How I Bought a $3.4M Business For $200K

0:00 If you've ever thought about buying a business, then this episode's gonna be for you because on the internet there are a lot of people telling you about how amazing it could be to just go buy a business that's already working. You just take out a loan, you put very little money down, and boom, you're cash flowing and you're working passively. But those are also people that are Kinda selling you the dream. Now My buddy Dan, is one of my best friends from college. just actually did this. A couple of years ago he bought a business, a very random, unsexy business.

0:24 that he had no experience in, he didn't have a lot of money coming in, he had never bought a business before, but he did it. And it's actually worked out pretty well. And I asked him to come on and tell the real story. So tell us like What was it like? What did you do the first hundred days? How did you actually find bind the business? How much money did you have to put down? How much money did it make? What are the downsides? What are the traps? All the real stuff. And uh

0:45 I love it because Dan was very honest. He was very uh open about all those things. And then at the end, he actually brainstormed a couple of business ideas that He saw because when you buy a business, you look at hundreds of businesses. Um, he actually saw has a couple of his favorite spaces that he thinks people could go into. And we brainstorm that at the end. So this episode I think is gonna be a lot of value for anyone who's ever thought about buying a business. And then we have a fun brainstorm also at the end for other businesses that people could check out. Alright, enjoy this episode with my buddy Dan. I feel like I could rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.

1:15 I'm putting my all in it like a day's off. On the roadless travel, never left. All right. This is a special one. My buddy Dan from college is here. And me and Dan, we've started a sushi restaurant together. We've owned a pet mouse together. We've tried to bring down the house at a casino together. We have d gone through many schemes and dreams and then Dan called me a couple of years ago. And I convinced him to try to buy a business. And then he he's done it now. He bought the business and he's here to tell the story of that whole Journey of going from a guy who never c thought that he would ever buy a business.

1:47 To now owning one of the most random businesses that you'll ever hear about. And then I got Sam here, who doesn't know dance. It's me and my college buddy. And then Sam, you're th sort of the third wheel on this date. Are you ready for this? Yeah, sign me up. This isn't the first time it's happened but I'm gonna ask questions that it usually what what I think is what the audience thinks. So so I'll ask some questions. Yeah, exactly. All right. So um Sam, where do you wanna start? Just maybe first question is like who who the hell is this guy? Who are you? Yeah. Well who are you?

2:13 Certner, Dan Sertner. So I wasn't his roommate in college. I was like the next door neighbor. So for the Seinfeld references. I was like the Kramer. I'd show up from time to time unannounced. Live with this guy for four years. So uh I go way back with Sean. And by the way, Sam, the funniest part of meeting Dan uh the first day of college, I walk in

2:34 And Dan, the way he looks now, he looked exactly the same. At age eighteen. And so Dan is standing there and he used to wear a visor'cause he's like, I don't know. Cool guy from New Jersey. So I thought he was someone's dad. I was like, I saw him from the back and he knew everything. He was like, Laundry's down there. Yeah, you have to do this. You know your meal plan's not gonna work until you activate it. Uh you have to go to he knew everything about the campus, and I was totally clueless. I didn't know anything about going to college. And uh so Well he was and he had a s he had a single he was like one of the smart guys who like requested having a single room, didn't have to have a random roommate. So Dan's been ahead of the game for a long time.

3:11 And uh okay, and what business did you end up buying, by the way? Uh, so I bought a company called Fleet Packaging. So it's a a packaging distributor. Uh so effectively we work with large retailers in the US uh who need uh any sort of packaging. So if you know you go to a mall

3:27 Yeah, you leave with one of those to go back. Uh, we help companies buy those. Um, and then we help with warehousing distribu distribution. We make it easy to buy bags overseas. So he he is Dan the Bagman now, which is all you really need to remember. Dan the Bagman. But to get there, I think it's a fun kind of journey. Right. So we're gonna skip the part about me and Dan in college and then the company we tried to start together. We're gonna skip that for now. We'll go we can go back there later. The I think though the buying a business story

3:54 starts where um In actually kind of a funny way. So after we After we kind of Try and fail at our first business. We go off and do different things. Um I go move to Australia. Dan moves to San Francisco and he goes and gets a job at Facebook.

4:09 A few months later, Dan calls me. And um he's like Oh yeah, uh sorry. I like he's I don't I don't know what he said, but he was like Yeah, I was just uh quickly just fixing a bug. And I was like fixing a bug what do you What are you talking about?

4:22 And he's like, Yeah, I'm coding now. Like your code? You're a he was like a economics fine he was like our finance guy. Well why is the why is our finance guy well what are you doing in code? And basically what he did was I don't know if you know this name, but I guess at Facebook They have just like a a coding academy internally at Facebook. Dan, is that how you describe it? Like a boot camp. I say any non non engineer could go like

4:45 Become an engineer. Just while on the job. Is that is that how it works? It's not explicitly so it's actually for the engineers when they show up. So when you show up and I actually think they just got rid of this like a few weeks ago. So this might be old news, but you know, for the first twenty years of Facebook's existence. Uh you know, when you get a job as an engineer at Facebook, you go to this eight week crash course on how to be an awesome Facebook engineer. And it's not typically open to non-engineers, but you know, why uh why accept the status quo?

5:12 Uh, so I was actually one of the few people who early on was able to take classes there. Um, so I started in fraud. Do you have a good Farmville fraud story? What what does an average person like us not know about like Fraud on a farm like farmville sounds like the stupidest thing in the world. The fact that there's even fraud going on. It's like w you know, am I stealing crops from Sam's farm on the street? You are stealing crops. Well what you're doing is you're probably You're wanting to b make a better farm than Sam, but you don't have time. Is it for pride or money?

5:42 It's Well, the fraudsters are doing it for money. So the the buyer is doing it for pride. They're like I want a bigger farm than Sean. but I don't have time to actually spend my time playing the game. So I'm gonna go online to the black market, wherever that is. And someone's gonna sell me Whatever, two hundred mushroom seeds.

5:58 to plant in my farm and they've procured those illegally because they've stolen someone's credit card. And there's this whole world of Facebook games fraud that existed. So so Farmville was basically like I don't know, is this call is that the laundering part but basically like G guy steals the credit card, uses it in Farmville, sells the Farmville stuff to me, which looks harmless. And he gets cash out the other side.

6:20 Precisely. This is like a much less cooler version of the wire. It it pretty much. Well there was also like real money laundering too, where like people would make their own app. And then launder money through that. That one was was a little more intense. Dude, so I have one time uh

6:34 I was like, Dave, what are you even doing at Facebook, Dave? What do you mean fraud? What is the Facebook fraud? He goes. Have you ever opened up your timeline on Facebook and just seen a dick? I go, No, he goes. You're welcome. No, that was uh oh no, that that that was the later iteration. I moved on to community, uh community tooling.

6:51 Yeah, yeah. But of effectively preventing fo uh porn on Facebook. So that that was my go to line. And uh what did you do after Facebook? So after Facebook Um I all of a sudden, you know.

7:03 Had transitioned into engineering. I went to a startup Uh called Namely. Uh it was a payroll company. And I joined as an engineering manager, eventually worked my way up to be CTO of that company. You gotta tell Sam the uh The brilliant Uh so Dan's Dan's actually a marketer at heart. He just never worked in marketing for some reason.

7:22 But the way he uh framed himself in the job market was amazing. So he's he's at Facebook, he becomes an engineer there, right? So it's not like he's like MIT computer scientist, right? Like Like when you think about like a Duke Spanish major. He's a Duke Spanish major. When he was at Duke, he kept he kept taking this class called Lemurs where they're going to the zoo and looking at lemurs all day. Like Dan was that's what Dan was doing with a Duke. But then he trains himself to be an engineer and then when he goes into the job market, he has this brilliant way of framing himself so that he ended up becoming a CTO of this like fast growing startup. All right. So I leave Facebook.

7:55 Um As as you will see, most of these things are schem that Sean and I have done in our lives that slowly elevated to get ideas. But I left Facebook, um, you know, basically the best of the best at the time. Like it was you know, still is, you know, one of the best technology companies. Um, but I'd say You know, I was I was uh I joined Facebook, there were three thousand people, I left when there were sixty thousand people. So I saw a lot of things. And I'm not like

8:17 Old school Facebook Rich. I missed that. And I wasn't an engineer in the beginning. So just want to clarify that too. But I left and I had, you know, kind of this weird amount of experience. Like I had whatever, four or five years of coding experience, which is cool. maybe enough to make me like an engine one or engine two at a normal company. Um, but you know, I had moved into management while I was at Facebook and and the way that I positioned it was You know.

8:40 I I'm a Facebook manager. I know how things work at Facebook. Let me come Into your startup. And let me whip your team in shape. Let me

8:50 help your team run like a Facebook engineering team. All right, so I've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year, and I've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year. And so I have a little bit of experiencing, building, creating new things. And I actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas. Instead, what I'm really, really good at, what my skill set is

9:15 is researching different ideas. different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies. And I didn't invent this, by the way. We had this guy, Brad Jacobs, we talked about him on the podcast. He started like four or five different publicly traded companies with tens of billions of dollars each. He actually is the one who I learned how to do this from. And so with the team at HubSpot, we put together all of my research tactics, frameworks, techniques on spotting different opportunities in the market, reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks. And so If you want to see my framework, you can check it out. The link is below in the YouTube description.

9:53 But Sam, isn't that great to just be like How to re how to rebrand yourself to be like, I'll make your engineering team run like a Facebook engineering team. And as if you're a startup founder who's you know sitting like namely was in New York, right? That's getting kinda aspirational. to have somebody say that versus just I have five years of experience, right? Yeah, man, that's great. Yeah. It was all about storytelling.

