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Acquiring Minds
It's All Your Fault: How to Become CEO of Your Acquisition
00:50:53
Mike Curry bought a business only to struggle for years as its new CEO. He shares the lessons that unlocked 2x growth.
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- [00:11]
A
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. My guest today is Mike Curry, who acquired a medical physics business in 2014. Mike goes deep in this conversation about the reality of becoming the CEO of a small business. It is not easy, as you've heard over and over from guests on Acquiring Minds, especially during the transition, when not only is there a learning curve to understand the business you just acquired, but many searchers are also becoming CEOs for the first time in that moment. And then always there's the challenge of earning the trust of your new employees. Mike puts this beautifully in the interview. You acquire the business, you don't acquire the hearts and minds of the employees. Strong words. So Mike and I got so deep during the conversation that I never had him define what the business he acquired actually does. So I'm putting it here. Apex Physics Partners provide support services to medical physicists and physics practices. And medical physics generally is the part of healthcare related to radiation and radiation safety. Now that you know what Mike acquired and runs to this day, here he is, Mike Curry. Mike Curry, thank you for joining me today on Acquiring Minds.
- [01:31]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [01:33]
A
You acquired a medical physics business. You and a partner in 2014. You're going to have to explain to us what medical physics is. And in these last seven and a half years, you've grown the business considerably. You are still at the helm of the company.
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B
So.
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A
So we are going to hear the story of a business acquisition, your story of business acquisition. But start us off, Mike, with a little bit of background on you, give us two or three minutes on what you were doing before the acquisition and what led you to want to go out and buy a business. Sure.
- [02:08]
B
So I am originally from Atlanta, Georgia. I went to Emory University, where I was an undergraduate business major. And directly out of college, I took my first job in investment banking in the UK of all places. And so I worked abroad, worked there for three years, and had a family event. My father actually took ill and passed away from lung cancer, which was a big shift in my life and career plan. So I moved back to Atlanta. And I remember as a result of that life event, thinking back to my graduation day at college, where the dean of the undergraduate business program, who also taught entrepreneurship, gave me and my mom a big hug when I told her that I got this great banking job and that I was moving to London. And she was very excited and she gave me a big hug and whispered in my ear, good luck with the banking job, but call me when you're ready to be an entrepreneur. And I think that she saw how my eyes lit up and how engaged I was in her entrepreneurship class. And so I think that she saw that somewhere deep down that entrepreneurial bug still existed. And I thought when I moved back to Atlanta, it. If not now, when? And so my first entrepreneurial venture was starting a men's custom clothing business called Phoenix Bespoke with a college classmate and good friend of mine. We ran the business from 2007 to 2008, 2009, and we, as many other small businesses, felt the crunch of the financial crisis and going as a bootstrap business into the headwinds of a pretty difficult time in a difficult economy. We had to make the really tough decision to close down the business. But one of the pieces of serendipity that came from that process was I found out about acquiring a small business through conversations with one of our key customers. And so one of our customers in the clothing business graduated from business school, teamed up with a classmate of his and started to search for a small business to purchase. They found a business in Arizona, bought that business, they were on the path of growing that business and found an additional business in a similar industry in Atlanta, which brought him to Atlanta to acquire and then integrate that business. And so was sitting one day talking with a client who's also a friend and over a Starbucks coffee. And that's when he really planted the seed and asked the question. He said, hey, I know that you have a head for business and you're very entrepreneurial, but have you ever thought about buying a business instead of trying to start one from scratch? And I hadn't because I think I, like many folks, thought that the archetype of an entrepreneur is kind of what you read about in Entrepreneur mag, or in Fast Company or in Inc. Where it's the bootstrap. Scrappy. I have a once in a lifetime idea, income hell or high water I'm going to make. But I never thought about entrepreneurship through acquisition, nor did I realize that you could actually buy an existing business, get in the business, identify opportunities to grow the business, to grow as a person, as a leader, and produce not only a good living, but a really good result for the company and for the people that work for you. And so with that little nugget of that conversation, I started to go to YouTube and I found a few grainy videos about people buying businesses. And I think the concept of Entrepreneurship through acquisition has clearly grown in popularity over the years. But if you kind of rewind to 2008, 2009, there were a few people, but it still seemed pretty far off. But I did catch a video of a professor at Stanford University by the name of Irv Grossbeck, who is one of the, you know, one of the godfathers of the search fund