Leaving $700s/Yr to Buy an Underperforming Printing Business

Summary

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Acquiring Minds Podcast Summary

Episode: Leaving $700s/Yr to Buy an Underperforming Printing Business

Host: Will Smith
Guest: Dom Smith, Owner of PrintMoz
Release Date: June 22, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Will Smith interviews Dom Smith, who made the bold leap from a lucrative private equity role—earning well into the high six figures—to purchase PrintMoz, an underperforming large format printing business in Southern California. The conversation covers Dom’s motivations, the acquisition process, diligence wins and warnings, early days in the trenches as an operator, and hard-earned lessons on business transformation and people management. The episode is rich with practical advice and candid reflections for anyone contemplating the path of acquisition entrepreneurship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dom’s Background & Motivation for the Leap

• Finance to Entrepreneurship: Started at JP Morgan, then 6.5 years in Ares Management’s private credit group (MM:05:38).
• Financial Success at a Young Age: At 29, earning well into the high six figures, approaching a 7-figure annual comp (MM:08:18).
• Motivation Beyond Money: Despite lucrative pay, felt a lack of passion and ownership. Sought freedom and the chance to shape his own destiny.
  • “When I was getting those big bonuses at the end of the year, I didn't really feel very much.” — Dom (MM:08:01)
  • Wanted control, possibility to “break up my career in sprints,” and more direct reward for effort.
• Search for Path with Purpose: The transition was about meaningful work, autonomy, and long-term flexibility, even while appreciating the grind (MM:10:09).

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2. Search and Acquisition Process

Search Strategy

• Geographic & EBITDA Criteria: Sought a SoCal-based business with ~$1M EBITDA/SDE, industry-agnostic (MM:11:03).
• Generalist Approach: Leveraged his broad experience “casting a wide net,” open to many industries rather than chasing a specific thesis (MM:12:52).

Escape from a Bad Deal

• First LOI Wasn’t PrintMoz: Diligenced an aerospace NDT company; discovered existential customer risk using scrappy, network-driven diligence (MM:12:57–17:41).
  • Quote: “If there are kind of 101 issues that you cannot, through normal means, get comfortable with, you have to be scrappy and get in the weeds and figure out how to get the answers.” — Dom (MM:16:59)
• Outcome: Deal died. “Incredible bullet dodged...”

Finding PrintMoz

• Initial Skepticism: Print industry reputation as declining, but saw opportunity in large format, E-commerce-oriented segment (MM:19:01).
• Industry Nuances: Understood from prior exposure (Ares had invested in FastSigns) that signage/large format isn’t declining like other print categories. Big, stable market with potential for growth (MM:22:19).

What Attracted Dom to PrintMoz

• Assets & Growth Potential: New, high-quality equipment running far below full utilization (MM:23:55).
• E-Com/Digital Native: Early mover advantage, strong organic rankings—though execution on conversion and e-marketing lagged behind competitors (MM:29:35).
• Trustworthy Seller: Seller was not “all in” (already had six kids, moving out of state); relationship and “gut feel” factored heavily (MM:23:55, 40:21).

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3. Diligence Discoveries & Negotiations

Key Diligence Win

• Identified two “revenue” months inflated by $500k worth of asset sales; flagged to seller, resulting in a ~$1M price reduction (MM:32:00–34:30).
  • “He was not super financially savvy… I think he was just looking at his bank account each month and it looked good.” — Dom (MM:32:44)
• SDE/EBITDA recast to ~$800K to $1.1M after all adjustments (MM:36:23).

Valuation & Structure

• Closed for ~$2.8M all-in (including fees and some lease/advance payments), about a 3–3.5x multiple—“a low multiple, driven by messy financials and personal expenses” (MM:37:25).
• SBA Lending: 10–15% down, 5% seller note, remainder SBA debt, assisted by Heather Anderson (MM:47:21).

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4. Transition & Operating Realities

Was PrintMoz as Promised?

• Yes, “truly passive” as advertised if run status quo—seller had built robust proprietary workflow software (MM:49:07).
• People Element: Not actually absentee—emotional presence and leadership needed, especially post-transition (MM:51:40).

People & Leadership

• Immediate HR challenges and emotional management required with staff (MM:51:40–53:04, 73:58).
  • “You are almost a therapist... It's a whole different skill.” — Dom (MM:75:31)
• Dom worked to build trust, allay acquisition fears, and shape a more proactive, customer-centric team culture.

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5. Turning Around and Growing PrintMoz

What Worked

• Customer Focus: Personally calling customers, learning what they do, and upselling ancillary printing needs often uncovered previously untapped revenue (MM:54:03).

• Large Contracts/Bids: Began bidding municipal and large enterprise work—won deals that became up to 10% of annual revenue (MM:56:35).

• Reactivated Large Accounts: Won back a major jewelry chain as a client by handling complex and demanding fulfillment work, which became a key niche for growth (MM:56:36–57:31).

• Sales Hires: Adding a motivated and managed sales rep produced a “step change” in growth (MM:77:02).

• Fixing Basics: Solved a crippling website speed issue—quick, high-impact win that directly boosted sales.

  • “We ultimately did find what the driving issue was for the underperformance. It was very simple... tried to save a hundred dollars a month on servers, and in different parts of the country the website was moving at a snail's pace.” — Dom (MM:41:37)

What Didn’t Work

• Marketing “Wastes”: Multiple $10–15K spends on consultants and agencies yielded little return.
  • “I spent $13,000 on email marketing and generated $1,000 in revenue (MM:59:44)... [But] the business was cash flowing, so I had the flexibility to throw money at a lot of different things.”
  • “No one is going to care as much as you do... The more you learn about your business, the better you can direct outsourced parties—but early on, you have to get in the weeds.” (MM:68:47, 69:42, 70:44)

Lessons from Wasted Spend

• Don’t Over-Outsource: “It never really pans out how you would expect… you should be doing as much yourself as possible, at least at first.” — Dom (MM:69:42, 70:44)
• Be In the Weeds: Cautionary tale re: the “private equity throw-money-at-the-problem” approach; small business needs scrappy, hands-on involvement.