10:13 So the story is so far is like You know, whatever, f pretty good. You're you're stumbling into things. And now you're in a position where you're like I'm at this startup. We just raised a bunch of money at a good valuation. I'm the CTO. I got these shares. I'm gonna be rich. Gonna be rich. What happens? Didn't get rich. Second time. Facebook. Cool. Really didn't get rich. This time didn't get rich. Uh you know, the so

10:40 You know, long story short. we found ourselves in a place where in order to do what we needed to do, uh, we needed to sell the company. Or in order for the company to do what it needed to do next, we need to sell the company. And It became very clear that this wasn't gonna be kind of this Massive windfall that I had been expecting. Long story short.

10:59 The company sells. I find myself out of a job because as part of the transition, the acquiring company was like, We have a CTO, so we don't need you. So it's like five years of hard work and kind of that dream of like, hey, we're gonna take something and and turn it into something else. Kinda goes away pretty quickly.

11:15 And that's kinda where things start to get interesting,'cause you know, I have uh Sean on speed dial, so had a had a fortuitous conversation with him that day. Was he the one who inspired you to do this or did you listen to the M F M or wha how did that insight gonna be because like it's not normal for a Facebook a Duke Facebook uh Unicord startup guy to

11:36 Buy business. Correct. Um so no, it was and it wasn't even like a hey Sean, I need advice. It was just like a random like We were just catch up catch up call, yeah. Yeah, let's just catch up. It's been a while. Wait, so Sean, did you say like I use this bad company? No. So we're on this college catch up call. What's going on with you? What's going on with you? Dan tells us

11:55 This story. Got we got acquired. You know, uh there can only be one CTO. They yeah, they they already have one. So great. I'm gonna be and so he was just saying, like if you know any cool companies, let me know. I'm I'm gonna be looking. And then I kinda just mentioned to him, I was like, Dude Dan, you're so like Like ever since I known you.

12:10 You've been entrepreneurial. And I think like Naval said this once he goes, you know, other people sometimes see your gifts easier than you can see them. So he was saying for Naval, he also used to think I'm gonna be a scientist. And his mom was like, No, no, no, you're gonna be a business person. He's like, What? Oh science, right? And she's like, No, like every time we walk by a pizza shop, you're telling me all the three different things that they should be doing to run their business better. Like you're always doing that. You're naturally you're a natural fit for a business person. Like that's what you're good at. And so Dan same thing. Dan was always somebody who was like

12:38 Shooting a shot. Like when our freshman year at Duke All of a sudden there's like this huge package and Dan has like a lifetime supply of stried gum. And I'm like, damn, why did you buy this much gun? He's like, I didn't buy it, I want it. And he would always be entering contests. I went yeah, one day with Dan I go to um

12:56 I go to work and Dan goes Uh, hey, I gotta get off early. I got an audition. I'm like, what? Yeah, what are you doing? He's like I'm going to try to get on Wheel of Fortune right now. And so we I went with them and we both got cast onto Wheel of Fortune. Well, y yeah, you you leave out the point, we like we came we were doing the sushi restaurant at the time, so we like were both Like Been working all day. We have the bright green headbands. Like we have not like we came in with knives. Like we had our sushi knives on our belt. We come into this interview.

13:23 Like no wonder we got cast. It was like this is good T V, man. These clowns. But he was always doing this. He was always like he early on he started uh recording like product review videos for like, I don't know, two cents a pop or something like that. Like he was just doing random shit all the time. So it just seems strange to me that he was like going to get a corporate job. Like this didn't it's not like the vision I had. So I was like, Dan. You ever started thought about starting a business? He's like I don't really have like A killer idea. I feel like I need like a Killer idea if I'm gonna like put my whole life on the line for something. Oh, that's fair.

13:54 I said, You know, but do this podcast and it's not something I was doing a lot of, but like Met a few people who Go and buy businesses. And it's honestly seems like a little bit of a cheat code. Like Um as in the business if you find a business already working. You don't have to come up with a genius idea. It's already validated. It's already working. It's got years of profitable history.

14:13 You can buy it at a fair price. And then if you're good at executing, like you can grow it over time. And you know, there's retiring business owners, like there's reasons these are up for sale. And so I just kinda like planted that seed. Like would you I don't know. Like Consider that. And Dan, I I don't know what your first reaction was, but I I bet it was probably just like

14:29 Lukewarm, I don't know. It was Luke Warm. I mean it was two part one, you know, I in the beginning I said Sean, you know, always knows what he's talking about, seems to seems to have his life figured out. My first response like Sean has no idea what he's talking about. He's never bought a business before. To this day, that is still my ver you know, my my main thing is like you don't know Matt. Um But the second one was like But Sean

14:49 He's a pretty smart dude, like and he You know, if he's saying this is a good idea, it's a good idea, but You know, my real my second reaction after that was with what money am I buying this business,'cause let's recall. Miss the boat on the Facebook Riches, Miss the Boat on the Namely Riches. But it actually turned out and you know, we'll uh I'll get into this more later, like

15:08 You don't need that much money to buy the business. That's the crazy part. And I think it it took a little bit of digging initially Um to figure that out. And I'll I'll talk more about that in a minute. Let's do a quick Tarantino. So let's give the ending first. So let's say you You buy you y you ended up buying a bag business as in like literally If you go to a s shopping store and you buy something and they have a custom branded bag when they

15:31 Check out like There's a decent chance I I made that back. So it's it's it's it's that big? It's that big. I unfortunately can't I like I'm under confidentiality agreements with most of my clients, but if you go to a mall, there's a pretty decent shot that You're gonna touch one of my back. We're gonna get it out of you somehow. We're gonna get out of you after. I'm not bound by any confidentiality. Maybe I can say some things. All right, so but but Dan, let's give the headline. So you buy a business, let's we're gonna we're gonna work backwards for like'cause it's gonna sound cool and then we're gonna be like, here's the crazy journey of how I got there. All right, so how much did you buy that business for?

16:05 I bought the business for three point four million dollars. So he buys a bag business for three point four million dollars. That business had been around for how long and about how much money was it making when you bought it? Yeah. So it was about fifteen years old. Uh the business had been making anywhere from

16:21 And it was right after Covid. So it was a weird few years, but it had been making anywhere from eight to eleven million dollars a year. In revenue. In revenue. And it was doing on average about eight hundred thousand dollars um in profit. And what's the URL?

16:38 What what's the uh Fleet fleet packaging dot com. Best bags in the business. Best bags in the business. Do you have like a do you have like a slogan yet? So the jingle? We're we're working oh Maybe we could come up with it later, uh brainstorm later. It's like Uh no, we're working on uh

16:53 Rethink your packaging partner. or rethink packaging partnership. Cause what we're trying to do is, you know, there's a lot of people that sell packaging, but what we're trying to do is just do it better than everybody. Just kinda go that extra level of like, let's make your life easy as a packaging. So Dan explain. So you said you bought this business this about eighteen months ago It was doing Eleven million in revenue, about eight hundred thousand in profit that the seller that the the guy who owned it was able to that was his living. He's making eight hundred grand a year.

17:21 And now uh last year, how much revenue did it do? You grew up. So last year, uh we had a record year I think we did we did about thirteen eight. Million. Uh that was pretty pretty easy to get the information out of him. Didn't he just say he can't. I can't share cli I just thought I can't share client names. I'll share it. How much money did you put down to buy this business?'Cause you talked about like do I most people assume if I'm gonna buy a business for three and a half million dollars, cool, where am I gonna get three and a half dollars from? Yep. And really quick, how much profit does it do now on the thirteen?

17:52 On the thirteen we did like one point seven million dollar profit last year. You've creamed it. I mean you've crushed it. You've you've last year was suck on that Zuckerberg, I don't need to go anymore. Yeah, you got it. So you bought a business that made eight hundred uh K in profit to uh you've more than doubled it. Yeah. And there were lots of and you know, was it every you know, things that I did that double did.

18:15 Certainly that was part of it. A lot of it was getting out of Covid and figuring out how we position it. Um and it turned out You know, the business had not kind of reached its Potentially yet. And back to what Sean said, you bought it for three million or so. Where'd the money come from? Three point four million. So we did it through an SBA loan.

18:33 Um And We ended up putting two hundred thousand down. I say we'cause I say me and my wife,'cause We put our house on the line. Like we went we went all in on this business. Uh we spent uh a hundred fifty thousand

18:46 uh from our savings and then my wife took a loan off her four oh one K for the other fifty. Um, so that was the again, house on the line, four oh one K on the line, like this was it. Was she just down from day one to do this or what did you did it take a lot of persuasion? How how did you position this with the wife to to make that happen? She was down. I mean she has a similar kind of philosophy on, you know, we should do something, that's gonna be kind of a step change in where we're at.

19:12 you know, if we're gonna bet on Someone we should bet on us. And you know, she knows Sean, she knows what we've been up to for the past, you know, however long. She knows she married a stallion who just needed to run. So this wasn't like a oh my goodness, where did this idea come from? This guy's crazy. It's like no, that that sounds about right, that this is what you're doing. How much of a loan have you paid back now? But but but Sam, so he put he put down two two hundred K, he got an SBA loan, and then he had a seller note also, which I think is a is a key part of this. So do you want to explain that where the rest of the money came from? So two hundred thousand from you, where'd the other three point two come from? Sure. So um One point eight came from the bank.