model, which is a path, a specific path towards entrepreneurship through acquisition. And, you know, not knowing who he was or how important he was to the ecosystem, I looked him up on Google and I just cold called him and he actually answered the phone and was gracious enough to spend 45 minutes to an hour talking to me about buying a business, about the fact that he had personally invested and mentored other young people who had similar ambitions as myself, who kind of found themselves not necessarily wanting to work for a big corporate, but didn't have the game changing technology innovative startup either, but wanted to do something entrepreneurial. And I left that call with Irv with a really renewed sense of excitement because I left the call feeling as though this is something that I could do that was achievable. It wasn't going to be easy, but there were more people out there who had done it than I thought. And some of those people, as we progress down our path of acquiring our business, turn into really allies, investors and mentors. So fast forward a couple of years, per the advice of Irv on that conversation, I actually went back to business school. I felt as though there were some things that I still wanted to learn and wanted to use that time to kind of refresh my skillset and use some of the opportunity that I had in downtime to intern, to actually work with investment firms that were focused on purchasing small businesses and use that opportunity to learn from people who made a living identifying business opportunities for small businesses, knowing that that was a key missing ingredient to my skill set at the time. And by the time I graduated business school from the University of Chicago in 2013, my business partner today and longtime friend from way back in university days at Emory University both decided that we were at a point in our careers where we wanted to take this leap. We wanted to work together as partners to identify a small business, and we were going to do it together. And we raised our search fund, we moved back to Atlanta from Chicago and New York respectively. We got a shoebox of an office, we got a couple of interns from Emory, our alma mater, and we started to call business owners. And we found a business just outside of Baltimore doing medical physics and almost eight years later.
- [09:40]
A
And wait, wait, Mike, you're jumping ahead.
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B
Here, so.
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A
Let me hop in here with a couple of questions. So we did you. Was Booth as associated with search funds in 20, you went there 2012, 2013, was that.
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B
Yes. Right.
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A
Because it's certainly associated with them today. Although I've talked to a couple of other people who went to Booth a little bit earlier on and who said that, yeah, at that time, like, the difference between going in 2011 or 2015 in terms of search, there was a big difference. So was search search funds, was that something that Booth students were doing during your time at Booth?
- [10:21]
B
Not nearly as much as you would find today. So I kind of feel like I was in the prehistoric ages of ETA At Booth. There was definitely a lineage of people who had done it over the years. And so it was a small enough community of Booth alumni over the years. And so over the years could be spanning from the mid-90s through 2012, 13, there may have been three or four people. So there wasn't a huge data set, and there weren't a huge number of people who are attending the school who were reaching out to those folks. So to that effect, it was a pretty tight knit, small community, but people were pretty responsive. When you did reach out, what I will say is entrepreneurship through acquisition and search funds started to gain in popularity. And I can remember that a close friend of mine, Alex Hodgkin, who is also a Booth alum, he, as well as Professor Kaplan at the school, were really starting to wrap their heads around, you know, seeing what was happening at schools like Stanford, at Wharton, at Harvard Business School, at other schools at Northwestern, and starting to see that this was something that was of interest to students. And so, interestingly enough, I got to be a fly on the wall at many of these conversations. I was the president of the Entrepreneurship through Acquisition group while attending Booth. It was a really tiny group. And to see it now and to also see a class being taught and a conference being held is really remarkable to see. But in the early days, I think the school was starting to see that this was something that was of interest to students as well as alumni. So I think schools have also done a really good job of not only presenting this career path to students as they're getting their degrees, but then circling around as people have been out of school three years, five years, seven years, where they may be thinking of doing something else with their careers and reaching back out and engaging people with resources and tools and options to pursue this. So that's One thing I do want to share is that I do think one of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship through acquisition is it is not solely the path for newly minted MBAs. I know a number of people who, in their 40s, 50s, even beyond, have pivoted from their careers, have retired in some way, shape or form, and decided that with their experience or with their relationships and contacts, or they know a particular industry cold, that there are opportunities for them to identify interesting businesses that they want to be involved in as kind of the operators and leaders of those businesses. So it really is, you know, I want to kind of share that it is a path that is available for a really large swath and diverse group of people. People.
