How 1 SBA Loan Brought Down 2 Businesses

Yeah, no, we hear it over and over from people in geographies that are growing, North Carolina, Texas, that particularly if they're in home services, that that's an incredible tailwind that can correct for a lot of, you know, weaknesses in your own operations sometimes. Okay, Edgar, thank you for all of that. Now, let's. As I said, there's a lot of story here.

There's the kind of the story of two businesses or two acquisitions in one. Let's hear now about the second acquisition. This was in Dallas, please. Yeah, begin.

So while structure down here really focused on landscaping, think plants, grass, turf, artificial turf. They did that, but they also did a lot more of like, covered patios, outdoor kitchens, more of the outdoor living, which is something that the owners down here had stayed away from. I think they. They had like one bad outdoor kitchen, and they were like, we don't do that.

And. But we had customers on here always saying, like, hey, we have outdoor kitchen. Like, we want this. We want a covered pergola, we want, et cetera, et cetera. So we saw that as an opportunity.

The Dallas business didn't do nearly as much landscaping, and we thought, hey, we can kind of cross pollinate these two. There's some opportunity there. Another thing we'd really been exploring in Austin was Maintenance.

So we, we don't do, we don't do maintenance down here. But they had a maintenance arm up there and we figured, okay, we're going to learn some things there. We already knew what you hear about, you know, maintenance, landscape maintenance, super low margin, kind of race to the bottom, very price conscious customers, but it keeps the lights on.

Like if projects slow down, you, you at least have this sort of more, more steady, reoccurring revenue. So we thought there was really good opportunity to, to cross pollinate these two. The Dallas business was a little bit bigger.

They had done 6 million the, the year before the acquisition. Their EBITDA was slightly larger than structure. They had 950,000 in SDE.

So it's like a 16% margin. They had a much more robust team in terms of operations as well. They had a bookkeeper in house, they had a couple designers and full time salespeople, like base and commission salespeople.

Down here, we were just commission only salespeople. They had an actual office with. Not that the office was like super necessary.

They had a really nice showroom. And so what really appealed to us was them bringing clients in, showing them like, you know, the showroom actually had an outdoor kitchen built in, being able to sit them down with big screen showing them their 3D model. And they just had what seemed to me like a very much more robust operation, like sales operations specifically.