Managing Growth Pains

• Growth means increased complexity but is vital, as even a “passive” business deteriorates with rising costs (rent, tariffs, materials).

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6. Results and Reflections

Early Success

• Revenue flat year one (in line with projections) after stabilizing business (MM:77:02).
• Hired a sales rep, then achieved 30%—and now toward 50%—YoY revenue growth (MM:77:02).
  • “Just coming out of that J curve... It’s very rewarding, very exciting.” — Dom

“Defining Period” of Dom’s Career

• Quote: “This has been an extremely rewarding experience that I think I’ll look back on as the defining period of my career.” — Dom (MM:79:07)
• Emphasizes the importance of being comfortable with risk and uncertainty; “the E is more important than the A in ETA” (Entrepreneurship through Acquisition); you can’t diligence away all risk (MM:43:47 & 81:53).

Why Dom Would Sell Instead of Coast

• Aim to build a track record (“log a win”), then possibly roll capital and replication into a portfolio or independent sponsor model (MM:72:14).

On Industry Opportunity for Others

• Large, established, but fragmented and slow-moving space—high potential for hungry, energetic owners to stand out (“just with the vibes”).
  • “A lot of these unsexy legacy industries… it can be easier to stand out if you bring that energy.” — Dom (MM:62:34, 63:51)

On Solitude & Risk

• Entrepreneurship is a lonely journey—requires comfort with ambiguity and an ability to “make your own luck through sheer will and grit” (MM:81:53).
  • “You have to be really comfortable with risk. ...Every business that you buy... will have some hair on it and you just have to be able to live with that risk and uncertainty.” — Dom

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Money ≠ Fulfillment:
  • “When I was getting those big bonuses at the end of the year, I didn’t really feel very much.” (MM:08:01, Dom)
• On Diligence:
  • “If there are... issues that you cannot, through normal means, get comfortable with, you have to be scrappy and get in the weeds.” (MM:16:59, Dom)
• Acquisition Price Negotiation:
  • “I needed to renegotiate the purchase price down. I took about a million dollars off of the purchase price.” (MM:32:00–34:30, Dom)
• Risk:
  • “There's no way to do this perfectly... a large part of entrepreneurship is comfort with uncertainty and tolerating risk.” (MM:43:47, Will)
• On the Value of Energy:
  • “It is refreshing to not have an older, worn out person... just saying the same script. I think operating in an industry where that is the standard, it is a lot easier to stand out.” (MM:62:34, Dom)
• People Management:
  • “You are almost a therapist... It's a whole different skill.” (MM:75:31, Dom)
• Loneliness of the Path:
  • “There are certain days where I have no idea what I should be doing and where I should be spending my time.” (MM:81:53, Dom)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-------------|------------------------------------------------------| | 05:10-10:17 | Dom’s finance background and motivation transition | | 12:52-17:41 | Diligence on bad LOI and dodged bullet | | 19:01-26:56 | PrintMoz opportunity, industry insights | | 32:00-39:10 | Diligence, valuation, and deal structure | | 47:21-48:55 | SBA financing and closing details | | 49:07-54:03 | Early days post-close, “passivity,” people issues | | 54:03-59:44 | Growth levers: sales, customer relations, bids | | 59:44-68:47 | Failed experiments, marketing waste, learning lessons| | 69:42-71:47 | Limitations of outsourcing, in-the-weeds operator | | 73:58-76:55 | People management: differences from white-collar | | 77:02-80:44 | Results: revenue growth, big career leap | | 81:53-84:12 | Loneliness, risk, entrepreneurial mindset |

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Takeaways for Acquisition Entrepreneurs

• Don’t underestimate the importance of true, hands-on diligence—occasionally requiring dramatic, creative efforts.
• Prepare for emotional leadership: team trust, transition fears, and people politics are as real as operational or financial tasks.
• Early mistakes with consultants and agencies can be expensive; no one will “get in the weeds” like you will.
• “Getting in the game” often beats waiting for a “perfect” business—the learning compounding post-acquisition is often decisive.
• Energy, hustle, and willingness to engage with customers directly is a major competitive advantage, especially in stolid industries.
• Acquisition entrepreneurship is ultimately about calculated risks, grit, and self-accountability. There's no owner's manual.

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For more, including numbers and Dom’s full reflections, check out his LinkedIn post and the Acquiring Minds newsletter.

Transcript

[Will Smith]

For many of us, the pull of

[Walker Deibel]

entrepreneurship is just too strong.

[Will Smith]

So strong that you leave a very lucrative job, one that promises to only get more so in the years ahead. Today's guest, Dom Smith worked in private equity, earning in the high six figures before age 30. But it's not all about the money. As Dom put it, when I was getting those big bonuses at the end of the year, I didn't really feel very much.

[Walker Deibel]

What I really cared about and what

[Will Smith]

I was looking for is something that I could find true passion in today. Dom is the owner of Print Moz, a large format printing business in Southern California. Two themes that you've heard on Acquiring

[Walker Deibel]

Minds appear in Dom's story.

[Will Smith]

The first, the value of getting in the game. There were features of Print Moz that might have scared Dom off, in particular the fact that the business was declining. Listen for why he pushed forward anyway. The second theme, getting in the weeds, coming from private equity. Dom was tempted by the offers of consultants and agencies to solve his business's problems for him that he could, quote, throw money at the problem. But ultimately he has learned the hard way that getting his hands dirty is more effective than outsourcing, not to mention better for his long term career as

[Walker Deibel]

business owner and builder.

[Will Smith]

We discuss here is Dom smith, owner of PrintMoz Webinars. There are sticking points that are common in searcher deals, often relating to due diligence findings or changes to the business during the exclusivity period or seller note terms or non competes or of course working capital. Attorney James David Williams, who specializes in small business acquisitions, returns for an office hours to walk you through these sticking points and how to overcome them. The webinar is Overcoming Common Deal Sticking Points and it is tomorrow, Tuesday, June 23rd noon Eastern. Link to register is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage Acquiringminds Co. Also, when SBA lenders consider a searcher's acquisition, they're not just underwriting the business, they're underwriting you. In a webinar this Thursday, leading SBA loan broker Heather Anderson will explain how lenders evaluate a buyer's background when deciding

[Walker Deibel]

whether to approve an acquisition loan.