- [13:46]
A
That's great. That's a, that's a great point, Mike, because certainly I'll be the first to admit that all of my guests have been people in their probably 30s and low 40s, maybe a couple of people in their late 20s, mid late 20s. But like many things in business, you know, in your mid-40s or, or later, you know, you just stop hearing people talk to you. You know, they're, they're talking to the 20 year olds and 30 year olds. So, Mike, when you, when you went to Booth, you were already enamored of the concept of eta. You'd had your conversation with the Stanford guru, you'd done your YouTube research, where you basically decided even before you started at the program that you were going to buy a business after business school, or it was just kind of percolating, but you weren't sure what, what path you were going to go on.
- [14:34]
B
I would say, to be honest, I was probably 90% sure. And by the time I got to the end of my first year, I think that was the real gut check moment, because I know myself and I know that I'm a pretty competitive person. And so if you start to go down the path of recruiting for banking or for private equity or for technology or consulting, you know, I know that if I had gone down that path and done a summer, I would have wanted to do well during the summer, which, you know, touch wood, would mean that I may have had an opportunity to come back full time, and then I would have had a much more difficult decision to make. And so at the end of my first year, I made a really tough but right decision for myself to not kind of throw my hat in the ring to do some of that traditional summer internship recruiting.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I was fortunate to, you know, to land a, an internship with a local private equity firm with the Understanding that there was a less than 10% probability that there would be a job for me at the end of my tenure at business school, which was great for me because, again, that also aligned very nicely with that nudge that I would need to get out there and continue with the plan. But it also gave me an opportunity to learn, again, from people who are evaluating businesses every day, looking at business models, talking to business owners. And so I learned quite a bit in that internship and being a fly on the wall and seeing how professionals look at businesses and, you know, frankly, how the process of evaluating and buying and running a business, particularly a small business, is art and science. Everything doesn't translate purely into the numbers. And there's a lot of art in terms of building relationship and, you know, making sure that you engage with that team and sell the team on the vision for the future of the business that you want to build. And a lot of that stuff you just can't find in a PowerPoint presentation or in an Excel spreadsheet.
- [17:04]
A
Mike, what do you say to people who want to buy a business who didn't get any, don't have any, and didn't go out like you and get some private equity experience? All the stuff that you just talked about that you learned in that stint at the private equity shop that was so valuable to you. Can I go out and buy business if I don't have that experience?
- [17:23]
B
Absolutely. And what I would say is there are probably more resources at your disposal today. Kind of virtually, there are online communities like searchfunder.com. there are LinkedIn groups now. I think there are a lot more affinity groups. There are small business lawyers and small business diligence experts and an ecosystem of people who can help kind of help you navigate the path. So I think that those are not, you know, having private equity experience or interning at a private equity fund is not a necessary condition whatsoever. But what I would say is before you launch a search or embark on the path, I think there are a number of books that have now been written about entrepreneurship through acquisition. I would say do your diligence again. I think there are a lot of communities, a lot of the members of those communities are pretty open to engaging with people who may not have all of the experience that I alluded to earlier, but have a desire to buy a small business. And so I think that there are a lot of people and resources that you can tap into before you have to kind of jump out and do it on your own. So I would definitely say do your research, get books get engaged in online communities, look at a lot of the material that's on YouTube, go on LinkedIn and find people who have done it. Reach out to people such as yourself, right, by virtue of your platform, you know, people who've done it before. What I find that's really encouraging about the ETA community is folks who have done it tend to be pretty open minded about paying it forward and passing along wisdom and introducing people who want to do it to other folks that, that can help them along their path. So there's lots of resources, there's lots of paths, there's lots of people who want to see you be successful. So there's no need to have all of that experience, but there's also no need to go it alone and feel as though there's no one out there to help.
