Buying a Wide Moat in a Consolidating Industry

Whereas a lot of people who are already in the industry and have been for a long time, that's obviously that knowledge is super valuable. But when you see things one way for a while and you're around people who sought the same way as you because they grew up the same as you. Career wise, it's harder to do something a little bit different.

And so I was really excited about it because it's like, well, I know nothing. And so I'm going to make my own opinions based on the information and data I see. And that's how we're going to grow this business.

You had also said that the manufacturers. So the lay of the land here is that there are these manufacturers, I think you said there's four of them who make AEDs, the manufacturers, and you all have these tight relationships because you're distributors for them and then of course service their equipment. They were excited to see some young blood because you're eager to grow this business, which…

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're really excited about it because similarly to what I kind of said earlier, we have a really unique corner of the market where we're actually servicing and maintaining these things on site. And that is the biggest part of our business. And that's also the most expensive type of business to prop up.

Right? It's really expensive to have people driving around in cars and touching things. It's expensive to hire people, it's expensive for maintenance. You got to make your costs back.

So it's a really tough business to start building organically. And this business has been around for almost 50 years, so it's just been able to get to the scale it needs to get. So the manufacturers recognized how differentiated our model is, because other times when something goes out for like an rfp, right.

Everybody else, you're just competing on the actual widget itself, the aed. But if you have this other component that you can now sell on top of it, that's extremely differentiated and you can offer this to this customer. And to the point of the conversation we were having earlier, people don't really understand they need to maintain these things.

So now you've planted a seed in their head like, oh, wow, like I didn't think about this. Somebody's going to have to take care of this. You go and you ask the other people that have put bids in like okay, what can you do?

And they can't do on site service and maintenance for you or if they can, it's, it's different, maybe they can't get to your region, etc, things like that. So it really just depends. And so we have this piece that makes us really unique and helps us win a lot more frequently because not only can we sell the actual widget, we can sell you something else that you're really going to need.

So Ania, at lss, you have people all over the country who do routes to service these aed. How do you have the, the reach. And the, do you have the reach.

And the density that you cover everywhere or just like major metropolitan areas or, or, or how. What's that look like? I mean do you have people in Alaska servicing these? No.