The 7-Year Collapse of an SBA Acquisition

You're the person adding all of the value. And I understand that now in a much bigger way than I did even then. So it was really just a point that made me look back and consider what I was doing it for.

In addition to being like, wow, what am I actually giving up if I can collect money that easily from people.

But that played, that clearly played a role here. Yeah, for sure. And I realized that I'm, I'm wearing my Patagonia right now, but I don't think I was like the traditional entrant or graduate from hbs and it was still really weird for me to even now think about, well, maybe that played a part in all of this.

Yeah.

Yeah, good.

Well, appreciate your honest feelings on all of this, Scott. Okay, so you decide to do a self funded search focused on New England. Maybe once you decided to go self purchase self funded, you tighten that geographical constraint even more.

Yeah, and there's another reason why I didn't like the funded path just for me and I don't think this is wrong. I just didn't believe in the idea of going in with an industry thesis because I knew that the stats were that, you know, people write their PPM for a raise and they're like I'm going to focus on this industry and industry B and industry C.

And I don't know if that's changed but a lot of folks don't actually end up acquiring within the industries that their PPM said were targets. So I thought, well, I definitely don't want to over constrain my search and if I'm optimizing to be close to my parents and my wife's parents, then yeah, okay, I probably can't just look within central Massachusetts, but I can look within, I know Vermont…

So it did. The geographic focus was the driver behind I think the majority of my search. Great.

And anything else to say then about the parameters of your search?

I don't know the strategy. I think probably everybody does this. It does it this way.