The Home Service Expert Podcast - Business Growth Strategies from Twitter's #1 Philanthropist, Bill Pulte

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Bill Pulte is the CEO of Pulte Capital Partners and the former director of Pulte Homes. A self-made millionaire, Bill is best known for being a Twitter philanthropist. He is also the grandson of William Pulte, the founder and chairman of the home construction and real estate development company Pulte Group. In this episode, we talked about arbitrage, platform consolidation, technology, EBITDA, cryptocurrency...

Every billionaire I've met, which I've been fortunate to meet and talk and learn from a lot of them, it's amazing how much they, Walton calls it, he says he doesn't like that you steal things from people, steal ideas from people, but that you borrow the ideas from people. And Tommy, every person that I've met who is a billionaire, like to your point, it's almost like they've learned from so many other people and they just draw on that well of wisdom. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. And today I have a very special guest visiting us from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Bill Pulte. Pleasure to have you on today. Tommy, thanks for having me. I've watched a lot of your podcasts and I think you're a good human being. And on top of that, I hear you built a hell of a company. It's coming together. We've got a lot of amazing people and it's an industry that hasn't really been through what we're trying to do to it.

So it's interesting. If I always tell people if I could go back, I might have went into HVAC, windows, or roofing. Those are the three big ones. But listen, I'm really excited you came on today. I'm excited to introduce you to everybody. Bill's an expert in HVAC entrepreneurship, business growth, private equity, and philanthropy. He is the CEO of Pulte Capital Partners, and he started that in 2011. And then he was the director at Pulte Homes from 2016 to 2020.

Bill is best known for being a Twitter philanthropist. He is also the grandson of the founder and chairman of the home construction and real estate development company, Pulte Group, which all of us have heard of Pulte Homes. A self-made millionaire, Bill's widely known acts of philanthropy are funded by his own earnings from his business pursuits and not his inheritance. Not yet. Not yet.

Hopefully my dad doesn't die for a long time. Yeah, that's what I hope. So, yeah, it looks like there's a lot of people that have joined. So first, I want to ask if you want to just explain everything you've been up to. I mean, Pulte Homes is just one avenue of what you've seen. And between you and I going back and forth this past couple of weeks, I learned you're up to a lot more than just that end of it. But do you want to just tell us your last 10 years and where you're going for the next 10? Sure. So my grandfather founded Pulte, as you had said, and Pulte Homes, that is. And basically, as he was getting toward the end of his life, which he died about two and a half years ago, he really needed to take the company a different direction. So I got involved, pretty involved. And we got involved, I got involved, and I was involved with that business for about four or

five years in some way or another, and really had a good outcome there. I would say that for the most part, we love that business. It's become a big business. That business is about, I mean, depending on the day, I think the stock was, it's about a $13, $14 billion company. You know, when I got involved, it was much, much less than that. But my grandfather really deserves the credit for having built that company into what it was. And then I was able to be involved with it, almost like his right-hand guy, so to speak, for the last many years of his life, even though I wasn't technically his right-hand guy because I was an independent director of the company and I had to make my own decisions and that kind of stuff. So I was very active in that business there for a period of time. And frankly, the company is now in a position where we've been able to sell a lot of our stock in that business. So the family, I think, has sold

a lot of stock in the last few years. So it's not to say we don't love that business. We love that business. It's just that we've now sold a bunch of our stock. Now, having said that, I started Tommy in the home services business, so to speak, almost immediately out of college. I went into private equity. I worked for a year in private equity for a transportation-focused private equity fund, a company called Penske Capital. You know, the yellow trucks on the road, Penske. And basically, I worked for Roger Penske's fund. And I saw that he was buying these companies that were in the transportation business. And he had a great name because of what he had done in transportation. And he had bought these companies, fleet washing companies, truck washing companies, et cetera. And he was really able to

grow them. And so I said, well, why aren't I doing this, but in the home space? And so I started Pulte Capital back in 2011. And then in 2013 was the first time I bought an air conditioning company. And that was a great business. I bought it from a guy named Doug Henry. And Doug was a terrific guy. He was in his late fifts. His son had just passed away in a tragic automobile accident. And so that was a tough deal, but it was a good deal in the sense that, you know, it worked out for everybody, but it was under tough circumstances. And since then, Tommy, you know, I've just been not only focused on the HVAC space and home services, but also on other products like countertops and shower doors. I had a very good portfolio company. That was actually my first company that I acquired in 2011, kind of in the depths of the recession. And we grew that business. We doubled that business. And I sold that to private equity

a couple of years ago as well. What is your play now? Is it you get in, we all know a little bit about arbitrage, the listeners. I've shared a lot. It's basically when you buy something for a multiple and then you shared a lot. It's basically when you buy something for a multiple and then you get a lot more for it. So there used to be the best example I could give of a cool way to think about arbitrage is there was, there's a book called the Clippership and Clipperships in the 1860s would go from New York all the way to San Francisco. And they did that because of the gold rush. And they bring all kinds of supply shoes and clothes and food and whatnot.

And they could sell it for five times more than they paid in New York because it was hard to get supplies there. People had more money because of the gold. And basically, that's what private equity does is you could add companies together. And because it's a lot less risk as the company grows, there's more directors, there's more owners, not owners necessarily, but usually they give about 10% of company shares

to the executive level. But can you tell us a little bit about what your play is on this? Because I know a lot of the questions that I've been getting in advance was what's Bill doing in this space? What's his game? What's his play? What is he looking for? So arbitrage, there's definitely an opportunity to arbitrage businesses. But I would say, I think where the market is going and

where the market is, it's kind of like a game, just doing it with arbitrage is kind of like playing hot potato, I think a little bit. So for my purposes, yes, are we getting an arbitrage? Sure. But I think that if we ever do have a market hiccup or something like that, it's going to be the companies that really have real meat to them, real substance that are going to get those arbitrages. Now, to your point, the market is so hot right now that people are able to get that. But I'm hearing some rumblings, at least in the private equity community. It's kind of a small community in terms of when a deal's out to market, people call around and say, hey, have you heard of this asset? And people know now that I've focused on this space. And I would not to say that smaller companies or less developed companies

won't be able to command the type of multiples that are out there. But I think that people are really wanting substance in these companies. You know, we could go through it, but making sure that they have real financial statements, not just, you know, hacked together financial statements, making sure that there's management depth. So if the owner gets hit by a bus, the management team and the company can keep on going. So I think you're going to probably see the multiple stay there to do the arbitrage. I just think it's going to come down more and more to a quality asset. I mean, I have a few friends in the private equity community, and I have a few that I'm particularly

close with, and sometimes they'll call me and say, can you believe that thing traded for that? And I mean, other things, you know, even things that are trading for crazy prices, I understand. But what I'm saying is there may be a shorter runway on some of these lower quality assets that are transacting. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. I think what you're talking about, one of the things that we're working on is getting audited by one of the big four.