- [19:39]
A
Cool, Mike. So when you and your partner were getting serious about buying a business, did you consider why did you choose the traditional search fund model versus self funded or some other way?
- [19:56]
B
So I would say the practical answer was the there were no funds to self fund self. What? Yeah, I was going to, you know, I was going to get a nice healthy bill at the end of my two year stint at the University of Chicago. And that's part of the answer. And I'm being a little bit facetious, but I would say the traditional search fund model was the model that I knew the most about. I would say that the self funded path has grown in popularity and that ecosystem has really expanded in terms of banks that understand the needs of self funded searchers, service providers. I think all of that has really grown and I'm glad to see it again. The traditional search model is what we did and what worked for us. But I'm a proponent of ETA more broadly and whatever path fits an individual, their goals, their lifestyle and their means. I say go for it, but I would say just familiarity with the model, just the reality of our economic circumstance and particularly my economic circumstance, finishing school. And I think the last piece though, and it kind of goes back to this concept of community, the traditional search community. As Keith and I kind of sat down and thought about it, you had a former investment banker and myself and Keith, who is a recovering corporate lawyer today, but was a practicing attorney at the time, who had a head for business and an interest in business, but had never run anything substantial. My previous entrepreneurial venture was two people that was a bootstrap startup and really we were only accountable to and for ourselves. But buying a business with employees and customers, with long standing relationships and systems and Complexity that extended far beyond my two person venture. We wanted to surround ourselves with a community of people who had seen past where we had seen up to that point from a professional perspective, operating a business. And so what we wanted to get out of the traditional search in our experience. And I think that I've now been able to connect with some folks who have done it on their own and self funded and they've created their own ways to create that brain trust and that advisory board, for lack of a better term, around them. But what we saw as being an advantage for us going down that path was it was something that had been done before. So there were people who had experience with the model. We were going to get investors who, many of whom, and most of whom in our case actually had sat in the seat and run a business. So we were going to be working with and learning alongside people who did know and understand the pitfalls and challenges that we were going to be facing, both from a business perspective and also just from a personal and emotional and psychological perspective. It's very hard to go from being a type A personality, get the gold star individual contributor, to really having to create results through other people. It's a very big shift. And what you're being asked to do, right as a banker, as a lawyer, you know, it is very project focused and you really contribute and make sure that your part of the project is up to snuff. But you cannot, you know, achieve all of the objectives that you want to in a small business on your own. And so learning how to humble yourself, learning how to spend more of your time coaching than doing it was really helpful for us to see that we were surrounding ourselves with people that can help us make that journey and make that transition as leaders. So that's kind of why we decided to go down that path.
- [24:14]
A
And just two quick follow up questions to that. The transition to leadership, exactly what you just touched on, that when you're an individual contributor, you just have to make sure your own work product is part of perfect as you want and then the rest is somebody else's responsibility. And then now having to lead people and you know, basically extract, it's the wrong word but you know, get them to put their best, put out their best work. How, how did you find that transition? Because I think a lot of searchers are going to have, will have to go through a similar transition where they've never necessarily led before. How was that for you personally?