19:48 Um two hundred thousand came from me and then the other one point four came from the seller. Uh, which effectively we said, Hey, like We're not gonna pay this up front. Over the next five years, assuming the business continues to do well. you know, we'll pay the second part of the business. Or sorry, second part of the debt. Uh so it's a forgivable seller note, which means effectively if the business doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

20:11 that debt's forgiven on any given year. So that was part of what made me feel better about the deal. Uh you know,'cause you run all these scenarios when you first buy it. It's like all right, we're gonna put our life savings and house on the line. What happens if things go bad. And it's like all right, at least Half of this debt if things go bad.

20:27 Will go away. Why'd they want to sell the company? That seems like a He was retiring. He just wanted out he was out and that's kind of the What I loved about

20:37 kind of this world once Sean kinda turned me on to it is Um like the baby boomers are retiring. Like the past few years to the next ten years, I forget what the window is, but Like a lot of them don't have kids or they have kids that don't want it. This guy had three kids. None of the kids wanted the business. Dan had told me, he goes, Anytime I ran into a business that looked really cool and the guy who owned it was twenty six He's like

20:58 I don't wanna buy this off a twenty six year old. Why are you selling this business? It's like I want to buy from a boomer. That is my goal. Yeah. I wanna buy from a guy that wants to move to Florida and play golf. Like that to me is like That we've this business has been great to me. And now I'm done. I've made my money. I'm ready to go. Like that's the type of business I want. Not like And he would probably still answer your phone calls when you had questions. Ex Exactly. Like and you know, spoiler alert, I found like the nicest buyer in the history of the world. Like I I got incredibly lucky. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch.

21:38 And the results were incredible. Click through rates jumped twenty five percent. Qualified leads quadruple. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to hubspot.com to see how breeze can help your business grow.

21:54 So the to me there's two kind of Good things out of this episode. One, I get to hang out with my best butt. All right. The second would be for other people who are listening to this. That they hear what I'll call like the real life take of this because Dan's not selling courses. He's not telling you you should do this. He's not like a The business buying guru's got a book and a and a mastermind. None of that. I think he's got good opinions and like a real story of like all right, where do you start? So to me this episode would be interesting if'cause if if I'm interested in buying a business, I kinda wanna know

22:22 What is it like from a person who's smart but came in with no experience? Um no money. And no like kinda clue where to start.'Cause even though I was like, Hey, you should do this, it's not like I was there Helping you every day or you know, th the y you were Wandering around figuring this out, you know, by yourself. So he he told me this. Uh I I called then like last week to be like, All right, what do you want to talk about? He had said something great. He goes,

22:44 He goes, all right, I started and I was high excitement and low knowledge. So I bought the books. You ever heard this framework? Like D one through four. It's like you start. High uh high excitement, low knowledge. And then you become, you know, you kind of go up in knowledge and down in excitement. You kinda enter into the like pit of pit of despair. Which is low knowledge, low excitement, and then you learn more and you slowly kinda get out of this, uh This pig.

23:09 His quote was This is great. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be easy. I'm gonna be rich. And he goes, then I started and I realized this is not easy. This is not going great. And I might not be rich. And so Um Do you want to talk about like how you actually like w what'd you do? Yeah, first maybe hundred days, what'd you do? Well, first how did you find the company?

23:31 Uh, so I ended up finding the company through a broker. Got it. Um So a lot of what I started to do and I'll go back to the beginning in a second, but Um, you know, there's a ton of business marketplaces out there. Acquire dot com probably the most known for for tech. uh biz by sell for kind of more of the those main street businesses, but there are these brokers that effectively represent buyers and kind of put together these packets of like, hey, I have this bag business, here's what it does. And most brokers, uh I was telling this to Sean

23:58 hate searchers. 'Cause they just assume like, you know, people are you know, they just saw Cody Sanchez video. They're about to buy a business, like they're pumped, you know, they this morning they saw the video and now they're ready to buy the business. So they reach out to the broker. This one broker actually like Understood.

24:13 He's like, I get it. I understand this jump from tech to this. And then like Several months later he calls me back, which is rare. Like Most people didn't. Uh he's like, I got this business, you know, check this guy out.

24:24 Um so it ended up happening through a broker, but and to go back to Sean's thing, the first hundred days. So the first thing, um Yeah. Hey Google. started reading books, started watching videos, started to just learn like What is a search fund? That was something that like Sean didn't use that word.

24:39 Um, but eventually I found it where effectively there's kind of a few models to do this. One of them is is kind of a search fund where someone will actually you know, you Get someone to finance you looking for a business, and then you take a small piece of it and they effectively own most of it. Um like there's lots of courses now in business schools. Um you know, teaching entrepreneurship through acquisition is kind of the the fancy way of of talking about it.

25:03 And then there's kind of like this other model. Of you know, you just do it yourself. Yeah, you're effectively Bootstrap it, find the money yourself, do it through an SBA loan. So first it was kind of like educating myself on the different models. Yeah, I

25:15 Thought a little bit about getting the funding. Um, but at the end of the day it's like No if I'm gonna do this like That's gonna be me. I I don't want to answer anybody.

25:24 And then it was really like finding this community. And there's a really cool community in search. It's been growing pretty steadily over the past, you know, call it. Five ish years, I think. Um but there's a there's a there's a website called searchfunder dot com. Um like

25:38 those were my people during the time.'Cause uh search is like it's a very lonely process. When you guys say look at a hundred. What does that mean? Does that mean browser a website with a hundred or does that mean actually due diligence on a hundred? So it's something in the middle. So you you basically see kind of like the headline on the website. It's like laundromat for sale, you know, four million dollars. Like usually you'll get like the flashy headline and and not much more information. Then you kinda got to double click in and request information. And so usually sign kind of a an NDA and you'll get something called a SIM or a confidential information memorandum.

26:08 Um, so it's kind of look at like a hundred of those because that's really gonna show you like here's here's the finances of the business. Like here's kind of the story that they're putting together. It's like a summary of the business today. And so that's the one where it's like, you know Pl I think I think a mistake is people think do you fall in love with the first Like, Oh, this is great. Yeah, I I could buy this. You kind of really like Yeah, I mean you're just like a teenager that just went through puberty and you just fall in love with the first you know, the the the the first set you see and you're like, Well, no, that's probably not the right way to do this. Let me Let me

26:39 Actually just plan that it's probably gonna take me Over a hundred to even find one good one. And let me have that mental expectation and let me start counting how many looking at and not just like being desperate to find, you know, the one right away. And you're saying like you're like

26:53 You're looking at an H VAC company, you're like, I don't know what H VAC is. You're looking at the financials, you're like, I don't know which number to look at. It's overwhelming. But you got you kinda gotta go through those reps and figure it out before you even have any idea of what you're looking at. I I kind of liken it to looking for a house because I think that's that's a pro uh you know, or an apartment even, but'cause that's something that that most everyone goes through, even if they're renting. You know, usually the first time you see it, you have nothing to compare it to. So you end up kind of getting to a place where you can you can spot the winners from the losers faster, but like Sean said When you when I first started it was like

27:25 Super exciting'cause it's like the ultimate career fair. It's like Oh cool, I'm gonna be a landscaper. I'm gonna be uh You know, I'm gonna own uh you know, a scrap metal recycling center. It's like you just get so excited and again. the business brokers especially, like they make these things.

27:41 Sound amazing. It's like of course I want to buy this business. So what what were some of the cool businesses you s you saw? Like what's one what tell give us an example of one that you kinda like, but you didn't end up pulling the trigger. So my favorite example um is I I I got pretty close to buying a sausage company. It did about like ten million dollars a year in sausage. You know, my favorite my favorite anecdote on this. Sam is also a fellow sausage man, actually. I know I I I know that kindred spirits. If we held an event, it might also be a sausage fest. We don't know. You're uh you're almost a purveyor of fine wieners. That could have been I I could have been, and still may be. So you you went but you you didn't just like look at you didn't just read the same. You're like touring. No, I went there. I went to this Austin. I went to the sauce. I'm like walking through like

28:23 pretending to know what I'm talking about, like, you know, how hot does this oven get? Like it's like that's the biggest thing. You gotta like figure out what questions to ask. This is a really common have you guys heard of uh the secretary problem? Yeah. Somebody t explain it. Somebody told us that on the podcast. So I used it when I was looking for an apartment the other day, and it was actually pretty magical. And so the thing is is that uh so I'm I'm repeating from memory, so I might get it wrong. But basically if you have uh it started with the secretary. If If you're hiring a secretary, you'd want to interview Let's say you had uh Uh ten interviews lined up.

