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

And so this deep sense that a culture has to make things. Now, certainly a believer in the law of comparative advantage and free trade and things like that, but fundamentally, we have to be able to make things. And I was also a huge World War II buffalo growing up from a young kid.

So I had read about the industrialization of America over Time. So I can't tell you exactly how all these things came together, but it was just this deep sense that, hey, tech's got a lot of people going into it. And certainly I wanted to use my tech background in manufacturing to bring better practices to do what I could there.

Great, well ahead of the curve. You were, Caleb, I heard you say your search was four years. Yes, but I didn't, I didn't track when it began in the story. So clarify that for us began in.

Late 2019, early 2020. I had been bouncing around this idea for a while, felt like I had learned a lot, certainly learned a ton in the four years after that. But I had been in manufacturing in a corporate environment for three years.

And so my father had since retired and I had been discussing this with him and he said, well, maybe we could partner to do it together and our skill sets are complementary. He's not involved in the business day to day, though he does help out. He knows the, the team here well.

They ask about him. We're even asking about him today. And so that's a. So when he said that, that's when we started to search. And certainly the search was prolonged by Covid, but it was also prolonged by the fact that we had a very specific set of criteria that we were trying to fulfill in, in the business we bought.

And that four years was all after your being in business school or some of that overlapped.

So I graduated from business school in 2017 and then moved, relocated across the country. And then I was. The search was from late 2019, early 2020 through 2024.

And you were searching on the side?

Yes, I was searching. While working full time.

While working full time. Okay. And also your parents are now started in Southern California where you grew up, but they're now also out there with you, or I should say back here, back east here in the Carolinas in your case.