Excellent. Yeah, no, it's, it's such a great perspective to, to be getting from you guys. We don't get it enough. And, and, and I take responsibility for that because I, you know, I'm often wanting to talk about the numbers and the bigger the better and so on.
Acquiring Minds
Why Choose Ownership Over Being a CEO
Excerpts · 343 segments · ~1:26:56 long
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But of course also recognizing that, um, it's very personal and bigger doesn't always mean better. And it just really depends on what you're, what you're going after, what you're going for. I should say getting back into the weeds. There was a, but a single employee at the business.
Yeah. So it was the owner at the time she sold the business. She was working maybe 10 hours a week and then one employee who was working 30 to 40 hours a week. And so, you know, we contracted with that employee to keep her on just for the transition.
But actually because the seller was working so little on the business, she consulted for a month and then she was out of the business. We had a, we have a year long. Actually just expired a year long consulting agreement with her.
I use the 330 days and I didn't even need to pay her to consult any more hours because she just wasn't that involved in the day to day to begin with. And so other than taking on some meetings, I didn't really have to do anything else to take the business over from her. And we really benefited by having that employee be the, you know, continuity piece in terms of making sure the operations…
Yeah. And so this operational person. And then as you explained earlier, the actual tour guides, although they're not formally guides but mediators whatever, are 1099 and you pay them on a per trip basis. Well, one other thing to say about this business, I don't think it's been said is that the margins are really great.
And usually when we see great margins we assume it's because the business is running so lean, which this was running lean, but too lean. And that when new, new buyer owner comes in they're going to need to, those margins are going to compress because you're actually going to need to build out a layer. And you have done that some.
Yeah, but she was, but, but, but in fact this was not a case where the seller was wearing three hats and working 50 hours a week.
Correct.
She was working. What did you say? 10 hours a week. Yeah, so, so that's those margins, assuming you didn't want to invest in the business and you just wanted to keep it where it was, were very sustainable. So there was, there wasn't necessarily going to be J curve, which is really unusual in these.
Yes, I think there has definitely been a J curve in terms of. There were a lot of, there was no, it was all word of mouth marketing. And ultimately to grow this business because it is a D2C business, we've had to invest a lot in SEO, we've had to invest a lot in how do we stand up paid marketing, how do we create loyalty programs and referral bonuses.
A lot of different marketing efforts which definitely, you know, when you look at the, the SGNA like the SG&A has been higher because of those marketing expenses. And I think I threw money at a lot of different experiments to figure out what was working. Our marketing budget is now $500 a month and I'm, you know, adding a thousand to fifteen hundred new prospects at the top of funnel for $500 a…
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