So I think when we closed on those three, we had seven more locations in our pipeline. We own all seven of those today. But that was really our first 10.
Acquiring Minds
How to Acquire 25 Franchise Units in 2.5 Years
Excerpts · 498 segments · ~1:53:57 long
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It was five in North Carolina. It was another five in Wisconsin. We can chat about why we went to Wisconsin, but I'm thrilled we did.
It was a great move for our business and it's opened up a lot of growth factors. But we knew that when we acquired these first three, more were coming. I think we bought the first three on September 1st of 23.
Number four was maybe December of 23. And so there was a couple months to figure out, can we work successfully with Joe? Do we like working together?
Do we like the Mein model, like all of those types of things that I don't think, you know, till you're really in it. And the three of us were living in Asheville at that point. We were going to the stores every day. We got really comfortable doing what we were doing.
Yeah, and I would also say we, we fully equitized that first acquisition.
What is that?
What does that mean? We paid with cash, didn't take on any leverage. We wanted to kind of remove any potential stressors until we got comfortable with the health of the business.
At which point we took a retroactive loan from a local bank. Small retroactive loan, but we wanted to feel comfortable in the state of the operations, make sure that things are growing. It was all new to us, so we didn't really want that pressure from, from a lender.
Jake, say more about that because for people familiar with private equity and finance, you know, buying a business fully equitized 100% in cash with the idea that you'll later put debt on it to kind of under, to kind of understand from inside what the optimal amount of debt is or capital structure is maybe obvious for many searchers listening, they, they just automatically assume you get the loan…
And so, you know, the loan looks like a 90 or 80% SBA loan. So just talk more about just how you thought about that and that. Sequencing all cash and then later putting debt on.
Yeah, I, I, I mean I, I think I summarized our mentality towards whether or not we knew we had the capital to go out and execute and close the deal. We didn't really know much about what we were getting into. First time operators.
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