Escaping the J-Curve in a $700k SDE Ecom Business

Summary

Acquiring Minds Podcast: Escaping the J-Curve in a $700k SDE Ecom Business

Host: Will Smith
Guest: Chris Farkas, Owner of EmergencyKits.com
Date: July 13, 2026
Summary Prepared By: Podcast Summarizer

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Episode Overview

This episode follows Chris Farkas’s journey to buying and running EmergencyKits.com, an e-commerce business generating $700,000 in SDE with over $3 million in annual revenue. Will Smith explores Chris’s background, the nuances of searching for a business, structuring the deal, the painful J-curve post-acquisition, digital marketing challenges, living far from the business, and what it truly takes to escape the turmoil of new ownership and lead a product-based business to growth.

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Guest Background and Search Philosophy

Chris’s Professional Origins

• Former founder of a business intelligence & analytics consultancy ($2M revenue, 13 staff)
• Lessons learned: The volatility of services business, staff layoffs, and founder burnout
• Preferred to transition to a products business for scale and stability:

  “What I love about product businesses … is that no one deal is make or break.” (09:51, Chris Farkas)

Approach to Search

• Determined early on not to buy a “time-for-money” services/consulting business (11:43)
• Joined the Acquisition Lab in July 2023 for guidance (06:57)
• Early efforts nearly landed a local food business (too much customer concentration) and a mobile auto glass repair business (beat out by another buyer who “survived a J-curve”) (13:18, 15:14)
• Geographic constraint: Sought businesses near Northern California, but ended up considering the Southern CA-based EmergencyKits.com, requiring regular flights (17:19, 19:05)

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The Deal: EmergencyKits.com

Business Profile

• Emergency preparedness kits and provisions (not a “prepper” niche)
  • ~1/3 revenue from D2C website sales, 2/3 from institutional bulk orders (20:51)
  • Products: Build-to-order emergency kits per FEMA 72-hour guidelines, canned water, food bars, etc.
• Warehouse and kit assembly managed in-house (21:55)
• Business metrics:
  • $3.4M revenue (prior year to acquisition)
  • 9 employees: 1 sales, 1 ops manager, 6 warehouse/fulfillment (28:11)
  • ~50% gross margin

Deal Structure

• Purchase price: $2.75M (~4x SDE, which Chris determined as $700k after deep diligence)
• Additional: $530K inventory + $320K net working capital = Total cost ~$3.6M (41:06)
• Buyer equity: 20%+ ($720K, collateralized his home)
• Loan: ~$3.2M SBA debt, no seller note (52:12)
• Due diligence: Chris did his own deep-dive with an external audit for accuracy—not a full QoE (49:27, 50:54)

Quote:

"Originally, it was being billed as a business doing $850k SDE. I didn't believe that … dug in and proved otherwise.” (29:44, Chris Farkas)

Inventory Negotiation Pain

• Major challenge in agreeing on valuation for excess/obsolete inventory (43:54)
• Chris accepted more than he wished for the sake of seller goodwill and smooth transition
• Reflection:

  “What I really bought was his goodwill. He did a fantastic transition.” (46:51, Chris Farkas)

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The J-Curve Experience

What Went Wrong

• Post-close, hired agency for SEO & ad management—poor performance and technical mistakes (53:11 onward)
  • Bug in website quote form during peak season caused quote requests to "evaporate," crippling sales (58:07)
  • Discovered after seven weeks, led to ~$500K lost top-line revenue (60:51)
  • Near financial crisis—forced to consider tapping more personal savings or losing the house (58:50)

Memorable Quote:

“The very thing I was scared about was the very thing that bit me.” (61:57, Will Smith in response to Chris)

Emotional Impact & Recovery

• Chris describes this seven-week period as “roiling” (58:50)
• Relief and renewed optimism when the bug was found and fixed, with immediate bounce in leads and best-ever month (60:21, 60:37)
• Lessons:
  • In digital, make changes one at a time to distinguish impact
  • Don’t be ashamed to lean on your network for support (62:02)
  • Don’t let pride block your troubleshooting

“Sometimes pride got in the way … had I talked to more people … I might have found this much sooner.” (63:04, Chris Farkas)

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Digital Marketing & E-commerce Learnings

Hiring & Managing Agencies

• Don’t use “full-stack” agencies—get best-of-breed for SEO, ads, CRO separately (65:05)
• Use Upwork/proposals for competitive vetting; pay for audits before hiring (66:30)
• “Point solutions, not full-stack solutions... Audit before you hire." (67:06, Will summarizing Chris)

E-commerce Model & Platform Risk

• Ownership of fulfillment and customer acquisition helps control margins

• Amazon and 3PLs present risk and additional inventory complexity (72:19)

  • “I’m not a big fan of Amazon ... I think they play dirty … they start knocking [good sellers] off.” (72:20, Chris Farkas)

• Build-to-order model avoids need for bloated inventory required by 3PLs (70:40)

Industry Perspective

• E-commerce is no longer “hot” for acquisitions, but the right model—either fully in-house or simple 3PL/wholesale—still works (68:12)

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The Human Side: Remote Ownership and Personal Impact

Commuting

• Chris flies weekly/biweekly (3.5hrs each way, Mon-Thurs) to Simi Valley (19:19, 80:54)
• Heavy personal cost: missed family moments, emotional toll on himself and spouse (79:42)
  • “I’m missing a lot of my kids’ lives ... It’s hard. Don’t take it lightly.” (79:42, Chris Farkas)
• Stresses that for an e-comm business with a warehouse, owner presence was critical early on (81:37)
  • Now beginning to trust team, plans to reduce physical presence to every third week

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Reflections on Entrepreneurship

Buying vs. Starting

• Buying saved years vs starting from scratch
• “I know what it takes to start from ground zero. I didn’t want to be doing that anymore.” (84:03, Chris Farkas)
• Important to “break the model” before buying: stress test for worst-case scenarios (86:02)

Financial Wisdom

• SBA loan payment is $38K/month, eats most profit—half goes to equity (84:47)
• “Don’t just go by what the bank will give you … test the lower bounds … If you’re not careful, you can get into a lot of trouble really fast.” (84:47, Chris Farkas)

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Optimism and Forward Trajectory

• Growth plan: On track to “positively comp” (grow revenue) year-over-year
• 2026 revenue target: $3.4M; $5M run-rate by 2028; $10M by 2030 (88:28)
• Much will come from both organic growth and tuck-in acquisitions

“Nine months later, I’m ecstatic … Traffic and conversions are trending up … Opportunities are coming my way.” (75:10, Chris Farkas)

• Recent hire: Bringing in a dedicated salesperson; moving old sales rep into ops

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On product business model:
  “What I love about product businesses ... no one deal is make or break.” (09:51, Chris)
• On risk of ignoring digital marketing complexity:
  “The very thing I was scared about was the very thing that bit me.” (61:57, Will)
• On emotional cost of a J-curve:
  “I was roiled ... I knew we were in big trouble.” (58:50, Chris)
• On lean startup vs. acquisition:
  “I know what it takes to start from ground zero. I didn’t want to be doing that anymore.” (84:03, Chris)
• On the grind of remote ownership:
  “I’m missing a lot of my kids’ lives ... It’s hard. Don’t take it lightly.” (79:42, Chris)
• On buy-side due diligence:
  “Don’t just go by what the bank will give you.” (84:47, Chris)

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Key Takeaways for Entrepreneurs

• You may need to personally reconstruct financials—don’t trust seller’s “SDE” at face value.
• Platform risk is real. Running an e-commerce business solely on Amazon/FBA or with 3PL fulfillment can undermine margins, create dependency, or require unsustainable inventory.
• Expertise in digital operations is vital, but outsource to best-in-class specialists; audit candidates before hiring.
• The early “J-curve” in a business acquisition is common; expect and plan for it (78:46).
• Don’t underestimate the cost—financial or emotional—of owning a “remote” small business.
• Network support can be the difference between disaster and turnaround; don’t let pride isolate you.
• Always model for downside and know your cut-off point for loss.
• The right business can open doors to additional, unexpected opportunities, beyond organic growth.

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For Deeper Listening

• Deep dive into discovery, deal structure, and post-acquisition struggle: [12:39–55:32]
• The J-curve bug crisis and recovery: [58:07–63:04]
• Reflections on remote ownership and work-life balance: [79:42–81:46]
• Financial caution and acquisition modeling: [84:47–86:36]

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Listen or watch full episode at: Acquiring Minds Podcast on YouTube
Subscribe for more summaries: acquiringminds.co

Transcript

[Will Smith]

E Commerce was probably the hottest category for entrepreneurial business buyers when I started Acquiring minds back in 2021. In those peak Covid days, E Commerce demand was surging and we all wanted a business we could run remotely. Well, E Commerce fell back to earth pretty hard and there aren't nearly as many Ecom business acquisition stories these days. So I was eager to hear the story of today's guest creat Chris FARKAS Chris bought EmergencyKits.com a business that seems to defy many of the weaknesses commonly associated with E commerce the consumer focus, the platform risk, the lack of differentiation. And with about $700,000 of SDE and nine employees, it was the right size for a self funded SBA searcher. Note Kris had to figure out that SDE number on his own. Listen for how the seller's cash accounting made calculating the business's true profitability a challenge. Also listen for Chris brutal J Curve

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

and how he finally got to the right side of that J.

