A Searcher’s Second Act: Building a $25m Holdco

Miller and Weber and getting into these other, like going full throttle into some of these industries that it was already in? We did.

And so I kind of have to talk about this in like two chapters. So there's like the chapter up until the point I sold the combined companies and then I bought those companies back recently. And so we're still kind of in it, but, um, you know, kind of up to the, kind of in the first chapter, um,

Today, Miller & Weber still exists as part of LK, and we have a lot more work on the food processing side that's just turned out to be a really big growth sector. There's some regionality to that, you know, in terms of where you're located and can drive kind of where your customers come from. But...

you know we have built kind of an expertise around being able to do certain kinds of calibrations in these industries and within these customer sets and um it's nice to i mean it's almost clockwork we can kind of say like these will be the sets of customers that come to us every june and every july of every year and that's that's nice compared to an oil and gas business yeah absolutely great

All right, Eric, well, let's start closing out this chapter of your story with LK. As you said, you're now owner of LK again, which is we'll get there. But let's close your kind of first search story out with how that ended.

And then because we got a lot of ground to cover on what you've been building since TXE. So. Tell us about the exit of LK.

So we sold the business at the end of 2018 and we sold it to a private equity group out of New York who was investing in... kind of everything that LK did on the gas side. So we were in, a lot of our product service, the oil, part of the oil and gas industry, this private equity group was trying to build out a thesis on testing.

And so we were a fit for their portfolio because we brought in kind of another half to what they were doing. We were not for sale per se. We were, you know, naturally when you do a search, there's an exit somewhere down the line, but we weren't actively marketing or looking to do anything in the immediate term.

And it had only been two-ish years at that point. It would have been closer to about three years. So we bought it in 2015.

We're talking about mid-year 2018. 2015, yeah. And so when we got approached by this, you know, we kind of grouped up, me and Rick and Royce and talked about, you know, could this be the right time to exit? And I think we were all of the opinion that it very well could be because we had come out of the industry, you know, dip.

We had fully integrated this Miller and Weber business by now. And so this was kind of the earliest we would want to have anyone take a look, you know, at the business because we were, you know, doing reasonably well. And so... As that process unfolded, it turned out that, you know, kind of from our perspective, this felt like it really fit in well to the private equity groups platform company…