I think that that's important. They put a stamp on there and they make sure that it's legitimate. They go through a deep, deep analysis to make sure your financials are what they say they are. Correct. What I found in this industry... Expensive though, to get an audit, it's expensive, right? I mean, they can, they can rank anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000, which again, is not a lot, but for some of the companies we're talking about, that's real money, right? I guess most of the companies that I'm looking at, it seems to me, and I hate to say this because I don't want to be condescending to the HVAC industry, but a lot of these guys,

it's not hard to do $20 million. In the 1990s, Frank Blau and a bunch of really, really smart people, Ron Smith. Ron Smith has been around. He's the godfather for the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. And he's still around. But to get the $20 million in a market, that's been done now for a long, long time. And if you can't afford $50,000 to have books to go to the bank when you need money, I always say build the best time to get monies

when you don't need it. Correct. But what is it that you're looking for when you look for a company? Because obviously you don't want to buy the perfect company necessarily, unless you're trying to buy a platform company. And is that what you go after is platform companies? I do. I try to go after platform companies. You know, one of the guys that I really respect in the industry is Ken Goodrich. And I know Ken, you know, he'll look at self-admittedly broken businesses and rehab them. Don't get me wrong, whether it's our legacy family business or other businesses we've

been involved with, they've had varying degrees of hurt. Maybe not many of the deals that he's done. They've probably hurt a lot more and then he's turned them around. But what we try to do is, we say life is tough enough. And so why not buy healthy businesses? So to answer your question, yes, we look for platforms. You know, we look for good, stable operators. One of the things, Tommy, that I've been doing recently, and I just partnered with a gentleman in Arizona who's a terrific guy. He's 39 years old.

He was a tank driver in Iraq, and he runs a sage shack company that we bought into. And we've really grown that business tremendously. But it's not so much that the platform there was nice as much as you had a really good guy there who, combined with our efforts, could really grow the business. And that business is two to three times the size of what it was before we got involved. And so, you know, was it a good platform? Sure. But it was more about partnering with the guy who's a good guy and knew that with a little bit of help

here and there, you know, this thing could be tremendously valuable. So when you find a stable operator, you know, when I look at businesses, typically, there's two big things I usually look at really closely and not to mention all the key performance indicators, the CRM system, stuff like that. But I look at how's their customer lead flow and how's their technicians, CSRs, dispatchers, their employee lead flow. And right now you'll find that everybody's short on employees. Everybody says I can use 10 guys right now. I could use six guys right now. What are you seeing out there? I'm sure you got your out there. You're learning a lot about what other companies are looking for. What's the word on the street from what you've been researching and discovery?

Yeah, I would say that, you know, there are things that I look for when we go to acquire or invest in a business. And then there are things that are important for the resale of the company. And those in some cases are kind of two different things. In other words, I'm looking for maybe more qualitative stuff in the sense that, you know, is this person a good person? Can this person handle pressure? Is this somebody who is really committed to grow a business from, I mean, the businesses that we've been involved with, we've been fortunate they've grown 100%, 200%, 300%. That takes somebody who is really emotionally, mentally able to handle it, right? You know that. I mean, look at how big your business has gotten, right? I mean, you're kind of the poster child for being able to handle

pressure and grow a company and whatnot. So I'm looking for more of those qualitative things. I think when it comes to the sale of these companies, specifically to private equity, and I'll just deal with private equity for purposes of this conversation, we could talk about strategics, which are kind of their own animal. And frankly, the strategics are often interested based on whether there's private equity money behind the strategic and whatnot. So let's just talk private equity. But private equity, they're looking for more quantitative stuff. They're looking for more. And again, I love the quantitative stuff. I'm all about the quantitative stuff. But our family's from a background of operators. And we know if you want to grow something 100, 200, 300 percent, it's only as good as the people who are a lot of these guys, they're like financial weenies. And I mean that in a loving way. But they come into the meeting and they want to see a certain set of facts. They want to see a certain set of grow the business tremendously? Once we grow it, can we also get it in a quantitative state that will allow the financial types to deem it a very attractive business?

Yeah, that makes sense to me. So how long do you typically want to hold on to a business? And if you're buying a platform, are you going to try to consolidate underneath that platform? You know, I don't know. I don't know about the consolidating. I've been obviously involved with our family business, which was consolidated. And frankly, there's real power in not being centralized. I mean, in other words, even in, you know, the Pulte Homes business, for example, I mean, there's subdivisions all across the country. And, you know, the Pulte Homes business, for example, I mean, there's subdivisions all across the country and, you know, they're decentralized in a certain way, meaning they kind of run themselves. So, you know, I believe there's big power in decentralization as well as centralization. So the jury's still out on that. I think what Ken has done is phenomenal in terms

of centralizing things. Dave Geiger's another one with Horizon. What they've done is just unbelievable. I mean, that has just been a home run. You know, I hear great things about Leland Smith and they've done it, but we'll see. I honestly don't know. Are you going to be buying anything? Are you going to be getting- Yeah, I've got seven LOIs out there right now.

Wow. An HVAC? No, no, I'm not going to be an HVAC just yet. My plan is I'm going to grow as much as I could in the garage door niche because I think we have something pretty special. We wrote the playbook on how to expand. A lot of the guys that are potential competition for me have never been able to make it out of their own backyard. So could they add garage doors to it? Yeah. But when they realize,

and I hate to say this because I don't care if someone comes into the industry, it just makes it stronger when I get a good operators in here. It's like taking a five gallon bucket to the ocean and saying we're out of water. It's just not the case. There's enough jobs out there for lots more, but I'm not worried about my industry. I'm just, I'm trying to take market share everywhere. And I'm a big fan of Google. And then I'm a big fan of branding. So those two things combined are deadly. So we've combined those things. And I'm not a big fan of commercial because I think it's apples and oranges. Commercial is a different pay grade. It's different licensing. It's different accounts receivable. It's different everything. So not that I don't like it. I just

don't know. And I decided to focus. I read probably seven years ago. I read the one thing by Gary Keller. And then I read a book about three years, two years ago, maybe essentialism. And just said, you know, a lot of people go in and they own plumbing, then they own HVAC, then they own electrical, then they're looking for the next thing. And that's fine. You look at a company like Parker and Sons, great friends of mine, they're going to do almost $200 million just in Phoenix. It's incredible. Not a lot of people could hit those numbers. So you got to go into multiple things. And they said, I want to own the customer. I want to own the house. I say, I want to own the garage on many houses. And then hopefully the garage door floor and the

garage door storage solutions. But one of the things we're working on and i've been pretty honest with the listeners that i'm doing our best practices for garage door companies and there's a guy named jim abrams who did this in the 90s uh he did it with benjamin franklin plumbing he did it with one hour air and then he did it with mr sparky is uh you do the best practices he did it with Mr. Sparky, is you do the best practices. He did it with a thing called Successware. We're using ServiceTite. We've already negotiated with them. But I've actually got 50 other companies I'm negotiating with, including ValPak, including, I mean, you name it. It's from how you do your background checks to how you buy your trucks to how you fix your EMOD score or work in comp. And the plan is we're stronger