[Will Smith]

Finally listen for Chris's experience owning a business that requires a three hour door to door flight to reach. He's made it work, but not without some personal costs. Here he is. Chris Farkas, owner of EmergencyKits.com youm know that the biggest unlock as an owner is making the leap from working in your business to working on your business. But knowing that and actually doing it are two very different things. In a webinar this Thursday for former ETA CEO and business coach Jake Buettner will show you how to make the transition from overwhelmed owner operator to growth focused CEO. Regular listeners will recognize Jake from his appearance on the podcast last year. He's the one who bought a struggling it business for 600k and sold it a decade later for 35 million 11x on earnings. Among the topics you'll learn this the shift from Hustle phase CEO to Growth Phase CEO. The seven attributes every scaling owner must develop, how to identify your biggest leadership bottleneck and the common mistakes that keep

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

a business dependent on its owner.

[Will Smith]

You'll also receive a diagnostic worksheet to pinpoint your highest impact. Next steps the webinar is working on the business how owners make the transition and it is this Thursday, July 16th noon Eastern. Link to register is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage. Acquiring Minds co. 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 talk to the people who do it. You know Enzo Technologies as one of the leading IT managed service providers serving the search community. Led by Nick akers, an Acquiring Minds guest who bought the 35 year old business. The team at Enzo regularly works with searchers and their acquisitions and one feature of acquired businesses that INZO is seeing over and over is the need to implement cybersecurity promptly during the transition. So many acquired small businesses either have glaring vulnerabilities, lack security best practices or both. That step one to de risk the deal you just closed should be addressing these issues. INSO is your full service IT MSP for post close stability. They assess your target, surface the biggest risks in plain English and give you a day one through 30 plan to cut exposure, prevent downtime and even find cost takeouts like bloated telecom bills. Check out enzotechnologies.com I N Z O or email Nick directly@nick zotechnologies.com Chris Farkas

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

welcome to Acquiring Minds.

[Chris Farkas]

Thanks Will.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Chris, you bought emergencykits.com a little over a year and a half ago. You survived a bad J curve, but

[Will Smith]

today you are super optimistic about the business's prospects.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

We're going to hear all about it. Let's begin with some background on you please Chris.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, sure. I before doing this I ran a business intelligence and analytics consultancy that I started back in like 2006. We grew at one point to about 13 employees and about $2 million in revenue. But we hit some struggles. We had a lot of customer concentration and so and then Covid hit and it was a really tough time. You know, for me personally, the struggles of a downsizing business laying people off. I'm a very employee friendly entrepreneur and people I had working more for me were close to me. And so it was a really tough process at some point. You know, I had known for a while that buying a business was a really good investment for somebody who could run a company. That's a pretty big if I think for a lot of folks. But I had known sort of the background that at some point I thought that might be something I'd want to do. And you know I had taken my hand at, at Startup World. What I found for myself is, you know, the movie Rounders. I'm more of the Matt Damon character than the Ed Norton character. You know, I'm singles and doubles, not, not home runs. And so I was really an operator. You know, I founded that company out of an expertise and I ran the company, certainly had help along the way but, but I was really operating that company. And so when things start, we really started to struggle. I think I came to the realization that I didn't really have the same passion for that business that I had when I started it, and it was time to move on to something else. And so.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And when was that?

[Chris Farkas]

That was In May of 23, I want to say.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh, okay. Okay.

[Chris Farkas]

And so, you know, I knew acquisition was an opportunity for me. I felt like I needed to come up to speed quickly. And so I went about trying to figure out, know what resources were available to help me with that. And that's when I found the acquisition lab. I took a [e-mail] I think that is run by Alex Hormozi. And it wasn't a great fit for me. But the folks, Chelsea and the folks at the acquisition lab were just a great fit and I had an outstanding experience. I think I started the acquisition lab in July of 23.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And Chris, how had you like just the idea of buying a business come on your radar?

[Chris Farkas]

You know, I'm not exactly sure Will. You know, I think at some point I came upon Biz Buy Sell. I think honestly, like stumbled on it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Chris Farkas]

And I started to look at the businesses and the prices and the, and the sde. And I. I'm thinking to myself, the return on the investment for this kind of a business is outstanding. You know, compared to other investments that were out there. I knew I could run a business. Maybe I was a little over optimistic at the time about how easy that might be, but I think that that's really kind of how my awareness of acquiring a business came to pass.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Chris, one of the things that you said about your search and what you wanted to me in the pre call was that you were super strong on not wanting a services business. Yes. And so this is something I don't know if you just like, it was such a strong feeling that you didn't need the lab to help tease that out of yourself. But anyway, when you went to market with your search, this was crystal clear for you.

[Will Smith]

And in.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

In some way it's, it's worth commenting on because in this world, services businesses are the default. Products businesses are less common. Talk us through why, what that criteria was all about.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, you know, through my experience in services, essentially it's an arbitrage business, in my opinion. Right. You're hiring people, you're billing them out oftentimes at an hourly rate. Certain businesses obviously have different models where you're selling packages and whatnot. And so there are some different models. The model that I was in was really Time for Money and Utilization became the most important thing. And we were doing relatively large projects for folks. I mean all. Our smallest project was probably in the neighborhood of $35,000. Our largest project was a half a million dollars. And when you're out, when you have a staff behind you that if they're not billing hours, you're losing money, you know, the, the stakes of making a sale or not making a sale are incredibly high. And you, you miss an opportunity and it may mean you have to lay people off. And I experienced that first, firsthand. What I love about product businesses, you know, is. And of course I think the other aspect of it is I, I wanted, you know, something that was sort of smaller revenue transactions. Right. So that no one deal was, was a make or break for you. Those high pressure situations for selling are, are tough. Some people are great at it. I don't love riding the roller coaster of those kinds of, you know, businesses. And we, we actually have some of that. But no one deal is going to make or break us in this business. But yeah, I just knew I didn't want to do services. I wanted better scale, I guess is one of the things that I would say. I have an operations background, so I was doing business intelligence and analytics, but mostly for operations because I had a background in supply chain management. And so the aspect of managing product and inventory is something that comes second nature to me. And so that was something that was interesting getting back into.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I wonder why your, what you didn't like about running a services business is not something we hear more people say. Maybe it's because you actually had the experience and many people who are buying a business haven't actually done it. But all, everything that you're saying makes a lot of sense. And yet service, as I said, services businesses are still the default for people searching to buy business. Of course, maybe also part of this is like the world of services is a vast universe. So we're generalizing broadly. Sounds like you were in a services business where the contracts were, the contract value was so high you had that roller coaster effect where you know, you could generate half a million dollars in a sale or lose it in a single sale versus, I don't know, a residential home services business where, you know, the stakes are much low on a per engagement basis.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, and I would actually say maybe in that initial conversation I said services broadly. I actually was open to businesses like that that were more, you know, microservices I guess to say, or small services. Right. I actually looked at plumbing and electrical, but in the state of California that's pretty hard for somebody who doesn't have a ton of experience in that business. And so I was. That, you know, became focused on. On product pretty quickly.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So you, you kind of were avoiding kind of consulting businesses, white collar services businesses with the. Where there's the idea of being on the bench and paying high salaries to people who are not doing anything. That kind of dynamic.

[Chris Farkas]

That's a much better way of saying it. Yes. Well.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. There were a couple businesses that you almost. Or that you were interested in.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Are they. Are they worth talking about here? Or should we jump right into the discovery briefly?

[Chris Farkas]

It's actually funny. The first business that I got engaged with was something I. So I live in Northern California and I was pretty focused on something local because my family is here, my kids are in school here. You know, we're pretty rooted here. And, and I found a food business that was just a couple miles away from my house. We got pretty deep and they had a high customer concentration. Ended up being the big problem. The 40% of their business was with through one supermarket chain.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

What was the food business?

[Chris Farkas]

They made pasta and potato salad that was sold in the deli section, you know, by the Pinter or whatnot. Wow. And interesting. I didn't have a lot of experience in food, transparently. Like, I did some consulting work for one food business. So I understood spoilage and a lot of, you know, the retail dynamics and, you know, my wife and I enjoy food, enjoy cooking, and thought it would kind of be interesting. The deal fell through on Christmas Eve and was a real bummer. It was a real downer for the, for the holidays. So that was, that was in December of 24. So I. Or sorry, 23. So I started the lab in July of 23. That first deal that I got into got an LOI on was in December of 23. And it fell through after that. And it fell through.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And it fell through, Chris, because you couldn't come to terms on the concentration, whatever risk mitigation you were looking for there, the seller wouldn't give you.

