A $800k Business to Start, $60m Portfolio Today

And at this point were you still doing your day job?

At this point I was still doing my day job, yeah.

Yeah, so that's what I'm talking about. I think it was a fantastic business. The exact right timing and I had a friend and colleague who was the exact right fit to take on the CEO role in this, in this, in this company.

So you'll recall that my second job out of university was CIBT Education Group, a publicly listed education business. We had a number of campuses within, you know, Sprotchaw and kgic, two of the education businesses that we owned. And one of the youngest and brightest campus directors who was running one of the biggest campuses within that network was in his late 20s.

You know, a lot of middle aged staff were reporting up to him and they were happy to do so. So that indicated to me this guy was, his name is Colin. He, he's a, and an exceptional leader.

Someone who's not necessarily the, the loudest person in the room, but he's got a quiet confidence about him and can rally the troops around him. And so someone like that is not only a great leader but also a great leader in the education space. And I knew that he'd be the right fit to, to run prosafe.

And if you hadn't found him, would you have done the acquisition? Are you basically only doing an acquisition if you, if you feel like you have a good operator or will you proceed and then hope to backfill that? How do you think about that sequencing that?

In this case, everything happened really, really fast for Pro Save. So now we do a bit of both. In my opinion, finding a really good business is more difficult than finding a really good operator.

There's, there's a lot of fantastic people that I've found and they'd all be great at running certain businesses. And so we're looking for both though. We, a lot of our efforts are spent, you know, looking through 500 teasers and 125 or 130 Sims per year.

And then out of those we usually find one that we actually acquire within operators. You know, there's, we do our, the, the opposite thing which is, you know, we're constantly looking for them and, and then if we find someone who's really great, we will search for a business within the industries that they have experience.

Ah, interesting.