And so to, to think about it, and so, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 or 60% of, of that is going to be leverage that we use. And so that's, say you're targeting $100 million of acquisitions, that's call it 40 to 60 million. That's way more than what the $5 million SBA loan is limit. Is, Is that the way that you thought about it?
Acquiring Minds
The Origin Story of a Compounder ($80m and Counting)
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That's exactly right. And just as your math, I think is generally right, you know, we would hit that limit way before we got to, you know, $100 million of. Of purchases. So we, we probably would have hit that limit within and in our minds within a year or two.
You know, it did take us a little bit longer to. To grow at that. That pace in the first couple of years that we expected. But, but we, we still had that vision and wanted to make sure that we were committing to the vision that we had.
And I was throwing out that number. A hundred million for easy math.
Yeah.
Is it something where the three of you sat down and we. And said, we want to acquire this much of enterprise value in this industry or this much of EBITDA in this industry? Did, did you kind of have a number that you worked back from, or was there some other way that you approached it, get into the weeds a little bit there?
Yeah. You know, I think it's funny because we, We've elevated our ambitions several times throughout the process, so we didn't necessarily think in terms of enterprise value, but we thought starting out that we would buy 10 companies that were around the Stanley Ruth type of profile, and maybe that'd be a little more, a little bit less, depending on whether some of them were larger or smaller.
But in the early days, we thought, if we can do 10 of these, manage them well, develop them, digitize them, which of course, we thought, you know, digitizing them and managing them, that would be super easy. Obviously, there's a lot of challenges there. And we, we thought that was crazy ambitious.
And, you know, even before we bought Stanley Ruth people, we, we went through a program called capital innovators in St. Louis where we had some great mentors, and they encouraged us to. To shoot larger. And we said, okay, well, we'll.
We'll double it from that. And we still thought that was really crazy. You know, we're. We're at the size now that is equal to or larger than.
Than what we had targeted as that big, crazy dream back then. And so what's happened along the way is we. We've said, you know what?
There's a lot of Runway to still go here. So, so we've kind of raised that. That picture a few times. Picture a few times, for sure.
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