Brian, you bought Citi Publications Atlanta, a direct advertising business for local service providers. The business was quite small. Your goal is to grow it 10x in 5 years.
Acquiring Minds
No SBA, No Investors: The Liquidity Access Line
Episode
Excerpts · 321 segments · ~1:15:36 long
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06:08 Background and Adobe career13:46 Why ETA over VC and corporate14:49 Finding the deal via network19:54 What Citi Publications does28:18 Growth assumptions vs reality36:26 Analog revolution thesis44:07 Buying small as a hedge47:12 Liquidity access line financing1:02:25 Franchise FDD diligence lessons1:10:14 Results and growth outlook
Let's dive in. Can we get some background on you please?
To begin Brian Absolutely, yeah. So I live in Atlanta. I've got two degrees from the University of Georgia.
I had an advertising undergraduate, went into big tech consulting, program management, later into sales and account direction. Um, also have an MBA that I took. I got a few years outside of school in Atlanta, so a lot of time in Atlanta working locally and I can get more into it but really got the bug for ETA around 2023, 2024 and got some inspiration that drove me ultimately to acquire the…
Well Brian, give us a little bit more of your career history so we understand where you're coming from, your years at Adobe, et cetera.
Sure, yeah. So I came out of school, I worked at a digital agency here in Atlanta and so we were supporting some of the big Fortune 5000 in Atlanta, mostly with digital marketing, software implementation services and consulting. I was a program manager, so really learned the ropes from understanding business requirements and what are the businesses really asking of this technology. So that really…
Most of the software we were recommending and implementing was the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of solutions, which is, if folks aren't familiar, it's, it's kind of the go to suite for the, the top companies for enterprises when it comes to digital marketing. We work alongside your Salesforce, CRM and some of the other extensions that you've probably heard of. So there was a couple folks.
My boss brought me over from the agency into Adobe, which I was there for about nine years. Grew up through the program management side and consulting side within Adobe and ultimately got went into consulting. And in 2024 I was an account director.
So I actually managed a $34 million book of business owning the relationship with the C suite. So that's mostly chief marketing officers, chief technology officers, intermediary between our technology and product teams and all the customer success and helping them realize the value out of their investment.
So you know, I always thought going into my career when I was earlier on and especially at Adobe, I, I don't know what path I'm going to take, but I want that C suite title. Like I want to be influencing the business and running the business and as I progress to that account director role, it's kind of the pinnacle of where you can go as an individual contributor. And I got a feel for what that…
At the same time starting a family. My wife and I have two girls now and had kind of a values assessment. So all these things are happening at once and I'm actually thinking is this corporate ladder what I want to commit to?
What's on the other side? So seeing how that C suite operated, engaging with them personally and then at the same time I mentioned I got some inspiration. So I had a friend who left another company called Clary and bought a local boring business and that really turned me on to eta.
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