Started as SBA Searcher, Built to a PE Fund

And how long were you acting as CEO of that company?

Technically still am, but now have a team that does all of the things and kind of moving towards an exit there as well. So.

So call it, I don't know, late 21, early 22. You got three businesses, you've got a lot of experience under your belt doing this acquisition entrepreneurship thing. How are you feeling?

What do you. Has the vision evolved, you know, as you, as you kind of pick your head up from your hard work? What are you thinking at that point in the story?

Yeah, I mean, I was. I was feeling great. I mean, it's, it's a lot of responsibility.

It's. It doesn't feel risky to me because I've been doing it for a long time, but I, I can see where the perceived risk can sneak in for folks and, and if you, you know, it doesn't take much to make a bad decision and have things go south. Um, you know, I, I had a couple of years of feeling like, okay, this is about all I can handle and I want to make sure everything is good on. At these, at…

The whole time I had still had this idea of doing more and more as things go, but I, I couldn't do it just myself. And if I was going to go do the holding company thing, what the. One of the purposes of that was that there's a team and some resources at that holding company level that can support the operations of those businesses.

So after a couple of years of owning these things to your point, my capacity started to go up and I wanted to go do more, but I didn't want to have another incremental business on, just that got stacked up alongside those other ones. Um, one of my partners in that metal fabrication company was. He and I always kind of talked about what, what the next step would be if we wanted.

When we wanted to do more. And we threw around a lot of different options between a fund or a multipurpose vehicle to go. To go put acquisitions in almost like a syndicate model.

If we were going to do it, what would it look like, what we would need? And we probably talked about it for two years. The consulting I was doing was all on M and A, so almost like an M and A advisory role.

And Brought somebody into that world that I've known for 25 years. So the three of us kind of said, all right. At one point the partner in the manufacturing company and I looked at each other and we said, all right, it's time, let's, let's like go to the next level.