Hometown Holdco: Geography as Moat

Yeah, we were saying things that, you know, we were giving them permission to do things that our industry standards that they just were never verbally told they could do. I mean, small things that, you know, before we ran the shop, it was almost entirely reactive. If something was broken, a car would come in, they'd fix the broken thing and send it back out.

Whereas now we do inspections on everything with a car is in here. We're going to look at its brakes, it's oil, it's power steering, it's everything. And not just upsell the customer, but so that the customer knows exactly the state of their vehicle and they don't have questions, and we're preventing them from coming in.

And had other people who were mechanically sadly come in and out. And then it was bought by a really awesome guy who had retired from Wall street, really liked cars, and kind of bought this as a fun side project. And he did a lot of great things for the actual financials of the business and standardizing some of that.

But in terms of getting customer experience or the. Or how the mechanics work and the systems that they're. That they're going through, there wasn't much change there.

So. Leaning into the education is important for us, and I think it's something we've learned a lot going forward. If we buy into a new industry, I think, you know, if we buy another Company. We always want to have our.

We always want to spend time here. We're going to want to spend time there. But it's. I think we are really going to invest heavily in the beginning of understanding the nuances of that specific industry so that we can speak the language to our operators, to our employees.

We still got a ways to go, guys. And we're. And we're deep in.

But just before we leave this fetal moment with the exit of your operator and so come to find out that all roads pass through this operator, which was a fragile. A fragile design of the business anyway. And so why this. That's part. Big part of why this has been a blessing.

And that was a blessing in disguise because not only did culture improve later, but so too did the. Did the structure. So it's now not all. There's not as much key man risk.

And so I guess. I guess the lesson there is over reliance on a single operator is a weakness. Yeah. And by the way, I loved the first few months of business ownership and I was so invigorated whatnot. But I would go home at the end of the day and be like, if he leaves, what will we do?

And I like, at the end. And then he did. Yes. At the end of the day, I still had a pit in my stomach always. And so, you know, I think that it.