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

Didn't, didn't make a lot of sense. But it was a beautiful, beautiful place to go to work. Got to have lunch every once in a while at Bryant park right down the street. So yeah, couldn't complain.

Oh wow, what a location.

Okay so seller was doing everything so you needed to de risk and build out some infrastructure, some human capital infrastructure.

Sure.

We'll assume that it probably also wasn't tech or process forward. So building tech and process was going to be part of the play here.

Absolutely.

So, and how did that go?

It went well. I mean, you know, first off the you know, year one was, was all about transitioning from the seller and you know, getting the human capital pieces in play and learning the business. We, I, I would say that, you know, we, we didn't you know, talk about earlier talking about not going, not being willing to go deep into the J curve or really into the J curve at all. We, we didn't add,…

We did it more steadily. But we, with the addition of me and David and some a couple other hires, we were able to, you know, significantly mitigate and the key person risk that we inherited when we bought the company.

And then from a technology perspective that was really A Year two initiative where we found a real software system to transition away from a lot of paper and pen and clipboards a little bit, a touch of Excel, but it was more paper and pen than Excel. Even in 2013, 2014, that was a really important step for being able to professionalize the business and then subsequently scale, you know, had a…

Had to navigate the war in the war in Ukraine or Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014. We had to take a bunch of, a bunch of people that were scheduled, a couple hundred people that were scheduled to go on river cruises in Ukraine and try to redirect them to other parts of the world. Ebola came into the mix that was, that was no fun.