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- [00:00]
Will Smith
Today's guest's journey into buying businesses began 10 years ago. Eric Calderon learned about the concept at Harvard Business School, which he entered with the idea that he would return to a corporate path and become an executive. But he took Rick and Royce's class at HBS and decided that this is.
- [00:21]
Eric Calderon
What he would do instead.
- [00:24]
Will Smith
And he did, buying a business in his native Houston with Rick and Royce as investors. We hear the story of that search and exit as well as what Eric is doing today, which is building TX Partners, his Holdco that buys small testing, inspection and calibration tick businesses. Today Taxi has aggregate revenues of $25 million. So this is a story of an entrepreneur who did a traditional search first, learned in industry, exited then for his second chapter, set out to build a long term Holdco and is doing it now. You'll notice that Eric himself never refers to TXC as a Holdco. That's my word. So it's not like he's been bitten by the Holdco trend. No, Eric is building a sector specific enterprise in tic. The businesses he acquires complement each other and fill gaps in the enterprise. You'll hear him say he thinks of them as divisions of the company as opposed to standalone businesses in a Holdco. We cover many themes in Eric's journey and around what he's building with Taxi, including shared services in a Holdco versus Decentralization raising patient capital from investors committed to a long term hold buying a business in the oil and gas industry which is typically avoided by searchers, the advantage of assembling a holdco of smaller $1 million SDE businesses and the tension Eric feels around his own identity. Is he an operator or is he an investor? And here he is, Eric Calderon, owner of TXC Partners. If you haven't checked out Smith List for a while, there are some great opportunities listed there. These are leadership positions within entrepreneurial small businesses, typically searcher acquired businesses, some open positions on the site right now GM for a leading pool business with 10 million in revenue entrepreneurial GM to help grow an outdoor services platform from 1 1/2 to 10 million COO of a wood product manufacturer with potential to become President or later owner. Head to smithlist.com to check out these roles and others for entrepreneurial operators and GMs. And while you're there, sign up for the alerts so that you're notified as we post yet more opportunities from the SMB and ETA ecosystem. Smithlist.com Smithlist.com welcome to acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith Acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs, and on this podcast I.
- [03:39]
Eric Calderon
Talk to the people who do it.
- [03:41]
Will Smith
Running payroll, paying your bills, closing your books, and producing financials. These are critical tasks every business owner must do or oversee, but spending time on them distracts you from the leadership in growth work you want to do. So let system 6 do it for you. Owned and led by a former Searcher, Chris Williams, System 6 is a leading outsourced finance team for hundreds of SMBs, including over 50 searcher acquired businesses. Chris, Tim and the System 6 team understand firsthand the challenges, the opportunities of jumping into a business as its new owner. So whether you own your business already or have one under LOI, talk to System 6 about how they can give you time back and improve your financial operations. Mention Acquiring Minds and they'll provide a free review of your books and Financial Ops, a $500 value. Check out system6.com, link in the show notes or email helloystem6.com Eric Calderon welcome to Acquiring Minds.
- [04:56]
Eric Calderon
Thanks Will. Nice to be here.
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Eric. Your path into buying businesses started with a traditional search fund.
- [05:04]
Will Smith
Today you're buying and holding businesses in TXE Partners in something of a Holdco independent sponsor hybrid.
- [05:14]
Eric Calderon
We're going to hear about all of this. First things first, some background on you, please.
- [05:19]
Eric Yep, so in terms of my background, I'm a native Houstonian, so my business is structured here as well. So it's kind of been a neat full circle to be able to come back into my community and build a business here. You know, I know there's some specific points that folks will already know, but I think emphasizing that I'm an engineer and kind of had a whole career mindset which was born around being an engineer and then found the path to surge as just kind of something that wasn't necessarily expected, but certainly had the entrepreneurial kind of instinct that was realized in business school and being able to jump into getting my hands on a business through a traditional search and then ultimately, you know, had a fell in love with the business model and wanted to do it over again. That's what's led to TXC Partners and the ability to have now a few different companies that we're focused on, yet I didn't leave the engineering background. So a lot of our businesses are involved in manufacturing or in sciences and it's been neat to kind of see the hybrid use of the technical skill with the kind of standard financial skills that you would expect in the search fund and apply those into our operations and Businesses.
- [06:27]
Great. Well, we're going to hear about that. And just going to your discovery or your decision to pursue a search fund, bridge the gap between whatever you were doing before and why you pursued a search fund.
- [06:40]
Sure. So, you know, to be actually very, very honest here, I went to business school fully believing I would graduate to be an engineer, like come back to be an engineering manager. So I was trying to add a business set, skill set to continue being an engineer and work my way up a corporate kind of ladder, if you will. And it was a little bit of happenstance that I ended up finding the search fund model at Harvard Business School. I ended up having an opening in my schedule, signed up for the class at the recommendation of a friend, and that kind of introduced me into a whole world I didn't know existed. And I think what really drew my interest is, you know, if you don't know about this model, you can't really appreciate that there's a way to become a, a business owner and like a hands on operator so quickly out of business school. And I think the appeal there has some similarities to what I had done in engineering, which was, you know, kind of solving problems across like multiple parties and, you know, complex, you know, capital projects. What I was doing before this in some ways had some mirroring of that. They kind of got your arms around something. And I think the other thing I really was intrigued about is the search itself. I can kind of look back on it now with some commentary, but just, you know, on the front end of it, it was kind of had some mystery to it. Like there were some best practices on how people have approached search, but there's really no like standard playbook. There is.
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What year was this, Eric?
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20. I graduated HBS in 2013, so, so this was early days of, early days of search. And yeah, I say there's no playbook. I mean, there's certainly best practices, but like if you were to interview, you know, a handful of different searchers that acquired something, they all have a different way that they got there. And so, you know, I think going through that experience and kind of understanding that this was in many ways very entrepreneurial, that I had the freedom to decide that I wanted to go into a certain industry or a certain geography, I think was very appealing because I was kind of writing my own path on what I could do. And of course I decided I wanted to follow something in oil and gas as a searcher because I had worked in that industry before. And so for me it really felt like a way to see an industry I'd already started to know in a different light.
- [08:46]
Yeah, well, interesting that the entrepreneurial nature of it appealed to you. Not interesting. Anybody who pursues this path is going to like that about it. But it sounds like you were not at all destined to be an entrepreneur. In fact, you just said explicitly you envisioned yourself climbing the corporate ladder for your whole career. So. So kind of interesting that you had never seen yourself or aspire to be an entrepreneur before that. Or am I wrong?
- [09:10]
You know, definitely not with a lot of effort behind it. Right. So I can admit among, you know, friends here that I didn't even go to job interviews at hbs. I was kind of like understanding there was a company I had worked for before. They were probably a good fit for me to go back to. So I was very much like tunnel visioned on what I was going to do in post business school until I learned about opportunity to do a search fund. And I think for me that's, you know, there's certain aspects of that that are unique, but I think that's the benefit of being able to have, you know, a business school experience that you get to learn about things you didn't know existed.
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Yeah, for sure. Well, and of course a testament to Rick and Royce. You are referring to the class, the now famous class by Rick and Royce, the authors of the HBR Guide and of course now co podcasters, they have a podcast interviewing searchers as well. And that though they've been on this podcast and they talk about the, the class and how much it's grown over these last 10 odd years, that must have been one of the very earliest years that the class was offered. How many people were in it, do you recall?
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Yeah, so they have two classes. There's kind of one that's more of a traditional course on just small business. And I think that one, you know, had a 150 students or so. But my year was they had launched kind of a part two for folks that really want to dive into this after graduating. And that class was more like 30 or 40 people. So a much smaller number of us that could work. And you're exactly right. Will that class, that set of experiences that I got with those professors and with those classmates really helped me go from this being a concept to actually something I might be able to do. Actually talking about how do you structure a transaction? How do you close the deal, how do you, what does day one of operations look like? And you know, getting to read those stories I think really kind of helps you understand like is this, for me, is this something I want to do. And you know, of course, when you get two great mentors like, you know, Rick and Royce, as people that you can continue to interact with and learn with, I think it became for me something that I felt like there was a network between the. My classmates that were going to search, between these professors that were kind of building this community that I could work through and learn together with and ultimately find a business to acquire. Yeah.
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And in fact, Rick and Royce did become true mentors because they invested in your search. So now take us into the chapter of your actual search.
