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

And you've either got to just be patient and let that build up or you've got to use the revolver. In our case, you know, because of how much it fluctuates, it was really, you know, it's something that we've, we've had to do. So. But, but that's been a great asset to us and allowed us to, to make sure that we maintain a measure of liquidity at all times that keeps us safe as a business.

So again, I don't think in an ideal scenario if you add all the cash in the world just sitting around, would it be in a break in case of glass or break glass in case of emergency only? Sure. But different businesses are different and some businesses working capital revolvers have a real. A real place to help you smooth that out because of just the nature of them.

We closed end of July 2024.

Okay, so you're coming up on two full years, but your. It was calendar year 2025. That revenue. You pushed revenue 40%, was that right?

Correct.

Which is. Which is a ton of growth. How did you do that?

So really, it started just working the process, you know, from the front end back. We. We had a. I started with quoting, and we really, you know, there were. I talked about how there was a lot of transactional work that was not.

There was a lot of duplication in terms of the transactional work. So we just did a few simple things. One is, I like calling, going from a horizontal structure to a vertical structure.

So one of the pitfalls of being. Having a lot of technical expertise was that they had. There were. And it worked very well for them.

But they had multiple different people who would, quote, they would be the manufacturing engineers who would get the jobs ready for the shop, and then to some extent, they would go out on the floor and look at that work and make sure it was being done correctly and all of those types of things. And when you have three people doing that, that requires a lot of experience and a lot of. A lot of…

And so I knew we wouldn't be able to do that. So what we did is two of those gentlemen were. One was the owner and one was a longtime employee who was retiring, one of the ones we knew about.