I flipped a house. I have many, many startups and business ventures and online things that could be almost a whole other discussion. But my wife was conditioned for all of that since many years.
Acquiring Minds
ETA Unicorn: $1 Billion in Revenue in 5 Years
Excerpts · 454 segments · ~1:41:53 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
Okay, mine too. Great, Steve. So take us back to where we, where we are. You and Steve decide you're going to try again, but go bigger. You, you've learned that you don't want to buy small and avoiding buying super small is something that we're often told, you got a taste of it without actually having crossed the line as you reflect back on it.
Fortunately, as painful as it was at the time. So mid search, you guys decide, okay, we're still going to do this, we're just going to go bigger.
That's exactly right. And my thought was let's, let's buy something that has some redundancy, has some management, has some process, has some leadership, has some diversity of customers. I would love to have a sheet metal shop.
I think that was, I felt a differentiator in our space to be able to make your own duct work. So, and it's all, it's a debate and an argument with people in our industry whether, whether you need it or not. But I felt like just being able to own and control a little more of the supply chain was important to me for my first business.
Just to be able to go to customers and say, I've got the team, but I can also make the duct work. I wanted to be able to do that. And so I, I again got on airplanes, flew all over the country on my own dime.
Steve wasn't paying me to do it, or I wasn't paying him. I was doing it with my own money. And so, you know, you stay in the Motel 6, you sure rent the cheapest car, and you take the Southwest flights.
And that's what I did for a couple of years here and went back to the, went back to the drawing board, found a business in Phoenix. And I found them relatively quickly. And so in over Thanksgiving again, I had some time off.
We had that week off for Thanksgiving, so I made a bunch of trips. And one of the trips was the day after Thanksgiving. I was in Arizona meeting with the owner of this business.
And so many stories to tell about this journey and this individual too. But said construction owner owned the business for 20 plus years. He had actually bought the business and he could kind of, maybe he BS to me, I don't know, but he could, he could relate somewhat to what we were doing and believed that we could buy the business.
And it was, it was bigger. It was 17 million of revenue instead of $700,000 revenue or $900,000 revenue.
Much bigger. Great.
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