A short three years earlier, I would have been desperate for a business owner to call me to say like, would you like to buy my business? And now it's happening not, not every day or even every week or month, but, you know, so happening often enough that it was just like this, this thing that I had like so yearned for, which was the opportunity to go and buy good businesses, was now coming my way.
Acquiring Minds
So Much Fun: The Buyer of Choice in a Fragmented Industry
Excerpts · 352 segments · ~1:32:57 long
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And I don't know, there's not a lot in my view that's more fun than going and sitting down with a business owner or more often than not in this industry, a husband and wife, and hearing their story and letting them talk about their baby, which is how they think of these businesses and, and being able to look them in the eye and assure them that you're going to do, do right by it if they entrust…
And, and I feel like I'm like really like sounding self absorbed right now, but like, you know, when you have people calling me and say like, you know, I hear you're like that high integrity and you do what you say you're going to do. You know, it feels good to have earned that kind of reputation. So I don't know, there's, there's a bunch of like the, I don't know, my, call it external validation…
Well, and you also just start to see a path of faster growth because yeah, there are daycare centers, of course, thousands upon thousands in every, you know, across the country. So in every, every town there's multiple and you can just kind of imagining just the dot, the dots on the map proliferating. So this is not appealing to your higher sense of, but just the kind of the, the hungry growthy…
It's like, wow, we could, we could, we could just supercharge how quickly we grow with all this inbound.
Right? Okay, so I have to go on another tangent because I, you know, earlier I got on the soapbox about kind of the altruism aspect of early ed. But what I learned about myself as I was in this industry was it was, it was lovely that it was altruistic, but really, that was not what fired me up. What fired me up was building a business. And yeah, it was fun to see the dots on the map.
And yeah, it was fun to. Fun to grow. And AJ Wasserstein, who I'm sure all of your listeners will be familiar with, who I think is just unbelievably wise, said to me when I was raising my search fund, I was pitching him on the search, and I told him I was going to do education, and I told him it was partly altruistic.
And he said to me, mark, I think you will be more fulfilled building a great business in any industry where you take great care of your employees and great career customers than if you have kind of a mediocre business in an altruistic industry. And, boy, was he right, in my view. So, anyway, yeah, it was a path like fast capital vision growth.
And for me, there's not much more fun than that. Mark, just let's underline the point of capital, efficient financy. People will understand what that means, but let's just highlight it for people who might not be so fluent.
What you met, you said earlier that you could acquire with just debt and balance sheet cash as opposed to equity.
Expand on why that's powerful, please. Yeah, so kind of Finance 101 here. Yeah, very simplistically, and this is maybe not the answer you're looking for, but if you put yourself in the position of the principal, so the, the, the CEO, the entrepreneur or whatever you want to describe yourself as.
There's a million different structures, but almost all of them come back to, I make more money if my equity investors make more money. And the best way to make your equity investors more money is to grow without needing more of their money.
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