Taking a Single-City Acquisition Nationwide

You know, there's like tree services and lawn care for homes and garden centers and you can grow, grow the plants yourself or you can buy them. You could install the soccer field at the local high school through the, the public bid process, et cetera, et cetera. I mean there's, there's a million ways to tackle that.

And there's actually, interestingly, there's a company in Portland, Oregon called Dennis's 70s that they do, they do. I think like all of those things, it's a family owned business as far as I know.

And all of, you know, if you pursue those other, you know, business lines, right, they're going to be different customers. There are different ways to market and spend. It's different equipment sets, it's different skill sets of your team, et cetera, et cetera.

The complexity just, and, and the, the number of things you have to be really good at gets unwieldy really, really quickly. So that was not a good path. So it was like, okay, if we want to grow and we want to stay in our niche, we need to do a really good job in our existing market, but we also need to go to other markets.

And that's where the acquisition discussions really started to take hold. And so that's what we did. So roundabout two years in.

Yeah, right before the pandemic there. So we're talking 2020 now. We bought a company in Denver from a retiring owner.

Same industry, same types of businesses, same types of customers, same types of products and services. A little smaller, but it was a really good test case and I think it went well, including the implementation and sort of getting to know the team and staying consistent and generating that recurring revenue consistently. And then about a year later, we bought a great company in the Twin Cities.

Um, you know, these were somewhat opportunistic on locations, but I was able to go to a lot of industry conferences and honestly, just I love, I love the people in the interior plant industry. You know, there's conferences all over the place, but it's just they're fun to get to know and as people and they're so passionate.

What do you love about them?

Passionate about what they're doing, you know. And I generally like talking to business owners all the time. Like, you probably do too, which is why you may be one of the reasons you have this podcast, so you can relate.

But I just always enjoyed conferences and, you know, industry events and such. And what helped early on was to sort of learn from, you know, them in a non competitive way, etc. Because they're, you know, in their own market, wherever they are, if they're in Boston or they're in whatever, Tampa.