- [24:54]
B
So it's a tough transition. And I'll tell a really quick story about Two years into us having bought and run the company, we were struggling. Keith and I were struggling. There were more problems than we knew how to fix at one time, and we had multiple stakeholders. So we had investors, we had employees, we had customers, and everybody needed something from us. And trying to figure out how to get everybody what they needed was really challenging. And I remember one day driving home from work and going back to this concept of community, actually talking to another search fund CEO who was a few years ahead of me and Keith, but also went to our alma mater. And so I knew. I knew of this guy, and I knew that he was in the search community, and he scheduled some time to talk, and we just needed someone to vent to that. And this is hard. And how did you get the team to do this? And how did you get your investors comfortable with this? And the one thing that he shared, or two things that he shared that really helped us on our journey is one, he introduced us to this book written by Ben Horowitz called the Hard Thing about Hard Things. Yeah. And reading that book and seeing the honesty and transparency and vulnerability of an individual who didn't have it all figured out, admitting that as the CEO, he didn't have it all figured out, and that he still had imposter syndrome, and he still was wondering whether he was building the right culture and treating people the right way and making the right decisions, it almost gave me a sense of comfort that I'm not the only person, and Keith, we're not the only people who've gone through this and struggled through this. So that gave me a sense of comfort. And then the second thing that he shared, which really, I think was a transition point for both of us, was he let us vent for about five straight minutes about this person, that person, this situation. And he said, the best advice that I can give you is as the leader of the company, you should recognize that it's all your fault. And I just. And I was floored by that. And he said, what I mean by that?
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A
You're like, I was calling you to make me feel better.
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B
Exactly. And now I feel not even slightly, but materially worse because it's all my fault. But. But what he was saying was, there is just a different level of accountability and responsibility. And until you make the transition to say, right, I did not cause all of the problems in the business. Right. I don't get to direct all the personalities that I interact with, but until I kind of make that switch in my brain, that I am responsible for the results and that I Have to take the reins versus letting the business kind of pull me along or let investors pull me along, or customers kind of jerk you around. And I think at that point, I think one, it didn't solve all of the problems, but I think that it gave us a sense of a greater locus of control and a greater sense of agency, that it was up to us to manage employee issues. It was up to us to manage how we wanted to relate to our board of directors. It was up to us to. If we had a relationship with a customer where we were giving our all and we just kept getting blessed out, we had to manage that relationship. And if we felt as though that customer relationship was abusive and wasn't good for the team, we actually were the people who got to make that call. And so we had to make some of those decisions to say, hey, this is a great paying customer. But at the end of the day, we've sent three team members to service this customer, and all three of them have come back, you know, upset, crying, or, you know, not exuding kind of their regular positive energy. It is our responsibility to fix that. And I think once we started to feel as though we were empowered to make those changes and not be at effect to them, I think things started to change. And we started to build our respect from our employees, and we started to build a trust. And the one piece of advice that I would give people is when you buy a business, you don't buy the hearts and minds of the employees. A lot of people want to make a lot of changes, and they see growth potential and they see all of the great things that they want to do with the business. But that is only truly achievable once you've earned the respect and trust of your team and you have found a way to clearly articulate what you and your vision is for the business and how they can work with you to help achieve this vision. And that that vision is going to be better for everyone. And that's something, frankly, that we struggled with in the early days. And coming from environments where we were individual contributors and pretty well paid for being individual contributors, we kind of came in with the mentality that you just come in and work your tail off and you leave. And that's reward in and of itself. And at the end of the year, when the bonus ferry comes, it takes care of itself. But the business that we bought, it was more like a family. And, you know, the first thing that we learned very quickly is that people appreciate and respect money. But money was not our best tool in the toolkit to motivate and to build alignment. And it kind of blew our minds. And, you know, you always think about, you don't need to pay attention in business school to the touchy feely organizational behavior classes. But those are the classes that I think I drew upon the most.
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A
Yeah.
