How to 4x EBITDA in 3 Years Without Growing Sales

But I learned a lot over that experience and I know I did it with my, you know, all our best intentions and I felt good about everything. But I'd say if I were more experienced and I, and I've done deals since where if my spidey sense is tingling back to the body brain thing, right. If you just know something doesn't feel right, I'm way more confident and comfortable talking about it because I've…

So I think first time searchers, it's just going to be hard. It's just you're not going to have that built up like pattern recognition to go back to. So something that like might feel slightly okay or slightly off might be a bigger thing than you think.

Well, it's so hard because the cliche is there's, you know, no perfect business. So any business you buy is going to have some problems with it.

Yeah.

And so there's that. So you know, how big a problem is too big a problem. Because there's going to be some problems, you know, that you, that you go into knowing about or, or expecting that you, that there will be problems that you don't know about.

I mean this is going to be messy and perfect and hard no matter what. So it's how to know if, if, if, if, if the doubt you're feeling is above the threshold of the doubt you should be feeling.

Yeah.

The other thing is you're, you're almost certainly going to feel doubt because this is just such a big decision. It's like, you know, you know, how, how can you not have, have a little bit of your, you know, a little, feel a little shaky going down, going to the closing table. So very hard. So. Okay, Ned, talk to us a little bit about an asset rental business model.

Just, just kind of broad strokes, pros and cons of the business model. It's a common one but we haven't, we don't spend a lot of time unpacking it. Let's just have a, just a quick primer.

Yeah, yeah. So let's see. I like large asset rental for long periods of time if I can actually. So the downsides are typically there's a capex investment. It's challenging to think about useful life, like the useful life of the asset.

There's a lot of assumptions made on useful life. Those are, those are kind of the two big levers that, that are challenging to think about. Maybe the third is like custody of ownership, right?