28:56 You wouldn't want to pick who to hire until you saw at least thirty seven percent of the applicant pool. In an re so for example, if you saw Ten. Uh or if you had ten to see ten interviews, you'd want to go through the first four, and then after the first four, you would select the first person who you met that was of equal value to or close to the highest person you saw in the first four. Does that make sense? So for if you see an apartment

29:22 Uh, let's say you go and see one hundred of them. The first thirty seven you don't do. But the next one after the first thirty seven who you that you see that is as good as the best one that you previously saw, that's the that's the one you select. And that's called the secretary problem. So you can't go back and buy that first one? You can't go back. You cannot go back. But you need to like s you need to spend time like exploring the first third to see what all is out there. That's fair. I bought the house that I found on the first day of touring. So I just want to make sure I didn't like violate the secretary problem, but I did. You did. But you didn't with the business. And so you didn't with the business. And so w of the hundred or so that you saw, were there any that looking back, you're like, that was a winner? Um

30:05 No. It wasn't until we saw and you know, there were a few close ones where like I I think I was under LOI For example, that sausage company had like One huge client. They had one huge client. And no contract. No contract. But you thought they were amazing. That's kinda my point is you thought of some were so good that you're under L O I

30:24 Uh Yeah, but then you get uh you know, you're under L O I and then you get, you know, the full amount of information and then you very quickly see like L O I also in this business is like A very it's kinda like agreeing to a first date more than it is

30:37 an engagement. Um people people make LOIs They'll have three LOIs out at the same time. And it just says it's an agreement to it's we agree to look more, right? We agree to take this seriously to to to show you some interest here, uh, but it's not like it's not binding in the way that you would. That you think when you first go into this, or if you're the seller, you're like, Oh, we got an L O I. It's like Well Hang on. I would bet the

31:00 LOI to close ratio is probably I don't I have no idea, but I would guess it's like under twenty percent, you know, in terms of Just L is received during a process. Yeah, because uh you know, you're not giving the uh a lot of the information you're not even getting until that point anyway. So you know, you're checking all the boxes up until there. Like this seems good. I think this is gonna be good. Um and then, you know, you get their financials or you go tour it and you find kind of that Oh, this is why, you know, you're selling it, or this is why it hasn't been bought yet. That's another thing.

31:27 One thing you did that uh that was great. I think I I think I kind of was like R the one piece of advice I think I was pushing on you was like, Hey, write a memo for every one of these deals that you like. Basically he would he would write me like a one page notion memo. That was basically like what is the business? Why does it w you know, like how it like what is the current state of it just speak in numbers only, right? Why is the seller selling

31:48 Um You know, what's the one reason that you would buy this business? What's the one reason you would not buy this business? Uh, you know, what are the kind of and you would just go there and you would write these memos and I feel like that was Key because I remember you would call you were like excited about let's say uh like I don't know what what was an example of one you were excited about that then after the memo and we talked it, we we beat it up and then we were like, No, this is not worth doing.

32:09 It was a Clover app, I remember the conversation. Uh so basically like uh so the the Clover point of sale system, like when you're like checking out of a restaurant, kinda it's like you know, they flip it and you're like, What's your tip? uh this guy made different apps for it. So like you know, like when you round up for charity, for instance, I think that was one of his apps. Um So it was actually pretty interesting. It was like hey, clovers are growing. Yeah. Very niche. Um, but he owned twenty of these things. It was, you know, more up my alley in terms of tech.

32:35 But you know, when I actually hashed it out with Sean. You know, it was kinda like at the end of the day. It was Very niche, very small.

32:43 And there wasn't necessarily a good path. to grow that business. It was just something that like was interesting now, but probably didn't have the longevity of Hey, you're you're about to swing, you know, this is gonna tha that's another thing you said to me, Sean. You were like This is gonna be

32:59 Yeah, don't Don't listen to all those like blogs out there of like yeah you're gonna buy this, flip it and the next year you're gonna buy two more businesses like No you're Probably gonna be working in this business for for a little bit of time. Um, make sure it's good, make sure it's lasting. Um, and I think that first one was an example of like

33:14 Sure, if I was gonna buy ten businesses, maybe that was one of them, but like that's not the game we're playing right now. A couple other I thought like key points. One was um Don't buy a job. So I think early on when you go to search. You see big price tags and you get scared a little bit'cause it's like, How am I gonna afford this? And like how this is too risky.

33:31 And so you gravitate towards things that feel Like s kind of safer and more achievable, but it's actually a bit of a trap'cause it's like Yeah, this is safer, more achievable. It and that's a hundred grand a year of profit. I can buy it for only You know, he only wants a hundred and eighty or something like that. Yeah, and and and so you get excited because it seems cheap.

33:50 But the problem is it's still gonna take all of your time. To own to to buy this business, to run this business. And you basically bought a job versus the thing you bought, which was like eleven million dollars in revenue. Doing a million dollars a year, almost a real real dollars. Yeah, that's not a job anymore. Now that's like an asset. That's like a real business. And yes, it took more risk and it took more time to find a good one of those, but it was like well worth it. So I feel like that was another kind of like key learning I think we both had. During this process, like

34:15 Became blatantly obvious. Yeah, not rusting the search. And and you want to, trust me. Like call it like five months in, you know, when you really hit of this pit of despair of like, I'm never gonna find anything. Everything under five million dollars is trash. you know, private equity scooping up scooping up all the good stuff and anything that's left.

34:32 You know, under this point, like There's a reason it's there. Uh you kinda just get to this place like you're never gonna find it. It's easy to want to just grab one and say like Yeah, those things are fine, like we'll kind of ignore those yeah those holes in the business.

34:45 I've made so many bad decisions. Like most all bad decisions that I've made, it was uh I could like It's like I had principles leading into this and I got fatigued and I didn't stick to my principles. Fatigue, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was one that was like a SEO business. It was actually like a good business, but w what was the

35:02 The situation with that one. Yeah, so that one was it was like a competitor for like uh SEM Rush. Um, you know, it was a solid business. It made I think it did like a millionaire uh it was It was like half a million to a million a year in profit. Like it it was a it was a nice business. Um, but this was right as

35:19 Um you know, AI was really starting to become in kind of the center point of the conversation, especially as it relates to search. I helped a friend buy a company that was in the SEO space and any time an SEO company Wants to sell. It's sort of like at a time do you guys remember Bitcoin miners? Mm-hmm. Uh like the it's like

35:36 So if these are so good, why are you selling a money money printer? Yeah and SEO is sort of the same way where it's like, Wait, so if you're just getting like a fountain of traffic and customers, why would you want to get rid of this? Well, that's the same thing. It's like when you meet a thirty year old selling a business, it's like You know why? And that that was exactly that. And I think going into you know, let's call it the AI headwinds. It was like there's a lot of reasons this business might be completely different. And I think Sean said like unless you feel like you're

36:06 the best suited to take this SEO company into the, you know, the next five years. There's more risk than upside. And it's like that is not my background. So you know, that's not the game I wanna play. And funny enough. I was actually in L O I with this SEO company. When I found fleet.

36:22 Um and I I was I almost wrote off Fleet. Like it seemed really interesting and I like there was some part of me that you know, didn't have me rejected even though I was kind of in very late stages with this other company. Um, thank goodness I you know, I made that pivot. So let's tell the story. So you you the broker calls you, says check out this business.

36:41 W uh what happens from there? So from there, um, I think this was before I was under L O I, but you know, effectively Fleet looked very different than a lot of these other companies. Like the finances at first g glance, like We're super clean. Um

36:57 You know, the story made a lot of sense. Like a lot of these sims and a lot of these brokers, like you know, yes, they're padding things and trying to make things sellable, but Um There was always like A blatant gotcha in a lot of these. Like

37:09 Let's take the sausage example. They're like oh yeah, this makes half a million a year. Oh, and by the way, he also makes another four hundred thousand in cash. Uh but We don't pay tax on that, so like you can't see that anywhere.

37:21 It's like Part of me is like that's kind of cool. Also sounds a little dangerous, like selling four hundred thousand dollars worth of sausage on the side of the road. Um there's always something like that. uh with a lot of these businesses, but but Fleet was like very clean. Like everything was kind of buttoned up, the story was really tight. And it kinda checked all the boxes of like this is a recurring business. Like people are rebuying the bags several times a year. They have these amazing clients, they have these amazing factories.

37:47 It looked very different than than these other than these other things. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I am Michael Scott. Um you know it's it's it's a it's a necessity that these companies need. Um So what'd you do? You go, you meet the guy? I was actually gonna say no to the broker. Um

38:06 because again, this SEO thing was heating up. I hadn't had my, you know, come to terms talk with Sean yet. He's like, Hey, the seller wants to meet you. You know let's all go out for lunch. Um all right. Free lunch, that's cool.

38:18 Um, so we meet for lunch. Um And like my goal was like you know, entertain this business, but at the end of the day, like I'm under L O I so I really shouldn't Uh free lunch. Yeah, free lunch. I should I should break up with him

38:31 After this lunch. But we start talking and like you know, just had this instant connection with this guy. Like he was the most stand up guy uh I had met in in the past few months, especially when it comes to like The business ownership.

38:43 You know, he wasn't trying to Um You know? pull something over my eyes, like he wasn't trying to spin the story. He's like, This is the story. Like a lot of people like, you know, put lipstick on a pig.

38:55 Uh, this guy was like selling a rabbit. Or selling a different animal. Like it wasn't like He kinda said it as it is and it was it was very refreshing. Um and like In that moment it was like

39:06 I kind of abandoned the like I'm gonna break up with you and like we kinda went the other way. We started talking about like okay, well, how are we gonna work together during the transition? How are we gonna grow this? Um And then my favorite part. Is they uh you know They asked if we wanted any dessert.

39:20 And he's like, Oh, do you want to share a tartufo? And I was like Yes. And we shared a Tartufo. I I don't think I've shared dessert with my wife ever. But I shared a tartufo with this guy and like I I remember calling uh my wife after I was like You know, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. Like I was supposed to break up with this company, but like

39:38 We shared a tartufo and like I think we're gonna buy a bag business now. Um and it was just like this like complete one eighty. Um literal Michael Scott, right? Doesn't he have a scene at Chili's that's like exactly this? Yeah, exactly. A Tartufo. Tartufo is. I had to Google it. You're you're my type of people, dad. There you go. And then you know, from there I you know I broke it off with the SEO guy. You know, we ended up like diligence took a while. That's like the second part was like okay, like now you're committed to buying a business.