together. We'll run the business together. And like, Bill, if I was to talk to you and you were a big company, let's just say in Traverse City, Michigan. And I said, Hey, buddy, why don't you come into this group? I'll show you how to save a ton of money, show you how to increase your profits, get your company ready to sell. Even if you're not looking to sell, there's a good book called Built to Sell. And if it makes sense, if I can get you a couple more turns and triple your profit, would that make sense to you? But we want to be a part of it because you're going to be under our kind of brand and it's got to be a win-win. But it's all done through these best practices groups is what I'm learning. And that's a great way to roll up a companies because i can grow greenfield really really good we figured out greenfield

really really good but if you take 100 companies that are doing three hundred thousand dollars get them to a million of ebita that's a two billion dollar company yeah and you know two billion dollars and i hate to say it because it is a lot of work but it's really not because it's the same formula in every single market whereas you start going into hvac plumbing electrical and everything else now you've got there's a lot more to it it's the same thing it's customer satisfaction it's just conversion rate it's average ticket it's cost per acquisition but i feel like it's a much easier way to scale. But if the listeners are out there saying, what is Bill looking for? Is Bill interested in my company?

Is there anything that touches the home we're interested in? My grandfather started out as a carpenter. I spent my life on job sites growing up. So we know a lot of the different trades. As I mentioned, kitchen and bath countertops is something that we really prefer as well, if there's anybody who's out there who has kitchen and bath countertop companies. But we've really carved out a niche at Pulte Capital for that plumbing, electrical, and HVAC segment the one that I bought in 2013. And then a couple of years later, I bought another one. We sold those to private equity in 2016. And then I went and bought another HVAC company, which we also sold to private equity. So we've had two very large exits between these two HVAC companies. And so that's really been my focus, frankly, has been HVAC. But, you know, we look at anything, we see all kinds of deal flow from everything that touches housing, basically, we look. So you are basically an investment.

You guys, Pulte Capital Partners is an equity company? It is. It was founded kind of with the idea that Penske had founded his, which is they had real domain expertise in transportation. And at Colby Capital, we have so much legacy knowledge around the home and how things go together, what things should cost. I mean, that's one of the big advantages when we go to buy these companies is, you know, we're able to help generate significant earnings just on the equipment savings alone. I mean, if I had a dime, Tommy, for every entrepreneur, every business owner, just in the HVAC industry, where I've

looked at hundreds of deals, literally, if I had a dime for every time an HVAC owner told me, hey, I have the best pricing, and my vendor tells me I have the best pricing in the entire world, and I'm growing faster than everybody, and my sales rep says that I'm the fastest growing one in the Northeast or the Southeast or the Southwest. I'd have a lot more dimes. And so it's kind of like the people who think that they're really buying really good are actually getting ripped off. And the guys who don't think they're doing really well are actually buying pretty good

from my experience. So yeah, so we're going into these companies and creating that type of value. That's just one of many things that we do. Have you ever heard of a company called CB? CB? S-I-B-I. S-I-B-I. I don't recall it off the top of my head. What do they do? They're a really, really smart group of guys that got together and they're out based out of Phoenix, but they work with hedge funds and big investment portfolios. And you look at Open Door, you look at all the big real estate companies. And I actually own a real estate company called Highest Cash Offer. And now I got a partner in that. And I love their name. We were looking at this deal. Yeah. It's a subsidiary of a company called Lead Geeks.

We provide motivated seller leads. And CB is amazing because they negotiated with HVAC. Then they negotiated with garage doors, painting, kitchen remodel. And so a hedge fund will go in and they'll buy 500 houses, three bedroom, two bath, not on a main road. They've got certain criteria. And they're investing lots and what cb did is said we're going to build the software and negotiate with the vendors we're going to go straight to the manufacturer and they negotiated this is ridiculous but a brand new five ton unit goodman with a 10 year warranty and 5,500 installed. And the garage doors are pretty negotiated down too,

but they got a better price from the vendor. So the distribution centers like me or, you know, whether it's ghetto or whoever can make a little bit of money, but there's no sales involved. You just go there. And the unit might still work. They figure when they move in, they're going to look at the age. They want everything under warranty because they figured out a way to make the investment much more safe or just replacing stuff and having everything under warranty so you know i just look at what some

people pay and my manufacturer who does about 600 million a year one of the bigger ones he's like man those guys are shrewd negotiators and now amazon's getting in the mix you know amazon gets 70 of the garage door searches that google gets wow but it's they want you to warranty that the customer measured it right you know they're they're a place to go shopping when you don't even know what to buy so i don't know how well that's going to work out what do you think's going to happen with i guess the question i was leaning towards. And real quick, if I could interrupt you, what were you saying that Amazon's doing with homes? Well, what happened was I've got some inside knowledge of, of they're getting much more involved with the manufacturers.

They're calling them up and they're saying, we want to own what's happening is everything's becoming a little bit more commoditized and it's scaring a lot of people i'm not too worried about it because i know they need me they need the guys that know what they're doing and they need reliable trucks everybody thought they were going to come in and they thought amazon is going to uberize the home service business they're just going to make it like uber hoods ever closer but then i think they're starting to see that man these small guys they don't have the equipment. They're not reliable. They don't have dependable vehicles.

They don't know how to work an iPad. They don't even have the right tooling to do some of the jobs. So it's not like you just own a car like Uber. And I think a lot of these guys that don't know the home service space, like me and you, they thought, wow, we're just going to come in here and own the industry. It's a multi tens, hundreds of billions of dollars, the whole industry, probably trillions. I don't even know. I never looked at the market cap for home service. Cause there's a lot of things that I don't even know what you consider in or out of, of home service. Cause it can go pest controls, somewhat commercial

too. So ultimately, what do you think technology is going to do here in the next decade to change out what what's going on right now? Yeah, the short answer is I don't know. But I agree with you that somebody is going to figure it out. And I think it's going to be pretty threatening. I agree with you in terms of Google and Amazon. And I think that this local services is pretty scary. If you're a HVAC contractor, you're just thinking, how are they going to get

more of their claw into the contractor's pockets? And I think that kind of gets to what I'm also saying about the private equity community and the quality of the assets that I think going forward that are going to transact these high multiples, Tommy, are going to be the people who are really kind of up the food chain and are potentially going to be some of the last to be disrupted by technology. So I really don't know the answer to that question. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, obviously. I think it's coming quicker than people think it's coming. And it's kind of one of those things, right? It's going to happen slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, and then boom, all at once. In the meantime, I just think we got to keep our head down.

