Call it what you want, call it J curve, call it a U curve. I don't know. Um, but we. Yeah, it was. I lost plenty of sleep, plenty of sleepless nights over wondering how this is gonna work out and how to make it work. And it just took thinking through it really slowly over time.
Acquiring Minds
When a $2.8m Acquisition Is More Like Zero-to-One
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And we're in a much better spot now. Like we've built the foundation of what we can build on. And you know, the, the biggest thing to me is, yeah, we kept revenue and we kept EBITDA roughly where it was when we bought it.
And I wish I could say it was because I was a genius, but it's not. It was just luck.
Well, how so how. Well, wait, but how. How did you do it?
We kept revenue coming in. Right. We restructured expenses. So there's two ways you can add EBITDA to your bottom line, right?
It's not rocket science. You add more revenue, you cut your expenses. Right? That's it. So, and you did both?
We did both, Right. We added revenue and we cut our expenses and we continue to do that. Like I look at where we can cut expenses all the time. That doesn't mean I'm cutting them at the expense of our culture or cutting them at expense of the value that we provide to our clients.
But part of running a company is just being as efficient as possible. Right? And the value gets created with your clients, with your, with your employees, with your culture. As you do that, as you improve.
You know, I think a lot of first time managers have a hard time letting people go. But to me, it's like you can either let that person go or they're going to drag down your five best people, where eventually you're going to pay for that long term. And so it's creating an environment where your best people can succeed and you get more of those people.
And it's a snowball effect, right? And then it just keeps churning and churning. The value you create keeps enlarging over time because you improve the culture.
Right? And I think that's what we are doing now, right? Yeah. We kept our revenue good, kept our EBITDA good. Wasn't at where we wanted it to be when we bought it, but now that we have the Foundation.
We're building on that. Where it's not going to be where we wanted it to be. It's going to be way further down the line.
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