Started as SBA Searcher, Built to a PE Fund

It manufacture and distribute.

It's a metal fabricating company. Custom metal fab, big things. So a Lot of. Not necessarily like structural steel, but big elements of large buildings, maybe architectural type of installments they would help build, like the lines for other manufacturing companies, the manufacturing lines themselves.

So project based revenue.

Project based revenue, yeah. They didn't have any widgets that they were cranking out.

And what else, what other bullet points about the business could you share again?

35 years. I think the biggest thing was meeting the owner and the team and getting comfort on what it was there. Their unique capabilities weren't much different than any other metal fab shop, except their building was massive and they were used to building very large things that most shops like that didn't have the capacity for. So they had some unique differentiation.

But I had a great, just a great feeling about the team and the owner, the, the, the seller who now, five years later, I mean, I talked to him yesterday and he's not there anymore. So.

And numbers about the business.

$750,000 EBITDA, $2.5 million acquisition, 90% debt. So some of that was a seller note.

The balance was sba and the plan there was the same, which is your involvement, your intense involvement for some number of weeks or months and then stepping back out. And were you living at the business or living up in Charlotte? How are you managing this three hour?

I was not. So for the first, call it two and a half to three months. I would drive to Charlotte every week and spend maybe two days a week there. We had, you know, it was a little bit larger of a company.