Sure. The bullet points are, you know, we bought a company called Botanical Designs based in Seattle, Washington. So it was really a, you know, at the time a one branch founder owned company doing interior plants and high impact urban landscaping. Really just in King County, Washington, which is Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, kind of the Amazon and Microsoft realm.
Acquiring Minds
Taking a Single-City Acquisition Nationwide
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I found out about that business probably 10, 12 months into my search and courted them. It ended up being brokered, but it was sort of a hybrid, sort of proprietary brokered type scenario. And I knew that it had legs, it was the right size, you know, for a traditional search fund and every other metric pretty much was right down the center of the fairway on you know, if you read the Stanford…
So basically we designed, installed and maintained interior plants, living walls, green roofs, some exterior plazas, that sort of thing. As a business I could understand it was, you know, over, if you count a holiday decor business, over 75% recurring and limited customer concentration. You know, one customer did about 5% of sales and the rest were less than 1%.
It was, you know, something that had low capex. The industry was growing really at the time you were just starting to see like, even in like the Trader Joe's or at the grocery store, like there weren't like pots of succulents that you could buy. Like it's little, you know, little cactus type of thing.
In 2013 that was like non existent. But by 2017, 2018, that was everywhere. So you could just sort of feel this growing and, and they were building commercial office buildings and hotels everywhere including Seattle like crazy.
So there are just some really good tailwinds to that type of company. And that type of industry, you know, really had all the, all the metrics you would want.
What about just to pick at that? Because yes, it does sound like just checks all the boxes. It does feel though like the spend that you represent for your clients, customers is pretty discretionary, non essential.
Nice to have a green wall, but that's the first thing that goes in a downturn sort of thing. A live, excuse me, a living wall.
Yeah, it's a fair question. I think that's something that you know, required diligence but kind of flipping that it was a very small dollar spend as a total budgetary requirement for customers. So for example, take like the class A high end office building in a downtown area.
You know, they have a lobby that they've spent millions of dollars on. That's top notch rent. You know, people have signed long term leases to lease that space.
They then have expectations about what that entails. And I would say the exterior plaza part is not discretionary at all.
Right.
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