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B
To understand why people come to work, to understand something as simple as the CEO and president sitting down, to have lunch with the admin staff every day. Something as simple as the president and CEO taking out the trash. All of those things contribute to, I think, winning the hearts and minds. And so I think a lot of people in business forget that. Particularly as you lead a business and you want to grow it. There's only so much that you can do on your own. And you're really creating a challenge for yourself if you skip that step of getting to know your people and thinking about the culture that you want to build. Because you can come in with the greatest PowerPoint and plan an Excel spreadsheet. But that's not really how getting everybody wrong in the right direction and achieving those objectives works in practice.
- [32:29]
A
From our experience, one of the traditional searchers that I spoke with recently, his interview actually aired today. His first two weeks in this seat, he just interviewed every single person at the organization. So he didn't, you know, none of his to do lists, none of his vision ideas, none of the things on his PowerPoint or even in his own mind were a priority. That was just all put aside. In fact, I think he even kind of went in thinking, yeah, I might have some ideas, but I'm really not going to understand this business until I get in and live in the business and talk to everybody. So let me do that. And he did it systematically, every single person. And that's one of the things he now recommends to searchers coming up behind him. Another way, Mike, that I might characterize this, and you can please correct me, it almost feels like when you guys got in there in those first year or two, that you didn't really feel like it was your business, like your business at kind of a visceral level. It felt like you were maybe you'd been hired to be the CEOs, but you had bought this business and owned this business and needed to internalize that as much as if you had founded it from scratch. Am I onto something there about kind of the emotional shift that occurred?
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B
You're absolutely correct and it is a shift. And I think that that's why I think what the searcher that you alluded to is, I Think that's the right start. But I think that it's those deposits over time, as a leader, are the things that are going to build trust. So, for example, when we bought the company in 2014, we talked to employees, we brought in a third party that gave us some great intel, some very anonymous intel. But what we recognized is that we were very forthcoming, that we wanted feedback, we wanted to make things better, we wanted to make it a better place, but no one believed us, right? And so I would get in my car and Keith would get in his car and meet some of our staff, you know, on site or close to their homes and just grab coffee and catch up. And so we would ask them, hey, what's going on? What could we fix? And a lot of the times people would just say, yeah, everything is fine. And we knew that everything wasn't fine, but we knew that there was a culture that we inherited where people didn't necessarily know whether or not the leaders really wanted to hear what was going on, particularly negative feedback or if there were areas of improvement that would make things better. Ideas and suggestions kind of fell on deaf ears. And so I think for us, you know, we did get some really good feedback in the first year, and then spending the second year showing people that we cared about the feedback, and we actioned some of the things right? And we never promised that things wouldn't change, and we never promised that we could solve all of the issues in the business overnight. But I can tell you that, you know, once we started having staff meetings and we said, hey, we listen to you guys, and across these three or four dimensions, we hear you loud and clear, we got to fix these things. And then being able to report back to the staff, right in this bucket, issue number one, we fixed it.
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A
Yeah, right.
