Don't grow at the same rate, but they grow at a great rate. I had made some capital expenditures and brought on some, some heads that were non operating and it worked. It worked out great.
Acquiring Minds
Leaving Wall Street to Buy a $1m Manufacturing Business
Excerpts · 351 segments · ~1:30:24 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
So much so that I became what I became what would be deemed as capacity constrained. There is really no more output that we could pull out of our current place. I looked at some options locally.
I was kind of hamstrung and able to pull the trigger on that because one of the key operators or the supervisor on the floor basically kind of indicated that he was not willing to basically even go to a new site even, even locally because he lived effectively next door. So I, I pivoted and tried to figure out other ways and I then came upon a competitor that was essentially trying to sell their,…
And this competitor was once the, the big dog in the industry probably 20 years previous, but now they were, they were just a shadow of their former self and it was in Connecticut, so it wasn't really right next door. But it, the, the beauty when I went and looked at the business is that it was, it had a lot of capacity and it also had some, some, some machines.
It had a requisite number of machines and had some bigger machines so it could expand some of our capabilities. The, the downside of it, it was. It was a distressed asset.
It really was. It was part of, of a lot of other machine process or this place it was a part of was a machine shop that did so many different things. And so I had to carve this business out. Worked at the same site when I basically bought it.
But the, the owner was old, the culture was as poor as you can get. I felt like the employees were battered and the place was a mess and just needed to be cleaned up. But here's a good point.
3 years what I was going to do is I was going to basically extract myself. I was capable now to extract myself from the Vermont business. So that's a plus, right?
And they. And now I was going to go down there and we were going to basically turn around, do work a turnaround on this other business and gain capacity and operate the two sites. So. And I bought this thing at real dirt prices. I. Dirt cheap prices it was.
And I, I just structured it, I structured it well, but it was, you know, I knew there was, there was work to be done and we. So about a month and a half and I. Things were kind of going well.
We were showing some Synergies. I was having some guys from the Connecticut place look, come up to Vermont, learn some of the trade, because they were just not nearly as productive as my Vermont place. And then Covid kicks in.
It really kicked in just right after my close, and I made a really bad decision shortly thereafter. I figured, like, I could only sustain one of the businesses, you know, the. Just when I did the math, and I don't think my math, I would redo the math the same way, but.
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