Passion & Profit in an American Pastime

The messaging changed and it wasn't necessarily the story had changed about what is our acquisition strategy. And it just didn't feel like it was going to be something that I had a lot of growth potential in. So I decided to transition out and I went back to a more traditional business school path and I worked in management consulting for about three years as well.

So worked for a boutique management consulting firm called Blue ridge Partners. Ex McKinsey partner founded it and led it. So it was very much a McKinsey light environment, if you will.

And I felt like I had a passion for small business, which is why I wanted to do a little bit more digging into the ETA space and eventually found acquiring minds and, and I think that hypercharge things for me to, to take that leap.

Well, music to my ears. Mike, before we get to your search, the I, I just want to understand if integrating the bowling centers at the sponsor made sense. Reason I ask is because in our world of if, if you're going to do some sort of rollup or some sort of inorganic acquisition play, there's always that question, how much to integrate?

Do you integrate? Decentralization versus integration. It's a spectrum. Every case is different and it's a constant source of conversation in this world. So that's why I asked.

It sounds like if Covid hadn't. Hadn't disrupted the plan, doing some integration of the bowling centers, in fact in this case was going to create economic value.

And it very much created economic value after I left the organization. I believe they've got 25 or 26 locations to date.

And I would say that probably a lot of that may be built off of some of the systems and processes that we built, such as online reservations that were congruent across the chain, even IT systems that interconnected the bowling centers, simple things like SharePoint across all of the locations, sales and marketing that were interconnected across all the locations. So those type of things.

When you're thinking about the big buckets of accounting, hr, sales, marketing, I think all of that benefits from having congruent systems. I think you need that in order to scale. But when you're thinking about the four walls of those locations, the general manager and the culture within that, those four walls usually drive the business more so than any corporate initiative can.

Can take hold. So finding good leaders, finding good people for those type of roles is going to. To really impact things. There was one location that comes to mind where the general manager was just the mayor really.

And he. Everyone loved him. He loved everybody. He was there quite often, you know, six, seven days a week at times. And you know, that Place flourished. So it does take a lot of on the ground work and I think that's where some of the decentralization can, can take effect.