Stacking Small Acquisitions to $5m in Revenue

They'll do such a great job. So we trusted them to, to kind of knock the dust off this thing and look through it and fast forward a little bit. They never even asked for bank statements in any appointment at any point.

So they had P. Ls and tax returns that matched. And we went pretty far through this process. And eventually Jake just kept saying, dude, something about those numbers doesn't seem right.

And so that right there just said, something's off with the bookkeeping. We ended up hiring a, she called herself a forensic bookkeeper that went through, through the books to try to, to create what we believe the real pianos to be. And she thought the bookkeeper had stolen upwards of $300,000 of profit from, from this company.

Wow. We are learning all of this on the side and not wanting the SBA to know anything because we want to keep this deal intact and we want to figure out what, what, what the real purchase price is going to be and then just let the SBA know that we've reached different terms. So this is all happening in the background as we're getting closer and closer to closing.

So you remember and your thought was. That if, if the SBA heard about potential embezzlement, they would just, or your lender, that they would just disqualify the deal out of hand at that point. Correct. So we're trying to keep this, keep this as far from them as possible.

And then back from my thing of how are we going to tell the SBA that we're going to offer significantly less with no real explanation whatsoever, but we still want the deal regardless.

A phenomenal company. Great management, great systems in place, like the processes they've created and their onboarding process and their training program and everything was that of a Fortune 500 company. It's a really well ran company.

We just want to pay the appropriate price for it is all. Yeah, yep.

And the owner of this company, the seller, she was learning this in real time as we were. She had no idea about any of this. And how could she have not felt in her own, you know, pocketbook that it's $300,000 less than it should be.

Had we not already had a really strong relationship with her? I just flat out wouldn't have believed her.

And, yeah, that's my reaction. We asked her that question. It's kind of a hard question to ask, but she, she said, you know, I'm not used to making this kind of money.