The First Steps to a Family Holdco

To what extent did all of that experience that you all have, has it been applicable into this business? Maybe you'll tell me. It's been very applicable and if you didn't have all that experience, you wouldn't.

Have bought the business. But please. No, I, I mean the way we, we've, the businesses we've looked at, it's not that we've only looked at businesses that, that we were familiar with in some way, shape or form. We did consider to be fair whether we would, whether we thought we would be engaged if we were running the business day to day, or was it sort of so far outside of our realm that we would…

Otherwise you have a, an issue in the business on all the other things. It's very much, there's an element around structuring and thinking about, okay, how do we put together, like how do we market the business, where do we market the business and getting that set up. Right, like starting to market on social media or something like that.

Right. Sales and trying to professionalize that, making sure you're always hitting your list of contacts and driving a pipeline and all of that. So there's structural elements that we can introduce.

There is obviously sort of the financial knowledge and being more structured about budgeting and planning and forecasting and, and tracking how you're sort of how and where you're making money, which are things that small businesses I think often don't do to that level. Because again, your business founders come from a delivery point of view. They grow up the business driving delivery, high…

They don't come to the business from a management, accounting, etc. Perspective. So that that focal lens is new and anybody can introduce that if they kind of spend the time to want to do it.

And I think Very, very importantly, and this is a bit maybe abstract, but I think fundamentally a lot of these businesses, what you can bring is energy and direction where some of what's needed is a focus of these are the things that we want to accomplish this year and we need to push to get towards there. And you're going to help mobilize the business.

You're going to, you know, go outside to get the help that you need and you push the business forward. And it's not necessarily that it's because you have all the knowledge and all the answers, but it's because you have the drive to push the business along and especially in search. I think oftentimes you're, you're in a place where you're talking to sellers who aren't as engaged anymore in the…

And so the fact that you come with this new energy and this new drive is extremely valuable to the business because you, you push for things to get done and you put new sort of stones in place and all of that. So I think that's, that's a fundamental value creation lever that has nothing to do with what, what you know or have done in the past. It's just kind of your, your mindset that you bring.

Excellent point, very well put. Lyn, you were going to tell us about how you structured the deal to acquire this business. Let's, let's hear what you can share, please.

Yeah, so as I mentioned, kind of we structure it with roughly 50% debt, kind of the maximum we can get from private lender in the UK and then the rest with equity. And that's a combination of some of our own capital as well as some outside investors and then seller financing which is a combination of both earn out as well as equity rollover. The main thesis for this deal is that trust and that…