Well, Robin, we are. We haven't gotten into your operations at all. It's been. You. You bought it when then?
Acquiring Minds
From Small Acquisition to $30m Industry Leader
Excerpts · 540 segments · ~1:40:54 long
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15, 2000? October 2014.
October 2014. So it's. You're into your 12th year now. We're not going to. We're going to hear pretty abbreviated recounting of those 12 years, but there's still a couple interesting details to the search itself that I don't want to leave. Namely, you're meeting with local owners.
And speaking of scale, how you scaled that, how many meetings did you have over how long?
Oh, thousands. Just thousands. I mean, I think it's funny when I go back to HBS now and I hear about how the young guns are doing it with their, like, the machines that they build and their interns, and I'm like, wow, they're so smart. Like, that's not what I did. I, like, literally put the baby in the car, started driving around, finding industrial parks that were, like, you know, within 30…
And then, you know, started, like, dropped off my, like, printed brochure and was like, hey, well, I kind of want to be an entrepreneur. Like you. Like, do you think you might have time for coffee? Like, I want to. I want to hear what your day is like and see whether that could be for me.
And my, like, Ashok's genuine personality or approach is very different from the, like, let's send out 3,000 flyers and see which three email us back, right. That a lot of success, successful searchers are use. And I, I probably would subscribe that that's a better model for people who are on a time clock and want to just find, you know, something that's really ready to transact.
The downside with my approach is I got. I had a lot of coffees and meetings where people just wanted to meet me. Not, not necessarily interested in.
In selling their businesses. Right. But that really helped me develop that muscle of what do I want to do for the next 30 years? What kind of business do I want to be in, what kind of environment?
And so, yeah, I had a very. A different approach to my search. I don't. I don't know if it would work today.
Well, what do you think? You're the expert.
Well, I actually think that could work. There are people who are still doing what you do. They're kind of in person, either physical mail or literally, there are a couple stories of people knocking on the doors and talking their way through reception to the owner's back office.
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