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Yep. So I did a search that was, I would say, somewhat, you know, limited in, in terms of both geographic constraint and a industry constraint. So first and foremost wanted to acquire something in the oil and gas sector. As I noted earlier, fortunately, that does align well with the Houston market. There's a big oil and gas sector here, but in many ways, I was kind of drawing the funnel a little bit tighter than I think best practices had been on how to search. And so for me, I was approaching the search not as a volume game of trying to send as many emails as I could or trying to look at kind of deals across the country. I wanted to be much more constrained in trying to find something in this local geography and in this industry. And so for me, what that meant is that some of my sourcing was a little bit different. You, of course, did the standard things of working with brokers and trying to get on to list serves and make sure you could see deals. But I also did a lot of work around trying to get to work with local accounting firms that may have clients that were kind of reaching retirement age, working with attorneys that were here in Houston. So trying to do a lot more to build like a Houston based network to find deals. I tell you, that's the approach I took. But it's actually funny how I found the deal that I ended up transacting on. So LK Industries is the first company that I bought. It's a niche manufacturing firm in Houston that makes oil testing equipment. The way I got connected to that deal is I was looking at another deal in Dallas, Texas that turned out not to be a fit. And in kind of downloading with the broker afterwards, after we had gone to visit the company, he asked me the question, like, what is it that you're looking for? You know, trying to just be helpful and try to give me the next deal. And I remember telling him, you know, I wanted a business near Houston. And I specifically said, I like Businesses with a long operating history. And at that time, that, that kind of thought for me was if a business has been around for 40 or 50 years, they're doing something right. And so that particular conversation, that broker recalled that he had a colleague, another broker, who had this really old company near Houston. He's like, let me introduce you. So this broker that ended up having the LK transaction was based in Iowa. And the way that he ended up connecting with the owners of lk, this Houston business was through cold email, cold mailing, literally writing letters to different business owners. That was his model. You know, the hit rate on that has to be low. But he wrote this letter that the owner of LK Industries responded to saying he would like to work with them in selling the business. So the connection happened there. And it took me about 15 months to find LK. So from kind of first day of searching to being under LOI took about 15 months. And LK turned out to be just kind of the right fit from, from all different measures. I summarize that 15 months pretty quickly. But there's a lot that happened in those 15 months of searching. And so we kind of seriously looked at about 165 deals in that time. I had indications of interest IOI on 16 and then did three letters of intent. Three, LOIs. The third one being the LOI for LK. First two, LOIs, you know, fell apart for kind of different reasons. There's some, definitely some learnings there we can elaborate on. But, you know, those numbers of 160 deals, I think to some, to some that sounds like a big number. To others it sounds like a small number. But we were certainly trying to curate and look at ones that passed our first funnel being in the right industry and second being in the right geography.
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And your. Your definition of looking at them would have been signing an NDA and looking.
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At the NDA getting, getting the thim. Reviewing in some cases, having calls with, with the broker owners.
- [15:06]
Great, Eric. Well, let me react to a few things there. First of all, when you were doing this search, Rick and Royce, while they had taught you and were maybe mentoring you and invested in you, they had not yet written the kind of codified the. Those criteria that we all now hear so much about, about the ideal business for a searcher. But oil and gas was certainly not it. Oil and gas. You don't see a lot of searchers in, in oil and gas because it's so cyclical.
- [15:37]
Correct? That's right. And I would say kind of the approach of what we were looking for Changed from kind of day one to what we ultimately transacted on. And one of the biggest changes was moving away from anything that would be service related. We started to look more on like product based businesses and manufacturing because of the capital intensity in which like oil and gas service businesses can have. Obviously we're trying to buy small. So one kind of pivot we made along the way was to look for a manufacturing business in the space. Still to your point, the cycle nature of oil and gas certainly makes a deal with any sort of leverage hard. And so you know, we wanted, we believe that we could do a little bit better than someone who maybe didn't know the industry only because we had been in it being cognizant of what cycles were and trying to make sure we bought not in an up cycle, trying to buy at a fair price that could get us through a down cycle. I won't say we did that perfectly, but I think we did it okay. We did experience kind of some cyclical challenges shortly after closing that we navigated and I can unpack a little bit more, but I think within the oil and gas sector we did our best to try to be in a place and we landed in like the mid, what they call midstream or like pipeline part of the business. And that has a little bit less cyclicality.
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Well, the other thing to your earlier point about one of your criteria being the longevity that would indirectly tell a story of a business that even if it's in a cyclical industry, it has survived those cycles. So you, you were trying to kind of, you know, triangulate a business that had survived the cyclicality. The other thing, I'll say you just said something there Eric, that was interesting to me that services businesses in oil and gas have capex and so you shifted to manufacturing. Implication being there's less capex that is completely counter to what I, how I understand the world, which is that services of course, I guess it depends on what the services and services generally are lower capex manufact is high capex. So. So reconcile that for me.
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Sure. So when we talk about like oil and gas services, that's kind of a sector that does everything kind of at the wellhead. And so there's just a lot of capital intensity to like equipment that has to be used out of yield on those services. Probably use that more as like an industry term than rather a broader to like an oil and gas specific services kind of term. For us looking at like a manufacturing business, this is niche manufacturing, so small manufacturing of like a niche product and being able to find a company that had, you know, really good amount of kind of equipment already on site like the CNCs already purchased. You know, you could kind of do a filter to make sure we didn't need new ones the day after closing that a lot of the manufacturing was in sub components coming from, you know, key vendors. And so being able to kind of look through and say this is a business where its current operating level is sustainable, maybe even can grow some without significant capex in terms of being able to produce a product at a volume that generates the revenues we want.
- [18:44]
Will Smith
What do the following acquiring minds guests all have in common? Doug Johns, Morley Desai, Tim Erickson, Chirag Shah, Shane Ursum. They all went through the Acquisition Lab, the accelerator in community for people serious.
- [19:00]
Eric Calderon
About buying a business.
- [19:02]
Will Smith
But they represent just a sliver of.
- [19:04]
Eric Calderon
The Lab success stories.
- [19:06]
Will Smith
The number of deals across the Lab's cohorts now stands at over 120 with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value. The Acquisition Lab was founded by Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build, the book that introduced so many of you to the very idea of buying a business. The Lab offers a month long, intensive, almost daily Q and A sessions with advisors, live deal reviews with Walker, Deal team introductions and an active community of serious searchers. Check out acquisitionlab.com, link in the notes or email the Lab's co founder, Chelsea wood. Chelsea buy, then build.com.
- [19:50]
Eric Calderon
I can just elaborate a little bit more on where this went. So as we continue to kind of look at this business, we did a bolt on acquisition shortly after acquiring LK and that was one of our key vendors that did calibration of our equipment. So imagine a manufacturing business makes a piece of equipment, sends it out to a third party for a calibration. We bought that calibration business and insourced it. And I think for us will, that turned out to be like a really interesting kind of pivot in what we were doing because we then were able to bring in a service to the manufacturing business that really redefined the company to be more in the testing, inspection and calibration sector as opposed to a true manufacturing business. And that turned out to be a really good win for us as we ultimately exited the company.
- [20:37]
Great. Well, well we'll turn our attention to that. There's a lot of interest these days in what is the. There's kind of a short form vernacular for testing and inspection businesses that you.
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The tick effector.
- [20:52]
Yes. Thank you. Yeah, so we'll get there I just want to, before we leave your search, want to say, first of all, how this Iowa broker got LK Industries by sending cold, you know, cold letters.
- [21:07]
Yeah, Real letters, right?
- [21:08]
Yeah, Actual letters, but also just, just for the audience. You're not only competing with other searchers when you're doing cold outreach to, to sellers, you're also competing with the brokers themselves who are basically making, you know, a similar pitch.
- [21:21]
I'll help you if I can. I think one thing that I also learned from that is often I was tempted to only kind of filter who I was talking to or who I was interacting with by the belief of people in my region might know deals in the region. And yet I found this Houston based company from a broker in Iowa. And so for me, kind of one of the things I learned from that is as a searcher, you got to tell your story to anyone who's listening. You never know where that deal will come from.
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Yeah, yeah. And. Well, and that was the final point I wanted to make, which is that you just kind of did all the things right. You were just basically, to use the cliche, creating a surface area of luck because you didn't know where the deal was going to come from. So you fair to say you just kind of did everything, talked to everybody, talked to accountants, told your story to everybody, hoping that at some point there would be some contact with some, some lead on a deal that you buy. Is that, is that a fair characterization?
- [22:11]
And I also say I had a little bit of the advantage of the search fund being relatively new. So as I was having those conversations, a lot of times people had not heard that term, which meant I got the benefit of kind of bringing to them a new concept to explain. This is what we're doing. And I think, you know, now the models become more mature, but at that time being, you know, possibly the only searcher in Houston or one of very few that was active in the market in 2013, was a good way to be able to make an impression on folks.
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Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great point. And great advantage because, you know, every owner now is getting five emails from search funds a day. So there's no intriguing intrigued there at all. Great.
- [22:50]
Will Smith
And the, can you tell us about the numbers of the business and also.
- [22:54]
Eric Calderon
The structure of how you did this? It was traditional search fund economics. So maybe that part first. What was the, what was the structure of your search and with your investors, Rick and Royce or others?
- [23:05]
Yeah, so Rick and Royce were our two equity providers solely. So it was, it was Kind of their, their funds that they put in. And we had kind of a standard, like 2, you know, 20% kind of PE model that, that were, there was a sweat equity component. And so we had the chance to co invest with Wicker Rice personal funds. And then we kind of had a 20% equity ownership that we would get after hitting certain, certain hurdle of a return. So for, for me, I mean, at the time, as you kind of noted, this was early days. So that seemed like a pretty standard model that I think was kind of modeled off of the normal PE kind of model, the 2 for 20 model. And so that felt like kind of right in the ballpark. So we, we put leverage on the business. And this is kind of an interesting concept of how we decided to leverage the business. So having the good fortune of working with Royce, there was a lot of different, you know, financiers that he had known over time in his career. And so got to talk to a lot of different debt providers, both bank and non bank lenders. And I had a thesis on wanting to work with a community bank to be able to do the debt. And for me, part of the thesis there was like, look, I'm talking to a lot of these banks to try to find a deal. It'd be nice that once I find one locally, like I can actually work with one of these banks, have that bank, be a kind of a community partner to our business, work with my employees, you know, on, work with us on the credit lines going forward. So, you know, trying to do my best to keep the kind of banking relationship local. And so we ended up working with a community bank. At first we were going to do an SBA loan and then we decided not to do an SBA loan and had a community bank here in Houston, a very small bank, only had three locations here in Houston. A very small bank decided to match the SBA terms and do the loan for us. And what was kind of interesting about that is when you have only a three location bank, I was talking directly to the CEO of the bank and you know, the vice president of the bank and kind of in one of my, you know, best moments of search, we had this deal pending approval, and the chairman and CEO of the bank calls me and says, I need to come see the business literally comes to LK Industries. I don't own it at this point. Bear in mind, right, we're still trying to get the deal closed. And I tell the owner, I was like, look, I've got some people coming, I want to see the business and he just kind of says, like, sure, go ahead. You know, here, here's the keys, if you will. And we did a full walkthrough of the business and sat down in this little kitchen, small little table. I was basically grilled by the CEO and chairman of all these different questions and what ifs on the deal. And as he left, he got into his car. I got the approval. And so there was like a real, like, I've got to do this in person, diligence from his end. And they. They did the approval on the transaction. So that was kind of a neat story. And I think ultimately turned out to be really good for us because as we went through the inevitable oil and gas cycle, which. Which we did, we saw some. Some highs and lows in that. It was really good to have that bank partner because literally they had an understanding of the Houston market. They had a portfolio that had a lot of oil and gas deals. They understood kind of the ebbs and flows of the market and worked with us to make sure that we were able to get to the other side of any sort of blips that we were seeing during our operating cycles.