[Chris Farkas]

That's exactly right. We were basically looking for a seller carry that would be discounted if there were customer losses.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

They actually had a forgivable seller note.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, that's right. And, and they just, they just couldn't get their, their arms around their head around it. You know, they, the risk that was involved. They. They insisted it was low risk. And I was like, well, then it should be no problem to, you know, do the seller's note anyway. So that Fell through. I saw another business that I was really interested in. It was a mobile auto get glass repair business and by the time I contacted the broker it was already under LOI and it turned out it was under LOI with one of my cohort classmates.

[Will Smith]

No way.

[Chris Farkas]

He ended up buying the business and he experienced a little bit of a J curve himself and is doing really well now though.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh, interesting.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah.

[Will Smith]

Mobile.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Mobile glass repair.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Well the one have I had just one though. The one guest who did buy a business like that on Choir minds guest that comes to mind Russ up in Seattle is had just had an awful brutal time with his business. Not mobile, it's a shop. Two locations. Yeah anyway, but don't know the space very well. But of course see those trucks driving around. So curious.

[Will Smith]

Buying a small business sounds simple.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Find a company, due diligence, get a loan close.

[Will Smith]

In reality you wear every hat just to get the deal done. And then the moment you close you have to throw those deal making skills out the window and learn how to operate. You shouldn't have to rebuild this infrastructure from scratch and you definitely shouldn't do it alone. That's why Walker Deibel created Acquisition Lab which started as an accelerator, has expanded into a complete ecosystem for acquisition entrepreneurs. Over six years, the lab's 1200 members have acquired over a billion dollars in businesses. The lab puts everything under one roof. An active community, deal reviews, post close services and a dedicated fund helping experienced operators buy larger businesses. If you're serious about buying a business, come see why Lab members have a 40% success rate. Learn more in the show notes [e-mail] acquiringminds

[Chris Farkas]

in May of 24 so, you know, this is taking a while. My, my box isn't super narrow, but because of my location it made it a lot harder. You know, why, what about, what about

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Northern California makes it hard?

[Chris Farkas]

I think there may be not quite as many opportunities. Commute ends up factoring in, you know, a fair bit. The traffic here in the Bay Area is pretty bad. And so if a business is in the south San Jose, I mean that's a pretty tough, you know, you know, thing to be doing on the daily. It could be two and a half hours, you know, a commute from where I'm at. And so I found this business emergency kids.com and immediately it kind of called to me a bit, you know, felt like a space that was fairly recession resistant for me. It was important that I buy a business that, that my personal values aligned well with, you know, and so that this Fit the bill pretty well there. It felt like a service that we're doing for people, you know, to help them be prepared for a disaster. The big downer was that it was in Southern California. It was based in Simi Valley, California. And so rather than having a daily commute of, you know, two hours or so for a business here in the Bay Area, potentially I took a. A weekly commute to. To Simi Valley. I'm really lucky. I'm doing a regional to regional airport. So door to door from my house to the office is about three and a half hours. The first quarter I did that, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, I'll say really quick. The first quarter I did that every week and then I backed off to every other week. And that's where I've been. And I'm hoping to back off a little bit more pretty much soon.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Great. Well, we're going to hear more about that.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

But to be clear, when you talk about regional to regional airport, you. That's faster because regional airports, you are smaller and you can park easily and stroll right in and hop on your plane sort of thing. And same. Same thing on the other side.

[Chris Farkas]

I get to the airport here in my local regional airport 45 minutes before my plane takes off.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's great. I've actually. I only ever used the big airport, so I'm not. I haven't had that experience I guess in other countries I have, but yeah. Anyway. Interesting. Okay.

[Will Smith]

More about the business, please, Chris.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So emergency kits.com that as we joked on the pre call, you probably have this people whenever they hear this, they probably react that it's a prepper business. It is not. Tell us about the business.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, so we do about a third of our revenue as D2C ish. You know, some of that DTC is actually businesses or organizations that are coming onto the website and buying direct. But about two thirds of our revenue actually comes via a quote request form that people submit to us for larger sales, custom sales. And these are typically businesses, government organizations, schools, nonprofits, things of that sort. Right. And they're buying larger volumes of key kits. We've had sales, you know, in the six figures and they tend to run, you know, on average somewhere around 6 or 7K.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And the SKUs, the, the things that you ship out, these kits are prepackaged bundles of things that you need in, in an emergency. Say more about the products themselves.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, so we sell sort of two different types of thing products. Right. We sell food rations, so to speak, that are just Kind of raw goods, an emergency food bar or an emergency, you know, some emergency water. But our more popular products are our kits, which we actually build to order. So because of my inventory background, I know that if we build out those kits and try to stock them all and have enough to be able to ship as customers want them, we actually have to stock more inventory. And so rather than building those out someplace else where you might think the labor is more cost effective or whatnot, and then just stocking them here and shipping them from here, we actually store all of the raw components and then build the kits as we get the orders. And those kits, you know, typically come in like a backpack or a duffel bag or a bucket, and the bucket doubles as a toilet seat. A toilet, because it has a toilet seat lid that snaps onto it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh, wow.

[Chris Farkas]

And then inside those containers, we put food water, a hand crank radio, oftentimes an emergency blanket, one of those Mylar blankets.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Chris Farkas]

A poncho. In some kids, we, we put tube tents. And you know, we have a variety. We have a, yeah, basic, a deluxe and a pro level. They're all built around the FEMA guideline of, you know, 72 hours. So the, the guideline is that FEMA says, hey, no matter what happens, we'll be there to help within 72 hours. And so you have to be able to stand on your own for that long. Of course, we carry a lot, you know, a lot of other things. Walkie talkies, we carry much longer term food options. Um, so we, we aren't really targeting preppers. We deal with a much more sort of, I don't want to say unsophisticated. They're just unknown, not so knowledgeable about the products. Right. They're, they're looking for something to sort of grab and be able to go through the checkout and just feel comfortable that they are prepared for an event. Right. Where preppers are very often building their own kits with very specific items that they've curated because they're, that's something they really care about and they're passionate about.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Exactly. No, that makes perfect sense. And the fact that this business was, was based in California, I guess, founded in California. Is that, should we read into that? That California with its fires and earthquakes is a place. I mean, the only emergency kit, I'm now realizing the only emergency kit I've ever owned was when I lived in San Francisco, gifted to me by my mother, or I should say imposed upon me by my east coast mother, who is terrified of earthquakes in California. And when I was living there, insisted that I have this emergency kit, which, you know, I thought was prudent. Anyway, so is there a tie, a California tie there? You know, the origin story of the business.

[Chris Farkas]

It's a, it's a funny little story. I'll be brief about it. I don't think it's so much that there is that kind of tie. Something odd happened in the Simi Valley, Santa Clarita Valley area. A bunch of businesses that are doing emergency preparedness all popped up in that region and there are a couple of handfuls that have popped up in that area. And for a long time there was a lot of collaboration between them. When people would run out of stock, they would trade stuff and whatever, helping each other out. I think the businesses aren't quite so tight at this point, but it's, it's interesting that that happened that way. And I don't really have a good explanation for it. I think maybe what happened is that early employees left and started other, you know, businesses. So. Yeah, so it's, it's a weird concentration down there in this California area that is.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

That is pretty interesting and weird. Strange. And Chris, the. So, so the front door of the business is this website. Great, amazing domain, of course, by the way, emergencykids.com and people can buy one offs, which some people do. I think you said a third of your business is kind of a D2C sale, but a lot of them are institutions and there's act. So there's a place on the website where you request a quote. And so they literally fill out this form and then you guys pick up the phone and call them or email back what the quote would be.

[Chris Farkas]

That's right.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Just say more about it.

[Chris Farkas]

The website ends up becoming a funnel, you know, for those lead opportunities. Right. And so we're doing a lot of work right now on optimizing. You know, it's an interesting thing because you have sort of two different conversion rate optimization flows that you're trying to optimize for. Right. You do want to optimize for the, the CART checkouts. Right. That's still a third of your revenue. But for us, if we want to grow the business 5%, it's a heck of a lot easier to do that by growing the business side than it is to the D to institution. Right. Beta institution than it is to do it on the consumer side. But we still are working on optimizing both on the, on the quoting side, the institutional side. You know, we're. We really focus on being very quick to respond to people. You would think that because it's a business, it's a more slow moving process and whatnot. And it can be, but there's, there is definitely, I don't want to call it a recency bias, I don't know. But important, being able to be responsive to people and staying really present, you're able to catch them more effectively and close a sale more quickly when you do it like that. But we do deal with a lot of organizations that are applying for grants. So we can take. It can take six months to close a sale, right? It sometimes it's two or three days, maybe even the same day occasionally. And sometimes it takes six months. And you never really know. You have, you know, a little bit of insight. But with the grants it can take, you know, easily two to six months.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And when you, and when you close one of these big orders from an institution, a multi thousand dollar order, do they, they pay up front?

