a chance to buy in relatively low.

So I'm curious. All right. Well, if you are curious, you can find it on Biz Buy Sell. The link will be in the show notes. Uh, thank you for joining us on this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. And thank you to Brad from Quietly Brokerage for joining us today. If you are interested in learn more from Brad, Brad, where can people find you on the internet? Brad Wayland at Twitter, Brad at Quietlyde.com to email me or you can get paired up with any number of, we have 15 advisors at Quietlyte.

So if you want to evaluation or just want to talk about buying or selling a business, we'd be happy to talk to you. Awesome. Thanks for being here. And if you are listening and you like this, we've got 500 more like it, some with Brad, some with all of us, and a whole bunch of other folks. every industry from e-commerce to construction to bookbinding to software whatever you're into we've covered it that's at acqueu anon.com you can also get on our email list there we email you the deals if you don't have time for more podcasts in your life you can get it in your inbox so i hope you enjoy this episode and we'll see on the next one