- [26:15]
And so do you think that that's generalizable advice for folks listening, or do you think it's working with a community bank makes made particular sense in your case? Because you're in this cyclical industry and this. This industry, you're in a. You're in a, you know, kind of a. An industry town. Houston's an oil town.
- [26:33]
There's definitely that aspect. I think if I. So all the deals we've done since have continued to be with community banks. And I think for us, you know, it's not just the industry cycles or the type of industry you're in. I think it has to do with having a business in the community where the bank is banking. Right. And so that's turned out to be really important for us, that we have these close relationships with the bank. They can come and see our businesses. They do indeed actually do a lot of programs with our employees to help them get auto loans and personal financing loans. And so we've built really deep relationships with our bank. And that's a model we want to follow going forward. Fortunately, our businesses have done reasonably well. But I think sitting across from a bank and having them understand the nuances of a business, if it is kind of going through dips is really valuable because we're not, you know, we're not having to do anything other than, you know, schedule a time to meet in person. And kind of go through this. And so for us, we're really committed to working with those community banks because they have an interest in the community doing well, which includes our business. Yeah. So I think it's a very symbiotic relationship.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Yeah.
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There's kind of a double incentive there. They're. They're visible in the community. They want their borrowers to. To do well. It will help their own community thrive. And of course, it will not look good on them if a business that they invested in locally doesn't do well. So they. They've got incentives in lots of directions, so that's great.
- [27:57]
I think they can actually have an appreciation for a unique deal structure and move faster because there's kind of less hurdles, if you will. You can kind of give right to decision makers at these small banks. And we've put some interesting, you know, kind of structures together that I think may have taken more time or just a bit more back and forth with maybe a larger bank that had kind of more specifics on the structure they wanted to do. These small banks can be a little.
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Bit more nimble, and you've seen that then multiple times. We have just that first deal. Yeah, we have. Great. And is there anything more to say about the fact that they matched SBA terms without it actually being an SBA deal?
- [28:33]
I think for us, we really just kind of fortunate that we were open with the bank at the front end on, like, we're, you know, we've got a few different processes we're considering, and one is SBA and outlined what those terms were and that. And they were. They kind of took those as terms they had to match in order to be at the table. And so it just worked out well for us that the SBA terms were, you know, somewhat friendly, if you will, in terms of duration and covenant light. And so, yeah, I think it just came from. They hadn't done a lot of acquisition financing before, and they kind of knew we were working a few different paths and they wanted to be a part of the deal. And they. They match those terms.
- [29:09]
Yeah, they match the pg too, didn't they?
- [29:12]
Of course, yeah. Yeah. For the good and for the bad.
- [29:16]
Okay, very interesting. Thank you, Eric. Okay, so now let's turn to. Back to LK Industries itself. If you could give us the numbers around the business and, you know, kind of the. What you liked about it, what you maybe didn't like about it.
- [29:29]
Yeah, sure. So top line, the business did well between, like, 6 and 7 million of revenue, so. And they had about a 25% EBITDA margin. And so we made a good entry multiple there. Recalling this, it was like I think a little over three times that we were able to get the entry multiple three and a half times. So it was a pretty good entry multiple there. Let me point out this is part of buying a business that has cycles. And so that entry multiple is based on kind of where it is now, anticipating it might move in the future.
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So important point that's. Thank you.
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And so for, for us, I think the, the business kind of when we bought it, one of the things that was, you know, really looking back we, I personally wish we had understood a little better. One of the things that we saw early on was it looked like the business had a lot of recurring revenue and they had the same kind of set of customers that were buying this kind of fixed sum of product every year. And you could just kind of see that perfectly all the way through the last few years of the financials. And what we learned kind of when we got, once we got our arms around that is that a lot of this was more project based than we thought. And so some of these projects were multi year projects and so they would buy a hundred of this unit over five years. And so when you kind of look at that, it's easy to look at and say, oh, they must need 20 of these units every year kind of going forward. It's like actually once the project finishes it may or may not need more. And so I think we kind of learned an important difference between I guess maybe like revenue that repeats versus true recurring need. And I think that was something for us that we learned and navigated through. I think another area of focus for us was understanding that in these businesses, you know, managing inventory is very important. And so because it's a manufacturing business and so coming in and kind of understanding like historic inventory levels versus kind of more like just in time sort of manufacturing and kind of what you wanted to hold going forward actually was an opportunity for us to really improve the working capital in the business to try to really right size the inventory for expected demand. So that was kind of another opportunity to reflect on and kind of get right. And something I've seen over and over just you know, how much kind of inventory analytics you can apply to some of these small businesses I think is usually an opportunity as you come in to buy one of these companies.
- [31:52]
So what is the owner, you know, quote doing wrong that you can, you as searcher can come in and improve that they're not doing just in time and that they've got, they're holding too much inventory basically.
- [32:04]
That, that's a fair way to put it. Although I don't think it's completely irrational on their end. You know, they've, they've kind of lived a, an existence where you know, they don't want to run out of inventory. Sometimes they buy large quantities that they can get a discount on multi year's worth of inventory and they stock it. And so I think just kind of depending on what they prioritize in their business might be different than what us as like a leverage buyout might prioritize how to using cash. And so moving away from buying 18 months or 24 months of a product to put on the shelf to buying more and you know, 60 and 90 day lots sort of thing for manufacturing. Yeah, and, and, and, and also I think obsoleting inventories and other things. So we've seen a few times where product lines get discontinued but a lot of inventory still sits on the shelf. Being very particular about obsoleting inventory, selling things off when you're not going to use them anymore. I think it is a way to create a change in working capital.
- [33:02]
You know, it's really, it's interesting, Eric. We just did a webinar yesterday with Heather Anderson and Chris Williamson at Cane Crossing about working capital and small business acquisitions, talking about this very point, inventory in many, in a manufacturing context or, or not, but any inventory business and how there is a temptation among searchers to come in and say oh this, this owner has held too much inventory and we can reduce that freeing some of the working capital. But what you have to be careful of is exactly what you just touched on that, that there may be a method to the badness they may have been. They may have all that inventory because they buy it at a discount if they buy, if they kind of over buy. And so if you reduce the inventory and buy less, you're not going to get the same margin on, on those inputs because you're going to have to buy at a higher price as an example. So it's just, you just really need to interrogate it before you just assume you can make working capital improvements fair.
- [33:58]
Yeah, that, that's a fair point. And I think you have to live it now that's not interrogating it. Living it's another way to say like you can have some thoughts on day one, but you have to live it. And I think some of the other things that we learned by living it was that, you know, There, there are times where you can find a new vendor for things and then it's worth it. Sometimes there isn't a new vendor and so you have to kind of live through that, that struggle. I think another area just to touch on is continued inventory management is also, I think a lot has changed in supply chain over the last few years and some of it's been difficult for companies and some is kind of bringing new opportunities to do a lot more like sub assembly. So you have like partners that build, you know, the first half of the unit for you and then send it to you in chunks. So a lot more like outsourcing of certain manufacturing needs I think is something that we're seeing is actually driving efficiency in our businesses.
- [34:57]
You had said 6 to 7 million in top line revenue, 25% margin. So we're talking well north of a million dollars of EBITDA or sde, which is of course what every searcher hopes for. Although you did have traditional search, traditional search fund economics. So you were probably looking for a larger business than a self funded searcher today would. But, and then you got a great multiple. However, that multiple was so good because there was some that revenue might not stay at 6 to 7 million depending on where you were in the cycle. And I think you hinted earlier that in fact you get in there and revenue does start to dip pretty, pretty quickly.
