Buying $1.5m of Earnings Without an SBA Loan

And as much as the media search fund world, you know, whatever you want to call it makes it out to be of this, you know, this young gun coming in and turning a business around and creating explosive growth and coming up with the smartest business school ideas and structuring and entering new markets and improving margins. Yes, that's all great. The biggest thing I learned is to focus on the…

And I know it's a cliche word, I wish I could find a better word for that but the, the trades are notorious for not respecting white collar and earning your. Earning your respect over time without having to. To really call in the structural lines that have been drawn.

And this is so difficult to do because at the same time you have investor updates to send out. You've got investors expecting the world from you because you've sold this deal with up and to the right and you then don't budget much time into relationship development and get building consensus as opposed to, to building profitability. And that for the first four months was really tricky because we…

But you can't mandate that. You got to get buy in. And so I think the biggest win out of all of that, outside of the growth and the profitability and all that good stuff, is seeing that plan pay off and over time building consensus.

The difficulty there is as well, we bought this business in the shoulder season, right? September through March are slow months for H Vac, which was the majority of the business. And there was some, there were some tough moments during the last six, six to eight months where you are not sure where your core volume is going to come from and you're trying to scale the business at the same time…

And, and that was really challenging. And you know, I would say through February, there were a lot more tough moments than easy ones in turning the ship around and we were already on a good growth rate. But you hit that slump and you start questioning, well, did we make the right decision?

And investors are starting to ask questions and then suddenly the summer hits and luckily for us, the heat came early in Texas. And so, you know, the last two months, I think we, we're really finding our stride.

Great. And this getting buy in sounds like leadership to me. What, what is your style? How did you get buy in?

Look, I, I think the, the first, the first piece is not, not announcing yourself with a title. You know, just announcing yourself as, as someone who's there to help and grow and make, make people's lives better.

I think we can so easily get stuck in this title world of and swim lanes from White Collar, where we almost need that as kind of an impetus or an introduction to be able to lead as opposed to just getting the work done and getting into addicts with your technicians and spending time in the field.

And you know, one of my investors, he's built a great business in Arizona, was that you know, his, his, he had a similar profile to me and he said the magic happens when you leave your desk. And you know, we feel, I mean, at least my background, my profile, we feel most comfortable analyzing a spreadsheet, building a deck and, you know, making a decision off of that data.