(replay)Art of the Roll-Up: 40 Businesses in 4 Years

By the time they're talking to us about selling the business, they're good and ready to leave. Selling is not celebrated in... Back to sort of... predispositions in the artistic world you know selling is almost sort of like defeat in some circles and sort of you know I understand why.

Yeah. Isn't that where the phrase comes from, from like musicians? Oh, you sold out.

But yeah, so the majority of the time, the owner's either leaving entirely or focusing on teaching, which was their original passion, right? That's what they got into the business to do. It's what they love to do.

Very, very, very infrequently have we had owners that have truly operated the business post-closing. And if they did, it was mostly because they were... sort of on the fringe of retirement, and they wanted to sort of sell the business now, be able to quit their job at some point in the future, sort of retain their income.

And as the platform grew, we gave them the opportunity to kind of narrow their scope of responsibility to just sort of, hey, lead the community, welcome the students, be part of the faculty. We'll do payroll, marketing, finance, accounting, tax, HR for you. And those are the things you don't like about the business.

So we've offered folks as we've become more of a mature consolidation platform that's been part of our value proposition for certain sellers has been, hey, sell the business to us and let us do the unfund things and you can just do what you like to do. But for Dana, she was in that second category of, hey, I'm a teacher at heart. I want to be in the classroom with my students.

I don't want to be in the office taking phone calls and dealing with customer complaints or worse, implementing software changes that in my 15 years of owning the business didn't feel like were worth my time to do. So I definitely am not going to do it for your benefit. But yeah, so it was myself and the general manager there.

And that's typical, again, of our structure where we really rely on those general managers to lead those communities and be responsible for that on the ground implementation at a lot of levels.

Well, speaking of scale and figuring out if it could work in using Vegas as a test balloon to figure out if this could work across the country and beyond the market where Jeff lives. This question of having competent general managers or elevating somebody who's at the business to general manager, this too is kind of the entire project hinges upon your being able to successfully do this. So I…

You kind of just did give us a picture. Or just in the case of this first school where you elevated Chelsea, she was front office. Maybe that would be the direct question.

What did you see in this front office person that you thought they could be general manager? And I'll just add some color to the question. I feel like many of my guests, if anything, they fumble there where they feel like they've identified somebody in the business that they can elevate to general manager.