40:18 How are we gonna do this now? Um and like it actually took four months. Um,'cause again, like I'm signing my house away, signing my life savings away. Um like I needed to be damn sure that this thing was gonna be solid before I did that. Um

40:31 And then like the world of search like took on kind of like that next chapter of like all right, well how do you actually like figure out Yeah. Are the assumptions you've made. in this quick few week period of dating. Like

40:43 Are they correct and we kinda transition to that uh that physical the process. What Uh what What was wrong and what was right. for your assumptions and what was the difference in his asking versus the paying So

40:57 We actually negotiated the price of it pretty early. Like that part actually happened during the L O I for the most part, or like ninety nine percent of it. And there were actually five bitters. Which I thought was a lie. Like I kind of assumed this was Um them bluffing because they were like Yeah, we got

41:14 For people in the packaging industry that wanna buy and then there's you. So, you know, it's gonna be competitive, blah, blah, blah. But again, I just figured that was a a tactic to try to drive the price up. Um, but to this day the you know the seller maintains that that was the case. So at this point I have no reason not to believe it.

41:30 We ended up taking I think They wanted three five or three six for the company. So we ended up uh agreeing to three four. the part that took the most negotiation was that forgivable seller note. Uh so the biggest kind of uh red flag in the business.

41:46 uh was that one client was over fifty percent of their revenue. So my biggest fear. Rightfully so it was you know Everything's great today. They've been a client for fifteen years.

42:00 you know, what happens if next year they leave all of a sudden it's a very different business. So what we did was, you know, uh kind of ran the numbers of the bank and said, Hey in order for us to finance this, like this is this is the number that we'd have to have if for whatever reason we lost that client. So that part was probably the you know, the most intense of the negotiations, but for better or worse, like

42:21 most of what he said ended up being true. Like there weren't any of these and and he said that in the sim, like that that wasn't news. surprising to you or what was different than the dream that gets sold on social media? So if you watch the videos and you see Cody Sanchez t telling you to buy just buy a laundromat.

42:40 It's gonna y y you'll be rich, whatever. That type type of shit. Like Was it in line with that? Was it different than that? What was the difference if there was one? Yeah, it's not nearly as easy. As uh Cody Sanchez makes it seem.

42:52 Um and I I probably went a little more overboard, I think, like when I think about the amount of time I spent in diligence. Um the amount of money I spent in diligence. You know, I Like I'm a risk taker for sure.

43:05 But I'm a calculated risk taker, so It's like before I make this gigantic gamble on the rest of my life. I wanna make sure I've done everything humanly possible. And I think when you watch a lot of these videos about buying the business, like they make it seem like You know, you can just find one.

43:20 And then kind of transition right away and and the whole process is really easy. Like The process of getting the loan, like uh some people liken it. Actually, I think Cody Sanchez likens it to this. So maybe uh maybe she actually isn't setting unrealistic expectations, but it's like it's a financial colonoscopy. Like they wanna know everything about you. Um And like that part's tough. And then you give the company a a a colonoscopy. uh to try to figure out everything about it, quality of earnings, that sort of thing.

43:45 And one of the things that I did, um, I think that I'm happiest that I did'cause it got me the most comfortable outside of, you know, paying for accountants and lawyers to scour things was Um I shadow the guy. So every week 'Cause he he happened to live in New York City too. Oh the the whole thing was serendipitous. Like he lived

44:02 twenty minutes from my house. Wow. And I the the the you know, before I signed the sim, it was like packaging distributor in in the northeast. So like you know could have been in Boston, could have been wherever. Uh this guy lived twenty minutes from me. That's how the Tartufo was so accessible. But I literally went to I went to the office every week, sat with the guy, um for several hours and just He walked me through packaging. He walked me through his day to day.

44:25 And it just gave me it you know, it started my training of like, Okay, well how am I gonna run this business, but it allowed me to really kind of take what was on that paper and figure out You know, okay, this is these are the skills that I will need to run this business. This is how I might be able to grow it. This is where I might need more help. Um it made it more real.

44:42 And I think I was lucky in that I was able to do that. 'Cause I've talked to other searchers and it's like, you know, th let's go back to the laundromat. You know, you buy a laundromat. I would imagine day one, you kinda walk in and the machine breaks and you're like, Oh crap, like what do I do? I know nothing about these machines. Now I need to find a mechanic. Like everything is a little more complicated and nuanced, uh, with regards to even like how laundromats are you know, I went down the laundromat path. Like I spent a while thinking that was gonna be my destiny.

45:06 And it's like, well no, like valuing a laundromat, like actually has a number of facets and you need to kind of really get into the weeds there. So yeah I'd say like the biggest takeaway is like It is hard and it takes time. It's not something that you can just do. You know, for a few minutes a day.

45:21 Um, like you really gotta invest in making this happen, if that's what you wanna do, or you're gonna end up you know, with some surprise down the road. I think that's probably my biggest relief is like I've been waiting for you know, the shooter dropped somewhere and like this is what I missed and like You know, knock on wood, haven't had that yet. How many hours a week are you working on it now and how many hours a week was he working on it?

45:41 He was probably working Let's call it. twenty five to forty. I think he definitely was working less. He kinda had it. On autopilot, I think he had started to

45:54 You know, kind of tune out a little bit, but not in a way that like he neglected the business. It was just like he'd been in packaging all his life, like he could run it in his sleep. He wasn't as focused on kind of doing the growing or renegotiating things with suppliers, building the supplier base. Um

46:10 You know, I'm probably working on and Yeah, fifty to sixty hours. I spend a like a bunch of time on this. Um How much were y were you able to take home? So that's the uh

46:20 The million dollar question. Uh is like okay, cool, your your business is making all this money. You know, at the end of the day, two years in, I'm still only making, you know, a hundred fifty A year. Like I take the minimum amount. that I need to for You know, IRS compliance.

46:36 Because I'm saving the rest enable to finance growth. Like I like I've made enough to pay back the loan, but I'm not paying back the loan because I need that cash to feel the growth. It's a very cash intensive business and I'm not in a place quite yet where I can Take as much off the table. Although Sean has been uh giving me some other framework saying, like, hey, you actually should be doing this. What's that framework, which is like If you want to replace yourself, you have to pay yourself the replacement costs.

47:00 No, not that, but basically I I did this in one of my businesses, not right for everybody. But I think it's easy to go into rainy day mode. As a business owner, when you play like two conservative so you know, several of our businesses right now have just like Like one of our business has just like two, three million dollars just sitting in the bank account.

47:18 And the bank like it goes up every month. It's not like we have this like wild swings where you need this big cash reserve buffer. It's not like a heavy inventory business. It's like you know your s your all of your operating expenses a salary and you know your salaries. So there's no surprises coming next month. And even if there was, like One of my friends uh our buddy Sue told me this. I was like, How much do you keep in there? Like three months of uh working capital, six months, twelve months, like I think I have like twelve months of working capital sitting in the bank right now.

47:43 He's like, No, I just take it all out. And like Zero months? He goes, Yeah. He goes. I own this business myself, so if I ever need the money, I just lend it back into the business. Like I just I can always write the check back. It forces you to make a profit as well.

47:56 Yeah, and so Andrew Wilkinson came on this podcast and had this book he was talking about Profit First. And I really like the philosophy of it, which is basically With normal business you have your revenue Then you have all your expenses and then it's like Surprise, here's how much profits left over after all that. And usually what actually happens is There's not there's less profit than you would have guessed. And it's why? Because expenses were a little higher, blah, blah, blah. And you're always in this

48:19 Profit comes last. Profit first was basically you decide up front, you say, Okay, I wanna have a twenty percent profit margin. So You take your revenue. You set aside money for taxes, which you know is gonna be um uh you you set you take your revenue, you take your profits, you do set aside amount amount for taxes.

48:35 What's left is your expenses budget. So instead of making profit the thing that comes last, you make the expenses come last. And then you have to say, All right, cool, then my marketing budget can only be this much because I've decided to take this much as a as a profit um a set profit margin out of my business. And I don't adhere to it a hundred percent. I don't think it's right for every business.

48:56 But I do think that you know, Dan in this case, I think is being a little overly conservative of as to how much cash he's leaving in the business. I did that too. And the longer I delayed it I took away one very valuable thing, which is if you have if you pay yourself every month out of the business And one month that's light. Or another month that's heavy.

49:12 The body just reacts to it. If it's light, you're like, Yo, what the hell? And you will go fix a part of your business that was broken. If you just leave it in and it's just like a P L, it's just numbers on a spreadsheet. It's not money you actually receive. You know you'll wait fifteen months before you end up correcting that problem, because it's all fictitious money anyways. It's not money you're actually getting. And so I think that pa actually getting that check every month

49:33 creates this feedback loop that's actually like quite valuable to a business owner. It'll it'll cause you to scrutinize unnecessary expenses. Or like go after it'cause once you taste a big month. Like Sam, we have this with M FM. If we have a big month And the next month I'm kinda like, Well, I I kinda like the feeling of that one. What do we need? One extra episode two? Should we go get a guest?

49:53 What's Lish doing today? Let me see what's going on over there. Right? Like you start to think about what you could do to go to go drive it back up. And I think there's an unhealthy version of that, but there's some healthy components to that. Yeah. So I think I That's a

50:06 a lesson learned for me. I think I'm still in the very conservative, um, you know, what if I need this money? And and I it I do have high working capital costs, especially Around now, kind of pre holiday, I'm about to have to write a bunch of checks. Um But very soon I should get to a place where I can take more out.

50:23 Um and or start paying back some of the the debt a little faster. All right. Listen up. Turn the volume up. Because it's your boy Sean and I got a little message for you. I talk to hundreds of founders a week. And when I talk to founders, everyone says the same thing.

