What were some of the parameters of the size? Fill it out for us because I think this is, this is a core chunk of your presentation at SM Boot. Yeah. So I knew what I wanted in the business was it obviously location. It needed to be somewhere in the South.
Acquiring Minds
Trades Over Tech: Buying an Appliance Repair Business
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Right. It didn't necessarily have to be in Florida. It could have, you know, South Carolina would have been fine, Georgia would have been okay. But it needed to be in the south, it needed to be scalable.
Right. That was important to me. So when I say scalable, like not franchise based and nothing that was locked into a territory like I needed, I needed to be able to grow it and not have any boundaries or, or anything, you know, stopping me from growing, growing the company. So that was one, I wanted to have some level of management in place that I wouldn't lose when I acquired the company.
That was important. Right, Because I didn't, I didn't want to go into a new industry and, and have to learn every nuance about that industry in two weeks time. Yeah, that just wasn't going to work because I was switching from white collar IT to blue collar. Like I wanted the blue collar business.
And a lot of people ask me, oh, why don't you, why didn't you get back into it? Yeah. And my answer to that is one, the multiples on those businesses are more than I was willing to pay and two, I just don't know what AI is going to do to that business, specifically msps and the way technology has developed in such a way that if you, if you're a generalist, you can figure out most IT issues.
It isn't like it was 25 years ago where you needed to call an IT professional to actually fix the problem. Like for the most part things are kind Of I don't want to say set it and forget it in it, but they can be. So you, you kind of have to move upstream to those more complex customers.
And with me moving to a new location, like I just, I don't know, I just, I didn't want to do that, that work anymore. I wanted something different, you know, and I wanted to be in the blue collar space, something that, and so that.
You said why you stayed away from MSPs, but why there are other businesses that are not blue collar that are also not MSPs. It sounds like you not only didn't want to do msps, but were drawn to blue collar. Why? Yeah, yeah, I thought, I just thought that, that I could provide a lot of value to a blue collar business.
You have a technician and typically what happens is a technician leaves a company that he's worked for for a long period of time, goes off on his own, starts his own company, does really good work, has to hire a couple other technicians, right?
Grows the business to five or six techs, maybe 10. And at that point they don't know how to scale the business beyond that. And if I could find a company that was at that point, I knew I could come in and provide the value from a back office and growth and technology perspective to get it to that 25, 50, 100 technician, you know, size company.
What were the skills that you saw yourself bringing Brian, to a 10, 15 person tech business and then scaling it. So a lot of that, you know, just process, you know, procedure and some basic stuff like just, you know, having a domain name that matches your email address. Right.
You think that's crazy, but some of those simple things like, like phones, you know how phones is all the, all the back office process that a typical technician wouldn't even care about or doesn't even think about, but are so critical to scale your business. You need those processes and systems in place in order to take yourself to the next level. Otherwise you're going to be chasing your tail.
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