How to Build a $5m Media Business Into a $20m Flywheel

And the acquisitions that we do help these aspiring entrepreneurs, like get a leg up, start with a great platform and a, and a strong team they can run and build with. And I think over the years, and I've owned and operated this business for nine years now, that has only gotten stronger in my view, that this path is about entrepreneurship, it's about leadership, it's about general management.

There's times where it's about capital allocation and the finance side. But only the best operators get to a point when they can really start thinking about using their business and its cash flows for their investment and a lot of, you know, strategic finance activity.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm, I'm totally on board with all of that, Clayton, but putting on my investor hat now I could also see how search investors looking at your deal would say, you know, I'm, I'm inspired by your vision. I too can see the vision, but there's just too many unknown unknowns there. Who knows if this category can support an event?

Who knows if you spin up an event that it, you know that whatever, any, any number of things can go wrong when you have, you're starting with zero events and envisioning launching events. Same with a data business. Who knows if there's a data business to be had there?

There's just a lot more ifs when you're buying a vision or when you're investing in a vision versus just doing more of the same. So really this is just a Phil philosophical back and forth. But I'm curious, did in, did all of your investors choose to invest?

They didn't. Definitely did not. So like we for that reason it's about, I think it was 60% of search investors participated in the deal. Some of them at 60 significantly larger than pro rata, others at at less than pro rata. And I still had a, an equity gap and brought in a few new investors from the search community who have proven to be wildly helpful partners.

So like the, I think that's another like great point Will. And you think about the ETA path. You know, a big part of it is conviction by the entrepreneur.

Is this a business that you want to buy and lead and see yourself being successful in? And if so, that is a reason we build diversified investor groups. Every deal is not going to be the right fit for every investor.

And when you look at some of the evolutions of the, of the ETA model where searchers might be backed by a single private equity firm or a single family office, that that's a different consideration. If the deal is not a fit for 100% of the investors, you're one investor. It doesn't get done.

Where traditional search was built to bring capital diversity to every deal. So new perspectives, new convictions could influence whether a deal gets done. And that's exactly what I learned as I went through funding this deal in 2016.

That's great. I had never heard that point made about, about the kind of diversity of capital sources in the traditional search has that kind of baked into the to.