ETA Unicorn: $1 Billion in Revenue in 5 Years

Yeah, okay.

For sure, in parts.

But what's great is we didn't have to. I mean, the parts that worked well in Arizona, we've never had to go up to Idaho and Utah, where he operates now, and try to change all the things he does. We've never had to do any of that.

We, we do a lot of stuff on the back end, but I think it does speak to him personally as being such a good fit for us early on. You need an entrepreneur that's willing to partner with you at that point, because a lot is ambiguous and you can't find somebody that expects everything to be perfect because it won't.

Yeah. And so after you do this second acquisition, kind of the first of your partnership model is, does that then reveal itself to be the unlock that you had hoped it would be?

It was, yeah, yeah, it was absolutely the, the keystone on this, this whole thing. And we quickly realized we bought a couple other little businesses and ownership changed. And, you know, they're, they joined Kelso.

We bought a few others kind of in the old model. None of those have had the same success as the others that we have done a partnership approach with.

And.

Integration is hard. Add ons are hard. Jamming a company into another company is really, really hard. We don't, we don't emphasize doing that.

We, we do it from time to time when it makes sense. But the majority of our deals are in a way a standalone platform that over time integrates the right things and becomes a part of Kelso through, we have divisions and we have all the support functions and their teams become a part of Kelso. But in the beginning you don't have any of that.

And so especially in the beginning, you need businesses that will by and large be a standalone. They can be a part of your strategy and start cross selling and doing certain things together, which we did early on as well. We had a lot of labor in Arizona and that was helpful to our partner in Utah because we shipped a lot of labor for work up to Utah where he was growing.