[Will Smith]

Topics covered to include how SBA lenders evaluate buyer experience, how to frame your resume for lender confidence, common buyer weaknesses that raise concerns, and how lenders think about leadership, operations and industry experience, or lack thereof. The webinar is Transferable Skills Crafting youg Resume for SBA Lenders and it is this Thursday, June 25 noon Eastern Link to register is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on

[Walker Deibel]

the Acquiring Minds homepage. Acquiringminds Co.

[Nick Akers]

Foreign

[Will Smith]

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.

[Nick Akers]

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

[Walker Deibel]

35 year old business.

[Nick Akers]

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's 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 on I n Z O or email nick directly@nickot technologies.com

[Walker Deibel]

Dom Smith welcome to Acquiring Minds.

[Dom Smith]

Thank you, thank you. Very happy to be here. I am a longtime listener, so very excited to be on DOM.

[Walker Deibel]

You walked away from a lucrative W2 in finance to buy a large format printing business and you've been going through your initiation as a business owner. We're going to hear all about it. Let's dive in starting with some background on you please.

[Dom Smith]

Dom yeah, so for a little bit of background on myself, I started out my career path kind of in a traditional finance type of role. Started out in banking at JP Morgan, did that for about a year and then I moved over to Aries Management where I was for six and a half years and I was in the private credit group there, so financing private equity buyouts. Aries was and continues to be the biggest direct lender in the private credit market in the US as well as Europe. I had a great run there. When I joined in 2018 I think we were 185 billion AUM and by the time I left in 2025 we were 550 billion AUM and I really enjoyed it. I have nothing but good things to say about Aries, but I think there was a little bit that was left to be desired from a passion standpoint. I did get worked pretty hard both in banking as well as at Aries. So I was looking for other potential career paths and avenues to pursue. And ETA really stood out to me.

[Will Smith]

So

[Walker Deibel]

the hard work bit wasn't gonna. ETA was not gonna solve that. You were gonna be working hard here as well, as you have found out, but you no doubt predicted. So this. That wasn't the thing you were trying to solve. What. What were you trying to solve?

[Dom Smith]

No, I. So I knew that I would be inev. Inevitably working very hard and anything that I would do in life, that's kind of just the type of person that I am. But I felt like I wasn't necessarily really tied to or benefiting from the hard work that I was putting in while I was at Aries. It was very transactional, obviously. It was, you know, when, when you do a. A groundbreaking record deal, it's always onto the next one. And I could really see what my path would look like if I stuck around at Aries. And it was a very lucrative path. You know, I wasn't far off from a seven figure a year type of compensation package. And the path ahead of that, it, you know, increases from there. And I was pretty young when I left. I was 29, but I.

[Walker Deibel]

And how much, how much. What was your compensation at that time?

[Dom Smith]

Just to be respectful for the. My prior employer and colleagues, it was kind of midpoint of 500k to a million a year, give or take a little bit.

[Walker Deibel]

So. High six figures.

[Dom Smith]

Yes. Yeah. Wow.

[Walker Deibel]

In your 20s. In your late 20s. Wow. Yeah.

[Dom Smith]

And that was certainly a hard thing to, to walk away from. But what I really cared about and what I was looking for is something that I could find true passion in. I. When I was getting those big bonuses at the end of the year, I didn't really feel very much. You know, it wasn't exactly as rewarding as what I think I was hoping for and envisioned might be. You know, a greater sense of being rewarded when it's your own business. I could see the partners in my group that really had a hand in building Aries and it was kind of their baby. And I saw how they conducted themselves and how much they truly cared. And I honestly just did not think that I could get there without having a more meaningful ownership stake or really feeling like it was my own. And I'd say freedom is also a very important thing to me. I. I want, you know, if I was. If I say that Aries and stuck it out, you're going to work very hard and be in the weeds for, you know, 30 years and, you know, you can definitely do that in entrepreneurship as well. But I was hoping to create a path and we'll get into it a little bit more where I could potentially break up my career a little bit in sprints and you know, eventually gets to the point where I can take my foot off the pedal if I want to need to. Kids were not very, still are not very far off for me. So I felt like the timing was right.

[Walker Deibel]

Well, the amount of W2 income you left behind is significant and it just makes the decision to pursue this path that much, I guess, more difficult. I mean, that, that, that is weighting you in this, staying in the W2 track more heavily maybe than somebody who is earning $150,000 a year, let's say. So all the more, it's a testament all the more to you're really wanting to, to, to pursue this path. And that's a theme that we'll probably return to over the course of our conversation. But this is great. Okay, Dom, so let's get into the search itself. Tell us geographically where you are and were and what that looked like and then your other criteria as well.

[Dom Smith]

Yes. So I, I went to USC for college in la and then I was working in la, so I wanted to stick around Southern California. That was one of my criteria. And I was looking for a business with around 1 million of EBITDA or SDE because that's, you know, all of your listeners, you would kind of understand that that's kind of a sweet spot for buying a business. The valuation multiples are less fundamental, industry driven, not necessarily where, you know, comps are trading at and more so, more so just debt service coverage driven. And oftentimes these sale processes are being run by less sophisticated brokers that might be selling a, you know, decent sized printing business one day and a restaurant business the next. So there's opportunity, I think, to get really good deals, which I did end up able, being able to execute for this one. So, and I guess last point, I was industry agnostic when I was at Aries, just a generalist. And I came across way too many companies and even niche industries that I did not even know existed and that I was able to build a thesis around and get very excited about. For me to necessarily pigeonhole myself or focus just on one end market. I do appreciate searchers that have an industry thesis and pursue acquisition that way. And I think it's getting really smart in the space and mapping it out, figuring out who the top players would be, maybe having an M and a strategy from there. That's A great way of doing it. For me, I kind of just cast more of a wide net. I wanted to be in SoCal and wanted a business of a certain size.

