Passion & Profit in an American Pastime

Yeah, excellent point. Improve the business, make it more profitable. And in a sale lease you can get more money from the real estate because it's basically from the buyer's perspective, more productive real estate.

Absolutely. And, and then you can kind of get into situation where you're not as an operator getting over your skis if you will, of how much rent you are paying. So you're kind of, I think that sweet spot is probably around 10% of revenue in this business where you know, it's, it's a very manageable number. It's not going to put you in a place where you are, you know, feeling stressed about the…

Yeah, yeah. Yep. Well, if the listeners are interested in learning more about sale leasebacks, go back and listen to the Carlos antelli episode from January 2025 also. Or maybe it was earlier than that. I think it was January when we aired it also.

We then did a webinar with the sale leaseback broker who helped Carlo put that deal together. So look under, on the Acquiring mind, Acquiring Minds website under webinars and you'll find a sale leaseback webinar and it goes very deep into the technicalities of this. So you'll be come out an expert or at least knowing what you're talking about.

It's good stuff.

Great. Well, and thank you Mike for, for explaining how this could work in your case. So you buy the business and let talk about what, what you have found as owner operator. Just give us kind of net out the transition. How has the transition gone would you say?

The first few months were very, very challenging. I mean just change in general. I think, you know, our goal was to maintain the employee base as much as we could.

But we also realized that our way of doing things and the previous ownership's way of doing things were, were very different. And I think, you know, most of the employees weren't necessarily getting on the bandwagon. So you know, fortunately and unfortunately.

Can you say more there? What were you wanting to do that they were resisting?

Well, I mean it's just, it ends up, it's a different business. When you're talking about an owner who has been in there for 25 years, has very, very little debt on the business, they can run it a little bit slower. They don't necessarily need to be as lean or as profitable.

Whereas now we're in a situation where there's two plus million dollars in debt on the business and we're looking at a, a big interest payment every month. And if we are not lean, if we're not operating efficiently and optimizing, we're Going to go out of business. I mean, there's just no two ways about it.