Buying 2 Rivals to Create a Dominant Leader

I guess I'm asking on behalf of people who might also be trying to arm themselves for a conversation with their workers, their partners. Yeah, it's just, I think it's just what you know and what you don't know. Right. I mean, we, we got married when we lived in New York and she was working at the time, but when we had our first child, then she stopped working, was full time mom.

And so by that point we were, you know, 12 years in to her being a full time mom out of the workforce and me being the sole breadwinner.

And she, you know, I was talking with the husband about like, how are things going? She'd be talking with the wife about all the stress they were feeling at home and she's like, I don't, I don't want to live in that world, you know, and so I helped. It was, there's a lot of education for both of us about the difference between starting a business and buying a business.

And ultimately, you know, what, what helped is that we kind of put a timeline on it and said, hey, let's, let's try it for a year. Right? Like, we've got enough savings for sure to get us through, you know, easily for a year. And if it doesn't work out, like, I'm relatively marketable, you know, human that I can go find in our job.

So it's kind of like, let's, let's give it a shot and if it doesn't work out, I'll go back and find a job and we'll keep on doing it. And, and so that's, that's kind of what we gave ourselves. Yeah, yeah. And the salary that you would have been making probably was pretty full.

So there was a lot of opportunity cost simply in, in leaving that to the side, let alone whatever happens with the business that you buy.

Can you share kind of what kind of range of salary you were earning? And, and what. Because the bigger the number the harder to walk away, the harder that conversation becomes. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I thought you might ask this, so I actually went back to some W2s and kind of check what it had been because, you know, in. In the sales world, it's pretty variable. But I was, you know, last six or seven years, average of, you know, kind of the six to 700 range is kind of where I'd been for six or seven years.

Probably. That's.

That's a lot of money to leave on the table. That makes the decision that much harder. It was. But at the same time, you know, my wife and I both came from, you know, families where our fathers were teachers.

We didn't have a lot, and so it's more than we'd ever earned.