[Walker Deibel]

Okay, there was one business that you liked and went after. Tell that story.

[Dom Smith]

Yes. So this will give you a sense of how wide the net that I cast was. I had another business under loi. I was doing the search while I was still employed at Aries, by the way. Um, so lots of, you know, late nights, weekends. Um, it was pretty hectic and the entire search process took about a year. But about four or five months into my search, I submitted an LOI and got a business under eye that LOI that was a aerospace, non destructive testing and chemical processing business. So they essentially did quality control for metal components that were going on military and commercial aviation platforms. And it seemed to be a good business. It was severely impacted by Covid just because plane production basically came to a halt. And then it was on the way out and it was showing very, very strong growth. And it was kind of being led by one customer in particular. And I tried. It was 35%, give or take of revenue. I tried to get the owner to introduce me to the customer.

[Walker Deibel]

To be 35% of revenue being really bad concentration. Yes, for the audience will probably mostly understand that. But just to underline it, that's pretty severe.

[Dom Smith]

Yes, a lot of concentration on revenue. I wasn't sure about earnings. The owner was not sure about earnings. Could have been more, could have been less. That part was unclear. The prior owner, he did not let me connect with this customer. So I thought, this is too much of a risk for me to just go in blindly. I'm gonna have to find another way in and talk to this customer. So I was able to leverage some contacts that I had. And I did some research on that customer, uncovered that a kind of colleague of mine, a guy who was higher up at a fund in la, their fund actually used to own that business and they sold it about 10 years prior. So I connected with him, talked with him about the business. He liked it a lot. And they said, I think I might know someone that still works there. Let me set up a phone call. So I kind of blindly went on the phone and I found that it was the general manager of the facility that managed that contract. And, you know, two minutes. And he said, we love these guys, they're great. But we're switching materials from steel to aluminum. It was for a missile platform. And the US army wanted greater range, so they wanted it to be lighter and the company that I was looking at did not have the ability to do the same process that they were doing on aluminum. So that business, 35% of revenue was at risk of going away. I brought that up to the seller. He, I'm not sure if this is true, but he was not aware of this. And then he and the broker, you know, kind of pulled away for a week or so. And then they approached me and said, hey, we have to pull this process because they had to go through a new regulatory approval process that can take like up to a year and stand up this whole new service line in order to keep that business.

[Walker Deibel]

You were looking at this business with a lot of concentration. You were able to work your network to find a contact, in fact the general manager at the customer of the business that you were contemplating buying that represented 35% of this revenue. Get that general manager on the phone and in two minutes he tells you that they're probably going to move away from your target business because of this shift from to aluminum. What an incredible bullet dodged, missile dodged. Haha. In your case, what's the learning there? That just incredibly lucky diligence, not luck. You, you, you, you, you deserve credit for it.

[Dom Smith]

But, but still, yeah, if there are kind of 101 issues that you cannot, through normal means get comfortable with, you have to be scrappy and you have to get in the weeds and figure out how to get the answers that you need to be comfortable to move forward. Because without having that conversation, if I just, I wouldn't have closed the deal without at least having some sort of communication conversation with that customer. It's just too much risk. And you know, that's a good case study of, of why it's so important to do that. If I didn't do that and I went through with the acquisition, they were trying to push me to move quickly. It could be, I could be in a very dark situation right now.

[Will Smith]

Buying a small business sounds simple.

[Walker Deibel]

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. What 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.

[Walker Deibel]

An active community deal Reviews post close

[Will Smith]

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]

[Walker Deibel]

acquiringminds okay, tell us about this printing business that you found.

[Nick Akers]

Yes.

[Dom Smith]

So shortly after I parted ways with the aerospace seller and deal, I kind of went back to the drawing board and I remembered that a few weeks prior I was on a broker's email chain. I was sent a short, very brief sim, if you'd even call it that, on this printing business. And I remember there was something about it being highly automated and passive. You know, you see that all the time in these sort of, sorts of marketing materials. But I took a closer look. At first I thought printing, why would I want to get into that industry? That's, that is a dying, secular decline type of industry and product set. But I looked a little bit closer and it was large format printing. And from Aries, we actually had an investment in a printing and signage franchise concept called Fast Signs. You've probably seen them, whether or not you've noticed it, you've driven by them before. Um, and I was able to look around at some of the resources that we had internally, like some consultant marketing decks on the industry and Fast Signs, one of the major risks to their business was a shift to E commerce, which Printmoz, the core business is E commerce oriented, kind of like a small version of Vistaprint, but focused on larger format printing. So banners, signage, decals, window clings, stickers, that sort of thing. So that kind of, you know, made me perk up a little bit and get interest and want to dig in.

[Walker Deibel]

Okay, great. So to be clear, Dom, first of all, so Fast Signs is a franchisor, it's a, it's a big franchise system.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah.

[Walker Deibel]

And it's, and it's brick and mortar. So you go into your local Fast Signs and order a assign. When you say E commerce focus, you mean the entire industry of printing and signage and large format printing is. When you say it's moving to E Commerce, you mean people are going into these brick and mortar locations less and less and they're doing the entire ordering process via a web. Via, Via the web. That's what you mean. And so print moss was obviously it has, you have to have a physical location to. You're producing physical products, but it's, it's go to market, if you will. Is its website versus its physical location perfectly summarized?

[Dom Smith]

Yes, exactly.

[Walker Deibel]

And, and just to be clear, on the large format printing, where that becomes signage. Because I actually understanding that they both solve the same problem, which is attracting people's attention as they're walking down the street. But it seems like the motion of those two businesses would be very different. Sign manufacturing is, is light manufacturing and very involved and very physical. Whereas large making signs and banners, it's still fundamentally printing. Right. You got printers that you configure and they spit out the thing. So I so, so just make the connect those two businesses. I mean, are you guys at Print Moz doing proper signs?