[Chris Farkas]

I assume it varies a little bit from customer to customer. So if it's a pretty standard product and it's not huge, then we will extend terms to the customers. And typically that's 30 days. When it's either custom or we're having to procure an exceptionally large amount of inventory, we'll typically require a 50% deposit up front. So our cash to cash cycle isn't, you know, isn't too bad. We usually, we get, I would say about a third of our purchases,

[Will Smith]

maybe

[Chris Farkas]

40% we're paying upfront. And then the rest we typically are getting 15 to 30 days terms.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Okay, okay, okay, Chris. And then about the business, the numbers of the business, the revenue and earnings it generated. The employees. Number of employees.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, yeah. The year before I bought the business, the top line revenue was about $3.4 million. At the time we had I think nine employees. One salesperson, one operations manager and the owner were the sort of inside staff. And then the rest of the staff were in the warehouse. There was shipping and receiving person and then I think four assembly people who were working in the company. So pretty good multiple on staff. You know, for, for revenue. The rev. The business runs very roughly a 50% gross margin. One of the biggest challenges that I ended up having throughout this transaction was that the owner was doing what I would call expense accounting rather than cogs accounting. And what I mean by that is, is that if he procured $100,000 of goods in March for that month, his cost basis was $100,000, which is pretty atypical of, you know, this type of business. What you really want to be measuring is the cost of goods sold. And then the goods that you bought but haven't sold go onto your balance sheet and they don't hit your P and L until you actually sell them. So the problem that we.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And, and Chris, this is just the difference between cash and accrual, essentially.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah. Although even, I mean, typically. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's, that's true. In most product businesses you're still going to do some kind of cost of goods accounting and then you make an adjustment at the end of the year when you're filing taxes and stuff for, you know, to be actually filing on a cash basis. And that's typically how it'd be done. But in this case, there were large shifts in inventory position. So from one year to the next, inventory might go up 60 or $80,000 and down the next year $120,000. And it was really hard to figure that because he wasn't doing a really good job of doing inventory and whatnot. And so fortunately for me, my expertise in background in operations and in supply chain in particular, made it so that I could really dig into the numbers and try to understand exactly how much the business was making. Originally it was being billed as a business that was doing about 850k in SDE. I didn't really believe that to be the case at the time and know, as I dug in I proved further that that really wasn't the case. Um, I think I got to a place where I was confident that it was at least 650 and probably closer to 7 and then it might even be as high as 7 50. Um, but I was, I had to, you know, just know that we were going to be in that range and then working on the deal to try to get to a multiple of that that I felt comfortable with, you know.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And so you're the, the base earnings assumption of yours was about 700,000 roughly.

[Will Smith]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And so your multiple was on that. Yeah, well, I mean, still great. I have to say that that is the, that, you know, is right in the range just at the, you know, trying at the707.50 of SDE, lower end of the range that self funded searchers really aim for. So you were psyched?

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, I was pretty happy. And again, looking at the business, I shouldn't say again because I haven't said this yet, looking at business, I knew that there were a lot of opportunities. You know, the, the founder did a lot of great stuff. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. He and I are still very friendly and I call him up from time to time to ask for help. He had done very well for himself, especially in the last few years, interestingly enough, right. This business actually does better or well when there's struggle out there. During COVID he did incredibly well selling N95 masks to a few large companies that they had worked with in the past and made a killing and then was doing really well on the ste front. And so I think that he had gotten comfortable and efforts to improve the business were really going to be more hassle than they were worth for him in many respects. So he was kind of sitting back and just, you know, cash and checks and doing pretty well. But when I took a look at the business, what was very clear to me is that the Google Ad management was not being managed well. SEO was horrible. There had been no work on digital reputation management, there was no email marketing going on. So all these things were big opportunities to chase down to improve the revenue and already like a really solid base, you know. So I felt really good about going

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

into it that as, I mean that's quite shocking that, that it was doing as well as it was given that all of the things that you just outlined, basically digital marketing, you'd think is how the business brought in any business at all. So was it in decline at all or was it just kind of limping along?

[Chris Farkas]

I actually, they were growing. The business had grown over the, over the previous four years. But what I did see is the domain traffic and authority was starting to slip, right? They were not writing a lot of blog stuff. The SEO stuff was really badly managed. I think the competition was starting to do all of these things more effectively and so the site was losing some traffic. I mean, quite honestly, I think the single best thing that the founder did was to buy the domain emergency kids.com, you know. But he did a lot of other good things on top of that. I mean, don't get me wrong, he, he, he managed the business really well. I mean, you get a business at three and a half million dollars in revenue, you've done a lot of things right, you know.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. So well and so right. But, but the, the larger point here is that all this stuff that isn't being done just feels like huge untapped potential in the business. Now on the flip side, one thing that you had pointed out to me was that you don't have SEO, ppc, those, I guess in particular that expertise. And so that made you a little bit uncomfortable. So all of this, what appears to be, you know, kind of juicy opportunity is also stuff that's outside your wheelhouse. So it wasn't necessarily a slam dunk. How are you thinking about that?

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, I'll tell you that when I started my search, E Commerce was not in my box really. You know, I had looked at a couple of things. It was interesting. But the question, one of the big questions that I ask myself, you know, when I, when I looked at a business, the first question is, is it something that I would feel good about associating myself with? Right. That putting my name to. The second question is when I looked at what the day to day would look like, that looked like something that I wanted to do and would enjoy. And the third question is when I think about the kinds of problems that I'm going to come up against, right. Every single business you're going to run into problems. The question is really, what kinds of problems, problems do you think would be good for you to run into?

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Exactly.

[Chris Farkas]

And knowing that SEO and ad management and stuff were going to be such an important component of managing this business well, it was a lot of discomfort for me to move into this space. Right. And I thought to myself, you know, do I want to be chasing down the next Google iteration, you know, search? I think one of the things that I, I came to grips with is that I'm actually really good at black box analysis. And that's kind of what a lot of that is, you know, so you, you look at the patterns and try to figure out like what's going on inside the algorithm. And so that's a skill that I have from my past. In the end, it just seemed like there was too much opportunity and I felt like this is something that I can feel figure out transparently. I think the other thing is I had been searching for 14 months, you know, at that point, and I was starting to feel a little bit of pressure and, and this seemed like in, in a certain kind of way, it seemed like good enough, at least in terms of how it fit the box. I don't want to make it sound like it was good enough like I was settling because I was actually really excited about the. Yeah, but it was certainly different than what I had thought I wanted to pursue going into it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Well, it was product, so you nailed that. It's definitely, definitely a product, product, business. And, but in going back to the SEO, PPC and your, in your, you know, lack of knowledge there, although your ability to, to, to analyze black boxes. So is that to say that you were expecting yourself to Learn SEO and ad management and ppc or learn enough to be dangerous and hire the consultant who, I assume that's the path. Hire the consultant who do it for you.

[Chris Farkas]

Much more the latter I think. You know, with so many, especially when you're a small business like this and playing in those spaces, I think it's unreasonable for almost anybody to think they're going to become experts in those fields. There are so much nuance and complexity and technicality in them and even having somewhat of a technical background. Right. To come up to speed on that kind of stuff takes years. And so I think it's outrageous for most people to think that they can just jump in and do that. Right. What's likely to happen is they're going to toil away at it poorly for a long time before they finally come to grips with the fact that they, they're going to need to hire somebody. So in the end I think the question is well, am I in a position to be able to manage people that I would hire to do these things right? And I think my general thought going into it was absolutely as we'll get to in just a bit. I think the results did not quite bear out the same way.

[Will Smith]

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

for one of their clients who did

[Will Smith]

just that, buying a $10 million business as a first time self funded searcher. The Pioneer team has closed more than 100 SBA loans averaging timelines well below industry standards.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Founder and owner Matthias Smith and CEO

[Will Smith]

Valerie Stash bring over two decades of SBA lending experience. Matthias and Valerie have a full bench of analysts and associates who work your deals with them. A true deal team.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Not just a single point of contact.

