From Searcher to Sponsor: How to Buy a $22m Business

of back into a similar model where it might become kind of serial acquiring where hey you know i've done this hopefully proven a track record floor guard's been successful people you know trust that you know if i'm putting my name behind a deal that you know i believe in it and you could see myself raising you know more equity to go run another business that um that could kind of be in that same…

I early on in my career, I thought I could map out exactly what everything would be. You know, when I was first in consulting, I thought, oh yeah, I'm going to map out my 20 year path and it's going to be, I'm going to be a partner by this date. And then it's going to be lovely.

And I know right now I love operating. I, I see a lot of growth potential for floor guard. I think that I don't think I'll ever go back to

corporate that that's not in the cards for me. I want to stay in the small, medium business world, but I could see that either, you know, doing kind of what I'm doing with FloorGuard again and kind of raising another fund. I could see, you know, potentially, you know, joining kind of a large, you know, FloorGuard becomes part of a larger organization at some point for the next acquirer, kind of…

And then, you know, maybe going in, you know, becoming more of a, an investor for a little while. I'm taking a little bit of a break. So. Yeah. I don't know. But I can tell you that I don't want to continue just doing a ton of deals and step away from FloorGuard and have another CEO run that.

The only way I could ever see that happening is if we buy maybe one more company where I would install, you know, maybe a general manager for FloorGuard and maybe we buy a coatings company that's... in an adjacent space, pipes or furniture or something like that. And maybe I go and operate that company because it's a little fresher and needs more integration.

But, you know, I really want to keep doing what I'm doing and really grow this as large as it can, because I think there's a ton of growth potential for floor guard. And I think we're I think it'll be, you know, hopefully as much of a rocket ship as we can make it over the next four or five years.

And about that timeline, Jan, so that is just to double underline it, that's a key implied difference between the sponsor and searcher model where often searchers want to hold indefinitely. What if you wanted to hold the business for longer? What if you wanted to hold the business for 10 years indefinitely?

What if so much of the value that you're creating here... building out a distribution network and enabling contractors to become better at their own businesses to create all that pull through demand for you. There's a tailwind here.

You think that there's a lot of opportunity in epoxy and actually in epoxy installers that that industry is actually underserved. it's going to take more than four or five years for all of that to truly come to fruition. What if you wanted to do it for 10 years?

Or what if you wanted to be active for 10 years and then hold it for the next 20? Does the sponsor model prohibit that? Or is there a way to do that? And just how do you think about...