So you make a lot of sacrifices and, you know, tiny violin on for a CEO there. But, but at the end of the day, you're putting a lot into it and, and you really hope to get rewarded for what you're doing. And it definitely, I don't know if it scarred me, but it certainly set me on the course that we're on today.
Acquiring Minds
Second-Time CEO Buys a $30m Title Company
Episode
Excerpts · 345 segments · ~1:22:28 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
05:00 Lawyer to CEO at 2911:00 Wanting equity, path to search18:28 Accessing search capital mid-career23:41 Finding and understanding Meridian Title33:40 Title industry cyclicality risk46:59 Deal structure and financing55:15 F reorg saves the deal59:09 Reps and warranties surprise1:05:59 Leadership changes and CFO1:13:04 EOS Lite operating model
Meridian, tell us about the business that you found.
Yeah, we found an amazing title company here in Indiana, which is where my wife and family, we all ended up moving in 2021, after we closed on the business. I had seen a title company come to market early in Covid, so it was probably April of 2020. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting.
I know insurance, I know financial services. I don't know title, but I can probably figure this thing out. And inevitably it was in Idaho.
We decided maybe not Idaho. We can go a lot of places, but we're not ready for Idaho. No offense to anyone there.
It's beautiful. But we waited a little bit longer. I studied the market, tried to understand the business a little bit better because it was a brokered business. So I hadn't yet done my homework on the space and really came to find that the title industry, while cyclical, historically existing home sales have gone up in a really steady path.
It's not recurring revenue, but it's high, repeat revenue. Customer concentration is really low. Private equity really hadn't been in the space, or financial buyers really hadn't come into the space a whole lot.
And then Meridian hit the market in June of 2020. It was a bigger company, really similar size to what I had left. And they were doing on average about 30 million in revenue.
And we'll say between 2 and 3 in EBITDA for the prior years. And now in 2020, numbers started to spike courtesy of COVID and lower rates. But it looked like an attractive opportunity.
I really wanted something where I could jump into where I had left off and didn't have to rebuild it, didn't have to fix it, and that's what we got. The deal itself took a really, a really long time to get done.
Let me pause you there, Randy. We're going to get into.
Into that, absolutely.
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