Buying Small to Build for the Long Term ($300k SDE)

And, and so I think she, she's been phenomenal. I, frankly, I, I don't know if I could have done this whole thing without her. I, I think having a spouse that's, that's on board is, is definitely a superpower in this.

Great. Brendan. Well, got you for just a few more minutes and want to hear now about what your ownership period has looked like. It's been. When did you close?

Touch over a year. Okay. High level. How, how have things gone and, and match line that up with your expectations.

Yeah, I mean, so far things have gone really well. They've beat expectations significantly into it. I, I, I would tell everybody, you know, I'd be happy if in the first year, if we were flat, you know, and then kind of grow from there.

Fortunately, you know, we ended 2025, so I didn't even have, I had what, nine months, nine and a half months in 2025. We ended 2025 up 25% in revenue. Eida up, you know, roughly 40% and just getting a lot of the building blocks in place like implementing EOs, establishing a leadership team, establishing regular weekly meetings and some key processes that we needed to create.

So definitely a big success so far. And so far in 2026, we want to grow another 25% this year. Really what we're trying to peg our growth to is we want to grow by net new one to two people per year.

That is the goal. And for now, yeah, that looks like 25% growth. And, and we're a little, we're actually a little bit ahead of schedule now. I would caught like, don't get me wrong, we are killing it so far and it's having success early on post acquisition is such a total blessing because it gives you a lot of, you know, my guys look at me now and they're like, you know, still don't fully…

So which is, which has bought a lot of goodwill. But I would also just, just like, part of the reason we were able to grow for EBITDA 40% in the first year is just because we had excess capacity. Right. Like we're not going to be able to do that every year.

That's not a repeatable thing. But it does show just how much slack there can be in these, in these businesses especially, I think when you buy small.

I'm just trying to see what my intuition says to that because I just feel like the smaller the team, the more likely it is to be overworked. Usually big team team suggests bloat, small team suggests overly lean, need to hire people to, to absorb some of the over capacity.

Yeah, I do. I agree with you there generally, but I think the smaller you buy, well, maybe not always the smaller, but a combination of, you know, buying smaller and finding like a one in a million scenario like I found where, you know, the owner was living in Tahoe and the business was shrinking, but slowly, all that kind of stuff.