And what I tell the guys that I work with, the different entrepreneurs that I either back or that I purchased 100% of their companies, which has been usually what I do is, hey, look, all we can focus on is keep our head down, get stuff done as quick as we can, focus. And God willing, the disruption is additive. But I too get concerned that once these guys get their claws in something, it's very hard.

Now, in the home building business, one of the things that we're insulated from there, Tommy, is building a home, for example. And Pulte Homes will build over 30,000 homes this year, for example. There's so many pieces that go Homes will build over 30,000 homes this year, for example. There's so many pieces that go into a home. And don't get me wrong, I believe in modular building. I think that that's going to be a huge way of the future. But there's so many things that go into a home. You have different types of building codes.

You have to be able to get product underneath certain highway systems. You have to be able to transport the stuff if you're doing it in a modular fashion. But to put all these pieces of the home together, it's going to be a lot for these tech companies to do. But I wouldn't be surprised, Tommy, at some point if they get their hands into that. But I think first they'll get their hands more into the other low-hanging fruit that's in the home, if you follow me. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think air conditioning is easier than garages. And I think some of the hard ones is like flooring. It's a lot more labor intensive and you don't know what you want and there's different types. And trusses and exterior walls. I mean, look at a garage. If you don't have the right measurements and you don't have the right headroom and you don't know the right bottom

rubber. There's so many things and we mess up and we know what we're doing because there's a lot that gets lost within the data entry and stuff. So we're working on some checks and balances. One of the things that we were talking about the other day, and this is a big gold nugget for those of you out there listening, is when you're making your orders to your manufacturer through the distribution center, how can you make it in a way that you don't mess up the ordering, whether it's HVAC, gutters, windows, whatever it might be. A great way to do it is you can get a third-party call center that is in front of the customer and in front of the sales rep to verify you you know, the wait times, you know, everything, and they're confirming everything that you're ordering.

And I thought about that, about a third-party call center. Then I thought about HomeAdvisor. HomeAdvisor has Adam Carolla, or used to years ago, that he says, hey, it's Adam Carolla. I need to do a quick recording to make sure. And he just records everything. You understand this, you understand that you're going to get multiple leads. HomeAdvisor works like this. And I said, wouldn't it be great just to have a recording like that? Yeah. Just of the client admitting that they understand

that the wait time and supply chain issues and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I don't know. I'm not going to get Adam Carolla. I'll get the CEO of my biggest manufacturer to say, hey, we're the largest manufacturer in North America, and this is what's going on. This is straight from the horse's mouth. We get our stuff from here, here, here, here. And there's no other company you could go to that doesn't get their stuff

from here. And here's a wait time. Yeah. And I bet you're probably getting it better than most people, right? Because of your size. You know, we're doing okay. A lot of people don't have torsion springs and that's the lifeblood of the company. And they're like, we can't even get springs. Luckily we're able to get that stuff. But you know, a long time ago, I took the approach of service into sales like HVAC. Hey, this is a 10 year old unit. It's probably time to replace this. Even though I can fix it, I'm going to have to fix it every six months. And when we learned how to do service and the sales, I'm really close with Ken Goodrich. Leland, I know really, really well. Ken Haynes is a really

smart guy. My buddy Keegan, best home services. You know, I talked to these guys. Yeah. What Haynes has built is pretty remarkable as well. Yeah. I mean, it's $750 million, I believe now, the revenue, but they did it through acquisitions. And I'm a big fan of acquisitions done right. I think the hard part for me with acquisitions is getting to the real numbers. Like you said, I go through these financials and there's no such thing as an earn out. It's tough to do an earn out in this business for me because they go, you're going to come change my entire company. How am I supposed to have an earn out when you're going to be taking over it? And I say, well, I got to hold your feet to the fire. And they say, so we're learning how

to do some interesting things. And right now, how can you go wrong if you're buying something for five times and you're worth 15, it's worth it. But it's just, is the staff going to make it through the turn? And I'm the type of guy, I'm not going to go in and change everything. I'm going to go in, I'm going to add call tracking numbers. I'm going to find out the booking rate per CSR. I'm going to find out conversion rate for services sales. And I'm just going to change one small thing at a time. And over the course of a year or two, I'll have a very, very fantastic company, but you kind of top grade, you find out what's working. You put the time and energy into a lot of times people put time and energy into the bottom guys. I'm like, you kind of just got to cut those guys pretty quick. A lot of times I buy companies or

I'm looking at buying companies. I bought three and they're smaller. I'm looking at buying a pretty big one. And then a really big one. A lot of times they're guys are running five, six, seven jobs a day day first thing you do is you cut the jobs in half and you need to hire and right now i think probably even you're you're experiencing here in uh arizona are you guys having i want to say a hard time because you probably have good staff but it's been a hot summer here yeah it's been a hot summer turns out a lot of people need air conditioning in Arizona. I've had every single HVAC unit break. It's crazy.

How many employees do you have, Tommy? We're going on 400. Wow. It's incredible. That's a big company. It is. It still feels tiny compared to what I think it's going to become. We've really worked hard to build an operation that's a recruiting machine. And we're always, always, always, we've got a new class that comes into Phoenix every single month. You start out as an apprentice, you're in your own market for 30 days, and you come to Phoenix. You're hiring a lot of friends and family and stuff like that? We've got a pretty good recruiting program from within, but that kind of ran. We took advantage

of that early. We give our guys 1500 bucks if they go recruit somebody, but they got to sign off on them. They're going to do good. But yeah, it's fun watching. You didn't know Parkinson's did 200 million. That's insane. Good for them. I would say it's a fraction of that size, but it was about a six or $7 million business when we got involved with it, Tommy. And, you know, it'll be multiples higher than that. To me, you know, I always say revenue is vanity, profitability is sanity. So to me, it's more about what's the EBITDA of these companies. And to my earlier point, have we gotten the qualitative aspects fully ironed out and transferred that into quantitative? Because these assets that we're selling, Tommy, yeah, we're going in and buying good platforms. But in order to attract the type of multiples, and I'm talking

in the minimum $70 million purchase price range and higher, in order to attract those type of multiples, and I'm talking in the minimum $70 million purchase price range and higher, in order to attract those type of multiples and that type of private equity buyer, we really have to do a lot of things. So again, not poo-pooing revenue, but I just think if you can really drive EBITDA in these companies, and we think we've got a pretty good playbook on how to do that, that's where you can really start to get into some of that arbitrage that you were talking about. That's when people really start to pay attention is when you can get there. And there's different break-off points, Tommy, and you've probably seen this, but private equity, they'll pay a certain price for something

that's $2 million of EBITDA. They'll pay a different price that's at $3 million of EBITDA. They'll pay a different price that's at $5 million,ITDA. They'll pay a different price if it's at 5 million, 7 million, 10 million. So there's kind of these different thresholds, Tommy, and each one of these assets, we're trying to really strive towards a targeted EBITDA to maximize that purchase price on the back end. You look at Nexstar, their main goal is for each of their companies to enjoy. Their vision is 17%. You talk to a guy like Ken Goodrich, you talk to a guy like Keegan, you talk to a guy like Leland, they're going to tell you 22%. 22% is a big number to carry through economies.

