Yeah, so Nicholas, regarding also the research that you mentioned, I'm not familiar with the details besides being a baby, but it's also about leverage, right? And when you are operating large caps, you can really leverage the business. You can get, depending on the quality of the asset, very good price debt.
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2 Years to $40m: The Anatomy of a High-Velocity Roll-up
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With small targets, that's not a possibility, right? As you scale, that starts to be more and more. But when you start, you cannot leverage businesses that much.
multiple expansion. It is there and the potential actually for multiple expansion is huge, but for us, it's mostly operational complexity. So going operational value add. So going to your point, I mean, once we were into the industry, we really researched
the best players that are public companies, right? So we purred through transcripts of quarterly reports. We went and read the industry reports on, for example, API group.
We look at other groups that were not doing so great in the UK, for example, Marlou PLC. And then obviously you have everything about route management, about quality technicians to create corrective work after the inspections. You hear about the importance of being quick to provide service to your customers and to program your routes correctly.
So you know that intellectually, however, once you sit in a very small business with no sophisticated IT, with very basically educated people, You see what you could get done in small business. So we set up some parameters, mainly about revenue per technician.
There was a minimum for us to get interesting markets. We set the ratio of back office personnel to front office.
office personnel and with those very simple parameters i'm i'm missing a bit you know a bit more of details but we were not all in of this is the vision and every business has to be like that we said at least we need to get to x many euros per technician and we have to keep the back office at this size and the um and the rest flows from there right so we had an invite but we were working on it…
And I have to imagine that being out there talking to so many business owners in any given month or quarter... You just accelerate your learning so much. You come from consulting.
You're used to having to learn fast. But this whole belief system that you have had to be in an industry for 10, 20, 30 years in order to be an expert, it doesn't have to be true if you can so rapidly educate yourself by talking to dozens and dozens of business owners and comparing all the companies in the space.
No, for sure. And look, we, despite our background, we don't want to go with the idea that we're smarter or we know better about the industry. What we're sure is that we are more willing and, you know, coming from tech, I have that...
uh inclination to try small experiments and if they don't work they don't work uh for example right now we'll talk about it later but we're now uh being ai first in everything that we do we started integrating ai into the scheduling of the routes with the customer
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