How to 4x EBITDA in 3 Years Without Growing Sales

But I think a lot of it was really just management, like basic management.

But, Ned, that as powerful as that solve seems to be, that seems like how you would capture more margin. So you took your margins from 10 or 15% to 40%, but that doesn't explain net new revenue, new sales. How did you, how did you quadruple sales?

So we, like, this was an operations case. For the first three years. We couldn't. I couldn't, right.

Because I, I guess, I guess if margins are 10% and then they're 40,.

That's four times I could, I couldn't crack the code on sales. We grew a little bit, but, like, no faster than the market, you know, than, you know, the growth rates, I'd assume. So this is actually a pretty common thing for ETA and search folks like me, with my background, these heavy finance backgrounds, were really comfortable figuring out all these little niches.

We're not great at listening to the customers and translating that into value right away. So it took me a while to unlock that and I'd say a pattern. As an investor now that's kind of a pattern I see.

And I'm much more vocal earlier with like, private equity or banker background people, because we're, we're comfortable. That's our, that's our jam. We can go and figure out how to make things more profitable.

Growing revenue, go to market, changing all those motions. That's really different. That's a different skill set.

So anyway, I don't want to detract us too much, but, but the, you know, operations lever was the one I pulled, and we couldn't quite crack revenue at that point. Took us, Took us a few more years.

Okay, Ned, so I want to get to your investing chapter now, but you quadrupled EBITDA by, by quadrupling the margins and sold for an 8x on 6 million of EBITDA. 48 million. Who did you sell to? How does that chapter end?

Yeah, we sold to a private equity fund out of Chicago, kind of middle market PE fund. And we went. So from when I bought the business to when I ultimately we. We sold it again to.