[Dom Smith]

No, we don't do sign fabrication. Fast signs, they market, they do everything. Um, and there's. Their signorama is very similar, but they actually outsource a lot of the actual printing, like what I do to third parties. So I actually do a lot of printing on behalf of Minuteman Press, Fast signs, Signorama, and then they focus on their core signage fabrication. Like you were saying in house, it kind of depends franchisee by franchisee. Some people have more or less in house operations and assets. But I just, you know, point being, I looked at a, you know, market study from Bain or McKinsey and they were pointing out that this is a space that's potentially growing. And then they also pointed out that signage, as opposed to, you know, magazines, newspapers, mailers, business cards, kind of traditional commercial printing, that's a segment that is not in secular decline, that's been at least stable and it's an enormous market.

[Walker Deibel]

Well, I feel like I hear about we. So I've had a number of people on who've done printing businesses, and I feel like what you hear over and over again is that large format is what these printing with the modern printing business is, is, or at least where the business is. And where to the extent there's growth, it's there.

[Dom Smith]

So.

[Walker Deibel]

So yeah, that comports with what I keep hearing. What else did you like about Print Moz in the industry? Broadly? Yeah.

[Dom Smith]

So after meeting with the seller, I liked him. I think finding a trustworthy seller is very important. And that is definitely. There's. There's not an instruction manual on how to evaluate that. You kind of have to go with your gut. But he's a younger guy. His story is he had his sixth kid, he made significant money doing a few other kind of ventures and projects. He's like a very smart, technical dude that was working on a bunch of different things. So this wasn't necessarily where all of his wealth was tied up. He was moving out of state to Oklahoma, from California. He Was deciding whether or not to bring the business with him to Oklahoma. And he ultimately decided that he didn't want to disrupt the lives of all of his employees. So he opted to sell. And we connected very early on. So that whole kind of component to it was important. They have great brand new assets. It's capital intensive industry, all brand new stuff. Kind of the best quality printing equipment that you can have for the type of work that we do. And not running very much at all, very low utilization in a very big space. So just as an example, we have a printer that we print rigid materials on. When I bought the business, it was running between four and six hours a day. You can in theory run it 24 hours, in practice, probably more like 1820. But you know, without having to buy additional assets, you could in theory multiply the size of the business or at least your output without having to, to invest in additional assets. So I liked that. And then just from a product category standpoint, I liked how ubiquitous the, the product set is. From window clings and decals to printed signage, stickers, whatever it may be. This is a product set that literally every business needs. Like if you will, if you're going to a trade show or an event, you're probably bringing some print collateral with you. We can do all of that. So I, you know, that cuts both ways. It's a very big industry that, you know, is a bit commoditized. So where do you compete? A lot of times price and that, you know, I've kind of come to learn is it's, it is difficult to truly differentiate in the industry. And you know, competing on price is not necessarily where you always want to be. We have a couple of angles that I can get into later that I think are important for our customers. But I liked that, you know, I would be able to sell it to, you know, basically anybody. Sell the service, sell the service, sell the products.

[Walker Deibel]

Yeah, yeah. Okay, a couple follow ups there. Just to underline what you were saying about your machines capacity. That's, that's kind of similar to the, a manufacturing lens that you would that where if you're looking at buying a manufacturing business, you ask yourself what is the capacity of my facility? Any machines, any capital assets that go into the manufacturing as well as my people, as well as the number of shifts. So you'll see in manufacturing business, sometimes a business go from 1 to 2 shifts, 2 to 3 shifts. And so with the, with now you have to pay for that additional labor. But from a capital assets perspective, you're, you're getting a lot more out of the, of the capital assets that the business is already invested in. So it can be a big needle mover. And that's very similar to what you just articulated in your business. You have these, these big capital assets, the printers that have already been acquired. And so to optimize the business is to basically have those things cranking for as many, as many hours out of the day as possible up to their own limits. Okay, point one, point two on this thing about the, yeah, the, the commoditization frankly of, of, of printing. In some ways that's the nature of the beast when you're selling a service that everybody needs. It also means that there are a lot of vendors who sell that service. So it, as you said, it cuts both ways. The trend to moving away from brick and mortar to online almost therefore seems to be a little bit not good because, because your local printer, large format printer could at least historically kind of have some, kind of ensure some market share by virtue of its, you know, its local physical footprint. Whereas if everybody's going online now, you're competing with everybody in, in the world and it becomes a pay per click game, it becomes an SEO game which, you know, that's where a lot of businesses is, is, is fought and won these days. But it, it's, it's very competitive and those pay per clicks will eat up your marketing spend. So I don't know how I feel about it if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose if you're a first mover or if you're an early mover that gives you some, some advantage. And it sounds like print moz with that name in particular, that brand name in particular. It was sort of digitally native online first. And so maybe it does have some, some early mover advantage there.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, I probably should have mentioned this as well when I was going through why I liked the business, but it did, it was digitally native. It was one of the first e commerce businesses for large format printing. And it was very reliant on organic rankings which were very strong. But there were some critical things that I think the prior owner, he had just taken a step, step back and taken his foot off the pedal and wasn't paying close attention to. He wasn't doing organized email marketing like E commerce 101 type stuff. He wasn't doing paid ads. I've kind of found that it's actually pretty difficult to do that in a profitable way. But you know, that was part of my thesis as well. He was ranking Very well for a lot of our core sub products from an SEO where organic perspective. But the sales that we were getting on those products relative to the overall E commerce market size were kind of way off. So I came to believe it was a conversion rate issue where. And it makes sense when you looked at what the website used to look like, it just looked to be about five years behind the competition in terms of quality of images, user interface, all of that. So that was another big opportunity that I identified as well. But to your point. Yeah, it's only getting easier for people to stand up a pretty good website very quickly. And the technical moat that I think I had as of a year and a half ago, ish is potentially being deteriorated a little bit with AI. So that's definitely something that I'm focusing on. I got an ad on Instagram for this person who was showing their AI automations for business and it was a few different examples. The second one was a printing storefront where they outsource the creation of all their listings and then the back end production was outsourced to a business, I think it's called Printify that is in place for exactly that for people who run an Etsy shop and then outsource production. So that definitely raised my antennas a little bit.

[Walker Deibel]

Very interesting. What about the numbers around the business and what it was selling for?