50:37 That's one thing they need the most is not funding. It's not more resources. It's just having more time. The goal here is to win and the way you win is you get yourself free time to do stuff that's high impact. How do you do that? Well I'll tell you my solution.

50:51 The answer is Gabby. Well, you might be wondering who is Gabby? Gabby is my assistant. She is my wonderful assistant. Gabby lives in Latin America and she helps me save about 20 hours a week. So what she's doing for me is every morning, my inbox is sorted and triaged, and the most important stuff is right at the top with draft replies ready for me. So I'm never behind on email. And then if as I'm on the go, I'll just send her voice notes saying, Hey, can you find my kids a soccer class? Hey, could you take care of this car registration thing for me? All these little tedious BS things that would take up time in my day, she takes care of for me. And so that's free time I'm getting back. So if you're a CEO who's serious about growing your company, you need to get yourself an assistant. The best place to go is Sumware.com. Somewhere sources the best assistance from low cost areas for you. So you can get an amazing executive assistant who's got you know business experience and has supported other CEOs for seven, eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. And so go ahead, go to summer.com. Tell them I sent you, they'll hook you up with a good deal and get yourself an assistant.

51:49 And you can take me later. All right, back to this episode. So Sam, I'm curious, what's your reaction to this whole thing? So I think that for people who have your personality type, which is you are you're a very serious person, I think. Like Like you're a person like if I was a broker and I met you

52:06 I would not think you were kicking tires. I'd be like, Oh, this guy's for real. Like it's you have the very obvious for real energy. And if you have that very obvious for real energy where like, No, I'm going to do this, this makes sense. I think that the path that you're taking is so wonderful and I My assumption is that you're gonna be wildly successful. Um, and so I think it's very wise to do.

52:28 I think that if you If you are an unserious person where you are not willing to put your house up or something like that, that's kinda like the one of the tells like Well, if you so if you're like not serious like that and you are not willing to do the diligence and say I'm willing to look at one hundred things, I would say do not do this. Yeah, I think there's also one I think you said it perfectly. There is one more thing to it, which is What situations do you shine the the most? And so like

52:54 For Dan, I think he always had an entrepreneurial streak. That was used as like random side quests in life. Like we would go try to win the Mun McDonald's Monopoly game every year. Like we tried to like actually win it. Not just like hope we had we thought we were gonna win it. We were like dumpster diving trying to f try to win the stupid thing, right? Like or you know, we started a blackjack club at s on campus and we're running simulations to see how much money we can make if we started a blackjack club. Like We were always trying to come up with

53:21 Ideas. It was more fun to come up with our own idea versus just like go get a job and do the thing. And so I I feel like if you know that you actually turn up the most You're the most version of you when you're doing this type of shit, when you're like

53:35 In control of your own fate. And you have your own project. As arbitrary as like, you know, bags are. Doesn't matter. It's like I'll take bags super seriously. I took he took gum seriously, black check seriously, sushi seriously, like all those things. I think that That's the other part, which is

53:49 Not only the part you said, but then also If you really are like at your core, more entrepreneurial and you're more switched on doing that, then you're gonna have a better result doing this than you are if you You know, stay in a a a more traditional job. That's my I think people, you know, when I tell them about you know, first it's always like the unbelievable wait, you do what?

54:07 But then the second, like, their mind goes like, Oh, I should do that because You know, it sounds great in hindsight, right? Like when everything works out, it's like cool, of course this is easy. Of course anyone can do it. But Um I think people missed the point that There's a lot of ways that

54:23 This doesn't go like that and it's not necessarily the most glamorous. I also think most people shouldn't do this. So for example, I this is not something I like this does not fall within my skill set. So my like uh if I had to guess You when you were buying the company. Like you guys were negotiating over ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollar things. Like if I had to guess, you were incredibly anal about the paperwork. You're asking you like What's this three hundred what's this three thousand dollar charge? What's this?

54:52 That is not what I do. I do not do that. That kills me. That does not fit my personality type. So I have bought and invested in done a bunch of real estate stuff in my time and uh I lose on all of it. Because

55:05 You make your money when you're buying it and when you sweat the details up front. Which is done. That is not what I do. I don't think necessarily that is what Sean likes to do. And I think that if you are the type of person who plays a board game and you memorize all the rules and you like sweat the details, Um And you have that attribute, then this

55:23 Uh buy a company is It could potentially work well for you. I'm the guy that takes the the rule book out of the box and reads it to explain to everybody. Exactly. If you have that trait. This could be awesome. Life changing. Yeah. So Danna, one of the other cool things about doing a search for a business is you

55:40 Realize how big the universe of businesses is. And I asked you, I said, you know, usually we try to brainstorm business ideas with people like what opportunities do you see? Um, you said you would come up with a couple of ideas. Give us a couple of your ideas of what you think other people could go do. Um this is just like the the sort of random section. Yeah, I think the I mean the biggest takeaway Like from buying a business before I get into in into the ideas, like Everything's a business, right? Like you walked you know, go look at any store

56:06 You know, every little piece of that business is something that someone sells. Like that display that says for sale, like someone sells that. Like the the holder for the gum on the store, like that's a business. Like I don't think I really appreciated how random and how basic some of these businesses can be and and people make really good money doing it. Uh even packaging. It's like you don't really think about that. Uh by the way, I'm pretty sure Robert Kraft

56:28 The owner the Patriots. The c he owns the craft group. I think that's a packaging company. It could be. There are so many packages. They make corrugated cardboard. Okay. Best episodes ever. If you want to go listen to a great episode, it's the Sarah Moore episode on this podcast.

56:45 And she's the I think it's called the egg carton queen. And sh her thing was she she did the same thing you did, basically. She went and found a retire who Owned a business that sold that Sold. Egg cartons. Like not the eggs, the carton they come in. You don't even think that's a business.

57:01 But you when you go look at you like eggs, yeah, okay, ex uh there's a farm that sells eggs. You don't even realize that the farm has to then buy Egg cartons and there's somebody whose job is to make egg cartons and they sell it at the best price and the the best value, blah blah blah. And so Per episode I think is amazing. And and you see that? The other example, Sam, that I always give when I explain what this podcast is to people.

57:21 Is I talk about like Everything you see is there because someone sold it. Like nothing gets there. So I was like, you know. Even in the workplace.

57:32 If you go to your break room and there's a poster on the wall That's like the labor code. There's a guy in Minnesota that sells that he makes a million dollars a year selling you the the poster every year. Once I heard that, I was like oh shit. It's like

57:45 A physicist when he learns about string theory or some shit. You know, it's like, Oh, it's everywhere. I get it. Oh, particles. Yeah, all the components themselves are businesses too. Uh and and then you realize like If you're not Making it in business it's mostly because of a lack of, you know, creativity and effort. It's not'cause of a lack of opportunity. Because literally Every item.

58:06 Everywhere is itself a you know, a business that somebody is running to get it there. And so, you know, there there's no lack of opportunities in that sense. Yeah. So now I'm like hardcore on the other end of the spectrum of like As unsexy as possible. I wanna do that. Like I wanna I wanna be the guy that has like the most random thing. I think packaging is pretty random, like You know, in a in a future world, once I you know, if and when I'm done with this, like I I wanna go even further. Yeah, by the way, do you have when you lay uh when you're laying in bed at night, what do you think like in ten, twenty years we're gonna we could be this. Like, do you have

58:35 Do do you think this could be a hundred million dollar company? Do you think you're you could sell it for a certain amount? What's your sort of North Star that excites you? So You know, at this point I don't have any plans to sell it. I do think it could be A hundred million and sales company easily. Like there's sort like

58:52 Some of these big packaging players are huge. Um And we're able to compete with them. That's kind of the you know we're small in the scheme of things. Like it's a it's a nice size business, but we're small in the scheme of things. But what I'm finding is as we as we work with these brands, like we actually

59:06 do have a pretty differentiated offering because we are small, we're scrappy. Um and people love that. Um and you know, as we've been able to kind of add clients, um, I'm like oh d this thing can really take. Like we can really scale this up and and you know start to gain more traction with these large brand brands. And you know, the crazy thing is people spend

59:25 Ten the these banies spend tens of millions of dollars on their packaging. Um, so you could easily get like five clients to get you to a hundred million like like that, if if it's the right five. So My goal is to grow it. I I do think in a few years I'll I'll hire an operator to run it. One of my

59:42 Biggest piece of advice to people searching is like, don't assume you're gonna hire the operator day one, especially if you're putting your house on the line, because there is not a single person that I trust to run this business. when I'm gonna get kicked out on the street if it fails. Um, when I get to the place that I feel better about that, like only then will I then decide, okay, well maybe I'll hire someone and just But yeah

1:00:02 Like I'm loving doing what I'm doing now. So I think it's uh eventually scaling my time so it's not like I'm very involved in all the processes right now and I designed it that way because that's how I learned. You know, I'd love to be able to go away and not have to take a call because

1:00:16 The blue isn't blue enough. Like you know, I got a lot I do a lot of color matching. When we were doing the sushi restaurant? Um Dan was not only sweating the details on the finance side, but we were like, dude We don't really know how a restaurant works. None of us have ever worked at a restaurant. So Dan went and got a job at Noodles and Company.

