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

And so I think one of the things that we learned to just pick one challenge was that it, it's a big cultural shift to get to where, where you, you can grow and empower leaders throughout the business so that all of those decisions don't have to come back to one person who's, who is deep in the business every day.

Another one depending on how much time we want to spend on it, but specifically because we bought A business that was serving in Manhattan in these co op apartment buildings with mostly largely senior citizen customers. When Covid hit in 2020, which was not that long after we came into the business, that was a huge disruption for us and it was very formative for us.

And so working through that and then the recovery and reopening from that, that was, that was a year that we were just operating every day for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And you're three guys doing this. You bought a size of business that a lot of searchers, individual searchers might buy and pay themselves 150 grand, maybe if they live in Manhattan, 200 grand, maybe they pay themselves that. So are, how are you, how are you affording your lifestyles?

And on this point of your respective personal finances, you guys, as I recall, also didn't really have any money going into this. You, you were, you know, not, you didn't have a lot of your own personal balance sheet to bring to this project. Just, just to set, set, set the context for people.

You know, we had a little bit, not a lot of, you know, and we were each in slightly different places. But you know, I would say for me personally, I had had a few years of working as a software engineer and making, you know, reasonable money, doing that and living very frugally because that was just what I was used to doing still. And so that provided a little bit of cushion.

But generally we ran quite lean for, for a good while in order to make sure that we weren't overly taxing the business. So, you know, it was a combination of, of some savings and taking small salaries from the business. We were, we used to joke about, you know, sort of where we sat in the ranking of highly paid employees and we were, we were pretty far from the top for a long time.

And, and actually I think still none of the three of us is the highest paid employee at the company. That would probably be, you know, a couple of, of commission based sales reps. And, and that was definitely important. It was definitely part of the, the challenge.

Great.

Well, I'm sure we could spend an entire episode just on those years of Stanley Ruth. But take us to how that first acquisition, I guess you probably wait till you get to the other side of COVID before you make a second acquisition. When does the second acquisition and Kind of the multiple acquisition period begin.

So there was actually a second acquisition, you know, after we've been running this business from 2018-19. We felt like we were finally getting a handle on things, learning how to be, you know, efficient operators, dealing with the, you know, issues that come with operating outside of Manhattan. We acquired a small competitor, more of like a bolt on acquisition, in 2020, specifically February of…