A $10m Acquisition for Freedom and Family

spiral bound, a journal, calendar, whatever it is, they know how to get you from, hey, here's my manuscript, but I can't figure out the formatting to it's ready for print. That process is called pre-flight. We do have a pre-flight team, but anytime you have questions, customer service is what deals with that.

So that'll take me time to learn. Pre-flight, again, it'll take me time to learn. But those are also, aspects of the business that have to do with learning software and process and all of that I can figure out.

I do have some hardware manufacturing in my background. But... the nuts and bolts of these million dollar machines that can do several pages of high quality color printing in one second. And, you know, when it goes down, figuring out what's wrong and being able to debug it myself, I think I'm quite far away from that level of expertise.

What do the following Acquiring Minds guests all have in common? Doug Johns, Morley Desai, Tim Erickson, Chirag Shaw, Shane Ersam. They all went through the Acquisition Lab, the accelerator and community for people serious about buying a business.

but they represent just a sliver of the lab's success stories. The number of deals across the lab's cohorts now stands at over 120, with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value. The Acquisition Lab was founded by Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build, the book that introduced so many of you to the very idea of buying a business.

The lab offers a month-long intensive, almost daily Q&A sessions with advisors, live deal reviews with Walker, deal team introductions, and an active community of serious searchers. Check out acquisitionlab.com, link in the notes, or email the lab's co-founder, Chelsea Wood, chelsea at buythenbuild.com.

And let's actually hear a little bit more about these machines. So this is a business with serious capex. Yes. Interestingly, you liked that.

Yeah, that's not the kind of canonical search business where you're looking for low capex. Why did you like it?

I liked it first and foremost because there's a moat around the business, right? So if... somebody hears about this and says, hey, this is a great business with great margins. Why don't I start it up?

It's not a matter of helping, you know, of AI helping you create some no-code solution and finding a couple of customers and, you know, testing it out and iterating. You have to have, you know, at least a million dollars to even get started. And that's on the secondhand market where there might be used machines and service levels might not be as they are here.

It is an investment. And so by nature, there is a moat around it. And as we talked about, the machines also, you need to have some training to operate them, right?