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B
And then, you know, over the course of the next year, after having, you know, shown that we. We were credible and that the culture that we said that we wanted matched, right, where people could say, well, hey, I just had a meeting with Mike and Keith, and I know they keep saying that they value healthy debate, and they were debating with one another. And then I told them, here's what I thought, and I left the room. And no one chastised me. And they actually heard me. And between the three ideas on the table, they took my idea. Now, my idea is the idea that's helping to solve one of the challenges. Like that process started to build it where cycle, like, emotionally and psychologically, it started to feel like our business and our team, and it just took time and it just took time to build that trust. And once you feel, and there isn't just one day you get out of the bed, but I think it's just a feeling that when you feel as though people trust you and trust the direction that you're taking the business in, then it feels like it's your business. And, you know, you're not pulling an organization, you know, forward, but people are like, I see it, I believe it, I'm contributing to it. You know, I can raise my hand if things aren't going well, but if I see a problem, part of the culture is I got to own it. So I can't just throw monkeys and complaints. Mike and Keith's back, and then go home. I've got to actually raise my hand and say, hey, I don't think that we're doing this right. And so I'm going to put together a little committee of people and we're going to come up with some options and solutions. And so it took us about two years to really feel like the team trusted us, that we had really properly stepped into our authority as the leaders of the company. And then from there, we started to, I think, start to move the business in the direction of the original plan. And I think that all goes to say as well, this path is not a microwaved path to success. So for people who think that, you know, oh, I'm going to jump in, and in 12 months, I'm going to solve these challenges, I'm going to, you know, quadruple this business. And you may. And if you can do that, bless you. That has not been our experience. I don't think that that is the typical experience. I think what is the typical experience is that it takes time for you to build your muscle as a leader, for you to build the trust with the team, for the team to get in sync, for you to, you know, to add some people to the team that help you get to where you want to go. And it's really about building that momentum so that the things that you wanted to do with the business, now you have the momentum for years and years to come to achieve the success that you want. But I don't, you know, I would not tell people with a straight face that, you know, this is a path that typically leads to microwave results. I think it's more of a patient, consistent effort. And I tell people, people probably overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in five. And so it was really special, actually, in our fifth year of ownership to take some of that feedback that we got in the first year because it took us a while, but we took a slew of feedback, positive and negative, and we put it together in a presentation and we shared it with the entire company. And at year five, we did just a little bit of a retrospective. So we showed people how many employees were at the business, the size of the business, the type of equipment that we had, the benefits that we had, the customers that we had, the leadership structure and opportunities for career advancement. So we really got to show people it didn't seem like it because it took time. But let's all take a blast to the past when Mike and Keith showed up 50 miles north of Baltimore in horse country with cufflink shirts. Completely out of place. Completely out of place right where we started and then where we ended up five years later in being able to honestly and proudly report that to a large degree, the issues and opportunities addressed in the feedback session had been executed against and that the company was larger, the company was on better financial standing, people were making more money, more take home, the company had grown. Yeah.
- [41:08]
A
Mike, share some of those specifics with me. How many employees was it when you acquired it and how many was it five years later? And if you can talk revenue and sales as well, locations, anything, any metrics, that would be interesting.
- [41:21]
B
Sure. So I'll focus on kind of headcount, which is a good barometer for kind of sales. But when we started, there were 16 people total in the business, including, including Keith and myself. Five years later we were at 34 people. And essentially we doubled the technical staff, which just as a rough benchmark, kind of approximate that. We doubled the size of the revenue of the business to have enough revenue to support essentially doubling the technical staff. And we've grown beyond that. And so we've gotten each person on that team their own set of equipment where people were sharing equipment. We've markedly improved the benefits package, the paid time off policy, continuing education policy. We've improved again career opportunities. We were a flat organization at 16. It was Mike and Keith and everybody else. And today we have a president of that group. We have two senior managers that report to the president. We have team leads, we have now a regulatory QA person, we have a client service manager where that was a flat side of the business. And so we've been able, and this is actually, for me, the most rewarding part of part of the gig is we hired a woman in 2015 to be a part time admin from Craigslist. And she is now our director of HR and head of integrations for all of Apex. And so we took kghp, grew it, took some of our learnings, built a larger organization, and have continued to acquire businesses under the new banner. And to see people from that Original team in 2014 and 2015 progress and blossom and do things that, frankly, sitting around the lunchroom table in the early days, folks thought we were crazy. That is truly, I think, one of the most rewarding elements. And I think that that's something that people don't think that they will feel as rewarded buy because, you know, obviously there are financial rewards, you know, by owning a business and growing a business and, you know, building, you know, your wealth and financial independence and the like. But I think also, I don't think there's a greater feeling than seeing potential, grooming potential and being a part of helping somebody achieve their goals and vision and mission and life and give them access to opportunity. And I think that that's a. It's a really cool position to be in, you know, running a business. And because you're running a small business and you have a pulse of what's going on, the feedback and the impact that you're able to make is a lot more direct. Right? You are directly involved in the hiring and the culture that you're building and how people are compensated and what new challenge you're going to take on next and how are you going to give this person an opportunity to prove him or herself is just a direct one to one feedback loop of being able to create impact for yourself, but for your team.
