Hiring a CEO to Run Things (and Get Life Back)

I don't want to have rose colored glasses with that either. I think I did and maybe we'll get here. I think part of my journey has been realizing that when I was operating a real estate portfolio at the spreadsheet level, I was not necessarily operating the businesses in a way that maybe I thought I was.

You thought you were an operator? I thought I was an operator. So I actually, I think some of the search phrase actually aligned with a lot of that.

And I really did. The numbers were super interesting and super fun to build on a model that in some ways was the same every time and in some ways different than real estate was entirely different. Like the expenses just might be super different from one to another. So I did like the searching phase.

I do vividly remember getting to a point in the searching phase where I was like, okay, if I get to a year, which I know is a very normal timeline and I was part time doing evenings and weekends. If I get to a year, I might take a pause on this because it's getting tiring. I'm working a full time job and then I call your other guests.

I'm also working in the evenings and the weekends and the lunch breaks and all of those things. So I did like it. And it is also tiring and often feels Fruitless for a while, yeah. And Jeremy, did you consider quitting and doing a full time search or was it. Was that never really something you.

You were going to do? I honestly never really considered it at the time. My wife's a therapist, a counselor, and at the time she was still in grad school, so I was our only source of income.

We had fine savings, but I don't think we were eager to live on our savings for any longer than we needed to at that point in time. So I honestly never really even considered it too much.

I do think if I got to the year and put it on pause, it might have been a whole, okay, do I do this full time? Do I do the search fund route? I. I don't know if I had that much strategy when I first went into it.

It was, I've got evenings, I got weekends, she's in grad school, I got time, let's just start looking and see what we can do. And I never had to get to the point where I had to consider, this is full time. Is this quitting my job?

What is this? Okay, Jeremy, tell us about anything more to say about the search or your criteria or how you found the business that you did? Yeah, I mean, I, I think similar to a lot of your guests, it was pretty open. Um, I mean, some guests have, obviously have very specific targets, but it was ideally 300 rand and SD minimum.

I knew I could, I knew my wife and I could probably take down something that maxed around 5 to 700 with our own money before we would need investors. But I was looking somewhere between 300 and a million, avoiding all the basics, retail, restaurants, et cetera, um, wanting recurring revenue that I never found. And it really was just a brokerage search.