The Origins and Future of a 9-Figure SMB Holdco

So I saw that we certainly saw an ability to run a company that we thought was simple and that we thought had roll up potential. One of those two things ended up being true. It had roll up potential. It wasn't particularly simple, it was particularly.

Attractive roll up potential.

It was not the best business to acquire and it became a very challenging journey. However, had I not done that, I'm fairly confident I would never be in this path and that would be a loss for me because I love being in this path and it got me there. So it was a little bit of just serendipity to make the choice and decide to go down the, the, the, the path and then no matter how Challenging.

It was all the challenges now are, you know, paying, paying dividends. Because it was a lot that I learned during those seven years running the company.

And does Elmore still hold the company?

So we, this is the only example in recent memory of us selling a company. And that was because of how challenging it was and an opportunistic potential where we actually had made a bunch of improvement. I should also say we, we really grew that company quite a bit.

We bought it and it had like about 2 million in revenue. At its peak, it was doing 26 million in revenue. We, we added a number of people.

It had 11 people at first. We got up into the six digits, a little over 100 at one time. And we had developed a lot of really interesting things in the industry.

Logistics things, new strategies and how we did contracts. We had a collection of amazing people and talent in the industry. And so we got approached by a large truck OEM in Europe, Scania, and one of their subsidiaries that wanted to acquire the company as part of a strategic endeavor.

So it really was an opportunistic thing for us. We weren't out necessarily looking to sell, but had the feeling that the business was a very challenging one. And we had figured something out and we thought we could go a lot further, faster and maybe improve it with their kind of capital on our side. And so we decided ultimately to sell.

One of the things from Matt's story that has always stuck out to me because I claim getting Matt to go run Bellwether Forest Products was my best sales job ever because everyone was saying he shouldn't do it. But Matt told me, he's like, he knew if he didn't do say yes now, he was never going to say yes. It was like, you can always find something wrong with the company.