Second-Time CEO Buys a $30m Title Company

That's right.

And, and you try to buy a piece of the business, that doesn't happen. But connect the dots there from, from, from, you know, understanding that you want equity in all of this value that you've added to deciding to buy your own small business, that they're connected, but that's still quite a, quite a leap.

And that was kind of my intro to the, hey, if you do a good job running businesses, they're willing to give you some skin here to really get some upside. And so that was the thing that made me realize, hey, I could be doing the same thing, but with a lot more upside for all the work that we do. And I also was in YPO at the time.

I got to know a couple folks who did search funds. And so I started to kind of learn all of this about the same time. And, and it really became clear to myself and my wife, in all fairness, that we wanted to do something different.

If we're going to put this much time and effort into building a business, we want to have some skin in the game.

And so how does it finally gel that what you're going to do is some version of a search? It sounds like initially you didn't do it, weren't going to do a search fund, you were going to do some other format. So now please do again, walk us through the evolution of your search.

Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, I took a little time off and it was wonderful. But it came time to start looking and we really were focused in the Twin Cities to try and find a business. We looked in a lot of markets, worked with a couple of family offices, and, you know, we saw a number of deals.

I don't know that I, you know, looking back on it, I'm probably glad we didn't do any of those deals. But they were a little slower to pull the trigger on getting a deal done. And after spending nine months of my own money, my own time out there looking, I had a couple friends who said, hey, the search fund thing, you have investors who are behind you.

It's committed capital. You pay yourself a salary and they really, they want to get a deal done. And so after I lost my last deal because I had an investor kind of get wishy washy in and out of a deal, I made a commitment to myself and my family that we're going to go do a search fund.

And I got some amazing introductions and we raised a fund pretty quickly and ended up kicking it off in. Oh, gosh, Was that late 2018? I think 2019.

Great. And just a couple follow up there. So you, first of all, you're referring to we as you and your wife. Is she actively involved or. She, she's not, but she's the genius behind the.