The Origin Story of a Compounder ($80m and Counting)

And then it wasn't until we had the pending acquisition that we went out and raised more money to close that deal so that we could approach a partially different set of investors with a very straightforward story of this is the return that you're going to get from the money that you put into this business.

And we were able to raise on, on very good terms in that way because we weren't, you know, we weren't, we weren't starting from something like traditional fund economics. We were starting from what is a really great return that you can get on the money that you put in on this deal. And, and we're not going to force you to commit to putting future money in.

Okay, so you had some quote unquote, angel money, angel investment to build the software platform from software people, but kind of who also understood rollups. And then, so you were living on that, kind of building on that. And then when you found Stanley Ruth, you raised yet more with this, with this actual deal in hand and, and a model built around this single deal, this single acquisition.

Exactly. So we raised a little bit under a million dollars of equity for that first deal. And we tried to raise it from people who we knew could come in for a lot more and would be interested in coming in for a lot more. If we could show the success and show the merits of each deal as we, as it came up and give.

Us a sense of the size of Stanley Ruth.

Yeah, yeah.

So Stanley Ruth at the time was about four and a half million in revenue, about 20 to 30 some odd employees and about 1.2 million in EBITDA. I think for us what was really attractive about the business was that it was primarily recurring and repeating customer base. They were servicing or still are high end, you know, high net worth individuals in Manhattan.

So they had a large contract pool. They had a lot of customers that had been around for, you know, 30, 40 some odd years because the business was a hundred plus year old company operating in the, you know, in the Manhattan market. So if we didn't have customers that had been with us for, you know, 40 years, their families may have been using us for 40 years.

And they were maybe the second or third generation to own a home that was being serviced by Stanley roof technicians.

Wow.

It was, yeah, it was a really,.