Yeah, I mean that as you point out in a manufacturing business, that last one, the reinvestment can mean that it's going to be, it's going to require quite a bit of earnings coming out of the business to do that. So you were looking for probably a business that had earnings in the typical range that we hear, 750 to, you know, one, one and a half if you could get it sort of thing.
Acquiring Minds
Growing a $5m Metal Business 40% in Year 1
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, great.
You've already started touching on it. But tell us, tell us the reasons that when Springfield came across, you liked it. Springfield Tool and Die.
Well, like I said, I had been running manufacturing businesses, mainly large extrusion or stamping businesses. And so we used a lot of machine shops as vendors for us. And what I had noticed through that time is, you know, time and time again projects would be delayed due to the machine shops we were using.
And as I dug, as I dug in on this, not this was unrelated to purchasing the business, but I had found that the common reasons that were given were, hey, in the past five years a bunch of our really skilled employees have, have retired. And so over five years quality had decreased on time had decreased. And when we, you know, Naturally, the question came up, where can we find other shops to do…
These must not be the only ones. And we had trouble finding any others. Right. And so that kind of put in the back of my mind that there was a real market here, a real need, and it wasn't fully being serviced.
So when Springfield came across, the first thing I thought was, well, I don't. I've never worked in a business like this, right. But I understand it about as closely as you can, not having worked in it, because we had to work closely with a lot of those, those players.
And then as we dug in, we, we really. I started to. The thing I kept saying was, wow, this is the supplier I wish I had had. Right. They care about the customer, they care about getting things right.
They care about being on time. And, and they really are the type of person that I would have wanted to work with. Right. They're technically excellent.
They've got the technical skills so they can step into the gap where your own technical people can't. And so those were, those were great things. And they came directly out of, unexpectedly out of my experience in corporate.
What value did you expect to add?
So the, the thing that we saw was that the business was run in a, in a very old school way. It was run on technology that was 1970s technology. And while there was machining process, there was a lack of business process.
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