[Will Smith]

Visit pioneercap.com or click the link in the notes.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Let's hear how you structured the deal for this. What you were kind of estimating or pegging at $700,000 of earnings. Business.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah. So we ended up agreeing to a purchase price on the business itself of 2.75 million. So it ends up working out to like just below a 4 multiple on SDE at that 700. And then there was another 850 which was about was composed of 530 in inventory and another 320 in networking capital. So that put our Total, you know, purchase price at about 3.6 million. And I brought about a little bit more than 20% to the table for that. And then the loan ended up being about 3.2, which included about 125 in fees and whatnot.

[Will Smith]

Great.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Thank you. Chris. On this point about the inventory and networking capital, oftentimes we see businesses that for sale that act as if that's apart from the business and, and kind of segregated as, as a separate item to buy. And first of all, you're paying for it anyway, so it doesn't really matter if they consider it part of the purchase, the full purchase price or not, but, but because it is effectively working capital inventory, and not to mention the, the cash networking capital. It is the, it is the, the gas in the tank that you need to operate the business on day one. So it's really, and it doesn't sound like you're saying anything different, it really is the full, true cost of the business is all of that as a package.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, 100%. I mean, if you, if you're, if I had half of that inventory, I couldn't have run the business in the same kind of way. Right. It's, it's table stakes for running that business. I will say, however the inventory ended up becoming. So we probably came close to breaking the deal a couple of times based on the, the earnings discrepancy. Sort of like what they saw is the earnings and what I saw as the earnings. In fact, I remember sitting in Bath, England. I was with my family on vacation and I'm sitting outside the, the Bath Museum and I'm negotiating with the broker and the seller, you know, on, on the price based on, you know, my estimation of the SDE versus theirs. But we came very close to breaking in. I guess it would probably be like September, late September of 24. We closed in October of 24, right about the middle of the month. But in late September, we were discussing inventory and we hadn't done. He had not been able to provide good data on what they were selling by sku. And so I had had to back into a lot of that information. And so then I was doing some analysis of aged inventory and to figure out what I believed was excess and obsolete. And by my analysis, there was an awful lot, I think, that you'll hear in the industry. People will tell you, you know, anything more than a year's worth of supply, you should be buying at a steep discount, you know, and, and, and much more than that. You probably shouldn't be buying at All. And we had some products.

[Will Smith]

He.

[Chris Farkas]

He literally had like 10 years of inventory at the velocity that he was selling those products. And it became a point of real contention between us because I think he had already felt like I had knocked him down on his valuation. And so then here I was coming back at him potentially, you know, another hundred thousand dollars on the inventory, because I told him, like, look, there's three options. Like, you can take it yourself or you can discount it to me, or we can do it on consignment. You know, like, that's, that's kind of. And you get into this very difficult situation. Right. I started looking at this thing in May, and here we are in September. I've been working on this deal for five months, you know, and you're on the precipice and the question is, like, do you. How hard do you push? Right. Because one of the important things here is that if I buy the business on the other side of the purchase, I need a seller who's actually going to be in, like, good natured about transitioning.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Exactly.

[Chris Farkas]

Him. If I piss him off, he's going to do the bare minimum and he's going to do it begrudgingly. And.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Chris Farkas]

So how hard do you push? You know, and. And in retrospect, I think sometimes I'm like, oh, I walk around the warehouse, sometimes I see some of the inventory, and I think, oh, man, I should have pushed back more on some of this, you know, because I think he wanted to do a deal as much as I did. I knew he did. Right. He wanted to retire, he was done. But I also really wanted to close this transaction. I had invested a lot at that point. And to think of it breaking over $50,000 in inventory, it seemed kind of like insanity. And so in the end, I think I ate more of it than I really wanted to. And we're going to be moving our. Our built to a new building in October. And I have a feeling that when we move, we may just jettison some of that inventory because it's just taking up space.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Well, we have also heard you say, Chris, that you have this friendly relationship with him to this day, that you've been able to call him for help. So let's not forget that, you know, what you thought you might be paying for, I. E. Goodwill with him, you've gotten 100%. So as you reflect on it, so under understanding that when you know that that that kind of useless inventory stares you in the face when you're walking around the. The warehouse, there can be an emotional reaction to it, like, ah, but from where I sit, it seems like you probably threaded that needle well. I mean, to get to let this deal die for 50 grand, probably, you know, that, that it's not a big enough swing between the two of you. How far apart you guys were to let it go is my. Also my instinct.

[Chris Farkas]

I think that's right, Will. And I think, you know, if you really believe that the opportunity that you have in front of you is one where you have a real opportunity to grow the business, you'll grow beyond that 50k pretty fast, you know, as I is theoretically is the idea and like you said, right it. For me, in retrospect, as much as I hate looking at that inventory and feel frustrated every now and again that I'm sitting on a bunch of inventory that I don't want, what I really bought, like you said, was his goodwill. And, and he did a really fantastic transition. I, I really, in fact, I, I actually want to take a quick second to just plug a few of the people that I worked with on the deal because I actually was really, really lucky. So Dave Richardson was the broker that I worked with. He's out of Westlake Village and he's going to kill me because I can't remember the name of his brokerage, but he put together the best SIM I saw in a year and a half, hands down. It was really, really well done and he was very professional throughout the entire transaction. He was really great to work with and he had prepped the seller very well. I, I've told Chelsea's, you know, trying to build a network of brokers to, to work with. And I've told her, you know, he's definitely somebody that she, she should reach out to, although he's a little more like upper middle market or even upper market, you know, typically. I was really fortunate to get connected up with Kaylin Foster at Live Oak Bank. They, he did great work for me and got me an. I met Prime Plus a Half, which I think at the time, I mean, you know, the benefit of the lab is you get to hear what everybody else is doing and what they're getting and you know, how they're doing deals. And at the time, I didn't hear of anybody else who had gotten a better rate than me at that prime plus a Half. So Dylan was great to work with and I couldn't recommend him more highly.

[Will Smith]

Great.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Well, thank you for those plugs, Chris. I was actually going to ask you on these inventory issues, on the earnings and really trying to tease out and understand what the true earnings of the business was.

[Will Smith]

Did you?

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And, and also just the, the discomfort of kind of that. That inventory negotiation feels like a quality of earnings or, or full due diligence provider could have added value here. Sounds like you didn't use anybody.

[Chris Farkas]

So I had dived so deep into the finances and because of my background, I felt like I really knew what was going on in that business and I understood everything, save one component. Right. And that is if somebody could like doctor up finances or something like that. Right. Then there's. That's something that I wasn't looking for and couldn't vet. Right. And so I actually hired Matt over at capforge to do a, A quick audit. He basically, he took all the bank records and the QuickBooks files and the bigcommerce data and he laid them all up against each other to just make sure that there were no shenanigans going on with that. I felt very comfortable, you know, with, with the business. I didn't feel like I needed a Q of E, frankly. I kind of thought like I did a better job with, over the amount of time that I took looking at this business than somebody else could have even, you know, in a. In a short amount of time, even with the amount of experience that they would have doing it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh, wow. And. And even now on this side of the, on this side of your transaction, year and a half into the business, you stand by that?

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, yeah. Actually, no surprises there. That is actually one of the very pleasant things is that I think the business was what I thought it was going into it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Okay, great. Let's return to the, the deal and then hear about this J curve. So it was. You said it was.

[Will Smith]

What was it?

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Approaching three and a half million. Altogether.

[Chris Farkas]

Altogether, 3.6.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, 3.6. Okay. And you. 20% equity. So you brought $700,000. Seven hundred and twenty to the table.

[Chris Farkas]

Yes, sir. Yep. That and collateralization of my home.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And. And did that clear you out? I mean, if you can give us a sense of what your balance sheet was, how much, how close to the edge did you get?

[Chris Farkas]

No, I was fortunate enough. We were fortunate enough to be in a situation where that wasn't. Wasn't the case. We had, you know, a fallback that we could lean into. I mean, we had some red lines, you know, drawn for ourselves, but. But we still had some fallback. And it turned out it was necessary for us to be able to have that because we were not pulling as much out of the business as we Expected.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

It.

[Chris Farkas]

Expected to. In fact, to date, we really. We haven't pulled a dollar out of the business. Beside my salary.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And what is your salary?

[Chris Farkas]

I take. I think it's 100 or 110k salary a year.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Okay. And that's quite a bit less than you. What you'd earn in a W2.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Will Smith]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Typically, you're. The SBA likes to see a seller note. Your SBA lender likes to see a seller note. I wonder if in this case, they were fine without a seller note because Your equity, your 20% equity is more equity than many SBA buyers put in. Is. Is that the case?

[Chris Farkas]

I think so. I think that that was the case. I think.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And how did you arrive at 20% as opposed to 10 or 15?

[Chris Farkas]

You know what? I think actually it ended up coming down to the dscr. Was that, like, to really make the numbers pencil out. That was what. What we needed to do.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And so you closed in October 2024. Okay, now let's hear about this J curve, this transition.