- [35:37]
It did. So we had kind of a down cycle hit in 2016, kind of 2017 timeframe. So it was actually pretty shortly after we closed. And you know, we had to go through the kind of standard playbook of things you have to do when, when that happens, which is reduce staff, you know, kind of optimize everywhere. You can do your best to kind of stretch working capital so, you know, ask your vendors to give you a little bit more time to pay the bills and you know, manage through that. I think in the industry that's pretty normal. And so there's you know, there's kind of like, you know, you're calling that vendor and other people have called them too. You know, there's kind of, they almost give you a standard answer. We can move you from 30 to 45 days, that's it, you know, that sort of thing. So there's kind of like some standard answers, but we had to go through that. I think the hardest thing for me as a young owner was understanding like what, what can we cut in terms of like personnel and, and kind of knowledge within the company. And so I really had to depend on some of the employees that had Been there longer to ask them, you know, when the business was smaller, you know, what was, how big was this department and how, you know, how. How much did you need kind of these different skill sets. And so we had to, you know, go through that. I will say, fortunately, we did not have any sort of issues with our bank. We were able to kind of mean this through, continue to pay our debt service. We didn't have any challenges there. And I think ultimately, as we got out of that cycle and it started to pick up, coming into 18 or so, we had a chance then to really rebuild in a way that we were going to own how it rebuilt. So deciding where are we going to put the resources as the business starts to grow, what are the, you know, sets of. What are the positions that we're going to bring back, you know, first and really got to rebuild and be stronger on the other end of it. As we recovered, we. We did it with less people, so the revenue started to approach that same level again. Right before we sold, we were able to do that with less people, which ultimately helped efficiency throughout the company. I talked about doing an acquisition. We did that acquisition in 2016. So kind of as things were slowing, we decided to kind of go more into the business and acquire this calibration and testing company. And that didn't bring us a lot of employees. It was a pretty small kind of business that we bolted on, and it wasn't a lot of revenue either. But it really changed the capability of the company in terms of being able to have a whole nother product line in testing and calibration. And that was. You know, I would like to describe that as some sort of master theme that I had, but it was actually a little bit of good luck. Right. We. We ended up getting to know that company. They told us they were the owner was going to retire, we're able to buy it. But that really shifted our business to being a lot more on the testing and inspection and calibration, which had a better multiple once we decided to sell. And so that was a win for us to be able to bring that in. It gave our people, like, really something to focus on as the business was, in some ways, like having less demand of its core products. We had a new service line that could focus on that was somewhat more insulated from cyclicality and able to really build that into our kind of culture and into our business going forward.
- [38:46]
Fantastic, Eric. That was great. And I want to hear more about testing, inspection and calibration and why it's a hot area Today first, how old.
- [38:55]
Will Smith
Was LK and how many employees did.
- [38:57]
Eric Calderon
It have when you bought it?
- [38:58]
LK was founded in 1930 and so when we bought it in 2015, it was 85 years old. And yeah, we've got a 100 year anniversary coming up of the company soon.
- [39:09]
Oh, I love it. That's so cool.
- [39:10]
Yeah, I'll have to think from memory here. I think the company had about 33 or 33 employees when we bought it and still owned the company today. Has a lot fewer employees now, but had about 33 employees at the time.
- [39:25]
Okay, great. And when this cycle, the down cycle started, you've told us kind of how you managed that, but just kind of emotionally how sure was it?
- [39:36]
Yeah, I think, you know, emotionally kind of the hardest, hardest moments are coming in there and having to let people go. And I think, you know, sometimes we can do these analysis on the computer and it's kind of very clear you got to get to a certain number and this is how you get there. But I think, you know, when you sit across from someone and you've got to actually make that change, it's hard. And I think it's okay to talk about that. There are emotions in doing that, changing people's livelihood and having, you know, to have that tough conversation. So I think, you know, that that was always kind of first and foremost. The one thing that I think was, was always hardest was having to let people go who it wasn't their fault. Right. I mean, the business had just changed. They had done a good job for us. I think the other emotional aspect of it is there was a lot of really good ideas that we had that had to find their way to the shelf. There just wasn't the cash to do it right now. So some kind of new marketing ideas that we had or kind of new products that we wanted to spend time building just had to wait until the business recovered. And I think that was hard too because, you know, 27 at the time, 26 years old at the time, we've got a, you know, a lot of energy behind wanting to do certain things and you know, you just have to wait until you have the resource to do it. And I think that was, that was interesting to kind of see how that played out. Some of those ideas ended up being able to be implemented later, which was nice, but you know, certainly it was hard to kind of see them have to wait. And then I think the other emotional aspect of, of the business is it just takes a lot more of your time as an operator when that Happens. Right. You have to get there a little bit earlier, you know, work a little bit later. Every opportunity that comes in from a customer is one that, you know, almost feels absolutely vital. And so you're really working hard to make sure you're getting every bit of revenue in the door that you possibly can. And I think as an owner, in some ways I look back on it, it's probably maybe a silver lining being I had to learn that business probably faster because of the pressure that was happening. But it weighed on you. Fortunately, I didn't have kids at the time. I could put a lot of time into the business. Just I was able to really run with it and you know, devote the time to it that I needed.
- [41:46]
And you said you were in your late 20s.
- [41:48]
I was, yeah. We closed on the deal that I would have been like 28 when, when I was running the business.
- [41:56]
Okay, so you're in your mid, late 30s now.
- [41:58]
Yep, yep, yep.
- [42:00]
Great. And before we turn back to tech, anything more to say about your background as an engineer? You had said at the top that.
- [42:09]
That has been really great in that role. Where I was running an oil and gas related company that was a product business, being an engineer gave me a lot of credibility with customers. And so I was selling to a lot of oil and gas companies, a lot of pipeline companies. So the buyer on the other end was usually similarly had the same education. They were also an engineer, petroleum engineer. And so I think, you know, that's kind of a learning I've had. It's like if you can hit the ground with your business and through a, back, through your background, have like a, a way of having credibility with the customer, it goes a long way.
- [42:46]
Yeah.
- [42:47]
You know, I could often say things like, I've been in your shoes, here's why I like this product.
- [42:51]
Yeah.
- [42:51]
And you know, that, that, that really helped. And so you know, as a, as the CEO of a small business like that, you are the chief sales officer as well. And so I think really getting in front of those customers and, and them understanding that you can look at it through their lens helps helps with wins in the business.
- [43:09]
Yeah, yeah. I'd say that's an example of some business buyer fit, as we affectionately refer to it.
- [43:17]
Will Smith
If you ask owners in the ETA and search community which insurance broker provides highest quality work, great outcomes and has a practice dedicated to searchers and acquisition entrepreneurs. One name comes up again and again.
- [43:34]
Eric Calderon
Oberle.
- [43:35]
Will Smith
Oberle Risk Strategies has worked with hundreds of searchers over nearly a decade and is in fact led by A two time successful searcher, August Felker, which makes Oberle a specialty insurance brokerage for searchers by a former searcher. And if you've got a business under Loi, Oberle will provide complimentary due diligence on that business's insurance and benefits program. An easy, no risk way to get.
- [44:03]
Eric Calderon
To know August and the team at.
- [44:05]
Will Smith
Oberle to take advantage. Check out oberly-risk.com that's O B E R L E- risk.com link in the notes.
- [44:18]
Eric Calderon
So you buy the testing, inspection and calibration business. It sounded like not through some grand strategy but because it kind of the opportunity presented itself. It was very small, little bolt on you could do but come to find out that it is opening up an entirely new market in business line for you that actually has pretty appealing characteristics, maybe even better than the business. Number one, tell us more about just the business of testing, inspection and calibration and why private equity and searchers like it so much today.
- [44:51]
Well, I think you know, first and foremost those businesses have a real recurring revenue stream. They have, they have a customer set who has to have their product calibrated or tested annually or based on some regulatory requirement quite often. So there's a recurring need from the customer's standpoint, which is great as a business for that. So that, that was really something that was important to us because we wanted something that didn't have a cyclicality to it. I think also we got into a few different industries so the majority of the vendor that we, the company that we bolted on, his name was Miller and Weber was, was in oil and gas but they also serviced the medical industry and the food testing industry through its lab services capability. So that got us into a few different industries as well, which was, which was great. And I think the reason, you know, you kind of continue to see a lot of focus on this and we focus on this now too in our kind of current existence of TXC is that it's been largely fragmented for a long time. There's been a lot of smaller labs, a lot of smaller testing companies that can do this work in their region. And so you know that's, that makes it appealing that there's just fragmented, there's a recurring revenue stream. And I would say one of the things that we kind of like about it is like there's a technical nature to it. We like that. And so you can really kind of build expertise in your area that cuts both ways because sometimes you have key man, key personnel risk when you buy one of these businesses. And so you have to really kind of understand that. But once you're kind of in the space, it becomes a competitive advantage because you start to understand the technical aspects of that industry really well and makes you a good buyer for more of those going forward. So we built on this business. We have to actually relocate the lab facility into LK's current facility. So we did a full build out of a new testing lab, relocating the equipment and getting everything set up and kind of building it into our facility. And ultimately we had some customers who were buying from both vendor, both LK and Miller and Weber. And so we got a larger wallet share of some of those customers, which was great. So they started to look towards us as not just a product company, but a service company for them. And that led to more opportunities because we were doing a lot more business. In fact, there's one super major EMP company that we work with even still who that relationship really took off by those two things coming together. And that turned out to be really important for us as a business.
- [47:20]
And. And so then did you start growing Miller and Weber? Miller and Weber and getting into these other, like, going full throttle into some of these industries that it was already in?
- [47:32]
We did. And so I kind of have to talk about this in like two chapters. So there's like the chapter up until the point I sold the combined companies and then I bought those companies back recently. And so we're still kind of in it, but, you know, kind of up to the kind of. In the first chapter, we really focus on integrating Miller and Weber in the oil and gas side. That was really, like, important for us because that's just where the bigger dollars were. And we really wanted to spend our time getting that right. Today, Miller Weber still exists as part of lk and we have a lot more work on the food processing side. That's just turned out to be a really big growth sector. There's. There's some regionality to that, you know, in terms of where you're located, can drive kind of where your customers come from. But, you know, we have built kind of an expertise around being able to do certain kinds of calibrations in these industries and within these customer sets. And it's nice to. I mean, it's almost clockwork. We can kind of say, like, these will be the sets of customers that come to us every June and every July of every year. And that's. That's nice compared to an oil and gas business.
