Buying a Business to Balance Ambition and Kids

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Well, that was one of those things that you find out when you're a little bit more intelligent. At the end of the day, you always know more once you close the business, right? So there was really no data, no tracking that I knew of when I was doing the due diligence.

My QOV provider also didn't really see any that would tell me the ratio between one time and recurring revenue. So I asked that explicitly and I have a document where it's written that the owner gave me and she said 90 to 10. I'm like 90% recurring.

10% was one time. I was like, okay, this is perfect. And that's around that the industry average actually. So it's pretty good.

So I was like, oh perfect. So I don't even have to work really hard. Like I just need to almost maintain and I'll be fine.

I'll be able to service my dad, yada, yada, all happy times. And then when I get the business round out. No, almost, almost. When I get the business.

This is like a week before closing, we had done shadowing. I have gone to this location. So I knew what the job was about and then I told the sellers, okay, the last thing I don't understand or don't know is like, how do you get your money?

So she's like, okay, I pay someone to do my invoice thing, I'm like, okay, so I just want to spend one hour with those people and learn what you do. So I spent one hour, and I looked at what they did, and then I looked at the numbers, and I was like, wait a second. If I multiplied all of the invoices you send every month, this doesn't come up to 90% of revenue.

This comes to 70% of revenue. And by that time, it was almost too late to do anything, and I was already, like, sure, I wanted to take this business. So I decided to just go for it, hopeful that with a little bit more effort, I would close the gap.

But, yeah, I had less quality revenue than I thought when I was buying the business. So to anyone listening, ask for invoices. It did not occur to me to ask for invoices, partially because I wanted to really maintain trust with the seller.