You got to have a really, really good service agreement plan for 22%. And your marketing has got to be on point. But the biggest thing that you mentioned earlier is they're not priced right. When you go in and buy a company, there's a lady named Ellen Rohr, a really good friend of mine. And she goes, whatever your prices are, double them. And I think we're definitely not at the top, top, top end, but we're very quick to change prices when our manufacturers change. A lot of people take three months to make the increase. We do it the same day we get an increase. And I think people have been overwhelmingly okay with our price increases. We did six of them this year because we got six of them and our prices are up double, double the cost. But what do you

think is the good target for EBITDA? Because I think you're right. I think we're hovering around 15. I'll be over 20. Here's the hard part for me is we're really getting good. We just switched to Intact because we outgrew QuickBooks. And I'm really looking to give the bank, and I've not taken any money from the bank yet, except for the building. But I'm looking to give them an exact amount, a case study for Greenfield,

because that's an ad back. That Greenfield is just like buying a company. This is what it costs for the first year. In a way, if you got a good accounting staff and a good finance department, you could say this is to break into this market because you got to look at the cost to break into the market to get to a five to $10 million market versus buy one, right? And that's what I think I want to be using the money for. But what do you think is a good number to be at? It's a great question. I think it depends on where in the home that you're selling product. For example, in HVAC, I agree with you. Frankly, most of our businesses have been 20 plus percent EBITDA margins. But if you get into drywall, you get into some of these other products that

are more commoditized, right? It becomes harder to command those type of margins. But, you know, I think it's in that high 20s range on a really good end. But as you know, Tommy, if you're a smaller company, you can get away with some of that higher margin EBITDA. And then as you scale, that's really where the talent comes in and keeping those margins high because, you know, you're adding all that SG&A, you're adding all those operating expenses, all those overhead expenses. And, you know, unless you really get

that scale correctly, you're going to see a compression in the EBITDA margins. And, you know, if you want to have the compression in the EBITDA margins, that's fine. But, you know, some of these businesses are just remarkable, Tommy, to your point, where if you can keep that SG&A at the right level and keep that revenue throughput going, you could be a high 20% EBITDA margin. But that's kind of best in class, best in class. And, you know, frankly, I'm happy with high teens on the bottom line, so to speak. You know, it's interesting because the guys that I deal with quite a bit, I'm sure you're familiar with. I'm going to think of it here in a second. My buddy, Eric Van Dam has done, oh, Cowan. Cowan is the name of the company. And Cowan, he's done about 55 deals. And he tells me,

look, you get to 20 million, you're going to start seeing an EBITDA. You get this 20 million, that's our goal here next year to pass that by quite a bit. But you get the 20 million, you're going to start seeing some crazy high teen multiples. You mean 20 million of EBITDA? 20 million of EBITDA, you're going to see between probably 15 to 20 times, depending on the story of the company, because it just hasn't been done in this industry. And then if you get to 50 million, now it starts getting crazy because that's a different type of buyer. That's like, you're going to New York, you're going to San Francisco.

Correct. And that's kind of where I was talking, Tommy, in terms of there's different levels of ebitda and there's different prices you can command right now you happen to have a bigger business than many of the home services companies just being honest so you're able to trade at that you know let's call it you get it to 20 million of ebitda that's right that's kind of a magic number at that level 20 million ebitda even if you get it to $30 million, that's another tranche. And then $40 and $50 million of EBITDA. So yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff. At what point... Here's a question. And I've got a question from someone in the audience here too, but you filled us up here. Yeah, I did. I got a question, but I wanted to ask you, as far as when you're thinking in terms of the company growth,

there's a lot of ways. There's a SPAC, there's an IPO, but I'm looking at this as a personal question and a greedy question because that's for me. But I'm going to the bank and I'm like, I want a line. They're going to give me a revolving line. They're going to do about four times EBITDA. Then they're going to use my current status, which if they take four, that gives me 40, $50 million. So I could borrow when I buy a company for, so let's just say a million dollars, I can borrow four. And let's say I pay six times, I could take 2 million off of what we're already doing. And then let me go all the way to that. And then they'll revolve that as long as they check off the deal and they go through the quality of earnings correctly.

So my question for you is how much money do I take? They'll let me go to 125 million as long as the EBIT is there. And then they can bring in other partners. And people say, take some chips out of the table way before you get that leverage. But at what point for you would you say, let's use other people's money, but not give away equity? Well, are you looking to make as much money as possible and put it in your bank account today? Or are you looking to build something that, you know, in five or 10 or 15 years will make you a lot of money? Because I don't think this is the right or wrong answer to that question. But, you know, if your goal is today to maximize cash, you know, obviously there's different ways to do that i think for me

it's it's i'll come up with a three-year plan we've got a pretty good thing going with some of the the employees here some of the senior level employees that they're involved in we're going to involve more of them and uh it's a win-win but in three years we're just picking up the momentum right now so to be able to start this best practices group, be able to have a playbook, like on my whiteboard, I've got a whole playbook that I've been devising on how to go into Orlando and I'm going to go in and freaking crush it. And I've got everything from, okay, I've got out here B&I groups, believe it or not, a little more grassroots. I've got on here deal of the day sites that

no one goes on anymore, like Living Social or Groupon. Those are all really, really, they're not high margin places to go, but it helps get the word out there in the beginning six months. So I got a soft open for six months. And then that next, that first year is where I, my goal is $5 million. And I could could go to revenue or even dollar well no that's revenue okay at the six month soft opening and all we're doing is reputation management and then after that five million dollars that's straight greenfield though that's not buying anything but from five million i could jump to 15 pretty easy. Once you got that basis there, I tell everybody this, you need a good, really, really strong lead tech.

For H-Track, I'd say you need, you need to find someone that can afford a $5 million producer. You get the right guy with the right closing rate, with the right options. That's very, very good. He'll lead the way of everybody else or she.