- [48:36]
Yeah, absolutely. Great.
- [48:39]
Will Smith
All right, Eric.
- [48:40]
Eric Calderon
Well, let's start closing out this chapter of your story with lk, as you said, you're now owner of LK again, which is we'll get there, but let's close your kind of first search story out with how that ended and then because we got a lot of ground to cover on what you've been building since txc. So tell us about the exit of lk.
- [49:01]
Yeah, so we, we sold the business at the end of 2018 and we sold it to a private equity group out of New York who was investing in kind of everything that LK did on the, on the gas side. So we were in a lot of our product service, the oil part of the oil and gas industry. This private equity group was trying to build out a thesis on testing. And so we were a fit for their portfolio because we brought in kind of another half to what they were doing and we were not for sale per se. We were, you know, naturally when you do a search, there's an exit somewhere down the line. But we weren't actively marketing or looking to, to do anything in the immediate.
- [49:43]
Term and it had only been 2ish years at that point it would have.
- [49:46]
Been closer to three years. So we bought it in 2015. We're talking about mid year 2018.
- [49:51]
2015. Yeah.
- [49:53]
And so when we got approached by this, you know, we kind of grouped up. Me and Rick and Ron talked about, you know, could this be the right time to exit. And I think we were all of the opinion that it very well could be because we had come out of the industry, you know, dip. We had fully integrated this Miller and Weber business by now. And so this was kind of the earliest we would want to have anyone take a look, you know, at the business because we were, you know, was doing reasonably well. And so as that process unfolded, it turned out that, you know, kind of from our perspective this felt like it really fit in well to the private equity group's platform company and what they were doing. And we, you know, made the transaction, you know, move forward at the end of 2018. And then I stayed on with the private equity group for about a year and a half after that. And in that role I was helping to tuck, you know, my business into their business, training my replacement, and then helping them do some stuff across the whole platform of companies that they had. That was actually really, you know, a fun experience. You know, certainly I, I didn't know that that would be something the exit looked like. I didn't know it would look like that for me that I would sell the business that have an opportunity to work in this private equity group and get to, you know, see kind of a different side of investing. That was a fun opportunity for us. In terms of an exit. I think the BIFF did, I think it did okay. It was certainly not the, you know, largest exit by any means. We, we were able to get a higher multiple at exit because of that tick affiliation that we had in the business. But the business had, had dipped a little bit from what we bought it from in terms of ebitda. So we, we, we ran out. We were able to get double digit return, you know, on our, on our proceeds from it. I was able to do well, you know, personally, this was still a good exit. And that, that exit actually helped set me up to be able to launch to TXE version 2 going forward. And so, you know, if you did the math on we sold it at year end. 18 and a year and a half later I left the private equity group. We're talking like right in the middle of COVID is when we chose to launch TXE version 2, which I'm happy to talk a little bit more about. But certainly, yeah, certainly that exit was something that, you know, turned out to be a good fit in terms of timing and good fit in terms of giving us a chance to put LK into another, you know, growth, growth partner as I would go forward.
- [52:13]
Yeah, well, I'm going to offer that maybe the private equities vision didn't come to pass if they have now sold the business back out of their portfolio. You'll correct me when we hit that point in the story if I'm wrong, but that was fantastic, Eric. So tell us then, after your exit, after your stint with the private equity firm, what did you, what was the vision for txc? What it, what was that pivot in your career all about?
- [52:43]
So because of the taste I got with Miller and Weber, I decided like I like the testing, inspection, calibration sector, that's where I wanted to spend more time investing and operating. And so in launching TXE version 2, the, the thought was let's attack that sector, let's find opportunities in that sector and all. And for all the macro reasons I've kind of alluded to the recurring revenue, it's fragmented. You know, we have a, we have an understanding of the space, so started to look for those opportunities. Did the first acquisition shortly after launching a year in 2020 of a company called Atlantic Product Services, that's a business that was based in the New Jersey area that did testing of petrochemical products. So Kind of got to marry a little bit of both. You know, the background there. This company would actually take products that came in through the port, take a sample of it off of a barge, right it to the lab, confirm that it meant spec before it was offloaded into the port. And so that was a business that we found through a, I guess I'll call it like a, a network search, if you want to call it that. We, I had gotten to know that business and business owner very briefly kind of during my time working at LK and then in 2020 learned that he was interested in selling the business. And so it turned out to be something we could move forward with.
- [53:58]
Other than your tick thesis, what were you trying to build? A Holdco, A roll up. What was the kind of larger vision or the, or the, or the structure maybe?
- [54:08]
Sure. So a larger vision there was to acquire multiple testing companies and to build them as a, under a Holdco structure. So to have several of these smaller testing businesses. We weren't at the time like regionally focused, so we did one in New Jersey as I mentioned. So looking at anywhere in the US and looking at industrial testing, so didn't want to go necessarily into healthcare related testing or even FDA related testing, wanted real industrial testing. So petrochemical related, water testing, kind of, you know, machinery testing, kind of things that would be all more in the industrial sector.
- [54:43]
Why did you like industrial more than health or fda?
- [54:47]
Because the regulatory aspects of healthcare at FDA are something that it's quite the learning curve. So to climb that, to be able to become an expert in it, we thought would just maybe slow down our ability to transact. And we had built some expertise on the petrochemical side and on like the chemical testing side. And so we kind of thought let's start there. But the concept being rather than try to have a portfolio of just a lot of varied companies that maybe are loosely associated through testing, inspection and calibration, really wanted to have a set of companies that could be thought of almost as like different divisions within one organization. So there's like a division that does the oil testing, there's a division that does the water testing, there's a division that does air testing, like whatever the different kind of parameters would be and wanted them to have an ability to be thought of as like more of a full service testing operation as we approach customers. So you know we can, we can do the following sets of tests for you through our sister companies and our affiliates. So that's, that's kind of how we wanted to start.
- [55:51]
For and, and was it to buy and hold or build this vision and then have an exit.
- [55:57]
So it is definitely with the buy and hold mindset and that's, you know, holding for the, we think can create kind of long term value because we're buying, you know, micro sized companies and if we put enough of them together we can become a little bit of a bigger company. But that'll take time. And so really holding these long enough to get a true integration, kind of a true build out of the thesis and you know, at some point down the line see if that as a whole might be, you know, something that's marketable. But I think in the individual kind of choices that we make every day, it's around holding these for 10 or more years. It's around making decisions where these, where we can be really long term holders in what we're doing. And I like to say we want to build a business that other people want to buy, but we're not necessarily looking to sell it.
- [56:42]
Sure, sure.
- [56:43]
Continuing to stitch together these things, you know, we have some unique ways of sourcing which AI is made a little bit easier. But back back then as we were kind of doing a lot of this very manually and trying to understand how to filter for high quality laboratories, look at labs that had accreditations, labs that, you know, had key sectors, they were servicing and trying to build those out. So we launched that in 2020, did our first acquisition then, and then have since bolted on a few more companies, including buying back LK Industries, which is a, which is a fun story to elaborate on, but have continued to add more testing companies and are out looking to do even more of that as we go forward. What has changed slightly in our approach is that we realize there's some good opportunities for not just looking at purely testing service companies, but looking for companies that also make testing products. And so we look at both the true service side and then also like a manufacturing aspect if it's servicing that same sector. So we, you know, using our manufacturing background, I've been able to find some unique opportunities there. And then the other thing we've kind of pivoted on is although we still have, you know, somewhat of a interest in looking broadly, we, we see that most of the deals we're going to do are probably going to be focused on kind of southern, kind of middle US kind of, so really kind of drawing somewhat of a regional aspect to what we're doing. And then lastly, we evolved to see a shared service aspect services center that we want to offer across Our companies and happy to elaborate a little bit more, but that is something that came kind of as an evolution of TXC as we went forward.
- [58:18]
Great. Yeah, we are going to hear about the shared services there just in a sec. But when you said AI has made searching I guess easier, can you elaborate on, on exactly what AI would do today versus what you guys were doing manually just a few years ago?
- [58:34]
Yeah. So you know, I vividly remember kind of in the early days of running TXC going through and you know, manually scraping a lot of data on, trying to get the, based on like the accreditations these labs have, they're listed and trying to really, you know, manually find owners and owners contact info and pulling a lot of that. That same exercise can be done now with an instruction to AI. Right. So pull this information, summarize it. And so I think what it's done is just made our ability to navigate those channels faster. And you know, before where, you know, Workstream might feel like something an intern could do or something that you just really needed someone to be behind the screen, you can really get that done kind of automatically. I will say it's a tool. It doesn't kind of fully fulfill the all the needs of how you search, but it is a tool to give you a lot of that info and filter it for you on the front end. And then, you know, we, we still very much believe in like high touch sourcing methods. And so going quickly into finding out, can we connect with these business owners not necessarily with the TXE hat on, but with the operator's hat on from one of our fellow companies. And that's been a good way to connect because sometimes these owners are not ready for a call from a, from a fund or ready to have a call with the buyer, but reaching out as their colleague that runs a very similar business in Houston, that's a very effective way of talking just owner to owner about operations, businesses and kind of building that rapport. And you know, over time that leads to a set of conversations that may allow a transaction to take place.
