Buying and Building a Xerox Dealer to $30m

And I guess it very much, of course, depends on the size of business. If the business is very small, you're going to need to get in there and lead whether or not you like it, just because there's not enough capacity for. for there not to be leadership.

Maybe your business was of a size where you could ease into that role and take the time to learn, to take everybody out and spend hours with them and meet them. But anyway, how do you address that at that point?

You know, get there an hour early, spend the first two hours of every day, you know, working on the business and learning and, you know, whatever I needed to take care of. And then the next six hours being with people out in the field or something like that. And then. maybe staying an hour after work or something like that to work on the business again.

And so, you know, I would love to tell business owners that when you jump in, yeah, you buy the business and you're playing golf every Wednesday and Friday afternoon, but that's not really the case. If you want to, you know, do it correctly, it oftentimes, you know, requires not just 40 hour weeks, but 50 and 60 hour weeks to. you know, set the stage or lay the foundation to be able to, you know,…

But that's how it worked, you know, best for me in my scenario.

And how did you treat your acquisitions? You didn't do the same program with the subsequent acquisitions?

Well, I still spent quality time with them. Maybe I couldn't spend a whole day. But try to spend, you know, go on two or three appointments with them or whatnot.

I did. I tried to do that as much as I could. It became harder. And I think that's the thing that you really have to be mindful of as you grow. you know, any businesses that, you know, the business you have at 10 people is not going to be the same business you have at 80 and 90, a hundred people versus a thousand people.

And again, back to what I was talking about Xerox, you know, how hard it became for them to run an agent program and do all that on a national scale. Yeah. You know, you have to continue to reinvent ways to push decision making down to your to your people within your organization.

And I had to learn to rely on other great leaders, you know, within our organization to lead the way I would want to lead whenever I, you know, we it became, you know, big enough to where I was not able to touch all parts of the business. And. What I found through that process was that, hey, there's people, there's a lot of people out there better than what you are and then hire them for their…

And man, then you can really achieve some great things. And so some really good lessons, you know, through all of that. That was great, Jeff.