[Chris Farkas]

Let's see. You know, it ends up boiling down, I think, mostly to finding partners that were really well suited to do the. The work around SEO and ad management. The first firm that we. We hired, we talked. I talked to three or four different firms. Oddly enough, it seemed like the salesperson was the most analytical and maybe even the most technical person. Once I got deep working with the

[Will Smith]

staff,

[Chris Farkas]

I found that they just weren't. And in retrospect especially, they were not as good as I expected them to be. Because of that quoting process.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

It's.

[Chris Farkas]

It's referred to as an offline conversion process. One of the things that you want to do is to take that sales data and feed it back to Google so that Google is training its algorithm on that data. Given the fact that it's two thirds of our revenue, having it train the algorithms on the 1/3 is sort of silly. They're completely different audiences. Right. So they assured us that they were going to be able to help us with that, and it just languished and left languished. In retrospect, they also were not doing technical SEO, like, right out of the gate. And what I know now understand from really good SEO providers is that that's like the first thing you do. You know, you want to clean up and fix all of the technical issues, because that's the stuff that gets. No matter how much good content and whatnot you produce, that's the kind of stuff that gets in your way. So, you know, I was right about the Concerns that I had about my lack of understanding and experiencing in these spaces. I generally have a pretty good intuition and I thought this company was really competent. The other thing that bit me a little bit with them is that they had a 90 day cancellation policy. So I ended up having to pay them longer than I wanted to. I ended up firing them and continuing to pay them on the side because they weren't working for me. So we were, we were down, trending a little bit, you know, on our traffic. I found.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And by the way, this. So all of that time and energy and money that you spent on that, on that consultant, on that group was opportunity cost and lost money. But it didn't necessarily hurt the business because you were starting from a pretty weak position anyway, SEO wise.

[Chris Farkas]

I would say it probably hurt us a little bit. We did some stuff around ads that got, that got messed up working with them and they weren't able to help us fix it. So I would say it was probably a bit of a negative return.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh man. Okay.

[Chris Farkas]

So then we found a new partner who we started working out a little bit. So I didn't say that that company originally was doing SEO ad management. And I'm trying to remember. They were doing one other small thing for us and I can't remember what. Maybe it was just those two. We had started to do some work in CRO conversion rate optimization with another company and we liked the work that we were doing with them and the product that we were getting. And so we, we ended up hiring them to do. We, when we fired that company, we hired them to do our SEO and our ad management. I felt like the ad management was a little bit weak maybe, but the SEO was really, really good. And I thought that the CRO was really good until in July of 25, which starts to be our peak season, they made a change on our website that had quotes evaporating into the ether, never to be recovered. And it took us quite a while to figure out exactly what was going on, in part because we had made another change simultaneous. So lesson number one, when you make changes, make them one at a time so that you can see what is affecting what. Because if we hadn't made that other change, it would have been stark, literally. It would have been no leads coming in. But we had started up a new quoting process on the website simultaneously where people could add stuff to their carts and then request a quote. We had two different processes. We were still getting quote requests from the new thing and so it kind of clouded what was going on. I Liked these people a lot, but it was very clear that they made this mistake. We had Google Tag Manager tracking events that were people opening the quote request form, people completing the quote request form. And I got a report one day when I started really pressing on them on, like, what the heck is going on? You know, like, you. We're in big trouble, people. Like, I mean, really big trouble. I mean, I had to have that conversation with my wife that was like, I don't know if I can pull this out. You know, like, we were. We were that. That desperate. And I got.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

How long did that period last?

[Chris Farkas]

About seven weeks.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And. And were you in a panic? Give us. Give us a kind of a sense of what it felt like from. From inside.

[Chris Farkas]

I was roiled. You know, I. I'm an emotional kind of guy. You know, there are some people that are like Steady Eddie, and that. Those kinds of people, I think, are great as entrepreneurs. I'm. I. I have a great admiration for them, and I'm actually very envious. You know, the people who can. They're just stoic, and they can just moderate very well. I'm not really one of those people. I've gotten a lot better at it over the years, but I was. I played disc golf. I was out with some friends playing disc golf, and I have this habit of checking the bank account every morning, you know, just to see, like, where we stand. And my loan had just come out of the account, and I saw what our balance was, and I knew where we were trending, and I was like, we're in trouble. Like, we're in big trouble. I mean, I had a line of credit to tap into and stuff, you know, but. But I knew we were in really big trouble. And so I came home and I started having a conversation with my wife, you know, and the question really was, is like, man, do we take a bunch more money out of our savings to sort of fund this thing so that I can try to turn it around, or do we walk and lose our house? You know, um, and the thing is, is that it would have taken us another two or three hundred thousand dollars potentially to turn it around if it kept going the way it was. And I didn't know exactly what was wrong yet. Yeah, I flew down to.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And so what. And Chris. So what was happening was basically sales were declining, and then that decline had accelerated. Effectively. That was the end result.

[Chris Farkas]

Revenue massively. Right. And I figured out what was going wrong. And the minute we figured it out, we. We fixed it. And just like that, the leads started Coming in and that was begin. Very beginning of September and then September was the biggest month we've had since I've owned the business.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh man.

[Chris Farkas]

So for the second half of July and all.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So it was, it was basically a bug. Yes, it was basically a website. A single website bug led to this whole crisis and seven week.

[Chris Farkas]

And the analysis is that it's probably about a half million dollars in top line revenue. Revenue.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Chris Farkas]

Lost. Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Well, Chris, on the one hand it's, you know, it's heartbreaking. On the other, at least you found it.

[Chris Farkas]

You know, I mean, the day I found it, Will, I was talking to a couple of friends and I was like, I don't know, I'm. Whether I'm more gleeful that I have a viable business again or more mad about what happened.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Exactly. It's hard to know how to feel but. Wow. And you know, it just, also just goes to the, the very frankly doubt you had about, about this business was that it's, you know, it's the black box of SEO and PPC and the in digital funnels and how. I mean I think even an expert who knows, but you know, you know, maybe even somebody who really knows this space could have, could have experienced this bug. But the very thing, in other words, the very thing that you were scared about in this business was the very thing that bit you.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So in some sense, you know, you were, your analysis was right on.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah. And I think I would say, you know, besides the mistake itself and like I said, changing this one thing and, and whatnot, you know, there were a couple of things that fed into it. The, the big beautiful bill had happened recently, the rescissions had happened and I had this thought that that's what was contributing to it. Right. And so it clouded a lot of stuff. And I think like one of the things is that we have to get more precise. We have to dig in, we have to, you know, really sharpen our pencils and get very, very detailed is. Is one thing. And then the other thing that I was going to say is I didn't lean enough on the community around me because I think I was, I was feeling a bit ashamed and embarrassed about what was going on and I didn't want to talk to people about it so much. And I think if I had talked to more people like Chelsea, I, I might have found this much sooner. Well, there's a learning on my community enough.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Well, in sort of pride got in the way. It was ultimately your pride was kind of your own getting in your own Way. Well, you know, I'm just. It's. It's. You said 3.4 million. Let's just say it's 3.65 million of revenue. For super easy math, you sell $10,000 a day of emergency kits. That is a lot of emergency kits. And a single emergency kit is about $100.

[Will Smith]

Call it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I mean, yeah, average.

[Chris Farkas]

We have some that are, you know, 60 and some that are 140. Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

But 100 emergency kits a day, let's say. Yeah, that's a lot. You know, I know we're kind of. As an aside, I wouldn't have thought that an emergency kit business could be so large. You probably didn't either.

[Chris Farkas]

And, you know, we sell lots of other things, and one of the biggest sellers right now is actually canned water. Believe it or not, it's a product that lasts 50 years in the can. They do a lot to purify it and make it stable in the can. And. And it's surprisingly a huge seller for us. We sold basically two truckloads of that water to a company just a month ago.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And what is the use case for that?

[Chris Farkas]

In this particular case, it was a health network that owned a bunch of hospitals. And because they have people in their care, the state mandates that they have resources on hand in case natural resources are unavailable. You know, the plumbing goes down or whatnot.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, Chris. Well, let's round out our conversation of this painful period by just now reflecting on digital marketing. How you think now today about SEO, AEO, which is that? Is it GEO or AEO? Basically, ChatGPT search optimization and cloud search optimization. Um, let's hear those. And then I also want to ask about E commerce.