- [60:09]
Yes, yes, we hear that theme or see that pattern a lot that sellers, owners that you might want to have conversations with if they see you on the other end of that request as a comrade, as a fellow owner, it's much more effective than seeing you as a searcher or as a private equity guy or as a fund or what have you. Great, thank you. This shared services model. So just to set the stage there that shared services versus decentralized kind of services where in a holdco Situation where every business is really self contained and doing its own marketing and finance and back office versus a shared service where some of that is pushed up to some central management. This is something that is a. Always a kind of a philosophical talking, talking point. In Holdco Land, Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway famously are pro decentralization. So all of their businesses are very self contained. Of course, they're enormous businesses. So maybe that's not, that's not a really analogous, that's not so analogous. But you will see shared services versus decentralized talked about a lot. So you have embraced shared services. Please tell us about your model.
- [61:30]
Sure. So, you know, our observation once we had, you know, three, four companies kind of in the portfolio was that, you know, none of these companies had a marketing person. It's a good example and you know that full salary burned on anyone would be meaningful. So we kind of observed like, you know, could we keep a marketing person busy across four companies and then allocate the cost to each. And so I, I say that to recognize that like we, we didn't get to shared services because we had a thesis on it. We got there through true operational kind of observing what the operational needs of the businesses were and recognizing that we, we're buying a lot of small companies. And so the ability to add overhead to any individual one is, is not necessarily easy. And so what we have found, and I've seen the shared service model at other, in other ways, you know, be used. But what we have found that's really important is that one, we don't overbuild the shared service offering. So you know, we're not going to reach the point where we have like a lawyer on staff. We don't overbuild it. We really do is we think about what are kind of the core needs that most businesses are going to have most of the time. And that from our opinion, that's marketing, that is finance and accounting, that is HR and recruiting, those have been kind of the, the handful that we really see are kind of a recurring need a lot of the businesses. And when we kind of took pencil to paper, you know, we were looking at recruiting, for instance, where we had an actual recruiter that we were paying to help staff positions and whatnot. And we're like that was a good amount of money going there. Can we like insource that? And we had a marketing firm for a while. We were seeing how much we were paying. So these have been services that we were kind of paying a third party for. When we decided to bring in. And what we have found is because of the nature of the businesses we're running, they're very technical, they have a lot of nuance to them. To be really effective at some of these services, people have to go deep into understanding the company. And so I think for, for us, it makes a lot of sense to have these people that can really understand our product offering, really understand our niche, and then use that understanding to effectively provide services to our businesses. So I think we think of it as, yes, they're small companies, so they can't afford these necessarily individually. This is a niche industry that we're playing in. So we want people to really go in depth and understand our businesses. And we're only going to add shared services for business needs, which are kind of common and recurring often. And so we have preferred partners for legal and for insurance and kind of other things that we will, you know, still work with the third parties. But we really want to make sure that we're tailoring our shared service group just for those recurring needs. Let me also say that I think it's really important to note what we don't want shared service to be is just another name for some sort of like corporate headquarters. Right? And we're trying very hard to build a culture around saying, like, our company presidents are our clients for shared service. Like when you as a marketing person, you as HR person are engaging with that company president, like, what they need is what you have to prioritize. And so really kind of reversing this model of like, the accounting group is here to help the portfolio company not get reports and data and, you know, demand things from the portfolio company and really try to build that mindset to where everyone understands this is a support service that's being offered to help our companies. Interestingly, we've seen the effects of that in our operating company, but we've also seen an effect in how we source deals and how we can talk about our shared service with potential sellers. That was maybe a little bit unanticipated, but has certainly been effective. Let me elaborate on what I mean by that. So as we talk to a potential seller, the potential seller is, you know, maybe retirement age. They may or may not have an heir apparent in the business. So sometimes they talk, they're kind of concerned about what does the next chapter look like, how does the business continue to run? And we can kind of put right on paper, here are all the services that we can take over, like day one, all the things that we'll have kind of integrated from our shared service group. So that as we're thinking of whoever is going to replace you as, you know, the future leader in the business, they don't have to worry about those things. They can just worry about learning better the technical side of the business, learning better the products, learning better the customers. Those, those things that are kind of most important to the skill set. And all the ancillary stuff that you, Mr. Owner, have been dealing with over the last several years on approving payroll and having to work with the CPAs on taxes, that's all done kind of by our back office. It's been an effective tool to differentiate ourselves and to also give sellers a way to better realize kind of what the day after selling looks like for their company.
- [66:13]
Well, Eric, that all sounds fantastic. And often you'll hear people say that shared services sounds great in theory for many of the reasons you articulated. What just to. Just to press on this, what are the reasons that shared services fail? To be. To be clear, what are the reasons that they fail and how have you dodged that?
- [66:34]
So, two points that I'll kind of just reiterate. One is when they add too much cost too quickly, so they go through and say we want to get every possible shared service in house and like let's do it immediately and then burden the companies with the cost so it's. You build it too fast. That's one.
- [66:48]
Okay.
- [66:49]
Second, this mixed culture of trying to be headquartered versus actually support to the companies, I think can be really difficult because then the opcos start to not feel that they can be really honest about what they need help with and start to feel like they're having to do work for shared service, which is not what you want. I think the other piece is, and this is something we deal with currently, is that business needs ebbs and flow. They have ebbs and flows. And so there may be times where it feels like a lot of our shared surface bandwidth is going to one particular company, you know, this week or in this day. And it's you're reflective of maybe that company has a conference coming up or they're growing and they have three or four new positions they're trying to staff, or they uniquely had an HR problem. And so at times it can kind of feel like the shared service is spending more effort in one place and not in the others. And I think that's something you do your best to manage, but you also have to realize that will never go away. Like certain companies will have more needs than others at different moments, but really Watching that, I think is something that can be really hard if you're not cognizant of it. Because certain companies will, you know, as you buy them, particularly new companies, they have a lot of need up front to get set up and established. And so I think just being very clear about ensuring that all your companies feel like they're getting value from shared service in a somewhat fair manner between all the different portfolio companies, it's been another thing. And then lastly, I'll just say it takes me as a where I sit, I spend a lot of time in operations. And so in some ways the shared service center is almost another business to manage. And so it just takes the bandwidth of management to understand, like what are the performance metrics for shared services? What are the performance metrics for OPCO 1 OPCO 2 how do we ensure we're kind of all performing optimally?
- [68:41]
And Eric, what about the critique that each business knows what it needs better than some shared or centralized resource would? Marketing might be a great example. So your marketing, the instinct of what communicates the value proposition is going to be strongest within your OPCOs as opposed to centralized. How do you address that?
- [69:06]
So what we're, what we don't do is we don't necessarily create like the marketing materials and say this is from txe when we're advertising it, we create, we work with that company president to what does the, what does the customer want? What are kind of the materials that are needed? How should we, you know, what is a good approach? And we do all that and we do it under the umbrella of the opco. And so from the outside looking in, the customers or the kind of industry shouldn't even see that there's a centralized marketing. It's all being done in the company. We're working very closely with those company presidents because to your point, like we want to just be helpful. So we're going to take guidance from those company presidents. We're not going to direct it, we're going to certainly share best practices. But maybe a very tangible example of how you do that is we're not going to tell them what trade show to go to, but when they tell us what trade show they believe is right, we're going to do a lot to make sure they have everything they need. The social media post on it, all the booth materials, everything they need. And if they want someone there from our marketing team, great. But they won't be there by themselves. We have to have employees from the company there because they know the industry, they know the business yeah, great, Great.
- [70:17]
Eric, thank you for, for that walk down the, the TXC model of shared services. Really powerful stuff there. Okay, we. I don't have you for too much longer, but still some topics I really want to get to here. Heard you refer to yourself as an operator. One really interesting thing that you said to me in our pre call is this question you ask yourself, do I want to be an operator or do I want to be an investor? What am I best at? How do you think about that?
- [70:47]
It's something I have. I feel like there's tension around at different moments. On a personal front, I think if I kind of observe where I spend my time, I like being an operator. I like being at the companies. I like working closely with our personnel and our businesses. And so I'm kind of being realistic about that. I like being in operations. However, with this kind of model where we're building out, having several companies, that becomes harder and harder to do. And so I think the realization of the direction we're going will require me to be better at investing and kind of looking at transactions more than being in each individual deal. I think this is kind of what I'm starting to realize. But I think one of the things that we feel somewhat fortunate on is like, you know, TXC doesn't have like a fund that's dedicated or has any sort of time specificity around how, how we have to do deals or how much money we have to deploy so we can kind of move at our own pace. And I think in some ways that allows us to understand that there's an operational issue or an opportunity that we can say we're gonna probably spend a little bit more time in the companies than, you know, working outside the companies. And so it is. That is a little bit of a benefit on how we, how we can operate. But I think the thing that I keep thinking about is with these small companies, do you ever get too far away from operations? And you know, at a certain size you probably have a COO in the companies, or at a certain size you have a whole set of people focused on us. But when we're talking about, you know, small companies that are 15 or 20 people, a lot of times there is a need for more, more operational involvement and to, to really help and then be partners for some of these businesses. Particularly as I touched on where there might be a new executive taking over or like a new president taking over after a retiring founder. And so, you know, this is a long way of saying I, I think the reality of, of this Is that tension? It's. With these small companies, we're probably going to not be always too far from operations, but as we have more of them, it'll be harder and harder to do. And so I hired a team member who sits at the TXE level with me who's working on what we call strategic growth. And so bringing in a partner, someone who can work and be at the companies working on particular projects, but doesn't have to use all of my time to be at the company so that I can continue to work on, build out. And I think that's, that's a realization of like I can't, you know, necessarily have more than one of myself, but I can start to put team members who can support these companies in the right way so that we're as txe, still close to operations, but not fully engulfed in them.
