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

When you have done those acquisitions, are you leading them? Are you the finance guy because of your banking experience?

Yeah. I mean, over the years we've kind of formed more of a deal team which is, you know, two or three people depending on the deals we've worked on. I am definitely extremely hands on in our deal processes.

Yeah. Well, I'm picking at this Clayton only because there are a lot of listeners who don't have finance backgrounds.

Yeah.

And for those folks often hearing the preponderance of former bankers, people with MBAs, former private equity types can be like, oh, do I have to have that experience to go do this? So that's why I always press and try to understand from each source's experience who does have that experience, how relevant was it?

Ultimately, I think as a entrepreneur or an operator, a CEO, you are going to have to and you're going to want to. And the most important part of the job is hiring people with strengths other than yours to, to be around you. And hiring finance and deal talent is a very easy thing and smart thing to do.

So if you're an operator going into an acquisitive strategy without deal experience, no, you shouldn't venture in blindly, but you should hire the right people around you, whether that's bankers and advisors and experienced chief of staff, tapping a board member or investor to kind of join you in the saddle as you go through the first tuck in or add on acquisition or if the business is of the…

So I think as a operator you have to, and it's the most important thing of hiring people smarter than you to supplement your skill set. If you're a fabulous deal person, you're probably going to need some great general managers and marketers and sales leaders around you. If you're a fabulous sales leader, there's going to be other parts of your skill set that aren't as developed.

So being honest with myself as a CEO about where my strengths lie and where I need to in the early stages of the business put smart people around me I think was an incredibly, you know, important activity and incredibly important step in this, in this journey.

Great. Well, we're gonna, we're gonna hear about where you, what gaps that you saw in yourself that you then filled and how you did that. But returning back to where we were in the story at the very beginning of it, Clayton. So it was actually working on deals that media industry, telecom media businesses that was finally got you excited enough to, to go out and search.

And so that is to say that you had a, had a media related thesis. Tell us, take us into your search now.