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, so this is a whole nother story. Another case study of why it is very important to do your diligence. So the business was originally listed for 3.6 million and they marketed it on about 1.3 million of earnings and three and a half of top line. And I got the business under LOI. I really liked it after I had, you know, gotten under the hood a little bit in the pre LOI stage and I basically bid to win. I could tell that I connected with the seller. I went slightly above asking price. I had a small seller note, I think it was. I was at like 3.6, it was listed for 3.5 and I put in an offer at 3.6. Um, and I got the business under LOI. He opened his books. I was going through, I think it's very important for people to not outsource Q of E work and financial diligence to the extent people feel comfortable doing that. I, I was just doing some basic work and charting out monthly revenues and I noticed there were two months where revenue was twice the amount of, you know, what it, what it normally would be. And then I went through the general ledger and I looked at okay, what day did this happen. And then I found these two transactions for $250,000 each in the separate months. And I asked the seller about this and he said, oh yeah, that's when we sold some assets last year, which you should not be, you know, counting as revenue. If that was an obvious. So it was not obvious to him. He. I was like, hey, that's, that's not revenue. He wasn't a. He was very technically smart from, you know, all the E commerce platform that he built out and everything. He was not super financially savvy. I think he was just looking at his bank account each month and it looked good. So that was his kind of finger in the air business performance analysis. But I needed to renegotiate the purchase price down. I took about a million dollars off of the purchase price. I was honestly concerned that I was going to lose the deal even, you know, even though there was going to have to be recast financials and they would have to go back out to the market. But ultimately they accepted that lower purchase price and I spent.

[Walker Deibel]

Dom, let me, let me stop you really quick. So 202. $250,000 asset sales. So half a million bucks he was claiming as revenue, which, which wasn't revenue. So you needed to knock down revenue. Half a million and associated ebitda. Speaking of the earning, this business's margins seem really strong.

[Dom Smith]

Yes.

[Walker Deibel]

For a business that. For a business that we just both acknowledged is on the. Is. Is somewhat commoditized. Surprising to see so address that. And then also the multiple.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah. So let's see. On. On the margins, this business was basically flat. It had not been growing. It had kind of recently, you know, a few months before the sales process started, hit a soft spot. The seller was not at all aware of that because of the asset sales, but I was able to uncover that. So that was you know, a bit of a concern for me. And that was also incorporated in the deduction, the purchase multiple purchase price. The multiple I think came in slightly, but because earnings were lower, obviously the purchase price came down.

[Walker Deibel]

You're saying the margins are what they are quite strong because he wasn't reinvesting in the business because he was. So there was no. So like in many of these instances, the business owner has kind of been resting on their laurels, taking their foot off the gas. And you as new owner, if that's the case, that they've been milking the business in some sense, they haven't been reinvesting. And so that's allowed them to optimize for earnings and margin. But you as new owner are not going to run the business that way. Probably you're probably going to want to grow it and therefore reinvest in it and your margins are going to come down.

[Nick Akers]

Yes.

[Walker Deibel]

Is that this pattern?

[Dom Smith]

Exactly. So when it was all said and done and I went through his financials and I found a bunch of other ad backs that were just not considered. SDE was around between a million and 1.1. There were a ton of personal expenses that he had to flow through the business that I just had to personally get comfortable with and walk through with him. But the 1 to 1.1 million of earnings, that's not what I, you know, considered go forward earnings to be. Because I was going to have to make meaningful investments to turn this business around and replatform the website, have agencies help me with all of the things I mentioned. SEO, email marketing, paid ads, spend money on paid ads. So the number that I was looking at, you know, in terms of my entry point was more around like 800k or so.

[Walker Deibel]

Okay. Okay. And then what was the purchase price or what, what was your offer?

[Dom Smith]

All in with fees and expenses, cash to the balance sheet. I also had to unexpectedly put down a 40,000 lease payment out of pocket. I probably could have put that on my credit facility at closing, but I just paid it out of pocket. It was high twos, 2.8 something. And then SDE was again around a million. And my EBITDA entry point I viewed as around 800,000.

[Walker Deibel]

A very strong multiple. I mean that's a, that, that feels like a low acquisition. Lowish acquisition price of depending on if we're doing STE or EBITDA. Call it 3ish.

[Dom Smith]

3ish or. Yeah, low multiple. And that being driven by the factors that we went through, really messy financials, lots of personal expenses running through. So that's, I'm being a bit wishy washy on numbers when it comes to earnings. I think with businesses of this size it's very difficult and you're, you might be lying to yourself a little bit if you get too prescriptive with specific numbers. Really like if, if I wanted to pump up EBITDA to a million dollars today, I could, but I don't think that I would be growing. So it's, it's kind of subjective in a sense and depends on the strategy that you want to implement. But yes, low, low multiple. So cash flow, I expect it to be strong and it has been strong and that's been great for me to try out A bunch of different strategies to grow this business, because that was priority number one as soon as I stepped in.

[Walker Deibel]

And a couple things on. The business fundamentals here, the acquisition deal fundamentals and your seller. So in the first place, it sounds like he's. He just had his sixth child, so he's not retiring. You said he was. He had a kind of. A lot of irons in the fire. This is but one thing that he had going on. But, you know, that's always a bit of a flag, because if it's such a good business, why are you selling it? Sort of logic, if you're not retiring or there's not some real strong reason that you own or want to get out it. It can be a little bit of a flag that they're selling. So I guess address that. And then. And then furthermore, just getting comfortable with the fact that the business was. Was underperforming. And I guess the explanation again is that he had just taken his foot off the gas. He was. Had all kinds of other stuff going on. You just worry. You just worry that. Was it really that he had all this other stuff going on. Was it really that he, you know, wanted to just devote his attention elsewhere, or is there something structurally weak about.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, really is kind of.

