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

But I think we were, we were looking to de. Risk and diversify ourselves and get some liquidity sort of going into this next phase of life.

Yeah, absolutely. And you knew Covid was coming, so.

If you. Putting all, all this makes a lot of sense. But let's pretend for the thought exercise here. If you had just wanted to hold on to it, you have this now, this business now doing seven and a half million dollars of ebitda.

As you told us, you've been paying down a lot of the debt. So, you know, you're, you, you have a line of sight on seven and a half million dollars of, of cash coming out of this business. If you had just wanted to hold on to that and, and either as a lifestyle business actually, or to keep growing, it could you have.

And I'm, I'm making a larger point about traditional search. Does this traditional search vehicle allow for that?

Yeah, it certainly allows from that, for that. And you know, we would have been able to start participating in the, in the distributions once we had, you know, if you think through the, you know, how the traditional search terms are set up, once we had paid down debt and, and return all the capital to investors, we would have started to participate meaningfully in the equity distributions.

And you know, over and above the, the salary and, and bonus structure that we had as co CEOs of the business, it was certainly doable. It was certainly, certainly at our, at our, at our discretion. I think it's, it's highly unusual because there's again, there's often a desire to sort of achieve more significant liquidity.

There are, there's also very favorable tax treatment from capital gains as opposed to equity distributions from an operating company. So, you know, there are a number of things that are at play. And you know, as we touched on earlier, it's, you know, it's, it's the tour operators.

It's a fun business to run, but it's, you know, it can, it can be stressful, it can be tiring. And I don't, you know, I don't necessarily think that we, we wanted to be doing it, you know, forever.

Yep. And can you share with us what the final sale price was and what all that looked like?

Sure. So we had about 7 and a half million of EBITDA when we sold, we sold it for nine times EBITDA which was 67 and a half million. We were, we had about a million dollars of excess cash on the balance sheet and we had delevered from 19 and a half million dollars of debt to around 4 million. And you know, net of some transaction fees, we, the proceeds to in aggregate to the Investor Group were…