SBA Deal Structuring to Manage Risk in a Cyclical Industry

Let me stop you there, Andrew. A couple follow up thoughts to that. I thought it was such an interesting point and it reminded me of that feature in another business that we've talked about on acquiring minds, Pallet manufacturing.

So where it doesn't make sense to ship pallets on yet other pallets. So pallets remains, pallet manufacturing remains pretty fragmented, pretty local and unlikely to change. The other question though then becomes what does that mean for an inorganic growth strategy?

Yeah, so. So Hopewell is a super company and if there's anything about the deal we can come back to that. But let's just sort of talk about this, which is a super company and you know, my goal is to grow this business. At the same time it's very clear that at a certain point the geography from Hagerstown, Maryland won't make sense.

You just, you won't ship into the Northeast, you won't ship into the Southeast, you won't ship into the heartland. And so is there an opportunity, whether it's, it's probably more likely inorganic than organic to put together, you know, a series of America's best duck shops. That and I guess maybe I should have said you get a choice, right?

You were either the lowest price, highest volume or you're the best quality. We are that best quality, best value position in our market. And I think there's something to that.

It's. There are industry standards, there are choices you can make in how you manufacture the duct and our customers rely on that.

And so can you start to take that model and find like minded businesses elsewhere where you can sort of, you can start to say that basically to larger contractors or not even just in each of our markets we're going to be the best and we're not necessarily going to look for synergies and cross selling and all the things that you know, big corporates love, but we're just going to be a good family…

Frankly that's about six steps further on than where I am today. And I'm not sure that's even the right answer right now. It's make this the best business it can be.

But certainly as you think about growth, you know one, one lever is, is inorganic but I think that's, that's down the road. We gotta make the most of the opportunity we got in the mid Atlantic first.

But recognizing that that is many steps ahead. If you did contemplate an inorganic kind of consolidation or roll up strategy, it actually seems like the profile of this industry is similar. Industry is similar to what you saw at Amphenol which would be decentralized.

So you would. Because. Because this is sort of a local services business or a local fabrication business. It serves its local customers. You probably wouldn't if you bought 5 and 10 more of these up and down the east coast.