SBA Acquisition to $9m Cash Exit in 5 Years

Into his own personal truck, do multiple trips to his house to drop off, you know, all his various random gear at his, you know, at his house in Colorado Springs and empty out the storage unit. That was all my, you know, my equipment I just paid for.

Wait, I'm sorry, you gave it. I don't. I didn't follow. I lost. You gave it to him.

So something we changed is we eventually became all company owned tools. Nobody brought personal stuff. So anything that was in the truck was owned by the business.

When I took it over, that wasn't true. And because there was no inventory saying, hey, for sure, this, you know, this demo saw is the company is not his. He just said, hey, essentially all this stuff is mine.

And you couldn't defend against it?

Oh, yeah, couldn't defend against it. I could have, you know, I could have said, no, I think this is mine. And sort of tried to try to fight about it.

But when you have somebody who's dealing with a serious drug issue, and as a, you know, as an employee, I thought the easiest thing was to say, hey, we're going to write off a couple thousand dollars in equipment and let this guy try to pawn it, you know, wherever he ended up pawning it.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, Andy, before we turn our attention to, you know, getting through your J curve, if there was one, and then how you grew the business, can we just also point out that this, like so many other acquiring minds episodes, is about a business you wouldn't even guess existed. I think a lot of people understand that storage as a category of real estate has surged in the last 10 and…

It certainly has among entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial real estate types. There's a lot of talk about that Nick Huber made his name on, on being a storage guy, but still I wouldn't have guessed that there are service providers, that there are picks and shovels to the public storage space in a single market or in you know, Denver and in I guess Colorado Springs.

So two, you know, one and a half markets that there could be a two and a half million dollar business there. Anything to say there other than. Well, yeah, there was.

Yeah. I'd say that more as investors you see these great amazing niche businesses and you see. And like if you were a VC investor you'd see the SaaS vertical that only serves storage, which there's several SaaS verticals that only serve storage like auctioning your stuff off, marketing, the managing of pricing. So every, every business has all these ancillary little interesting things tied to it.