Buy Well, Exit Better: A $67m Win in 4 Years

Incredibly, incredibly sticky. You. It, it has a lot of characteristics despite being direct to consumer has a lot of characteristics of what you would see. And in B2B services, frankly from a stickiness perspective, of course there's no contractual recurring component or anything, anything like that.

But if you can deliver a good, good experience, you've got that customer for really as long as they are able to and inclined to travel.

So the cyclicality piece is, is obviously very important and you've got to be very mindful of. But if you look at every cycle, you see an incredible snapback in travel following coming out of that cycle. So you saw that in you know, after 9 11, you saw that after the great financial crisis.

You certainly saw that out of, coming out of COVID where there everyone is talking about revenge travel. Um, so there's, there's a cycle but it's, but the, the trend line is, is compelling you know, up into the right and so the, the implications of that are, you know, don't over lever don't overpay but if you buy well put in a sensible capital structure, you're fine.

Well in Catherine and Rahul's case, so they, they bought this million dollar revenue tour operator and their aim is to acquire more to, to bolt on probably retaining the brand of each of these bolt ons and the, the observation that all travel to all tour operators taste like chicken. So they built some tech on the back end where the, the front what faces the front the, the brand is what change…

But if you can standardize and streamline the back end with tech, you can really get economies of scale by doing, doing a strategy like this. And, and it just seems like it's. As healthy as ever. Lest we think that technology or young people or, or you know, a new generation or 10 years later that, you know, a different generation are, are, are traveling less than they were back in 2013, it…

There you go.

Okay, Greg, so one more call out just on the size of this business or the EBITDA of this business. So $5 million in EBITDA, a seven person company. What was the founder story?

I mean that's, that's quite a life this person has built for himself.

Brilliant guy. He is Israeli by birth and served, served in the military there and I think just had a very keen sense of, of how to you know, operate something really efficiently, not get distracted by shiny objects. Just you know, he knew what needed to get done. Cut to the chase.

He had founded the business in, in 1996, certainly did very well for himself just through the cash flow of generative nature of the business during his ownership period without any outside equity or debt. And then I think he got to the point pretty classic search story where he was ready to, to move on and was a bit, a bit Tired perhaps in part because he hadn't built out the team quite as much.