The Magic of Low Multiple + Growth

As, as you put it, the personal guarantee doesn't care if you have nothing to your name or if you have a million dollars to your name. It'll come after, it'll come after both. The, say more about the, the report that you referred to.

The, the SIG's self funded search report which we reported on when it came out.

And so this, that really instead of extrapolating mentally and sort of guessing, you know, does this, does this data set from traditional search extrapolate to self funded search? I didn't have to guess. The timing was perfect where that data set from SIG had just been released around that time, I believe.

And so it just really helped give me the confidence to understand what the return profile could look like and the bear based bull case and get behind it and also frankly, you know, convince my wife as well. I think it convinced both of us that there's a, there's an attractive opportunity here.

I'll just add a few more things to that.

So that really was a pretty exciting report to have come out because as you said, historically there'd been all this data from the traditional search fund side, namely the Stanford search study, which people will have heard of and really CLE data and lots of it and nothing on the self funded side which is way messier and amorphous and people come and go from their searches and it's not this sort…

So Sig took a stab at, at building something and it was the closest, I mean it was, it was the most data any of us had ever seen on self funded search. They have not done a updated version, nor do I think they will. So I would encourage people to go look at it or to listen to the episode that we did when we interviewed SIG about it, where we go, went over some of the key takeaways from it.

We try to distill down the most exciting findings. But it is also now old data and Self funded search results have probably declined in aggregate since then as rates went up and businesses got harder, got more challenging and, and the competition among self funded searchers. There are just more of us around running around trying to buy businesses.

So one assumes that multiples have drifted up a little bit due to the increased competition. Although we could have an argument about that. I could argue that both ways.

So anyway, encourage people to go dig it up and listen to and either listen to the episode or look at the report itself. Keep in mind though that it's two or three years old and that difference in when the data was collected matters in this world.

So.