[Chris Farkas]

So the first thing I would tell anybody running an E commerce business is don't hire an agency to do multiple things for you. I think it's a big mistake. I think you go out and you find best of breed for each function. Go find the best SEO person you can find. Go find the best ad management person you can find. Go buy the. Find the best CRO person you can find. It's kind of like back in the old days, you know, we had this choice about buying individual audio components or. Or one that had everything integrated. And the downside was if one thing breaks in the integrated unit, you know, the whole thing is kind of useless. If you start to struggle in one particular area and you have to blow the whole relationship and it's three different functions that you now have to replace. So what I did is I went Back to the SEO person at the company that we really liked that was doing SEO great. I went on to upgrade Upwork and I found about 10 people who had really good reviews for, for ad management and I narrowed it down to three and then I paid the three of them to do an assessment and proposal for us for our business. And then from that we picked one, we actually had two that we really liked and we ended up picking one and then we did the same. We've. We're doing the same thing now for CRO. We found somebody on, on Upwork that we really like. We put them through their paces, we paid them to do an analysis and proposal for us and we brought them in.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Chris, that was just a ton of value there. So I just want to distill it for the audience. First of all, learning number one is point Solutions, not full stack solutions. In terms of service providers, you want a PPC expert who is separate from an SEO expert. Hire these folks individually and then to hire them you're what you're basically have them do some work, use upwork, put up a job, pick the ones you like, have them do a project for you or and maybe the project is essentially an audit or of your existing site.

[Will Smith]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And pay them for their time doing that audit and then choose the one you like. And that has worked well.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, I feel like it's been great. I feel like we have best of breed in each function and I think we're getting really great results now.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Oh fantastic. Okay. And then the E Commerce overall. So preface to the question would be E commerce was hot in Covid. In the aftermath of COVID when I came into this world of buying businesses, I thought I would buy an E commerce business. E commerce was exploded and then of course has crashed in the last. I mean the crash is now pretty far in the rearview mirror but it went up, but it came right, it came down and you just don't hear about it that much anymore in our world. I've interviewed the occasional person who's bought an E commerce business but it's. They're few and far between. So kind of what, what's from. From a searcher's business buyers perspective,

[Will Smith]

what

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

would you say about E commerce today? Don't know if you can generalize based on your one business but try. Yeah.

[Chris Farkas]

I think that to me there are like two models that I think that can work really well. Right. I think that's great about our business is that we're self contained, we're not reliant on a 3 PL to fulfill product for us. We're not reliant on Amazon for the fulfillment or for the lead gen. You know, we manage our, our, our pipeline, our marketing, ourselves what we, you know, what comes in, we manage what we ship out. We manage and we do it with a pretty small team for the amount of revenue that we, you know, that we bring in and we, you know, we build the order. I think that that's one model that can work really well. I think that the other model and we have a, we have not a huge SKU proliferation, but we've got, you know, quite a few products, right. We're in the neighborhood of about 400 SKUs and, and again, you know, build the order and I think that's an important component of that. Build to order is pretty hard to do in a 3 PL type of model. I think some ways that allows us to have richer margins because you know, the competition is a little bit different. I think on the other side is like product that you don't have to do anything with, right? You buy it, it sits in a warehouse, it gets picked and shipped. There's no build out. And there the 3 PL model can work really well. It can be cost effective. Although, you know, I think, I think we do pretty well. When I look at it, the one thing I think I would say is that we would, you know, a benefit from the shipping, the shipping savings that A3PL gets because they ship out so much more product than we ship out, you know, our shipping rate.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And to be clear, A3PL would actually also offer you the warehouse space. So you basically outsource your entire shipping, picking, storing function.

[Chris Farkas]

Yep, that's exactly right. And you know, when I first started looking this at the business, that was one of the things that I thought about like skinny down the SKUs, move it to A3PL, simplify the business, right. Very quickly I realized that that really wasn't an option. I'd have to carry three or four times the amount of inventory, you know, to be able to support the business. If we, if we tried to operate like that.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I'm sorry, why, why would do it, using a 3PL mean more inventory?

[Chris Farkas]

Well, so you know, we offer 30 different emergency kits, right? And so if I built out so to be able to ship a hundred units, if we, if we know we might get an order of 100 units tomorrow, but we don't know which hundred units, we have to have 100 of all 30 of the products on the shelf, right? So all of the components that go into those Kits have to be procured and built into the kits and then stored. So it's now 100 units times 30 different models. But if I'm keeping all of the components separately then I have enough for a hundred of each kit and I build out the hundred that I need so I don't have to have as much inventory on hand.

[Will Smith]

I see.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So the, what you're saying is the 3 PL couldn't do the kit assembly that you guys do.

[Chris Farkas]

They could do it. It gets very, very expensive. They, one of the things charges, they charge by how much space you take up in the warehouse. But another thing is by how many touches you have. And so every time they, you know, they're picking an item, building out one of those kits. It's a touch and so it gets really expensive.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Will Smith]

Great.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Okay. And so yeah, so it's. You named a lot of the common weaknesses of these, of E commerce businesses or, or big cost centers, the three pl. The platforms. Classically at least in that sort of post Covid era there was a lot, there was a ton of E commerce businesses that were selling on Amazon. So there was an enormous amount of platform, platform risk. So if the, you know, your, your positioning in Amazon changes, you know, you talk about sales crashing, your sales could crash. Very, very vulnerable.

[Chris Farkas]

You're not.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Are you guys even on Amazon?

[Chris Farkas]

No. The founder, you know, made an attempt to do some sales through Amazon and found it was very, very difficult. It didn't fit the business model very well. I'm not a big fan of Amazon. I think, you know, long and short is, I think they play dirty. You know, if you sell products on there that start to do well, then they just start knocking you off and, and, and, and push me down rankings and I don't want to be paying somebody who I'm also competing against. I don't like to model very much.

[Will Smith]

Sure.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah. I mean, you know, as we look out in the future, I'm looking at potential acquisition opportunities to you know, little tuck ins and stuff like that. And I'm, I'm not interested in anything that's primarily fba. If it's mostly E comm and it has a little bit of fba, you know, maybe I'll entertain it but it's actually kind of quite an effort. The inventory management, you know, to be on Amazon is one of the biggest factors because you have to keep inventory at all of their locations, you know, to be. So they can ship your product out quickly and everything. And if you're not maintaining that inventory in a Satisfactory way you get penalized pretty hard.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The. The value prop of Amazon just kind of handling it all for you, not to mention bringing you customers. They are. They become. Your channel is strong on its face, but then, you know, like peel back the onion a little bit and. And the horror stories are everywhere and it ain't it. It don't come cheap. The e commerce businesses of 2023 were. If they weren't on Amazon, you know, the big lever to pull was, oh, this business isn't even on Amazon yet. You put it on it, you can get it on Amazon or vice versa. If it was only selling on Amazon. This business doesn't even have its own direct website. You know, turn on Shopify and have, you know, turn. Spin up another channel direct to customers. And that was always. Both of those in either direction were always very oversold because each of those is its own bear of.

[Chris Farkas]

Of.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I mean, they're basically become different businesses. So. Yeah, I mean, there's so much complexity to those different channels that they become almost two completely different motions of business.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, when you have a good product and you go take it to retail, it. It complicates the business so much more. Everybody thinks. Exactly. Getting into retail is the panacea and kills a lot of businesses.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Chris, we're gonna wrap up here, but let's hear now, as a cherry on top, the, you know, how you're feeling today, which as I said at the top is pretty optimistic and just, you know, so tell us how you're feeling, what you're looking at at the future. And just. Just to remind us, contrast that with how you were feeling when you were at that low period. Because I think that that ARC is important in its own right.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, right. I mean, what a difference nine months makes in both directions. You know, nine months before that happened, I was sort of in the exuberant phase of, hey, I own a new business and it's fun and interesting. And nine months later, I'm. I'm ecstatic about where we sit. We've had last month, we. We almost beat the revenue of. Of September, which was our biggest month. We were $600 short. And we're coming into, you know, our busy season. Our traffic is looking good, trending in the right way. Our conversion rates are trending in the right direction. I mean, everything looks positive and we're just starting to implement some of our big initiatives on top of that, you know, and so add to that that there's a couple of partnerships that we're working with, working on that I think are going to be game changers for us in terms of some brand and stuff like that that we're going to be able to sell. And so I. I'm continuing to invest in the business. I still haven't pulled a dollar out of the business. We just hired our first. A new salesperson. My previous salesperson was great, but she wasn't. She didn't love sales, so I moved her into an operations role and she's doing a great job there. But we hired our first salesperson and, yeah, I'm very optimistic. My nature is such that I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So there's a pensiveness in that. But that's more, I think about me and I guess some sort of general concern about the. The global economic environment. You know, it seems like there's a lot of risk out there right now. And I know anecdotally from some of our suppliers that some of our competition is really struggling. So the fact that we're actually doing well, I think is. Is pretty fantastic. And yeah, I. I think one of the other great things I'll tell you is just being out here again in the world, in this. In this business world is that opportunities have kind of come my way because I'm just in the industry. You know, I hear about opportunities. We almost bought another business that was a vendor of ours because of an odd situation, and. And I would have never had that opportunity. We didn't. We didn't end up doing it, but I would have never had that opportunity had I not, you know, just been out there in the business world and being in contact with people. So in addition to, you know, just closing that business, sometimes the closing even for that little extra expense and whatnot. Right. Is the opportunity to now be out there and having access to other opportunities. I think in the end, or at least at this point, I think. I think the business is what I thought it was and the opportunities were and are what I thought they were. The J curve was definitely deeper than I expected it to be, and there were some missteps on my part, for sure. I guess I take a little bit of comfort. One of my fellow alumni sat in on one of Walker's talks recently, and he said, you know, of the umpteen acquisitions that he's made now over his career, not one of them has positively comped in the first year.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

This is Walker.

