Growing a $5m Metal Business 40% in Year 1

So 75 is just a little bit above that. How did you get comfortable with that? How did your lender get comfortable with that?

Yeah, I mean it was certainly one of the first things we looked at because we had to wrap our, our head around that. I mean, I think, you know, the first, the first thing to remember is a lot of, I would say almost all of the deals, it would be rare to find one at this size that doesn't have something that's not ideal. Right.

This is common in manufacturing for certain. And so there's a sense in which looking at that and saying, okay, let's break that down and say, what does that mean? Well, when we looked, it wasn't a central purchasing arrangement.

Because of what we do, we have relationships with lots of different engineers in the company that, and frankly around the world. And so when you look at it, it's one, it's one customer and we have a master agreement with them. And but beneath that, what's driving the purchases every day is our ability to service that engineer who has a problem and needs it taken care of or has something that they…

Right. And they need us to make that or they broke something that we made for them five years ago and we have to remake that. Right. And so it actually operates in some ways like a single customer, but in a lot of ways we view every single person we interact with there, of whom there's probably 100, as an individual customer. Right.

And so when you think about it like that and, and the number of different facilities and things that we service, it, it got our mind wrapped around it a bit more.

You know, it's interesting, Caleb, because you are talking about what is now a theme that we talk about with customer concentration, but a slightly more nuanced way to think about it is sort of how many decisions need to be made for that revenue to say go, go away. And in your case it would need to be all of these different engineers for whatever reason would stop doing business with you.

So there's multiple, that revenue actually represents multiple people making decisions to use your services every year. So far so good.

I would say yes, yes, definitely.

On the other hand though, that, that you can also take that logic a little bit too far because you're still, your fortunes probably are rising and falling with the fortunes or the, or the, or the, the market of that customer. So if there's a slowdown in that customer's business broadly, maybe you'll you know, their business shrinks 5% a year, that is likely to trickle down to you.

And in one kind of, in a similar way, maybe, and maybe it's one of these where when the US economy sneezes, the rest of the world has, gets a cold. It's one of these where in fact your fortunes are, are, are the effects are more extreme based on the, the, the ebbs and flows of that businesses, your customers, sales in a given year. Okay. But anyway, you, I also heard you say that there's a master…