Well, as I mentioned, the former owners managed to taxes and so they wanted extra costs going through the business. We didn't. Every decision we made was how do we maximize EBITDA from what types of construction projects do we go after that Drive higher margin. So I created a metric of margin per labor dollar.
Acquiring Minds
8-Figure Exit After 5 Years
Excerpts · 362 segments · ~1:21:19 long
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Those are the types of construction projects that we wanted to go to. We're going to spend 100 hours on this job. Let's find the jobs that bring substantially more margin for those hundred hours as opposed to just doing labor.
We want to sell the parts and sell the equipment and sell other aspects of the job. To add on to that, how we chose to manage our fleet and vehicles. We consolidated an office or Two that we didn't need anymore.
There was a very large yard that we had that just kind of ended up storing old equipment that was useless, but we're paying for that. So over time, how can we skinny down the business, the controllables, but use some of that. Yeah, to go to the bottom line, but use some of that to invest in.
To where we really think will drive profitable growth in the service side of the business. And so there was investments that we made on. On the service side of the business to.
To continue to grow that. So just every decision we made the other way I'll put it, there were times that you would ask me, what's our revenue this so far, this quarter? I. I could have guessed.
I couldn't tell you. I didn't care. I could tell you exactly what our EBITDA was. I could tell you exactly what our gross margins were per day on construction, but I could.
I just didn't care about revenue. That wasn't. That wasn't a thing to me. I didn't make any decisions on that. It was all about profitable growth in the form of ebitda.
And that was your approach the entire time, or was that just as you started thinking about a sale?
I would say not the entire time, but as I felt like I got smarter in the business and what levers were important. So probably after two years before I was really getting serious about a seller, that's when I really started transitioning to the way I think. So I even mapped out on our construction side, all of our jobs.
The estimated time it took, the jobs, the estimated margin. And I'm not kidding, I knew every. I think I did it down to a week, not necessarily a day, but every week.
This is what we can expect from a margin perspective from our construction jobs. And if we had gaps, how do we fill those in? So, yeah, it was probably two years after buying the business that I feel I got smarter in that.
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