- [73:32]
And what is that person's title?
- [73:35]
Manager of Strategic Growth.
- [73:37]
Manager of Strategic growth. Great. And we didn't define the size of businesses that you're acquiring into TXC. We've heard you say now that there are 15, 20 people that they're quite small, so please be explicit.
- [73:49]
Yeah, so we are looking at companies that will do anywhere from about $750,000 of EBITDA to probably about 1.5 million. They'll be some a little bigger that we might look at, but we think that sweet spot is on the lower end of, of the market. That's where we see a lot of opportunities for these testing laboratories and where we think. I'm talking about EBITDA when I said those numbers, but where we think that they're, they're a good fit. And you know, why is that? Some of this is, I'm sure things you, you've talked about before, but there's not as much competition in that lower end of the market. We also think back to the fragment the kind of the fragmented aspect of the industry. We can see a lot more. And we've, we've built, you know, expertise in our niche. And so these businesses that often have a key man risk to them, we can have some confidence that we can go in and understand the business because of the other companies that we have, we've kind of learned a particular industry. So that being said, we have businesses in our portfolio that are bigger than that range I just gave you. And so, you know, we kind of, you know, see, we take the opportunities as they come, but we think buying in that range is right for us.
- [74:54]
And why Eric is buying larger, not right. Why is that outside of the Sweet spot. Buying a, a tick business with 2 million, let's say, of EBITDA. Why is that?
- [75:04]
Generally speaking, it's because we see like, you know, upmarket competition, right, from, from other buyers. And then two, if we get too big just to take it to like the extreme one, that's 3 or 4 million of EBITDA, they're going to have a lot of the services in house that we're trying to offer. And so yeah, at that point the shared service model doesn't work. And so it's very specific that these things work together because we're buying small companies that don't have this infrastructure. Shared service adds value and making sure that we kind of play in that space to ensure that, you know, we're not duplicating costs within the companies.
- [75:37]
Yeah, well, at 750 to a million and a half of SDE in a tech business, I bet you are competing with every searcher in the world because.
- [75:46]
That we do, we do bump up against searchers, obviously. You know, we, we think we could differentiate just based on experience and kind of, you know, deals that we have. And so a lot of what we're doing is we do see searchers. But honestly it's as I think about it more, it's not that often because we're doing a lot of deals that aren't even on the market. So we're talking to our peers that are running other companies and telling them our story. And the best compliment I got is there's one company in the Northeast where the owner told me, I'm not ready to retire yet, I'm probably going to work, I'm going to die in the office. That was his joke. But he goes, there's a list of potential buyers in my desk drawer and you're on that list. And so he's like, my wife knows to open that drawer if something happens to me. And so a lot of what we're doing is putting seeds out there for deals that we know are just not necessarily with the broker getting marketed. And we'll handle those as they come up. We want to have a good reputation in what we do and have owners think of us as a good next step for whenever they decide to sell their business.
- [76:47]
Well, that's one of the benefits too of this long term horizon that you have, not having raised a fund where the clock is ticking for you to deploy capital. Also searchers whose own Runway is a ticking clock. So searchers need to move. They can't just wait around for hoping the seller is ready to sell. So great advantage that you have with this long term, this long term perspective or approach.
- [77:10]
And I'll touch on kind of one more thing. So relatively new announcement for TXE is we added an operating partner here recently, actually on Monday of this week, who is in a different region and is looking at businesses in our same kind of sector, but basically wants to be the CEO of the company and after it acquire, after it's bought. And so we look at that as kind of a new evolution for taxi as well. Can we find the right operating partners who we can help source a deal? But you know, we need an operator and we're not the businesses that in Houston we're not going to be able to be on the ground. So we need an operator. So really excited to kind of see how that evolves. But again, it requires that we're looking at kind of those smaller businesses who are probably going to have an owner operator stepping out after they sell. We have to put someone immediately back in. And so I think we're going to keep looking at these kind of different opportunities. But this aligns with shared service because that operator, once they step in, wants to have the backing of TXE to kind of help with everything that happens in the back office there and allow this new CEO to just be focused on customer operations and sales. And so that's been a new evolution to our business as well.
- [78:19]
And was that operating partner a searcher or somebody from ETA Land?
- [78:24]
It is, yep. So someone who had approached searching before stopped and then kind of, I guess getting back into it in some ways.
- [78:31]
But with TXE and they have an equity consideration presumably in the business that they find for you.
- [78:40]
Absolutely. In fact, we'll look very much like co investing together. So we'll put the structure together and then that individual will be able to bring as much capital as they would like to to the table alongside us to actually make sure they have a good, good amount of upside. Because we are looking at these small deals, you know, there has to be enough upside for, for everybody. And so that, that's why we think co investing makes a lot of sense.
- [79:04]
Well, for many of the quote unquote, hold cos, for lack of a better term in this world, this is one of the key bottlenecks to their growth is once the deal flow engine is in place and the reputation is established of the Holdco and who's going to run these businesses? Who's going to deal with all this deal flow Once we close on these deals and figuring out a way to hire CEOs of these very small businesses is, is part of the art of doing this. Well, Chenmark of course is, is the kind of canonical example. You've probably heard their name and they have a kind of a similar. They look in the search community and the ETA community, they speak at the conferences precisely to find folks who might be doing their own search but see an opportunity to run a chenmark business search for in fact with alongside chenmarker with chenmark for a business to then be the, the, the operator CEO of has been a model that appears to work for them and they're certainly not the only ones. And it sounds like did you come up with this on your own or were you looking around our ecosystem at other models that seem to work?
- [80:08]
You know this, this came a little bit opportunistically and so basically had a, you know, colleague that I'd known for a while saying that they wanted to search again and they've got a lot of experience kind of working directly in an industry. And so we saw that as like I think we could help each other. We need good operators and you know, the infrastructure to help you search. And so I think this is something we might see ourselves doing again. But we're not really, I think as I think about it we're not necessarily going to like a searcher that's right out of business school. We're actually I think right for the mid career person that decides searching is something they want to do. So they've cut, they've come with some capital that they're interested in deploying. They have, you know, some expertise and the infrastructure we can provide just helps them get to the deal faster because we have a good sourcing mechanism and can, can put more in front of them. So you know, taking two years to search is kind of hard to do mid career and so we can help them close in you know, six to nine months on something because we have a good pipeline. I think it's a win win all the way around.
- [81:11]
Yeah, that's great. We had introduced this concept as well of searcher in residence, Eric, which is not exactly what you're talking about because you're talking about a true operating partner and I guess an indefinite partnership with this person who's going to retain equity in the business. But there are parallels and the idea basically being that there's this profile of person, many of them listening to this podcast who, who really just want to get into this world and run a business and there are many flavors of doing that that don't necessarily mean searching for and buying your own business, but maybe working with a searcher like yourself or a hold code builder like yourself who's already deeply down the journey and somehow working, you know, being brought under or along with you. We're starting to wrap up here Eric.
- [81:58]
Will Smith
But let, let's hear just a little.
- [82:00]
Eric Calderon
Bit more about the structure of TXC and how you're buying these businesses.
- [82:06]
Sure there's definitely some, some overlap like an independent sponsor kind of model, but we essentially take each deal that we find and we have kind of a small set of people who have shown interest in kind of co investing with us. And so we'll negotiate the deal, kind of get our kind of capital structure understood in terms of how much debt we would have put on and then you know, kind of do a little bit of a pass the hat for on for people that are currently working with us. So like some of my current entity presidents are interested in investing in a, in a new deal, small, in a small piece, put personal capital in and then we have like I said, a few partners that are folks that have maybe you know, ran businesses early in their career and are now just looking to make investments, some family offices, those kind of conversations where we can go and just shop the deal. And so no, I don't, you know, as we go forward, I don't suspect any two deals will have the same capital structure. I think each one will kind of be marketed on its own. And what's been really interesting Will is like we have one deal we did recently where I know someone who invested in a business like this back in the 90s and was just real excited about hey this, this feels similar. I'd like to write a bigger check for into this business than maybe the next one. And it was just appeal to their personal interest. And so that's how we want to keep approaching it. I think from our perspective the value the trade offs there are in a positive sense as we get a better track record we can negotiate kind of better terms for from the TXE side going forward with each deal. I think too if you have a high quality set of investors or partners that are at the table, you can raise the capital pretty quickly and feel certain that with a couple of calls we can, it can or can't do this deal. I think the negative trade off is you do still have to spend the time going out and shopping the deal as opposed to having committed capital ready to go. But we are able to move at our own pace and I think that really matters for what we want to do. And it creates kind of a model for us that we think is somewhat differentiated in that we can say we can do a lot of deals, but we don't have to do any one deal. And I think that's important for us.
- [84:13]
And what you're saying there is because you're going deal by deal and haven't raised a fund, so you're not under pressure to deploy capital from the blind pool that you have raised. Great. And just the. You said that no two cap structures will look the same on your deals, but they all do. Have you said that? They kind of. There's a band there of 750 to 1 million and a half of SDE, although I guess there's a couple in there that are a bit larger. And so I would imagine that the cap structures would be somewhat similar, that there would be a band there. How much leverage are you using? I mean you could buy those with SBA loans, of course, then you have the personal guarantee constraints and that might not. That probably doesn't work with your model. But can you share like how much leverage you put versus equity on these deals?