It was just hard to find. So I got to make them because to find them you gotta steal them and for us we consider a million dollar producer the same as probably a four or five million dollar producer in hvac uh here's a question from jeremy hein and by the way just to finish because i know you'd ask me a question i want to make sure i'm responding but if you're trying to maximize your cash right now, you can do one of two things. You can go for a business of your size. Again, if it's a smaller company, the options are a little bit different. But for your business, Tommy, obviously, you go get a liquidity event, sell the company, right, which sounds like you don't want to do. Or to your point,

you could get a revolving line of credit. You could fund some of these acquisitions, and then you could do what's called a dividend recap, where you can basically recap and take your money out. Now, sometimes if you don't have a really good management team, the bank is going to be worried about doing that dividend recap because they think, oh, shit, I'm going to give Tommy all this money, and he's just going to go to the Bahamas and run away with his girlfriend, and we're never going to see him again. And so if you can really have a deep bench, Tommy, I think you can do some dividend recaps on these businesses and make a lot of money. So I'm sure you're being advised by people on that and you know that, but you asked me the

question. So I want to- No, no, it's a great answer. I think one of the biggest things that I've learned from a colleague of mine that I want you to meet is your whole team needs to know where you're running to. They need to understand the goal. You just, because you get to a date and you might not be where you want to be, doesn't mean that you don't get to do it, but you get to 20, 30, 40, $50 million of EBITDA. You got a lot of options. So Jeremy, a lot of options, a lot. And by the way, as you get to those levels too, in terms of being able to take out a revolver and fund debt, you have more options and you know what to do if you can get to those levels well if you think about 50 million and this is probably your grandpa was somewhat in this boat at some point 50 million business so on a trailing basis

is doing about 2 billion of ebitda it's hard to think about but yeah yeah it's crazy well if money makes money and it's crazy because $50 million is, is roughly a million bucks a week of net. For example, a lot of people from service time, there's a lot of guys that are high up that I talked to quite a bit and they go, you know, why would you want to sell if you got to 50 million? Because you re put four or $5 million into the business a month, it's going to grow astronomically a couple hundred percent a year and then it starts feeding itself it's feeding the beast but my question is if i'm going to get 20 times and i'm able to put that money into investments very very good investments

or you just buy an index fund yeah i mean but there's still a risk you know for example on my master's program we talked about the risk of the supply chain i was actually doing garage doors and we talked a lot about what happens when tesla and everybody else self-driving cars the garage is not going to be used in fact a lot of builders right now are saying they're not going to be building their future house with garages because they don't believe the cars are going to be. And this is not tomorrow. This is probably not next year. But the supply chain and understanding the economic value of a garage and the cycle life and what I know about it. So what are you going to do with the Teslas if they figure out the auto driving capability? Well, what I mean by that is if they build a bunch of Uber Teslas and you can wait less than two minutes for a car,

it might not be economically in your best interest to own a car unless you're very, very wealthy. And if that's the case and you could get an Uber within two minutes all the time and not have to worry and it's no gas, you just got to pay a small fee, is the garage being used as much or would you want to make that livable space is the question. And it might not be something that happens overnight. I'm talking about a decade, but it will happen probably. And garage door companies, they're not going to be as needed as much if you've made that square feet and didn't want it to open like that. I'm just saying it's a possibility. Yeah. I would say that that's obviously a personal decision that you have to make, but given that backdrop, that's something I would very seriously be looking at because that's potentially a big headwind for your business.

A lot of people... I got to ask this question, but I'm going to bring back this. I want to talk about Bitcoin too. Yeah, we're getting... It's hilarious, the questions that are in here. People are asking about Dogecoin. They're trying to get me to, or DoggyCoin, they're trying to get me on Twitter because I tweet about Bitcoin a lot. And so the DoggyCoin people, they're trying to get me to tweet about it. So they've clearly come into the chat room trying to get me to talk about it. Yeah, I know exactly what's going on. So here's a question from Jeremy Hine. I really like this question. What info do you look at to forecast growth based on the economy? For example, is it home sales, unemployment, mortgage rate, or some other index? And which of these should we be looking for in theclass business being over 20% in terms of HVAC, plumbing, electrical, etc. But right now, I would argue that the mortgage business and the liquidity in the mortgage industry in particular is largely driving that and other liquidities is driving incredible financing power, Tommy, in many of the companies that we service. And so some companies, frankly, that probably shouldn't command a 20% plus EBITDA

margin are commanding it right now because liquidity is just so rampant. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is the Federal Reserve is currently buying, depending on the day, billions and billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities. And so that's driving down the interest rates and therefore it's able to drive up the price of these homes. Now, some people would call it a bubble. I wouldn't go so far, but I would just say that these things have downstream effects in terms of what the implications are. And if you have a mortgage, for example, that's being bought by the federal government, literally they own like 40% of the market. I don't know if you know that

they own 40% of the mortgage market. Well, between them two and what the federal reserve is doing, buying these mortgage backed securities. And so they're driving down the cost of capital, driving down the cost of capital. So to your point about housing starts and all these other things, these other metrics that we look at, and housing starts used to be the big one. But now you have a mortgage industry, Tommy, that is in many ways predicated on how much government support there is for the mortgage industry to the benefit of the housing market. And I say that in terms of looking at the housing market, the mortgage business, the mortgage industry is really the mother's milk of housing. And if you don't have the mother's milk flowing to the baby, right, the baby's going to have some hard times. But if you have that mother's milk flowing to that baby, that's going to be a big baby. And

there's been just so much liquidity pumped into the system that, you know, that is, in my opinion, Tommy, what to look at in terms of housing. Now, that's not something that you often hear, but that, in my opinion, is what's really occurring behind the scenes. You know, Linda said BlackRock's buying up homes and there's a really smart guy. I'm sure you've heard of him, Grant Cardone. And I'm not a huge follower, but I listen to his stuff. And he basically said, right now, out of the entire world, the United States is a buy signal, the highest buy signal of any investor in all of the world.

And you look at it, and I'll tell you right now, every smart person is buying real estate. I personally have lots and lots and lots and lots of crypto. Me too. What do you have? I have about 60. Yeah. But you know, my doctor buddy has 500. So I thought I was cool with about 60,

but today was a good day. This whole last couple of weeks has been kind of bouncing back. I have about what you have. I'm looking at Michael Saylor. I like Michael Saylor. He's a good guy. He's a smart dude. If you really looked him up and realized how smart this dude is, and all he does is tweet about gold. Gold is up nothing. And Bitcoin is, here's the deal with the new stuff coming out today with the government and the tax laws, it looks like they're going to compromise and not be taxing crypto. And you know, I've got a little bit of USD.

I think we got $500,000 and it's kicking off about 9%. I've got a little bit of a couple others. Nothing to brag home about. Then I did a Hail Mary shot and I bought $50,000 worth of this thing called SafeMoon. Yeah, sure. With the Portnoy? Yeah. And, you know, that one I'm just like there's gonna be another

dogecoin it could be something like this one because it's gonna get a lot of hype and that thing's probably gonna be a pump and dump kind of like a stinky pinky stock back in the day but don't underestimate portnoy though you know i'll tell you what i do believe and listen by the way any listeners out there i tell you guys this i'm not a financial advisor i'm not telling you what to do with your money i always tell people i want to be there when the party comes and if the party doesn't happen oh well it's not my life savings it's i don't have everything i own put into it but if it goes and i've got it through uh celsius is where i dumped all the coins because it makes 3.5%, 3.51%, I think.