[Chris Farkas]

Walker Dibel. Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Author of the book and co founder of the lab, he hasn't not experienced a J curve.

[Chris Farkas]

That's right. Every single one, every single company, even to date. Right. And so it gives me some comfort. You know, I think I, I tell my staff, you know, sometimes you move fast, you break things and I think we, we broke a couple things and I think we were, you know, lucky that it didn't, it didn't lead to our demise. And sometimes you need luck.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Right?

[Chris Farkas]

My dad used to say, better to be lucky than good. So.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Sure. And Chris, what of the plane flight to get to your business? We heard you say that you were going every week in the beginning. How was that? And, and what does it look like now? And, and what would you tell somebody contemplating a three hour flight to get to their business?

[Chris Farkas]

Do not take it lightly. I think if, I think if you're, if you got a family thinking that you're going to do that every week forever is, is insanity. I've been doing it every other week for 15 months, I guess I'd say now. And it's been hard. I've got two teenage girls, one who just graduated and one who's going to be a junior and I'm missing a lot of their lives and I'm going to get all weepy. I do this sometimes and it's hard sometimes. My younger one plays water polo and swims and I've missed a lot of stuff that I really want to be at and that's with me working really hard to be able to be there when I can. I think sometimes it's a little bit hard on my relationship. You know, my, my wife is fantastic and, and she is not a risk tolerant person. So this ride for her is, is challenging and she's been nothing but supportive and amazing. Um, and it's hard being away for, you know, four, four days every, you know, every other week. Every other week is the way it work.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And so you go down Monday, come back Friday?

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, I fly down. I'm really lucky. The schedules are pretty conducive for me at least right now. I fly down Monday morning early and I fly home Thursday afternoon. Basically I put in a full work day on Thursday and then fly home and I, and I work on Friday still. You know, I mean I'm working, you know, as much as any other entrepreneur and then the travel on top of it. Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard. Don't, don't take it lightly.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And you felt, feel that this amount of travel, you being at the business is necessary. We often think of E commerce businesses as sort of virtual remote businesses. This is definitely not. We know you have your own warehouse, but everybody goes to the business. And so is that part of the reason why you feel you need to show your face and the business?

[Chris Farkas]

I think initially it was really important to me to convey to my team that, like, I'm all in on this. I think that teams that have an absent owner oftentimes like, slack off and, you know, if they feel like if you're not taking it seriously, like, why should they? Right. And so I feel like I've put in my time with my team. I've earned, I've earned the trust of my team. I've built a lot of equity with them. I think also I've made a few changes in the staff. So I brought in a guy who's worked for me for 10 years, dating back to my previous business. I hired a new salesperson. I think I'm just now getting to the point where I feel like I can probably back off a little bit. So I think that I'm actually going on a two and a half week vacation with my daughter who just graduated. Her graduation gift was a trip to Europe. And so I'm taking her to Europe and oh, that's amazing. And I feel good about being away and I think when I come back, I'll. I'll go there for a couple of weeks in a row trying to just get things. My arms back around everything. But then my intention is to try to back off eventually to like every third week.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And then, Chris, what about the fact. So you had done your own, started a business from scratch, got and gotten it the consulting business that we heard about earlier, gotten it to, I think you said, about $2 million of revenue. So how do you reflect on buying versus starting from scratch now that you've done both?

[Chris Farkas]

You know, it's interesting that you say that, because when I was searching, I told you I, I have an interest in disc golf. And so I actually kind of like put a word out in a few different communities, one of which was Facebook. If anybody knew of somebody who is selling a disc golf business, you know, and somebody's like, oh, why don't you start your own, blah, blah, blah. And I'm, you know, everybody's got an opinion, right, thinks that they know everything. And, and, and my response was basically like, I know myself and I know what I want to do. And I didn't want to go back to square one. You know, I had a friend who actually who, when I was [e-mail] tried to persuade me to just start that business with him. And I was like, man, I know what this road is. Looks like I know what it takes. I think he thought that, you know, in two years we could be cranking three and a half million dollars. And I'm like, man, I don't, you know, I don't think so.

[Will Smith]

I know.

[Chris Farkas]

I know what it takes to start from. From ground zero. And I didn't want to be doing that anymore. You know, I mean, one of the big challenges of this time that I've been in is when I started out, I was the only one who could do strategic changes in the business. If I wanted to put in a new piece of software, I had to do it. I had to do all the transition. I had to train everybody how to do it. And now I have more of a staff. And that's what I want, is a team that I can coach to do all of these things. I don't want to have to be blocking and tackling every single thing. And you need to have a somewhat substantial business to be in that kind of a mode.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

The $700,000 of earnings, did that end up being about right?

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah, I think it's about right. I mean, you know, one of the challenges. And this is what, you know, I will also caution buyers, you know, don't just, like, go by what the bank will give you. You know, I think a lot of people look at what a bank will give them and trust that the bank is going to be a judge of whether or not it's the right investment for them. You know, my loan payment is 38k a month. It chews up an awful lot of the profit of the business. Right. I mean, granted, like. And actually this is one of the challenges, right, is half of that is interest, which is deductible, but half of it is going to equity, and I have to pay taxes on that. So you gotta really sharpen your pencil and make sure you gotta test the lower bounds. If the business shrinks this much, will I be okay? If the business shrinks this much, will I be okay? You need to know what your. Your tolerances are because a lot of people experience the J curve. And if you're not careful, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble really fast. And if you've collateralized your home, you know, it. It can be disaster. And we've heard that, you know, for other people on the show.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, when I did the lab way back 22, maybe there was. There's a modeling section and they really encourage you to break the model. Where is that point where your business is no longer viable? And essentially, what does revenue have to the exact thing that you just captured? How much do sales dip before the business is no longer viable and the model breaks? So understanding that number very clearly, is it just a invaluable exercise? Chris, anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to share?

[Chris Farkas]

I mean, at the risk of being. I don't even know what the word I'm looking for is, Will, I think, you know, I listened to your show a lot when I. When I was shopping around, and it really was invaluable to me to hear everybody's stories. I remember one that was, you know, disastrous for somebody and. And actually made my wife listen to it because I wanted her to know, like, these are the stakes that we're talking about, you know, and one of

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

the horror stories, you played it for your wife.

[Chris Farkas]

Yeah.

[Will Smith]

And.

[Chris Farkas]

And I think, you know, you do the community a really great service by. By putting all these stories out there and giving people the opportunity to hear about the range of things that can go right and wrong. I think sometimes, I know in the lab, I sometimes look to the right of me and look to the left of me and sometimes saw people in my cohort that I was afraid for, that I wasn't sure that they were really ready for what they were potentially getting themselves into. And I think that your show helps with that if people are paying attention and listening. Well, so kudos to you. Thank you for. For doing that for me.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Well, thank you for saying that, Chris. I really appreciate that. Speaking, you know, the. The ups and downs of this world, you know, they. In a single story, they. There are there. It happens, like yours. But love that I got you. When things are looking rosy now. Where is revenue, by the way?

[Chris Farkas]

Today we're on track. I think we have a decent shot of positively comping that last year. So we ended up coming in actually just under 3 million last year. And this year, I think we're gonna. We're Gonna probably beat 3, 4.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Right, right.

[Will Smith]

We're.

[Chris Farkas]

We're shooting for. For 5. A run rate of 5 in 20. 20. 28, and a run rate of 10 in 2030.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Wow. Doubling from 28. Doubling in two years from 28 to 30. And is that, if I may, is that based on hope or is that. Is. Is there a. Is there a miracle path that gets you there?

[Chris Farkas]

No, I have. I have some particular paths that I think that are going to get us there and just to be clear, I don't think that that's all going to be organic growth. I think that there will probably be some acquisition that contributes to that.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Great Chris Farkas Great story. Congratulations on finding that that bug and surviving that very painful J curve and being where you are today and making all this happen for yourself. Really appreciate you coming on and sharing. So thank you.

[Chris Farkas]

Thanks Will.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Hope you enjoyed that interview.

[Will Smith]

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

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[Will Smith]

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

at acquiringminds Co. You'll also find all our webinars there on the website, both those we have coming up and recordings of past webinars.

[Will Smith]

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

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