1:00:33 Oh yeah. And he studied them from the inside and we treated it like it was like Oceans Eleven, like every day he'd come home and we were like, What did you think a report. Yeah. Yeah, and he'd like to draw the like draw the workflows or he'd like to what did you learn and what did you bring me? Give me the pesto cavatopi. Yeah, then he'd bring the pesto cavatopi and he'd be like Trust me, do not Eat the tomato basil soup. We're like, Why? It seems just tomato soup. Don't eat the tomato based soup guy. And so he was like, went undercover. And he was like willing to go to like the big reveal, like the big undercover boss reveal at the end. When I quit. Yeah, were w were by the way, were they blown away by the fact that you're like, I am creating a sushi change. I think I tried to hire the GM and she's like

1:01:10 Alright. Like that sounds better than what I'm doing here at Noodles and Company. Like she was like I thought she'd like you betrayed me and it's like Cool. You're like, Oh, you're trying to move next door? Great. Like we can trade food at lunch. So Dan, you um Let's do uh let's do uh actually, do you have that? The business plan that we made, do you still have that binder?

1:01:32 Yeah, one's like let's find it. So the story here is that Uh not only did I work undercover at Noodles and Company. At some point Also this was not a

1:01:42 Th I didn't just put that there. Like that's lived there. behind it there. I don't have one. I need to get a copy of this. I have this. I also like our Sabi sushi hat is right there. Oh nice. Yeah, so basically the first business we me and Dan uh and our buddy Trevor had out of college was to create It's a brand called Sabi Sushi. The idea was to create the chipotle for sushi, so

1:02:02 Go get it. Go get sushi the way you eat chipotle, where you just walk down the line, you pick your ingredients and you get the thing. This is our big idea. And um how I maintain a good idea. Uh time.

1:02:13 Been proven. It's been proven it's a bad idea, but like I still want it. Okay. So so we not only did Dan work undercover at Noodles and Company, we then go in I don't know how, we get a meeting with the founder of Noodles and Company and we show up to this meeting With this binder. This binder is our business plan. We had been working on this for months while we were searching for a location. And can you just hold up the thickness of this binder so people see thick.

1:02:38 Uh let's see. Yeah, like this is probably a couple hundred pages of a business plan in there. And there was stupid things. So Part of it is what you would expect. Like here's the startup cost, but part of it was dumb stuff like the uniforms and how we're gonna like progress people from from entry level to manager and what their values are and all We had not sold a single role to a single customer and we're worried about all this other shit but what we think we're tricking ourselves into thinking that. Planning equals productivity. And you know, spoiler, planning did not equal productivity.

1:03:06 Uh, we're basically doing a very fancy form of procrastination. And so we get to this meeting with this guy from Noodles and Company. I think his name's A Aaron, if I remember correctly. And he forgot that guy's name. He's like, All right, so like what's the plan? And we think We're about to wow this guy and we're like plan, oh funny you should ask.

1:03:26 Whip out that binder. slam it on the table and it's basically like Here's our plan. Look how great this is. And I remember he looks at it and first of all, it looks like a kid's project. Even the cover is like we inserted this colorful thing in the front plastic thing. And then he flips through and he's like realizes pretty quickly, Oh, these idiots wrote a two hundred fifty page business plan for their

1:03:47 Sushi restaurant. And they don't even have a location. They don't have any Customers. They they're they're starting on you know from scratch. And I remember The look on his face. And then I remember like the moment that was rock bottom for me in the whole sushi v journey, which was that he should have just ripped us and been like, Guys, what the hell are you doing? This is so ass backwards.

1:04:06 Like, why don't you get out there, start testing your concept, see if people actually want this, and then like, you know, you'll learn by doing. And instead he kinda took pity on us and didn't say that. I could tell he wanted to say something, and then he was like And then he just tried to be nice about it and I was like, Oh my God, we're so bad. That he feels like he needs to be polite about this.

1:04:28 That means we're even worse than just being bad. Um, and I just remember realizing like w I don't know what the right answer is, but whatever we're doing is dead wrong. I could tell you that right now. after that meeting. I just wondered like later years later someone did tell us that though. Um in Boston. There you know, we were talking about We're about to sign a ten year lease. Um and we literally just met this guy like ten minutes ago.

1:04:51 And he oh he was uh it was a guy, uh he like owned a bunch of Boston markets. I don't know. Prender gas. Prender gas. I don't know how you say. That's his name. Uh He was not he was doing a a tech company now, but he was like in it, you know, early in my career I owned twenty or thirty Boston markets.

1:05:08 And um So I know a little bit about the quick service industry. Let me, you know, be your mentor. Yeah. But he basically just tore the whole thing to shreds, like within five minutes was like This is wrong. Don't sign that lease. And like Trevor, like d wasn't in Massachusetts when we when we were doing this. We like he was like about to sign a lease. We like called him like, Wait, no. Well this guy this guy was great because he's like, you know, so like he asked us a question and we gave him the answer we've been giving everybody else. So I think he was something like

1:05:35 You know, so what makes you think that There's like there's demand for this. And we were like, Well, you know, sushi's been on the rise, blah blah blah. We gave him this like spiel. He's like All right, so Is this gonna work or what?

1:05:46 And he basically cut through the nonsense and he's like, How do you know? Are you testing this? You're just gonna sign a 10 year lease with a personal guarantee. With no clue if this if the market actually even wants this. Like, doesn't that seem insane to you guys? And he gave us real talk and I will forever be grateful for him, uh for giving us that real talk because he saved our ass.

1:06:02 From signing that that lease and he gave us a different plan and he was like Why don't you test this, rent out a commissary kitchen like bakers and caterers use. There well turned out they were like twenty dollars an hour. It was like super cheap. No and no long term commitments. And he's like, rent those out, do it delivery only, validate the demand, see if people like your recipes, see if people like the price points. You'll learn so much by doing that. And Then you'll know what you need out of your first location if you're gonna go there.

1:06:26 And um That saved our ass. That advice saved saved us. And you know That if I w whenever somebody asked me for like any Advice or help. Um, I just remember like can I can I give them one tenth of the value John gave us is the new like North Star for that that situation.

1:06:42 Yeah. I remember he introduced us to like lean startup and you know, actually figuring out Um We we used to poll people, we're like, you know, would you eat sushi? Once a week. Like how many times a week would you eat sushi? Which is a bad badly phrased question anyway. Yeah. Uh in hindsight. Like oh I'd come two to three times a week. And it's like We we did this proof of concept.

1:07:02 Um on the cheap. Um as as quickly as we could. And like the answer was like not even once a month. Yeah. Like night and day.

1:07:10 Right. Outside of outside of like LA, SF, New York. The answer is like if I eat sushi at all. Like, right, to make a concept like this work, it needs to work in Texas. Colorado, you know, it needs to work everywhere.

1:07:22 And the answer was if I eat sushi at all, I eat it about once a month and I'm happy with that. I'm not trying to eat it three times a month. And I'm gonna go to the nice restaurant to do it. Right. And we were looking for like the three people who validated us rather than and ignoring the ninety seven people who were saying no. We're like, Yeah, see those three. Um He also did one other amazing thing. That's

1:07:40 As an entrepreneur, I now see like This pattern over and over again. So he suggested to us he's like Do it delivery only. And we were like uh but

1:07:49 He like saw the look on our face. He's like what and we were like Delivery just sucks. And we we started ex you know, uh he's like why? So we're like Delivery, I mean you order food, you don't even know when it's gonna come. This is before DoorDash, by the way. I think the biggest thing is we we probably invented DoorDash. Uh and didn't know it and we were fixed we were fixated on the sushi, but we really, you know, came up with a better model.

1:08:11 Exactly. So this before all those we were like you You know, you call in an order, you don't know when it's gonna come, it shows up an hour later, the packaging is all shitty, the food is cold, the It's leaking out the bottom. And it just feels cheap.

1:08:24 And uh we're like that's why Like it sucks. And our takeaway was Therefore, no. And his was Wow.

1:08:31 Looks like you found all the things to improve to make this a ten X better experience. And like since then, now I see this all the time. If you talk to entrepreneurs, it's like the you think about a space and you're like, oh, that's horrible. That's horrible for these reasons. And like the entrepreneurial response The customer response is it's horrible. The entrepreneur response is, wow, what an opportunity. Cause if I just change those four things, I now have created this huge like you know level up in the customer experience.

1:08:56 And so we ended up doing it where Our delivery times were sub thirty minutes. You knew exactly when it was gonna come. We stamped on the food when we made it, so you knew it was fresh. We put a webcam in our kitchen so you could see us working on your order. We did like all these other things to try to make delivery actually a cool experience. And the bar was so low by basic delivery standards that it that kind of actually worked. And so I thought that was the other like really brilliant thing that John did for us. Yeah. Rethinking Rethinking what you know, everyone kind of assumed we would make with a restaurant and kind of flipping it on its head. Um

1:09:27 And it allowed us to fail faster. So back to the business ideas. You had a few here. Are there any that you think are cool or interesting that you think somebody could go do? I am very into what I'm calling uh fun to run businesses. Um so I actually looked at a few of these towards the end. I think I found fleet when I when I saw some of these, like laser tag, bowling alleys, like kind of these family entertainment businesses. Um Yeah, I've kind of Two hypotheses around them. One is like I think I saw like one or two P and L again, do the do your own research. Don't just blindly uh accept that this is a good space.

