Yeah, no, I did. I took a 70 to 80% discount on my stock value to wanna leave and do my own thing, which was something that I was, you know, that I really, really wanted to do. And so it came at a tremendous financial cost, but, you know, still did well, you know, there and was something that, you know, that I wanted to do.
Acquiring Minds
Buying and Building a Xerox Dealer to $30m
Excerpts · 274 segments · ~1:20:39 long
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And that remaining 20 to 30% that I had was enough to be able to, you know, get the job done with the bank and make them feel comfortable with the business that they were now financing.
Yeah. Well, I maybe should have underlined this point back when we were talking about the timing of your decision to go do this with the busyness of your family life and all of the responsibilities and swirl of your life at that particular moment, that you also walked away from a significant amount of money. You're leaving 80 to 70% of the equity on the table to go off and do this.
Yeah.
Really, I can see why JD was inspired. Jeff, thank you for explaining the deal to us. Okay, so you become owner of this $5 billion business that you paid about the same amount for.
It's doing about a million of EBITDA. We've touched on a lot already of what your vision was for it, transitioning from agent to dealer. You have... mentioned that you did a number of acquisitions.
Maybe, why don't we do this? Why don't you tell us where you exited, what the business looked like when you exited, so we can understand where this is all going. And then we'll unpack a little bit of exactly what you did to get it there.
What was revenue when you exited? Yeah, so when we exited, revenue was right at $30 million with a $30 million annual in revenue with a projected next 12 months of really close to $35 million in revenue. full agent to dealer migration and growth and all the acquisitions had kicked in.
And at that point in time at 30 million, you know, we were a three to $4 million a year EBITDA business as well. And so probably a little harder as the business became a dealer, you know, the expectation to have a 20%, you know, bottom line became a little bit more, you know, difficult to achieve. But, you know, there was so much more revenue there.
And, you know, it ended up, you know, ended up being a good deal.
Yeah. And how long did it take you to grow from five to 30 million?
Well, that took us... Let's see, that took us five years. So five.
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