Leaving Wall Street to Buy a $1m Manufacturing Business

I guess this is similar here is I think the reward is to the upside, the risk is I guess my near term cash flows. But if I didn't find that to be that, that challenging, I don't find it to be that risky. Yeah, that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. And it is, it's an important point for a couple reasons. First of all, just as people hear your story and know put themselves in your shoes or not, you did have a nice balance sheet.

Right.

And on top of being able to basically pay almost all in cash for the business. Most people don't, that's fine, but just need to underline that. But then also I just think that is a great perspective because so often in our world when we talk about buying these businesses there is a, there is a bit of a near termism or a short termism where the entrepreneur is saying how much can I earn from the…

You know, am I going to be able to pay my, replace my $250,000 salary tomorrow in this business? Of course not everybody, a lot of, a lot of people probably, in fact most people do expect to take some sort of cut to their, their annual income by buying a business. But anyway, anyway you, you, you cut it all the way.

You were going to basically reinvest everything into the business and you were thinking about this not what it could look like in year one, two and three, but beyond that. So just to just a, a perspective that's a little different than kind of the typical searcher in 2026. Before I. And so let's want to hear about how you did a little bit more detail on how you did buy the business, structured it.

But just before we do that heard you say capex high capex related to your business. And, and that's a characteristic of manufacturing broadly and that's a, that's a ding on manufacturing. We don't like this feature because it means every time you hit capacity of your current resources at the, at a manufacturing company, there's a big investment to then expand capacity and, and grow into that.

So there's all, there's these, there's this stair step effect and you're always or often needing to make big investments, big strategic decisions to get to the next level. As opposed to say a blue collar trades business where you can kind of grow more linearly by adding another person than another, then another. How did you think about that?

Because that, that is one, one feature that would be in the con column we assume, right?

Yes, I mean it certainly is but it's basically something I think that you should, you should basically factor into your equation of the cash flows. Okay so you know what is, what is a scalable cash flow or you know what, so you take the base cash flow, put in things like if you had an owner salary or that you want to put in there.

But capex should also go in there and that also should be in the, you know, if you envision a certain growth pattern you should also put in there the, the added labor of that. Especially if it doesn't, you know, some of these businesses, you know, are as if it's labor intensive, it doesn't have as much operating leverage as other businesses.