It's like, how do you go hire the right team? How do you go to a new strategy? Like, do you want to go geographic, do you buy another company?
Acquiring Minds
60% Concentration That Killed an Exit
Episode
Excerpts · 620 segments · ~1:49:21 long
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05:02 Background: finance to search fund11:05 Fundraising and finding the deal14:39 The salon POS business26:23 SaaS conversion and deal terms33:48 Building HQ and team in Minnesota45:15 Growth and POS market getting hot55:16 Going to market, buyer walks1:01:31 Whistleblower, lawsuit, settlement1:26:13 Buying back software for Zenoti1:30:02 Lessons and searching again
You talk about all these potential levers of growth, but you never actually execute on them. And I wanted to go execute.
Great. Okay, so you decide to search. Is there anything to say about your fundraise or searching process before we get to the business itself?
I mean, because I didn't come from a big school, it took me a lot longer than probably most. You know, I didn't come from the traditional search schools and had to learn it from just asking and talking to a lot of people. I mean, I must have talked to 30 to 40 searchers or post searchers or operators or anyone in the space, those that had closed down.
I drove around the country to. Flew around the country to meet people and sit with them, kind of understand their environments.
Former searchers, you mean?
Yeah, and current searchers too. Like, if there were multiple in the city and usually the hubs like Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, you can find more of an influx of people. So I just sat with them and I was like, look, I love to understand how your search process goes, what this model looks like. So, yeah,
great. And then the fundraise itself took longer again, but you. And you kind of just networked your way into the traditional search fund investors
who were active at the time. Yeah, I created a big list, the database. Again, this is like where you found one.
Because there used to be, like, only a handful of search fund investors, and you find one. And a lot of the search fund websites look the same. Like, here's my team, and you find one, and then you find all the other 15 other people that were in it, and you create a table and you just start to see who's really active.
Like, you know, the, the Pacific Lakes, the search fund partners, the anacapas. Like, you start seeing their names over and over again, and you can start to create, like, who's a real search fund investor and who's someone's uncle, you know, that's done one deal. And, you know, it was kind of a dog with a bone.
Like, people said no. And I said, okay, we'll start there, but I'll come back. And so I had many people that said no.
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