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

Yeah, I mean it can be a little bit painful even when you model for the EBITDA compression, to see it happening and to see things not working. And I have thought of a lot of these things as one time and I've thought, you know, when I eventually sell this business I'm going to have a little bit of explaining to do and have to walk through each of these things and explain what I was doing and why…

Another point that I wanted to get to is it's related. In my personal life I have not very closely managed to a budget and I've never, you know, I have, I came into this with zero operational experience. I was just doing underwriting for you know, six and a half, seven years.

You know, $15,000 later it was basically failed and I had to walk away from it. But you know, point being these things when you're, you know, even though $800,000 of earnings or a million dollars of earnings sounds like a lot, it's very easy to chip away at that. And for me this is kind of, it's been a learning experience and now I am much more judicial in my spend and I have experienced what is…

And as a business owner, another thing to be aware of and sorry for jumping around to so many points. I just want to make sure to hit on the big ones that I've come across. You're going to get approached with people all the time that promise you the world and that try and sell you anything from courses to managing your marketing spend, whatever it may be.

And you know, I have gotten, got a lot of times doing that. It never, it never really pans out how you would expect. So you know, if, if you are considering bringing on that consultant or agency, definitely make sure that you do your diligence and, and that you're very thoughtful in the questions that you ask or you know, how you're going to measure their success and how you can get out if they…

And let's explore this Dom, because this is where you had started to go because the private equity format is certainly to do exactly that. They, they a private equity buyer is not going to go get in the weeds. Maybe a smaller private equity shop, an independent sponsor model like we see at Mines Capital, maybe, but even they are likely not going to want to be doing that.

It's, it's, it's delegation and it's, it's either to the existing team or bringing in, you know, new new parties to grow the business. So what is the disconnect between the model that private equity uses and you basically trying to import that into your business? Was it, were you just not judicious enough to use your word and who you selected or is there something fundamentally that does not…

Yeah, I think with the private equity model, the quality of the people that you will have doing this third party work is going to be a bit higher. They're going to be working at, you know, the top tier consulting firms and whatnot. And that's not to say there aren't good freelancers out there to help you with whatever your business needs are.

But I think, you know, there is something there. What I've found is just that no one, it goes back to, you know, just the force of will point that I was making known is going to care as much as you do. And the more informed that you are, maybe you eventually outsource it to a third party or hire and delegate whatever the responsibility is to somebody else.

But it's going to be impossible for you to manage or track or really, you know, fundamentally understand what and how people are doing their work unless you go through the process of understanding it Yourself. So I think for a small business, you really have to spend your time, you know, founder mode, like Isaac Zimmerman talked about on your podcast, getting really in the weeds.

And I really like his model, by the way, of, you know, having a lot of conviction in a space, having it be his life's work. I'm taking a little bit of a different approach where I am hoping to log a win on this and meaning exit at some point, at some point, take some chips off the table. At that point, I will hopefully have some kids. And, you know, this is all,.