ETA Unicorn: $1 Billion in Revenue in 5 Years

But I, we had known, known each other and my business partner had looked at doing deals with him for 10 years. Never had done anything but had looked at deals together because my business partner was an independent sponsor for a while in his previous life and he had also raised a fund and they were off doing other things before he left.

But he was, my business partner was very skilled at that journey of raising money and getting deals done as an independent sponsor. I don't know if anyone was calling it that back then, but he was doing that work. And so we effectively went back to his well of hey, let's go to some people that we know.

And so I have to really tip my hand to everybody at Peterson Partners. They believed in us, bought into this whole thing without any in person meetings. It was all phone calls and it was all zooms and teams calls.

And we had known each other so it wasn't like totally weird. Completely weird. But we weren't doing in person PowerPoint, you know, sure, we were doing it on, on teams and yeah, that was very an odd time.

Well, it's probably also a testament to Steve, your partner, that they had a lot of faith in his ability to, to pull something like this off. Not to say that they, you didn't, you didn't also weigh in, but it sounds like he was the one that brought the relationship, had the relationship 100%.

And we leaned on each other's strengths. He, he's, he was, was and is a wizard when it comes to capital and strategy with capital and he's seen a lot of things, he's seen a lot of things go poorly as well too. So that's, that's the great thing about Kelso is we've, we've mitigated a lot of bad things because my business partner's been around long enough to see what can go wrong, especially at, in…

So I brought the operations, construction boots on the ground experience. He brought the finance and capital side and, and the Peterson guys, they believed us and we're, we're lucky that it worked out that way. But Steve has a long list that we were going to go hit, hit up and we just didn't have to. So it allowed us to move quickly.

And. But can you tell us how the ownership structure changed, how your, your, you know, your effective equity changed?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they brought more of the check, obviously, and we didn't, we actually didn't use any debt in the beginning, which was really instrumental. I would highly recommend for. Groups starting out because if you're getting into a new industry, there's going to be things you don't know.

Even if you think you know the industry, there's going to be lots of things you're not going to know. So we had no debt for over a year and that was extremely helpful.

And so that means they weren't just equitizing this acquisition, they were putting a lot of cash on your balance sheet to go off and do more acquisitions.