We started off our search in probably around December 2023 and just started looking at what was available on Biz by Sell. Reaching out to brokers, reaching out to my network.
Acquiring Minds
A Few Hours Per Week, a Few States Away
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Knowing a lot of accountants, attorneys, insurance guys, kind of looking under anything I could and reaching out to whomever I could that led to a lot of interesting businesses. You know, I've always worked in and on smaller mid market businesses that every new one was something that, you know, I didn't really picture it existed before.
So I didn't really have a honed in buy box where it was, we're only going to buy an H Vac company or a plumbing company. So it was fairly open. We looked at, we, my wife and I are me looking at it and sharing what I found with my wife looked at quite a bit and definitely had a few false starts.
A couple of businesses we looked into that we issued Lois for negotiate Lois only to find areas of concern that we decided to walk away. We had one loi on a business in the mountains of Colorado that we just couldn't agree to a purchase price with and then thought we found the perfect business.
A really cool commercial plumbing company that we got into LOI on in probably June of 2024 and went through that full process, negotiated the purchase price, negotiated a purchase agreement, got SVA financing approval. We were pretty much two days before close, actually going to the broker's office to meet with the sellers to finalize the disclosure checklist and just cover any remaining…
And about 45 minutes before that meeting, the broker called and said, hey, I'm not sure what's going on. The deal's off. Sellers just called me. I don't have any more details than that.
Sorry. And that was, I mean in the fall of 2024 and just crushing because we, we had been through four rounds of the purchase agreement. We had heard all the legal fees.
Had you quit your job, Brett? Searching full time? I was still with my job at the time.
My expectation was that once we had that locked in, then I would give notice and have that transition period. It was an opportunity where pretty solid management team in place.
And so it, it was something where I was going to be more working on the business than in the business. Right away, we hope. Yes. In fact, you, you bought something, I think smaller, less likely to be able to be worked on rather than in.
And yet here you sit a thousand miles from the business, working on it, not in it.
So we'll get there. But Brett, what were your criteria in terms of size and SDE or EBITDA and, and, and tie that to what kind of salary did you want to be able to pay yourself? Sure. Out of the, out of the acquired business. You know, it's probably similar to what a lot of your audience is looking for in the search space.
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