[Walker Deibel]

That's the question.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, it's. It's a bit of an art and a bit of a science to work through all of this. I think, candidly, I will be very straight up with you. I had a bit of deal fatigue, so I think I had a little bit of bias to get this deal done. And that I am now, in retrospect, aware of. And that is something that people should definitely look out for. It's going to be a lot more stressful, expensive, and time consuming to figure out a crappy situation if you buy an underperforming business versus just waiting for the right one. I had kind of gotten to the point where I was thinking, you know, I just need to get in the game. I've been talking about this for so long. I just need to do it. And this business, even if it is underperforming, it's in a, you know, 20 to $40 billion industry. I will be able to grow it. And when it came to the seller again, I had a good. I met with him several times. He seemed like a nice guy. He was telling me about the other things that he had going on when I asked. He wasn't, you know, being pushy.

[Will Smith]

He.

[Dom Smith]

He also was just fine moving the business. We had kind of been working together For a while. And he's like, hey, you're, you're clearly very spooked. He was very open in working with me to allow me to give whatever access I needed. Like he gave me access to his stripe data directly in the platform before selling. So I had his full customer list. All of that. Yeah, I could tell he was very high level, not in the weeds. He, he was not. When I, you know, asked him details about his margins and whatnot, he, he's never managed to margins. And you know, I, at a certain point I kind of just had decided, am I going to do it or not? And in any, in any deal, whether or not you uncover these kind of obvious risks, they exist. These little businesses have a lot of hair on them. There are going to be skeletons in the closet. Hopefully they're not being hidden by the seller, but sometimes they are. In this situation, I felt like I would, I just had, you know, I wasn't sure about it, but I had a pretty solid level of confidence that I would just figure it out and that to the extent something went really wrong, the seller would, you know, help me to work through whatever the issue would be. We ultimately did find what the driving issue was for the underperformance. And it was very simple and straightforward. It was the website speed they down. They tried to save like a hundred dollars a month on their servers. And he didn't realize this, but in different parts of the country the website was moving at a snail's pace. So he logged in from Oklahoma through the sales process and it was, you couldn't load the page. So you're, you know, people just bounce and go to somebody else. So that was, I probably asked him the question.

[Walker Deibel]

That's actually, that, that's actually a really great find.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah.

[Walker Deibel]

Because it's like, wow, we can fix this. And, and that probably is just revenue that will, I mean just move the needle very quickly and straightforwardly. Everything you just said, Dom, about just at some point you gotta, gotta jump.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah.

[Walker Deibel]

Is, is true. And so while I'm, while I'm pressing you on this, at the same time we all understand that there you can't diligence away all risk in any deal. Even in, in giant large, you know, big boy private equity stuff, but certainly not down here. A large part of entrepreneurship and you know, the, the, the E is more important than the A in eta that this is entrepreneurship. At least as I see it, a large part of entrepreneurship is comfort with uncertainty and tolerating risk. Now we all try to mitigate risk where we can, which is a lot of what the all of this podcast is about. But at the same time there's no, there's no way to do this perfectly. And as, as I think you said, it's as as much art as science. So thank you for indulging, indulging all of this. But by the way, also getting a good acquisition price, a reasonable multiple is a great way of de risking. It's probably the way of, of, of of controlling risk.

[Dom Smith]

Yes, I, the first couple of months I was a bit anxious to see what cash flow would actually look like. A great attribute of this business that I have not mentioned is we get paid upfront and we have net payment terms with our raw material suppliers. So it has negative net working capital which is a good thing. You know, you, you. Oh yeah. As you're growing, you have a greater cash balance that's changing a little bit. Traditionally in E commerce you get paid up front. When you're working with bigger customers, they're going to have net payment terms but those would typically just match, you know, the terms that you have from your raw material suppliers. So those first couple of months very focused on watching cash flow and you know, the margins that I was assuming because it was not a perfect science. I had to strip out a lot of again, personal expenses from this guy's P and L. I was expecting 60% gross profit margins. Pretty high for a printing business. That's exactly where they shook out.

[Will Smith]

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[Walker Deibel]

We're about to turn our attention to your experience being in the business as owner. But before we do, can you tell us how you structure the acquisition?

[Dom Smith]

Yes. So I worked with Heather Anderson at Vizzo. She helped me shop around the deal with different lenders. She was fantastic. Would highly recommend working with her. And we found Huntington Bank. I worked with Brendan o' Brien there. He was also fantastic to work with. They I believe are the number one SBA lender in the print industry. So you know, the one on one questions were kind of already addressed and we, I put in I think about 350,000, 40 of that was that lease that I did not expect and then I think 150k seller note and the rest was on the, the SBA loan. So my math is not going to be perfect here, but it was like a 2.45 million SBA loan and that's

[Walker Deibel]

basically your 10% equity and then 5% seller note.

[Dom Smith]

Directionally we ended up being a little bit higher than 10% which I was fine with. I, I, if I pushed I probably could have put in less. But you know, I wanted to be invested. I didn't want to super max out the SBA capacity because of the concerns that I had. So you know, I think it's more like 85% ish, which I was fine with.

[Walker Deibel]

Dom.

[Dom Smith]

So

[Walker Deibel]

give us your highlights from the first couple months of transition. Starting with was it the business that you thought it was?

[Dom Smith]

So it really was the business that was advertised and I, I could tell that the seller had done an incredible job of building a truly passive business himself. He told me about how the year prior to selling he went to, I think it was on a cross country trip. Yeah, he was on a cross country trip for three months, was not at the business for three months and it just kind of ran itself. He built out a lot of proprietary software that it's basically connects the front end E commerce platform which is custom built to the back end ERP production flow. So you know, you click on a product on our website that maps to a full production flow on the back end. And all of the different pro production people in their different departments, they are told exactly what to do and how to prioritize their jobs. So as the owner, if I operated the business status quo, it would really just be kind of busy work, running payroll, you know, not very involved stuff that I could probably outsource if I wanted to. So running the business status quo would have been a very light lift. But that wasn't really my plan from the get go. It's, you know, triage, find whatever is going wrong. We just before we closed we found that website speed issue and then I was very focused on trying a thousand ways to grow the business and I can speak a little bit about that as well.