So what are your thoughts overall? I'm a pretty big bull on it still. I think it's going to be six figures here within a matter of six months, but we'll see. Yeah, I think Bitcoin will be very valuable. That's what I think. Are you still buying or are you kind of just in and out watching? No, I'm buying. You know, I sold a lot of my way up just as a

matter of returning back my capital and being conservative. But the more information that I get just about Bitcoin, even this legislation, I mean, this legislation is, you know, the fact that it goes through all these trials and tribulations and the people that are backing Bitcoin and the different people that I hear who are backing Bitcoin, I think it's unstoppable. Somebody's saying something about how Bitcoin's out of their price range. Many people don't know that you can buy Satoshis, you can buy pieces of Bitcoin. And so I would just encourage people to say that. And I know that that's big lore with DoggyCoin or DogeCoin, but you can't buy pieces of a Bitcoin. And I do think it's going to be pretty valuable one day. The reason I got into it is I got a buddy of mine.

His grandpa started Bank Forward in North Dakota. And he was on the board. And he saw banking going to change in the early 2000s. So he went to medical school. He was getting ready to take over the family bank. And then decided to become a doctor. And I'm sitting there with him and he's doing vitamin B shot or something. And he goes, dude, and this was four or five years ago.

And I will tell you, he's not exactly right every year because he's like, it's going to be 500,000 last year. But you never know. And I tell every one of my employees, you need to be a doctor when you're talking to them. Because when you're a doctor and someone says, Bill, based on what your calories, your workout, based on what you're telling me, here's exactly what you need. This is what you need to live. And this is when I diagnosed the drowsiness. I'm like, here's what we need to fix it. And if you diagnose the problem, do you think if I told you, Bill, what you needed that you go well how much is that prescription i don't think i could afford it and i just said this is to make you live bill yeah you don't look at the price maybe the insurance will cover it but either way you're going to get that prescription

correct and so when he tells me something i'm like ah do you think he's like this is what you need to do and i'm like shit so i go out and I buy and I bought, bought, bought. I mean, I was, I bought a few of them at 60, but overall I think my cost average is about 27. So yeah, mine's about 7,000 average costs. Really? Yeah. I had a few hundred, but you know, I've done well with it. And then I love Bitcoin. So you're probably asking the wrong guy. Well, this is it. I got a little bit of some other ones because, you know, he did make the point of some of them are going to run a thousand percent, but the long-term play is always going to be Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the safest.

It's the best. It solves like Michael Saylor. He says it solves world hunger. You know, I was just in Columbia and people have a hard time getting a bank account. See Bitcoin down there. Not that I knew of. I didn't really look for that. But you just know that people...

The places that you went to only took cash. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. No, I guess. I actually was there getting stem cells, believe it or not. I know that's not you. Yeah.

Listen, I'll start wrapping this up. I have a lot of other great questions, but tell me a little bit about your philanthropy. Well, this started, I had an idea to basically give away money online, which a few years ago, nobody had actually heard of, which is kind of crazy because now it's the rage on Twitter. I mean, I don't know if you've seen this, but Cardi B and all kinds of celebrities now are giving away money on Twitter. And they're doing it for mostly philanthropic things. I'm sure there's other things that they're doing it for as well. But for me, it just was, Tommy, I would see people who are

dying of cancer, literally terminal cancer patients I was finding on Twitter. This is a true story, by the way. You can just search, search Pulte Cancer on Twitter. That's not a great name, actually, in terms of my name. But you search that or Pulte Cancer on Twitter. That's not a great name, actually, in terms of my name, but you search that or Pulte Diabetes. You'll see people who are literally dying of cancer on Twitter who have nowhere else to turn. And you see them coming on Twitter if they can't afford an insulin pump, for example. And Tommy, I'm able to send money directly, boom, right there to them, right there and solve that need. And so when I started doing this, I just had the kind of this epiphany to do it one day.

The things just started going viral. Okay. And like my tweets were averaging, I don't know, a few likes. My first tweet, when I started saying who needs help in terms of diabetes and all these other things, got 10,000 something retweets, which is a lot, you know, that's a lot of retweets. And so I said, wow, there's really something here. And then a few weeks went by, it was going really viral. And then I was fortunate enough to get the president to retweet me. This is going back a couple of years ago. And so Trump retweeted me about two times. And then, I mean, it just went crazy viral. And then he tweeted me another two to three times and the thing just went straight up. And it's kind of been nonstop ever since. So, you know, I started with, you know, I must've had a few thousand followers and then I, you know, hit 10,000 and then it was 30,000 and then it was 150,000 followers. And now we're up to about 2.8

million. And I call them teammates because we're like on a team together. And I'll tweet out somebody who's dying of cancer. And literally within minutes, the damn thing fills up. It's amazing. I mean, people are sending in money like crazy to these different campaigns or GoFundMes. There was a girl who got eaten by a dog, a seven-year-old in Detroit. And her funeral was like $25,000 and the family couldn't afford it. And Tommy, I put this campaign up and boom, it just got funded in no time. So, you know, as you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about it because, you know, it's pretty sweet being able to help people with just tweets that otherwise would not get the help,

right? And it's disappointing that the government isn't able to help a lot of these people. But nonetheless, we're using technology for good. You know, technology is used for such hate, such vitriol, but it's nice to use it for something good. So I really enjoy it. You know, it's interesting because I decided about a month ago I wanted to be the number one influencer in all of home service and i became obsessed with social media not like scrolling and liking and swiping but just the things that you could do now on tiktok twitter youtube facebook instagram and it just keeps going my email list podcasting and think about it donald trump ran the country through twitter and i don't know what your thought is, if there's any of those that impact more. But the average person now, on TikTok alone, the average user spends 58 minutes a day.

And I'm telling you, it's freaking nuts. It is nuts how much you can influence, especially if you're going to do it for greatness. And, you know, we are involved. We got a program called A1 Cares. Right now we're raising 25,000 bottles of water. I have not even done social media hardly at all. I'm going to get way more involved and I probably want to have a separate offline talk to you about it, but it's pretty cool to hear what you're doing. If someone wants to reach out to you, Bill, and get ahold of you, whether that's help with

philanthropy or just maybe find out if you're interested in their business, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, probably LinkedIn's the best. Tweeting, I mean, I actually read a lot of my tweets and I'm on Instagram as well. So yeah, Instagram's good too. You're asking which platform is the most effective for us in what we're doing? It's definitely Twitter. I mean, I think that it's harder to get an audience there, but once you do, if you're doing things the right way, it's a really powerful platform. I mean, I've got 1.8 million on Instagram and you just don't have,

you know, I can put up campaigns and I've done it on my stories and stuff. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people that watch it, but there's just something special about putting something on Twitter and people just, they want to help other people. It's interesting. I haven't heard Twitter in a while, man. I've

