Yeah, that's right. Yeah. If you buy, if I go buy a childcare center and I have a bunch of attrition customers or employees for that matter, because they're averse to maybe not just the brand, but really what the brand stands for or mean, you know, means to them. Yeah. Then, then a lot of what you've paid for is as probably the value has eroded. But then there's a million other considerations.
Acquiring Minds
So Much Fun: The Buyer of Choice in a Fragmented Industry
Excerpts · 352 segments · ~1:32:57 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
Right. Like you know, marketing dollars if you're, you know, if you're needing to go to market to, to advertise for a bunch of different brands versus one brand, that that's not costless, you know, and so on and so forth. Yeah, totally. Speaking of marketing, that was a big feature of your growth.
Talk to us about how that played out, please. Yeah, well, I say to folks that I think I did almost nothing good for little sprouts, but there was maybe like a small handful of things. And one was I realized early on that we were in a consumer facing business and our marketing function was substandard.
And, and anyway, so then that's okay. You know, these small businesses are not going to be aces across all the functions.
And I did become clear in my head though that it was going to be important to upgrade that, that function. And so I did not conduct an executive search. I just called my friend from business school, Sarah Clabby, and I just said, Sarah, she was in Chicago, she had this, she, she was the one that everyone loved in our business school class because she's wonderful and everyone hated because she got…
So she had this like fancy, you know, marketing job at Pepsi, like international. She's traveling globally all the time. And I was like, Sarah, you've got to come to Little Sprouts.
Like I just, I need you to come. And I kept calling until she agreed to come. And so several months later she came and it was, it was like almost instantaneous the improvement that we saw in our, in our marketing function and importantly culturally.
So she was my first, you know, key hire and she fit in beautifully into the culture. So the team embraced her and she was one of these people like, like, I don't know, she's not a unicorn. But like she, she was so high functioning and so capable that like, yeah, she was like a partner this, she was basically like a partner that I could have searched with but didn't.
And I'm immensely grateful for her skipping way ahead. When I stepped down as CEO in 2019, the board and I agreed to promote Sarah to CEO and she's now off on her next journey as CEO of a very successful childcare consolidation. So she's an absolute star.
Well, good for you. For, for getting her. One of the, one of the things that you said in our pre call and when we were talking about it, her and in this was demand was never a problem for you. So you, you, you, you know, the, the leads came, the customers came.
It was interesting to me because one of the things that we often hear about the lower middle market broadly is that, is that actually that, that, that it's not hard to get customers and so often these businesses are handicapped by founders and the owners and the sellers who, who just aren't good at marketing or aren't doing the bare minimum or the best practices, aren't phone, aren't calling you…
How, how you, you know what the delta was between what you had and what you got from Sarah. Yeah, absolutely. So the supply, demand imbalance is always very much in our favor. So that was like when you asked me the outset, what is one of the things I liked about it really what it boiled down to was there's vastly more demand for childcare services than there was supply.
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