- [84:56]
So we're trying to be heavily levered. So we're definitely over 50%, sometimes approaching 60% on these deals. And so the uniting element in all the cap structures is that the debt's a big chunk, maybe the biggest chunk on the cap structure where we can, we try to get some seller, you know, paper in the deal too, and then we'll raise the equity, you know, for what's remaining.
- [85:18]
Okay, well. And when you say 50% or more of leverage being a lot of leverage, I guess you're comparing that to private equity, a private equity style transaction, because certainly for a self funded searcher who will have 80% leverage or more, that's not a lot of leverage.
- [85:33]
You're right. And this is, you're hearing the characteristic of my oil and gas background where 50% a lot, you're in that industry. So okay, that's what's coming out there. But no, we certainly, we think of leverage as a good tool and the nature of the businesses we're looking at with recurring revenue streams, we feel comfortable kind of pushing, you know, heavy leverage into these businesses.
- [85:55]
And say a little bit, Eric, about the pitch to LPs when you invite them to participate in a deal. And specifically with the attention to the long term hold here as ourselves at Mines Capital, investors in independent sponsored deals, we need to see a path to a liquidity event because of our own LPs. And so while I Personally have an affinity for the long term hold and like that. I now appreciate that that isn't always viable when you're raising money from others who need to know. Your investors need to know when they're going to see their money plus return back. It can't just be, well, maybe it can, but it's a rarer investor who's willing to go along on some indefinite ride. How do you position this to your LPs?
- [86:40]
So we, you know, we do screen, if you will, the investors that we choose to work with based on them being comfortable with the long, with the long holding period. You know, when the actual question comes up of, you know, well, what if the business grows quickly and we get a really good, you know, offer on it, Would you sell? Like, you know, I can't say no, we would not. Because you know, I don't want to be misleading. Right. The right opportunity lined up, we would consider an exit. But what we try to sell is we try to note is that we're going to buy and make decisions for the long term. So a good example of that, like one of our businesses, we bought the real estate because we needed, you know, to really hone in on, on our manufacturing plant being in one place. So we. You wouldn't normally buy the real estate if you're a short term holder, right?
- [87:26]
Yeah.
- [87:27]
And so we continue to make decisions like that which are, we're going to operate as therefore a long term holder and it's the stars aligned to where something comes up that's economically rational to sell. We would consider that. But from an investor standpoint they need to be signed up for the long term. And if, you know, if I had a partner that says I really do need to get out, we would work on, you know, a pre established structure for how to buy them out in a, at a rate of return and kind of in a fair way. Right. To make sure that we keep, keep everyone that that's working with us treated fairly and.
- [87:59]
But the pro forma that you would show a prospective LP on a given deal shows a particular IRR or MOIC based on a hypothetical exit or is it just dividends that are coming out? Like what are the numbers that you show them in terms of what their return will, will be?
- [88:16]
Sure. So we will generally show you know, the return based on like a, like a seven year kind of hold because you know, you need something to be able to do that. But most of these businesses are going to be dividend based once we pay off the debt. So we think that's really attractive to show, like the way we levered this. We can be aggressively paying off the debt and then have dividends that pay out over a long period of time. However, just to have the right conversation, we have to be able to show different exit scenarios. But we really emphasize, if you will, the concept of we want these to be strong, cash flowing businesses for several years. And the good thing about the companies we're looking at is most of the time we're buying from the owner. And so the look back is kind of representative of what we want kind of going forward, obviously with more growth. These businesses have long track records. They're not just growing overnight, if you will. They've been stable companies. And so there's good reason to believe that we can start to move these businesses up and grow them in a stable way for a long period of time. And that's another point of this as well. I think we constantly look at can we hit a lot of singles and doubles in the portfolio? And ultimately that'd be a way to build a lot of value, get a lot of points on the board. And I think that's why we're comfortable looking at the smaller deals, you know, putting growth rates on them that are maybe smaller than what other people might put on them. Because we just, we want a good portfolio of businesses that are slightly moving up into the right over the long term. And I think that drives our decision making and what we're doing.
- [89:50]
Well, the, the thing about singles and doubles is that when you add long termism to singles and doubles, you get the wonders of compounding and they can be very, very interesting. But you do need that. The, obviously you need the long termism of singles and doubles to make that spectacular. But it is, but it can be really compelling. And so, so your LPs are basically signing up for sure. A liquidity event, if it makes sense, could happen. But really this is a play to see dividends coming out, annual dividends coming out of these cash flowing businesses and hopefully those dividends grow over time as your, as your shared services model and your new energy is brought in, brought into these small businesses.
- [90:35]
Exactly right. Exactly right.
- [90:37]
Last question for you, Eric. The story of the reacquisition of where you started with lk. What happened there?
- [90:44]
Yeah, so that was kind of an unexpected outcome that came. But as I mentioned, this private equity group bought LK and built it into a part of a platform investment that they had with COVID They decided to kind of change strategy and so they ended up selling the platform Business and sold it in parts. And one of the parts was LK Industries. And so I had maintained a good relationship there. Kind of got a call back that they were going to go to market for these handful of different businesses that were all part of this platform. And that if I wanted to be on the buyer's list, you know, I certainly could be. And so I said, absolutely, would like to be on the buyer's list. And as the deal went to market, it was mass marketed, you know, with large, large independent, large investment bankers were marketing the deal. And so LK Industries turned out to be one that I understood quite well. And so I was able to kind of put in a bid that I think was reflected that I understood the business well. And as they ended up selling the, the different companies, there was one buyer that bought a particular segment of the platform business and left a few other ones out. And one of the ones that was left out was lk. And so when they had like a smaller set of them left, it was right for me to be able to buy back. And what I think was really unique Will is with, you know, really no exception, everyone who was at the business when I bought it were people that I had worked with before. And so these are, you know, familiar faces. A lot of them I had hired before. And so it was really neat to be able to come back. Okay. Is in Houston, which is where, you know, I, I live still. And so this is a business very close to home in a very literal way. And it's been really neat to have such an understanding of a business that I can, I can, I can really understand what it takes to run it well without having to be there all the time. And so I've got some really good managers in that company. We have a really good long term working relationship. And the business is, is doing really well and continues to, you know, operate both the Miller and Weber and the LK product lines going forward. And that's just been a lot of fun to come full circle on that.
- [92:49]
Yeah, absolutely. That's great, Eric. And tell us what the overall revenue of TXE is today. I, I meant to ask that earlier.
- [92:56]
It's about 25 million.
- [92:58]
Well, Eric, I have to say, despite the fact that you have this long term horizon, which as I said, I always love that just kind of personally, if you are really have built a $25 million and that number grows of tick businesses that are adjacent to one another and that there's a certain logic to them and they kind of operate as a package offering. I Imagine you're going to be able to command a premium for the entire thing if you want it. I mean, you are, as we've now touched on a number of times, in a very hot space. And you have generated, you know, you built a $25 million business in this very hot space. So you're probably already getting a lot of inbound.
- [93:41]
It's interesting. It, it. It does happen. So far, we've gotten a lot of inbounds for the individual companies because we really run those, you know, try to run those individually. And so we've gotten inbounds on the individual businesses. But it's definitely, you know, we like one of those, you know, like, makes you feel good when that sort of thing happens. But I think, you know, we built a. A niche around being able to get these really small businesses, and we've got a lot more, you know, left to do before I think we're ready to have any sort of conversation like that.
- [94:08]
Great. Well, Eric, we were introduced, let me say, by Reed Pennebaker. And Reed, of course, runs ETA Circle, the ETA meetup in the Houston area. In Houston. You guys know each other. He thought you'd be a great guest. He was not wrong. And you will also be on stage at ETA Circle sometime. I don't know yet when, but in the fall.
- [94:33]
Yeah, maybe September, October, in that timeframe. It's really great. Yeah. Reed's done a lot of really good things with that group, and I appreciate the introduction. It's been fun to watch his story unfold and at different moments in time, offer at least some of my experience on what's worked and not work. It's been fun to be able to have that network, and I generalize that to. I think the search community as a whole is really one that's receptive to that. People being able to offer their insights and perspectives and kind of feedback to folks. And I've really valued that and kind of getting back into it with this conversation and with ETA Circle has allowed me to realize, like, yep, there are some real things that we've learned, and if we can share that with folks getting started, that's always a good thing.
- [95:18]
Yeah, absolutely. Well, listener, the date hasn't been locked down, but it is going to be sometime in the next couple of months. Check out etacircle.com for. Just keep your eye on that. I don't think there's a listing for the event yet because it hasn't been locked down, but that's where you'll find information on how to go see Mr. Eric Calderon here on stage in Houston if you like. Eric, thank you very much for coming on for being so transparent and sharing this 13 year journey into buying businesses that's been really successful for you. So we really appreciate your time.
- [95:49]
Yeah, absolutely. I've enjoyed it and thanks a little for all you're doing to unite this community.
- [95:54]
Hope you enjoyed that interview.
- [95:56]
Will Smith
Don't forget to subscribe to the Acquiring Minds newsletter. We send an email for every episode.
- [96:01]
Eric Calderon
With an introduction to the interview, a.
- [96:04]
Will Smith
Link to the video version on YouTube and soon key takeaways, numbers and more essentials from the interview. For those of you who don't have time to listen or watch it, subscribe at acquiringminds code.
- [96:19]
Eric Calderon
You'll also find all our webinars there on the website, both those we have.
- [96:24]
Will Smith
Coming up and recordings of past webinars. At this point There are over 30 webinar recordings, a wealth of information on all the technical nitty gritty of buying a business. Acquiringminds copy.