Buying 2 Rivals to Create a Dominant Leader

Like, there's too many things that are lined up here that feel like the right fit for all of us, for you, for us. Like, we've got to make this deal happen. And so we started to talk about different options.

One of them was that I was just going to invest some of my own capital and put it at a valuation that was much lower. That kind of, we agreed to. And I wasn't going to buy the entire business.

Let's look at it. But what about. I should. He said, I should probably introduce you to Grable. Now, I had known about Grable. Grable was the investment firm, private equity group, small group out of Wyoming that had bought Pogo Pass a year earlier.

They had been pursuing Get Out Pass all along. I was competing against them, right? They were the. You know, I was basically, basically bidding against them for the business.

And when they had bought Pogo Pass and found out about Get Out Pass, they're like, we need both of these. Like, it makes no sense not to put these together. So they were actively pursuing them, but part of the reason that they didn't go with them was, you know, this guy tc, he really wanted to roll equity.

He really wanted an operator in there that he, you know, he could trust, and that felt like he was going to take the business to the next level. And he wasn't sure if he was going to get that at Grable. And he Also wasn't sure about the whole merger with Pogo, and then a variety of other reasons.

But it occurred to both of us that this company, whatever it's worth, is worth more to Grable than anyone else in the world. As an unattached investor who just invests in this business, you've got to compete against pogopass. And then there's this whole valuation thing.

But if you're Pogo, Pass and you can combine forces, these two businesses have no real competitors. This is a very valuable business to you. And so that was part of why we approached them.

And so we sat down at lunch. He was in town from Wyoming. We went down to lunch, the three of us, the CEO of Greybull, TC and myself, and we sat down and talked about the opportunity, about the, you know, what it could look like with the two together.

It turns out Grebel was looking for an operator. You know, they had this business they had bought. There were three owners who had sold the business, but still owned 30% between the three of them.

And they were still operating the business. It wasn't a CEO, it was kind of three people operating. They knew they needed to find someone.