- [45:04]
A
Mike, we're about a time, but I want to ask you a question related to why you. So I found you because of that article that you published in Entrepreneur magazine that was basically advocating ETA entrepreneurship through acquisition. But this article is from August and you've been talking about and excited about ETA, I guess going back to those grainy videos in 2008, 2009 on YouTube. So why now? What inspired you to publish this article at this moment in time?
- [45:37]
B
So I think a few things. I think candidly, I was working my butt off for a long time and I just wanted to make sure that I was being a good steward of the business. But I think the second piece is both Keith and myself were really impacted by the killing of George Floyd and a lot of the conversations that were happening in the country around social justice, economic justice, and access to opportunity. And I just observed in a lot of the press that I read that there was a lot of movement and activity to Open the aperture in terms of opportunity and diversity for entrepreneurship, particularly in the startup world, which I think is great and I think is sorely needed. But I think that this path of entrepreneurship through acquisition, I think both from a ethnic perspective, from a gender perspective, from an age perspective, from a professional background perspective, I think more people should be educated and made aware that this is a career path and opportunity. And I wanted to. To highlight that there are different ways to achieve success and that all of that success doesn't look the same. All of that success doesn't come from the same background. And I think the big thing that Keith and I tried to do when we do things like write articles and speak at schools or in other forums, is we try to demystify the process. And we try to let people know that on the outside looking in, these people who go out and buy businesses, a lot of whom are very polished and very smart, and sometimes it can be daunting and people don't feel as though they can do it, or the story that they hear is, I bought the business, I was really smart, everything worked swimmingly well, and I'm a rock star. And I wanted to just share that our story wasn't that, and our story was rocky, and there were times where we doubted whether or not we will be able to be good leaders of the business. And, you know, I tell people a true story. There was a time early in our leadership period where, you know, I drove home and I sat in a grocery store parking lot and I cried, and I called my mom and asked her, you know, I spent all this money to go to business school. Am I doing the right thing? Am I really cut out to be a CEO or a leader of a small business? And, you know, I just want people to know that it's not easy, but it's doable. And I want more people to at least investigate it as an option and as a path if they truly have that entrepreneurial bug. And I think that is just another way to express a desire to lead, to manage, to grow outside of, kind of like I said, going back to 2008, 2009, kind of what seems to be the typical perception of what entrepreneurship is, which is, you know, taking an idea from scratch and, you know, building a startup. There's. There are other paths, and I just want to make sure more people in more places, from other backgrounds, no matter how you slice it, see someone or hear from someone, that it's achievable and doable. And, you know, Keith and I, you know, where we can also put our money where our mouths are. But definitely, we definitely put our time where our hearts and intentions are and we make as much time as we possibly can to connect with and shepherd and guide or make introductions to people who are who are considering this path. So if people want to connect with me, want to learn more, want to talk to people who've done traditional search, self funded search and anything in between, I'm happy to be a resource and helpful if I can.
- [49:43]
A
Well, that's great Mike, and that was an awesome sentiment you expressed there, so let's leave it at that. And why don't you share with the audience how people can reach out to you if they need your help or guidance or just want to talk about what the possibilities are.
- [49:58]
B
Sure. I think the easiest way to connect with me is via LinkedIn. So first name Michael last name Curry. I am the CEO of Apex Physics Partners and besides that you can shoot me an email at mcurry C U r r yapexphysicspartners all one word.com and happy to be a resource if I can.
- [50:23]
A
That's great Mike. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story, the downs and the ups and congratulations on on getting through those first two years.
- [50:34]
B
Thank you very much and thank you for having me. I I really enjoyed this.