$60m Roll-Up That Started With an SBA Acquisition

Well one other thing to add will on the geographically diverse as well. It was important to us so that we had, we had lanes and we had carrier networks in different parts of the country. So we've been intentional on.

We've done two deals in North Carolina, we've done one in the Northeast, we've done one in Chicago and we've done one on the west coast. So we've been, it's been important to have geographical diversity as well from logistics perspective to have stuff going out of the northeast, stuff going out of North Carolina but also coming into North Carolina and then going west to east Coast. So that's,…

So it's a little counterintuitive because you'd think for people searching, searching, searching, searching, they're looking for some. What they finally end up closing on is going to be, you know, a million and a half dollars of SD or something. But this business doesn't.

It felt like it was pretty small and therefore I would, I would have thought maybe not so rare. So why was it the needle in the haystack that you've been looking for?

So for us, we've bootstrapped this thing between, you know, me, Brian and we have a third partner. This has been 100% bootstrapped. So we have, we, we didn't raise capital until our fourth deal.

So consequently, the first deal, it was literally like our personal assets that we had to bring to the table to get the deal closed. Right. So in order for us to accomplish that and retain 100% of the ownership on the outset, it's. We needed to use our financing that we personally raised, you know, with, you know, from our bank accounts to close the deal.

So we started off small for that reason. Can you share kind of what your budget was for that first deal? Oh man, it's, you know, five deals.

That seems like so long ago, but it was, I think it was a $1.5 million transaction. Okay. If memory serves me. Yeah. And we had the ability to go, to go higher than that will if we needed to because it was an element of opportunistic nature of what the deal came up in the ranges.

So we had looked at acquiring capital as well. We'd looked at raising capital. It was just expensive for, for rookie entrepreneurs.

Right. And that makes sense, right. When you didn't have a track record. So to owner's point, we made the decision that if we can find a deal in that right sweet spot of range where we can have 100% of the equity and build a track record, that the equity will become a lot cheaper over time.

And that worked out as expected. Once we were able to show a three year track record and three deals, we were able to raise on totally different terms than we would have starting out. So that was a focus.