heard a lot more lately off of some other forums, but, but I'm going to focus on that as well. It's just, what it's about is if you follow, what's his name? Banner Chuck Gary, he thinks LinkedIn is the best opportunity right now because of some of the newest things they've done about going live and video. And I'm pretty, you know, I thought 25,000 was okay. Cause I haven't really tried, but it's all, it really depends what I'm learning about social media is I can get a couple million followers, but I want them to be, you know, North America and I want them to be kind of like in the home service niche. Cause that's what I'm trying to do. But yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, my business, and it's not a business because I'm not making money on it, but my area of focus for purposes of social media is philanthropy. And the kind of cool thing about that is that it's universal when people want to help each other, right? So I don't have so much of an international audience. You know, my average donation to these campaigns that I'm describing of people who are in these terminal illness conditions is $14. So, you know, that's the type of person, which is amazing. And all those $14, hell, $1 a lot, you know, I mean, this stuff all adds up. That crazy i contributed to uh the past president pursuing the big the big guys for pulling him off because personally i believe in the first amendment and i think it's tough if everybody anybody took me off i used to 250 bucks but i don't want to get political but this whole

riot thing i don't know it's just but he's got a ton you know he had a ton of followers and as you said he ran the country through the Twitter. It was enormously powerful. I mean, and he had everybody and their mom followed him. Tell you what, there's this little Twitter nugget. I mean, I got a lot of nuggets here. But if you had three books to recommend, three different books other than the E-Myth. Sure.

Or How to Win Friends and Influence People. And other other than the bible we all know the bible is amazing but i would say probably the best one it's okay i'll give you one because it's just i love it so much it actually reminds me a lot of my family's original business is sam walton's made in america have you ever read that no no i got a book right here called keeping up with the waltons but no i'll get that but it's his autobiography and you know just the lessons in it are timeless reminds me a lot of my grandfather so my grandfather was a pretty important person to me you know he uh he taught me a lot from being young and he was a lot like sam walton in a way you know he's the first person who came up with the subdivision first person who came up with really mass production of housing in the united states so it was a cool story you know he's

depression era guy he's a carpenter you know built one home at a time i had a buddy in here the other day and he said what do you think the one word that describes billionaires is and i said you know we both had the right answer i think i said networking i said it's the being able to make a phone call to anybody and they'll answer and they'll give you advice and the billionaires are the dumbest guys in the room, but know how to scale. And he said, well, that's a good one. And he said, I think it's trust.

It's your handshake. It's that you're never going to screw people. And I said, I know a lot of billionaires that screwed a lot of people, but they still have trust within their own groups. And I think those are both important. Do you have one word that maybe you would say? And it's not, look, the billionaires,

it's what I want to do, when I want to do, with who I want to do it. Forget the money. The byproduct is being able to help a lot of people. Yeah, influence a lot of people. You know, I would just say it's probably learning from other people. That's what I would say. Because every billionaire I've met, which I'm unfortunate to meet and talk and learn

from a lot of them, it's amazing how much they, Walton calls it, he says he doesn't like that you steal things from people, steal ideas from people, but that you borrow the ideas from people. And Tommy, every person that I've met who is a billionaire, like to your point, it's almost like they've learned

from so many other people and they just draw on that well of wisdom. I probably got 20 trusted advisors that I could call that are just experts in a topic that I could actually count on advice from. And also being able to flow through the things, take a piece of what they give me, but maybe not all of it. Maybe they've been jaded about something. But last thing I'll ask here is, we talked about a lot of things. We went from really a lot about EBITDA and just private equity to even a little bit on Bitcoin to philanthropy. Maybe we didn't get to spend as much time on something.

I'll give you the last couple of minutes to talk to the listeners and maybe give them some good points of value and sum it all up. Yeah, I would just say that I think that the industry is going to be really interesting over the next few years. I think that this M&A activity is incredible. I think it's largely funded by cheap debt. I think a lot of people are thinking they're geniuses, potentially myself included, and many of my friends because of how cheap debt is that people say, oh, my business is worth so much. And my only thought, Tommy, is that I founded my business, Pulte Capital, in 2011. At that time, I think Pulte Home's stock price had gone from $45 a share down to $3, right? So shit had really hit the fan, and stuff was really screwed up. And I'm not saying that we'll ever go back there. I

don't think that we'll have that type of situation. But if and when the music ever does stop with these multiples and whatnot, which I actually think it's going to be a long, long time, if it even does stop these multiples, to be honest with you. But if it does, it's really that substance of the company. And again, I talked just about a couple of them. There's a whole list of things that private equity really likes, but the financials, you know, so important. And I only say that not because private equity and financials, although I do, but it's one that often, especially in our industry, the operators, the entrepreneurs, they don't know

the financials that well. And to your point, I think you're very wise to get an audit and to spend that kind of money to do it. Again, there's something called a review for everybody. That's kind of a lightweight audit that's lower cost that you would want to do, for example. So I would say really make sure that your financial controls are in place. And then, you know, I call them the substance things. And there's a whole checklist of them, but I'll just give you a few of them, you know, strong management team. And when I say management team, you know, a lot of

people are getting away with putting these management teams out there now to private equity funds. And, you know, the private equity funds don't really care because right now the cost of capital is so low that they just need to put this money to work. Like they don't even care. They actually spend money paying on the interest if they don't spend it. True. They have to until they run out of it because their deals blow up, because they don't do what I'm talking about, which is really making sure that that's a quality management team. And I would tell you when and if, and if you know the tide does come out um you know it's going to be the people who've really invested in that management team who've really invested in those quality people those systems those processes you mentioned the emf obviously that's a big one

it's a bunch of other things frankly but yeah i mean i think if we just keep our head down these things i think there will always be a market for something that's good so i think so too and i'm very thankful that i've been able to put some money away and not be depending i think a lot of people that are less fortunate that their house is their most valuable thing in their life and for me my business is and i'm not ready to just part with it luckily i put some money away for a rainy day and if everything went to shit i think it would suck but i'd still be okay and i think it's the tough times that make you stronger right what doesn't kill you makes you stronger but i got a ton out of this bill and and you know i'm from sterling heights 17 and ryan right i uh i was a dishwasher at rookies clubhouse on the

corner there when i was 12 and spent four years at the restaurant there. But 15 mile in the locker room. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Small world. So I'll keep in touch with you. Please do.

I'll introduce you to some people. And if anybody wants to get a hold of me, they can obviously reach out to you. I'm happy to have a talk. And I always say, too, I see a lot of deals. I talk to a lot of people. I talk to a lot of people. I talk to private equity. Even if there's not a role for me to be involved, you know, happy to help with whatever I can. So anybody can contact me.

And someone just bought $50 of Bitcoin on Robinhood. So look at that. How about that? So listen, Bill, really appreciate you a lot. I'm glad we finally met. Well, Zoom kind of faced. And we'll be in touch, my friend. You too. Take care.

Thanks, Tommy. Bye-bye. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're

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