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

How do we craft that? And, and so it was, it was very collaborative, I'd say. Yeah. And, and that I think just led to a better outcome for everyone.

Yeah. Well, certainly reducing payment terms from just as an example, 180 days to 60 days for 75% of the business's revenue is going to have an utterly transformative effect on the working capital needs of the business. So good stuff.

Before we leave this point of concentration, the one of the things that you would do if you're starting to get comfortable with a business you're looking at acquiring that has customer concentration is diligence that customer to the extent that you can. Obviously that Gets very delicate very quickly. The seller is, is, is going to be very protective of that relationship.

And even if they're willing to introduce you to that customer before close, during diligence, when you have a situation like you described here, where there isn't a single point person at the customer, there's a hundred different people that you might be working for at that customer or doing jobs with at that customer. How do you diligent. How did you, Caleb, diligence this customer?

So we asked a ton of questions and poured through documents and looked because, you know, I'd say one, one thing is you have to read the tea leaves. You're right. You can't just ask them to say, hey, signal to your largest customer that you're selling the business by. Right. By introducing them to somebody who may not buy the business.

You can't. Exactly. Right. But you can see the pattern. And this gets back to the cultural conversation from before. You can see the pattern.

Like if it's been 50 years. Right. If you see repeat business, if you look through the order book and you see repeat names, if you understand the work that's being done and it's not, there's some sort of service that's being offered, that's why they keep coming back. Right. You can see the story that's in there.

Yes. You're not hearing it directly. And yes, the seller, you know, our seller was very open and transparent in anything he said turned out to be true. But that's not always the case.

Right. And so you're always trying to judge that. But being able to go through and see the pattern and does the pattern that they're describing, do you see that played out in the data? And if you do that, then you can make assumptions about how the customer's behaving.

Right. Because the customer wouldn't have behaved that way. And in some ways that's better than talking to the customer. Right. Because they're, you know, don't, don't listen to what I say. Look at what I do or whatever.

Exactly.