Acquiring a $7m Niche Marketing Agency with 50 Employees

And this line of work with, you know, everybody in the office together every day, when you bring in a consultant plus new owner, I think that can be pretty intimidating for the employee group. And so while I personally believe he was very net positive, I would recognize that maybe get your feet underneath you and don't start pushing a bunch of best practices right off the bat. Really try to…

And so I would have, in retrospect, probably would have waited a couple of weeks, months before, you know, going down that path if I did want to still try to have someone from a consulting background.

That's right.

And then you close the deal and you continue working with this, this industry expert consultant and bring them now into, bring this person into the business to start talking about implementing best practices, which is, you know, the C word change. And so, and so you feel that you maybe did that second engagement with the consultant too aggressively because new owner consultant, talking about all…

And as we know, employees chafe at all of that. They're skittish in that moment. And so one of the arts of this world is figuring out the right moment and cadence to introduce change. You feel like you did it too soon, too aggressively.

That's right. And one of the reasons why I really fell in love with the business was because of the team and the people. Excellent group of folks. Really strong leadership, team already in place.

You know, we kind of joke that like the kind of hit by the bus, the win the lottery. If that happened, you know, the business would continue on like it really. You know, I like to think I'm a net benefit, especially on the, you know, as we're trying to grow and think about strategy.

But there's folks that have been in this business for several years and know what they're doing and do it extremely well. And so I think getting in there, working with the team, building those relationships first as a team, deciding, hey, let's push ourselves to really benchmark ourselves against industry standards would have been the better approach than to kind of come in hot.

The deal closed kind of at that end of the year, started the new year. So it was this person coming in to help with annual planning and strategic planning for the year. So maybe if the timing of the deal was different, maybe it wouldn't have kind of played out like it did.

But yeah, I mean it's only just something to learn from and I think at this point I've been operating for about six months and you know, been top of mind to build those relationships, did the kind of one on one tour with every employee would highly recommend that does feel like that's kind of like a no brainer.

But again, you know, it's hard to carve out that time in the moment, but building that trust is huge and you know, try to remind myself to carve out more time to continue to have good one on ones and an open door policy.