Deciding to Exit After 2 Years of Ownership

In brief, give us whatever is relevant that led you up to wanting to buy business. Sure.

Super high level. Grew up, born and raised Virginia to working class mom and dad and decided at a kind of late age in high school, if you will, that I was drawn to the military. So decided to go to West Point and spent, you know, my four years there.

Decided to go to the corporate world and had a friend of mine that was a Capital One that recruited me to come and spent my next 10 professional years at Capital One. I decided to get my MBA during that time as well. So went to the University of Richmond and did that in the evenings.

Had our second child during that time and kind of when I started to approach the age of 40, you know, I had kind of thought about searching, thought about acquiring a business. Didn't really know what all that entailed, but you know, was. Was really drawn to it.

The older I got, it was more and more apparent that if I don't go do this and do it full time, then it's frankly just never going to happen for me. So why were you drawn to it? Check. I think for me it was like there was a lot, well, frankly a lot of things like just the.

The concept of ownership has always been very important to me and I think a key part of my story is, you know, although I've worked in some phenomenal companies, like never had that really deep sense of ownership, you know, led teams, had, you know, responsibilities and scopes of work and in the corporate world. Right. But it is not true ownership. And had had some close friends that were owning…

And it always sounds way more sexy and appealing frankly than it is. But that was a big part of it for me, like wanting to own something, wanting to control what was within my ability to control. And so again decided to take the leap.

Gave myself the kind of the quintessential two years to search at the time, kind of getting into a little bit, probably more well than we want to at this moment. But at the time realized that although I'm generally a confident person, my confidence in search honestly was a bit lacking. So got connected with Sam, probably through Twitter, gave him a call, asked him what was in it for him in terms…

I think you had just gone through your first one, if I'm correct here, was super transparent. I appreciated the openness and honesty. What did he say? It was, look, I want to work with great people, I want to share what I've learned and frankly, I want to have the ability to invest in great deals and great people.

So for me that was the. There was no hidden agenda with Sam. I think Sam, that's probably a defining trait of yours.

There's no real hidden agendas to Sam. And as again, as someone who appreciates openness and honesty like that resonated with me. And honestly it was three days to go meet some new people in my new world of search.