Founder Mode for ETA: $6m to $25m in 3 Years

Again, you don't have to use other people's money to search for a business. So if you don't use other people's money to search, you're going to end up with having the ability to have a more of a bespoke structure and to have more control over the terms. And so, yeah, by nature of...

how much of equity i brought of my own to the table the fact that i did a self-funded search the fact that i used sba debt that i personally guarantee i structured a bespoke deal and uh yeah having control over my business long term to live or die by this was my main thing that I was open about during the entire time. And I was not willing to embark on this long term journey, pour my heart and…

And so the investors that you had were signing up for a long term for a very illiquid investment, for sure. When you said that self-funded searchers or SBA style acquisitions where it's 80% or 90% leverage does not set them well up for a long term building a business over the long term. Why not?

Because you've sucked all the oxygen out.

You are not going to... Because the debt is going to be too heavy to be able to grow.

You're constantly going to be... You're going to have too much fear and too much risk. There's been... We've made a lot of mistakes learning this business the last three years.

But because we've had breathing room, it's given us the creativity to make mistakes, to spend money, and to figure this out. And we've basically... Sitting on the three-year anniversary, we've run rates...

four or five X the revenue and we're run rate. And if we keep up where we are right now, we've three X the EBITDA. So, you know, we 4X, 4 or 5X in revenue, 3X the EBITDA in three years if we keep going with what we're doing right now through the balance of the year.

And so, you know, obviously it's worked out really good so far, but it's all, it's worked out really good with a lot of micro ups and downs. And what's allowed us to have those micro ups and downs is having oxygen and breathing room so that we could invest to grow so that if we tried something and it didn't work, okay, not a big deal.

So that if we had somebody leave, a key employee leave and we had to take a step back, it didn't cripple us. So like, do you want to, you know, be a big fish in a small pond, a small fish in a big pond? And I think, you know, it's a lot more fun to run a business with more resources and it allows you to be a lot more creative and do a lot more stuff.

And yeah, I would not... I don't know. I would not buy a company 90% debt. I think that's crazy.