1:09:59 Um The one or two I saw, like Wildly profitable, very low cost. Um, there's probably a high startup cost in the beginning, but like climbing gym or something like that. It's like once you get it set up, they have like these autonomous ones now too. You don't even need that much labor. Um But also as a dad, I have two kids. Like I'm always

1:10:17 spending money on these things. Like uh my son had a a laser tag birthday party. Um, there's like one person working at this laser tag thing. They like own the laser tag game in town. They charge you for the adult standing at the birthday party and I'm like, Wow, like I could do this better. I want you know they And they have you hostage. All the arcade games, you gotta buy their food. Um Kinda these very easy to run, um like

1:10:42 Almost a single person, but you know, I uh let's call it like a teenage business. So you hire teenagers to work there, like anything that they're not gonna mess up. Yeah, like a bowling alley. And then how do you find things that like have multiple purposes? Like there's a bowling alley in my town and I it you know, it's you know, during the day it's for kids. Like they have the kids activities, then like after school activities. And then at night it's the bowling league for the adults and they have a bar, so it's the local dive bar. It's like You know, then there's like five you know, five vending machines in there. Again, teenager working, like the no frills. But I have to imagine if you can find the right business like this.

1:11:15 kinda great to be able to just go bowling at your bowling hour. Like I can't do much with my paper bags. Like I go and I check them out. I maybe walk around with them. But like Not Like why family entertainment? Why this out of home entertainment? Why now? Like is there anything that's changed in the market why 'Cause you know, these have been around forever. Blazer Tag. Puppet golf bowling alley, whatever. Uh my hunch is they've been profitable for a while. Like I think a lot of these are like sneaky businesses that you don't think of.

1:11:39 Um You know, I think there's also kind of more of a trend. I was reading about this like, you know, millennials like don't drink as much. They want more like sober events. Um, I think this idea of doing more like games is starting to take on again, you know, small sample size of of things in in my town, but like, you know, you go to these like unlimited you know, there's an arcade in my town. It's like you pay like eight bucks for an hour, you can play unlimited arcade games. This place is packed. Um, you know, that sort of thing never really existed, but I think there's like this desire to like

1:12:10 leave the house and do things. Maybe it's a post Covid thing, I'm not sure. Um thing that I think is really interesting about this is like and It's probably true across the country. Like

1:12:19 If I think about like I always drive by like these large commercial real estate Um You know, old malls, you know, these big buildings that no one wants to buy anymore. Uh and then when I see one When I see what people put in them, like

1:12:31 It tends to be kind of like these newer th you know, more interesting things like Um pickleball courts. Like I think I read something it's like, Oh, they're taking all the old bed baths and turning'em into pickleball courts. Um so it's actually like take something that maybe you can get. That's not being used and you know, make a climbing gym, make it a ninja course.

1:12:49 Um way, I think is like the most incredible marketing uh where they like just marketed gymnastics to boys and now all of a sudden they've doubled they've doubled the amount of like demand for this. And then there's like the climbing team and like this place is packed All the time. Um So that one is one So so one of my biggest investments over the past two years has been in um my brother in law's uh commercial real estate. So he does

1:13:14 What everybody thinks is dying. But is actually like uh thriving. So for example Kind of like mall like strip mall locations. Not like a mall, like an indoor mall.

1:13:24 But basically a shopping center. And a shopping center with a grocery store, uh you know, maybe a So there's got the Trader Joe's, there may be like a Crunch Fitness, there's like whatever, there's a bunch of these types of locations. And then how do you fill up the rest of the boxes and People think that shopping centers are probably dead because

1:13:42 E commerce or whatever. Everything's on Amazon now or whatever. Um These things have like ninety seven percent occupancy. It's like really it's like higher than multifamily and office. Like it's it's a really great category. And even the few concepts that are like kind of going out of business, like a Bed Bath and Beyond or like Joanne's fabric. He's replacing them with trampoline parks.

1:14:01 And pickable and Tesla charging networks. He's like there's just new tenants that are always there. And he's like the the best part of this entire model. 'Cause the returns are bananas for this thing. Like I it's like it is by far like the the thing I've been most bullish on in the last twenty four months has been investing into this. I basically took All my spare cash, put it over here. And um the reason why was A is a good operator, but B

1:14:24 Um there's no supply. So nobody builds any new shopping centers. So like Even though Um Like you know, every everything else people build more. They build more condos, they build more stuff. Nobody builds new shopping centers. And so it's all just retrofitting existing centers. You buy them usually like below the actual build cost of the of the center themselves. And so I've seen this.

1:14:45 My kids go to this thing called uh Little kickers. It's in uh San Ramon, like a little town like you know, in the Bay Area. And it's exactly what you're describing. A teenager runs it. Like I asked to speak to the manager. And um the manager was seventeen years old. He had like a chain on and like the F boy haircut. And I was like what uh you're in charge of this thing and he was great, by the way. He he was actually like a really good uh good messager. But

1:15:11 Everybody who works there is young. Like he's young, he's like probably he's definitely like, I don't know, under twenty three years old. And all the coaches, there's two coaches per class that they're all they're all also like just kind of soccer players who were high schoolers probably. And but this thing is packed and it's just like one large venue for kids soccer. And um This thing has to be printing. Like I just doing the rough math of it. This thing has to be printing. They have

1:15:35 Yeah, definitely over a thousand members. It's like Two hundred to three hundred dollars per month. Um yeah, this is this is a a very big business that's basically, like you said, sort of like a fun business that's teenager, right? Yeah, and it's you don't need to and it's AI proof, right? Like so like if you're looking for where do I do business if I know the whole world is changing with AI. Well AI's probably not gonna like Do a trampoline park or you know, do a a kids soccer center. You know, like those are those are s pretty safe businesses. Yeah, and they're predictable. I mean, like they're kids are always gonna want to jump. It's not like you're buying a product that, you know, all of a sudden

1:16:07 You don't know if it's gonna last. Uh you put a bullet point on here. The least sexy businesses possible. Touch the taboo. What do you what do you mean by that? So this is I start again when In the pit of despair you start to you start to go crazy with ideas where like, all right, well what are what you know, I started looking at like medical ambulances, which I still think could have worked. But effectively, you know, the government subsidizes medical transport for um disabled and elderly from you know nursing homes to their medical appointments. Um so it's actually government contracts.

1:16:36 Um if you have a fleet of, you know, these special handicap accessible bands. you know, you effectively can you mobilize this fleet every day, you kinda fill up your appointments with the people. Um and you just transport them to and from. Super simple. You don't really think about it. But like the demand is Is there, especially as as the population is aging.

1:16:54 That's a that's a good example of an unsexy one. I would love to buy a funeral home. Like something that's just like, oh man, like you work in that. It's like how do I mean all of the deal like If you want to find a deal that's kind of like Yeah. punching above your weight, if you will.

1:17:08 Like there's gonna be some hair on the deal, like on the at the lower end of the market. Like I said, like private equity's gonna scoop up the easy ones. Um there's gonna be something. Like If that's something can be that is just like weird and like no one really wants to touch it or or think about it, like to me that's a great

1:17:25 A great reason to buy it. Right,'cause it'cause it might mean that You know, let's say there's a really sexy business on one side, right? There's a business that's like Uh, maybe it's like software only. You don't have to run it. Um, yeah, you know, it's it's low operations, blah, blah, blah. And it's It's about whatever, party planning or something fun.

1:17:44 The hair on that deal might be it may be just that the valuation is extremely high. So it's gonna take you a long time to get your cash back. Or it might be some other something else, like you know, users are very fickle, the competition's very intense, whatever. There there's gonna be hair and every deal. The good thing about what you're saying is that If you choose the hair that It's not the most fun thing to run. It's gonna be like you gotta cremate someone. It's like actually like I don't actually know if I wanna do that, like now that I'm saying it out loud. Like

1:18:09 That's I mean, I'll hire a teenager to do it then. Uh but like that's a better hair that's about a better amount of hair. Like you kinda know what it is. It's like the hair is the thing almost. The P and L has hair. Or the the there's a lot of debt on the business. Alright, there's other problems in other areas. Exactly. So if there's something that like Yeah, like if twenty people are gonna to flock to the software only party planning one, but only like too crazy enough people are like, well, let me roll up these funeral homes. Try to like and I'm sure people do this. Like the you know, I'm not the first one to think about this. Um, but I like that. The other thing I really like right now, Party City just went out of business. Who's buy where are you buying balloons?

1:18:45 Um Like twenty minutes from me, he had a fireworks store. His fireworks store happen to sell balloons. The day party city went out of business. He rebranded, man. Now his store is called Balloons.

1:18:56 Uh it used to just be called fireworks, now it's called balloons. He's taking out all the ads on the street. Um and we went there uh You know, for my for my son's birthday and the He's doing awesome. So it's like how do you like kinda and don't copy party city. That clearly didn't work. Right. But The demand for balloons still exists. And the supply continue to exist. Exactly. The supply just shrunk like a whole lot.

1:19:17 Right. And I imagine as things change, like the landscape for better or worse, is changing very rapidly these days. Um you know, maybe something goes out of business'cause they can't compete'cause of tariffs or whatever. Like how do you think about being

1:19:31 you know, opportunistic in that sense in doing it. And you can do it Um like you don't even need like you could start selling balloons, like get a permit and start doing delivery only balloons. Like That I actually saw a truck doing that. When I went to Monish Pabrai's house, he's he's a great investor and he on his desk there's a pl like a where you have a name placard. Normally you just have your name engraved on it.

1:19:51 Engraved on it, it just said, Trouble is opportunity. He just had it on his desk,'cause at all times, you know, he's reading the news or he's hearing something. As a reminder, trouble is opportunity. Uh I love that. Yep, that's awesome. Cool. Awesome hanging out with you as always. I'm glad you got to tell your story and

1:20:08 Congrats, Benham. Blown away by what you did with the with the business that you bought. You are officially Dan the Bagman. Thanks for the telling the story. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's uh exciting to uh To be here. Cool.

1:20:29 Alright, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzi Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts.

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