We met at UT's ETA event in Austin in February and I have since been eager to share your journey with the audience. And that was even before some of the dramatic events that have happened since. We have a lot of story, a lot of themes to cover today.
Acquiring Minds
How 1 SBA Loan Brought Down 2 Businesses
Episode
Excerpts · 478 segments · ~1:34:10 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
03:45 Background: construction to consulting13:10 Meeting Matthias, operating partner deal17:23 Equity structure and personal guarantee24:37 Austin landscaping business details31:55 Dallas acquisition thesis43:01 Undisclosed commission liability surfaces53:35 Employees stealing customers, competitor1:03:58 Dallas bankruptcy and personal fallout1:16:25 Shutting down Austin business1:23:07 Custom AI-built software for landscaping
Let's get right into it. Some background on you to start, please, Edgar.
Yeah, for sure. I won't take you all the way back here, but I grew up right outside of New Orleans. I went to undergrad for math. I thought I wanted to be an engineer and that kind of path led me down a construction path.
My first job was for a family owned construction business ran out of New Orleans. They were much larger, I think they were probably 80 million a year revenue, but that was kind of my first, my first job, first introduction to a family owned business. Right. Much larger operation.
Got to work across the Gulf coast on different industrial installation projects and cut my teeth there for five years. Everything from field engineer to planner, scheduler, estimator, and finished out at project manager. And yeah, about five years in I realized that the ceiling was kind of very near me.
The guy I reported to, he reported to the owner. So there wasn't going to be much opportunity or growth. That led me to exploring different options and decided to pursue an mba, which is why my wife and I ended up moving to Austin where I got my MBA in 2020 at McCombs Business School and went into Deloitte Consulting.
Spent two years there, did a ton of really cool work, really enjoyed my time there. Worked a lot, but worked with construction clients also everything from procurement to data strategy.
And ultimately decided that in order to have the life I wanted, which was mostly more time to start a family, I really needed to pivot, started to look for a business and actually took a brief detour to Google where I spent, I want to say like two months before being laid off, before I actually acquired a business. And those two months were very short, but it gave me a great opportunity. Google…
They vested some of my equity ahead of time and I had just got a signing bonus. So that was actually the capital that I used to do a self funded search. I spent 10 months looking for a business and used some of that as well as for the, for the down payment.
So two months at Google.
Yeah.
Got you a signing bonus, some vested equity and a generous severance package. That is the way to play it.
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