If I'm going to do something, I do it like 100% A plus, Christian Bateson style, or I just say I'm not doing it, you know, and either. Either is a good. Is a good choice. Right. And so you get so much agency in your life. It's. It starts out professionally, but then it starts to.
Acquiring Minds
Getting Unstuck by Buying a Business
Excerpts · 581 segments · ~1:52:20 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
At least for me, it starts to manifest in all these other ways in your life where you're like, the way that I run my business is the way that I try and do all the things that I do. So anyway, 2019 was a great year. We made money. In fact, we started.
We got so Busy that our $100,000 cash in the bank was insufficient because there was a mismatch between me writing checks to my employees every month, every week, and me getting paid by my customers after the 60, 90 days. So my accounts receivable went from like 500,000 to almost 900,000. And I had to go to my wife and say, honey, we need to put more money into the business because it's doing so…
And that was. She wasn't very happy about that. So we sold some stocks and we took some money out of this and that, and, you know, it was. It was great. We Were off to the races.
Then Covid hit and all of a sudden construction basically ceased. So now I have, you know, 35 employees who like don't have jobs and are calling me. And you know, it was.
So that was very, very difficult. The good news is that all of our accounts receivable, that had ballooned, all, all turned into cash. And so I went from, you know, I had a bunch of money in the bank all of a sudden, which was a good feeling in a time of extreme uncertainty.
But you still gotta be payroll.
Well, I mean, if we're not working, then people aren't working, they aren't getting paid. Right? So I mean, that's, that's one of the benefits of this business is that the, the variable costs is almost all, I mean, like labor is 90% of my cost, you know, or higher than 90%. So my customers don't want me cleaning construction.
Then no one's working. And you know, I mean, it was, it was very disruptive and I think less so here than maybe some places, but still, I mean, because of the types of jobs we were doing. So if you're cleaning, you know, a high rise, a high rise office building, the outside skin of that building with like the curtain wall isn't like, they're not like going to the local glass store and buying…
These are pre manufactured components manufactured in China at mass scale and shipped all over the world. So when the supply chain gets disrupted and shut down, that means that construction basically stops. And so you may have a contract and they may have a timeline to get the cleaning of that curtain wall done.
But you know, when the ships don't come to port, then everything just, everything just got very delayed. So 20, 2020, our revenue was down, you know, 30% versus 2019. That was very stressful.
Got some SBA money or some, some PPP money. And there was also SBA assistance for people with SBA loans. And then 2020, it started to come back.
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