Leaving $700s/Yr to Buy an Underperforming Printing Business

So it really was the business that was advertised and I, I could tell that the seller had done an incredible job of building a truly passive business himself. He told me about how the year prior to selling he went to, I think it was on a cross country trip. Yeah, he was on a cross country trip for three months, was not at the business for three months and it just kind of ran itself.

He built out a lot of proprietary software that it's basically connects the front end E commerce platform which is custom built to the back end ERP production flow. So you know, you click on a product on our website that maps to a full production flow on the back end. And all of the different pro production people in their different departments, they are told exactly what to do and how to…

It's, you know, triage, find whatever is going wrong. We just before we closed we found that website speed issue and then I was very focused on trying a thousand ways to grow the business and I can speak a little bit about that as well.

Well, I do want you to, to share some of the levers. You posted this great LinkedIn post where you talked about your last year in the business and everything you've accomplished, including numbers. And that's actually how I found you.

So we'll link to that because there's a lot of good stuff in it. But before we turn our attention to that, I think to come into a business and find that if you just don't need, don't want to grow it and just operate at its status quo, and it really does just operate, what a wonderful thing to discover as new owner. That it really, that it really.

It's not a, it's not a fire drill every day. You can take your time.

Yeah, I, I think the people component of it is probably something that I should have hit on there. You can't just buy a business and then be absent there. There were, on the first day I showed up, there were some tears in the office.

People were worried about what was going to happen to them. I think one of the employees, they mentioned that they were at a company previously that got acquired and then everyone was fired. So I really was focused on building relationships and trust with my employees.

So it's not like I could just buy it and, you know, as though I could have kept my job at Aries and run this on the side. It definitely was important for me to be there, but from an operational standpoint, yes, was pretty self sufficient, but it wasn't growing. And the cost of doing business, it goes, it goes up every year from rent to raw materials.

We were impacted pretty early on with tariffs last year. All of our raw materials basically come from China in one way or another. And then this year all of my products are also, you know, petrochemical derivatives for the most part from a raw material standpoint.

So, you know, you need to be growing in order to survive, is the point.