You’ve Been Served: Buying a $1.3m Process-Serving Company

And I could easily knock out five or 10 of those a day. So just a quick way to get by in that interim period. At that time, I wasn't anticipating buying a process service company, nor was I anticipating that I'd be the owner of a business less than two years later.

And that guy who served your papers answered you, what, over $100? Over $100.

Okay. So pick us back up. So how do you then proceed to try to do this on your own?

So I was serving papers. I was contracting with various process service companies in Houston. The next step for me was going to be to find some clients that were actual legal firms and lawyers.

It was never supposed to be a long-term thing. It was just supposed to be something that gets me through whatever the next step would be for me. At the same time, I was interviewing at large corporations. I was interviewing at other investment banks.

um my heart just wasn't in any of those interviews um maybe it was because the emotional uh you know the the emotional roller coaster i was going through as a result of divorce maybe it was just because i didn't want to go back to that because it had eroded my previous relationship and i just wanted to do something different for myself and so while i was interviewing at all these different…

grow this process service business that I'd started, if I wanted to acquire a company that was in a completely different space, or if I, you know, I was just kind of going through a transition at that moment. So there's a lot of different options presented to me. And, you know, I was not expecting to buy the company that I was contracting with.

and so to be clear how this worked raj at this stage is you said this this serving company that you'd spun up and by that you essentially just mean you know a single person llc it was you contracting your services to companies that farm this out essentially yeah exactly exactly larger larger national process service companies and regional ones as well

And so they'd call you or email you, or maybe there's some sort of, you know, a website where there's a queue and you pick off jobs or something. And so you were doing that on a one-off basis, getting paid, you know, a hundred bucks a pop plus.

So the option there was to continue, well, the W-2 that you just explained to us, but if you were going to go the entrepreneurial route, you could have continued growing this zero to one enterprise, as you said, or... As it turned out, you could also buy an existing one of these businesses. Why did you... So did you end up pursuing the buy this business because you'd learned about ETA? So...

So I learned about ETA, but separately, I started developing a relationship with the owner of Lone Star Attorney Service, a gentleman named Patrick Yoder. He had also bought this company as a searcher. He didn't call himself a searcher.