Like time is not. I understand obviously, and can calculate the time value of money and the time impact on IRR and all that good stuff. But to me, you know, you spend two years becoming good at searching and you become incrementally better and then the likelihood of finding being more successful in that, like next six months. So what does it really matter?
Acquiring Minds
From Small Acquisition to $30m Industry Leader
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You, you might pick a better business, you might have far better returns. Like it would be. So do you know, is anyone studying like the correlation between returns and search initial search time?
Well, not that I know of, no. It's an interesting question. And similarly on this point that you're making an episode that will have aired a few weeks before you.
Robin, Megan McGee. Megan did a traditional search fund search for two years. Ran out of the basically of our. And usually that two years is basically correlated to kind of the budget that you're given with your fund and you spend it down.
But her investors actually encouraged her to re up and search for another year or whatever because they made the same point that you make, which is like now you're really a really experienced searcher. They have de. Risked her. They've gotten to see her process for two years, how she searched, how she communicated and so on for two years.
So, so, so though we do throw around this two year thing as if as a rule, I encourage people to think about it as not an arbitrary or, or fixed, unmovable time frame. It may be that you're. Even if you don't find something in two years, if you've done a good job as a searcher, even if you haven't consummated on a deal, your investors may be willing to re up.
They may have liked what they seen if they de risk you and they want you to keep at it. So interesting that this hasn't really come up at all in 400 episodes and it's coming up twice in a couple of weeks. So anyway, point taken.
It's so interesting. Yeah, I know over the years I've had like people who have quit who would have been great business owners. Right. And they just didn't.
They got unlucky or whatever. Yeah. So I really think the two years is arbitrary and I'm excited to hear that. That's, that's changing.
I think if you want to create a sustainable entity, it takes much longer than five to seven years. I think if you. For me, it was like I just became a new mom. I was still figuring out life.
Took me a year just to figure out what I wanted to do. Did I want to be in a manufacturing environment, an office environment? Took me another year to just figure out like what is a really good business, right?
Like what are the characterist of a business that is worth, that could endure and be scaled and, and you know, I looked at hundreds of businesses before I developed that like muscle memory and definition in my own mind of what a good business is. And I think every investor has a different definition of what a business, good business is to them. And then it took me another year just meeting with…
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