[Walker Deibel]

Well, I do want you to, to share some of the levers. You posted this great LinkedIn post where you talked about your last year in the business and everything you've accomplished, including numbers. And that's actually how I found you. So we'll link to that because there's a lot of good stuff in it. But before we turn our attention to that, I think to come into a business and find that if you just don't need, don't want to grow it and just operate at its status quo, and it really does just operate, what a wonderful thing to discover as new owner. That it really, that it really. It's not a, it's not a fire drill every day. You can take your time.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, I, I think the people component of it is probably something that I should have hit on there. You can't just buy a business and then be absent there. There were, on the first day I showed up, there were some tears in the office. People were worried about what was going to happen to them. I think one of the employees, they mentioned that they were at a company previously that got acquired and then everyone was fired. So I really was focused on building relationships and trust with my employees. So it's not like I could just buy it and, you know, as though I could have kept my job at Aries and run this on the side. It definitely was important for me to be there, but from an operational standpoint, yes, was pretty self sufficient, but it wasn't growing. And the cost of doing business, it goes, it goes up every year from rent to raw materials. We were impacted pretty early on with tariffs last year. All of our raw materials basically come from China in one way or another. And then this year all of my products are also, you know, petrochemical derivatives for the most part from a raw material standpoint. So, you know, you need to be growing in order to survive, is the point.

[Walker Deibel]

Yeah, yeah. And fair enough. And certainly we on this podcast do not advocate people buying a business and thinking it's going to be some sort of passive investment at all. But what you do want is when you arrive day one, that the thing has some natural momentum and doesn't need you immediately doing everything. Yeah. Especially when the seller has been claiming that it's passive. You know, that's almost, that word is so, so loaded. It's almost like I'd rather not see that word at all than see it because it feels like there's going to be over promises everywhere. Anyway, this was claimed to be semi passive and you found out that it would. That it was. But of Course, that's not why you bought it. And you were going to try to grow it. And so give us a couple, two or three or four of the things that you did to improve this business and get it growing again, get it on. Get it on a firmer, forward footing.

[Dom Smith]

Yes. So I'll talk about some of the things that worked and some of the things that did not work and where I wasted a ton of money and time. So the seller, like I mentioned, he wanted to have kind of as little involvement as possible. He didn't like talking to customers. He did not want. Oftentimes he'd get on the phone with customers and say that he was, you know, somebody else working for the company, that he needed sign off from his boss in order to, you know, get approval on pricing, whatever it may be, which I found confusing because people love talking to the owner of a business, especially when they, you know, have been working with the business for a long time. I think they have a perception that we're bigger than we actually are. So I kind of flipped it on its head from a. And it. That goes to customer service as well. Very reactive, very, you know, just responding to emails, trying to get through their to do list as quickly as possible, not building relationships. It was incredible to me. Some of our biggest customers, my customer service team, did not even know what they did, what industry they were in, what our products were used for, any other potential print needs. So something that I was very focused on was just getting in front of my customers, introducing myself, showing an interest, just being at a place like Aries, having to learn about different businesses, you get a lot of exposure to different companies, and you can articulate an understanding back to a person quite quickly. So, you know, just do five minutes of research, figure out what a business does, and then honestly, probably 30 to 50% of the time when I've done this, there's always more work to be done. There is a. Oh, I didn't realize that, you know, you do trade show type printing. We have a trade show coming up. I was going to use another vendor or, you know, this is just a small piece of our marketing collateral package. You guys can do everything and at a discount. That is awesome. So that was just getting in front of customers was very important. There are tons of municipal printing bids out there that we never were bidding on. I bid on one with the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus Transit authority right by where I live, and it's the first one that I bid on. And I bid it pretty aggressively, but still profitably. And we won that and that's going to be, you know, maybe 10% of our revenue this year, which is great.

[Walker Deibel]

Congratulations.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, yeah. And we, I also, the biggest needle mover has been, we used to work historically with a large jewelry retailer that has 110 locations across the country. And the seller decided they were too demanding and it was too much work to keep up with their needs. So obviously I, you know, saw that as an opportunity and I think about a month in I got an introduction to the, the buyer there. They tried us out and there's a little bit of complexity to their work. It's very fast turnaround. They themselves are still a founder owned business, even though I'd imagine they're several hundred million in revenue. And he signs off on all of their marketing. It's usually three days before it's needed in 110 stores. So they'll come to us and say they need 5,000 pieces printed, bunch of different designs based on the layout of the store. Each store gets a different kit and they send it in this messy Excel file. Thankfully for me, I'm very comfortable in Excel, so I've been able to cut through it and make it easier for my team to make sense of that. And that was, you know, doing those complex, fast turnaround, multi location packouts, very, you know, niche and random and was not on my radar as a, you know, a focus that I should lean into. We built that skill a lot last year and that I identified as a potential growth avenue to find more larger businesses that need exactly that. They have a distributed footprint of some sort. They have fast turnaround needs, you know, a little bit of complexity. There's so many print vendors out there. A lot of them are kind of run by older guys that have lost their spark. They're what I would call kind of dusty businesses. You know, they're not responsive like I am. They are not going to be super detail oriented like I can be. And I'm training my team to be so going after those bigger customers and I eventually brought on a salesman to, to do that. That's, that is the needle mover for our business. And that's what's driving the 30% now, 40, 50% growth year over year this year.

[Walker Deibel]

Great. Well, I, I just love to hear that. Dom, good for you. Congratulations. And at the risk of sounding like I'm belittling this accomplishment, essentially you started chasing business. Yes, yes, you started chasing business. You were hungry. The previous owner was, had not been, as we keep saying, distracted, not focused on the business. And you Know, you, you put your attention on something as a new owner and you hope this, this is kind of one of the, one of the classic patterns or formula in our world is, you know, pour your energy into something and hopefully it'll, it'll start growing. So it's, it's working like it's supposed to.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, I, this was kind of my idea overall in terms of, you know, I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do, but I will figure it out. I would assume you're familiar with Alex Hormozi. He has a saying that is something like you should be willing to work so hard that it becomes unreasonable for you to not succeed. That was kind of the mentality that I was coming into this with. I tried a lot of different things. I haven't hit on all the money and time that was wasted on different avenues that didn't work like spending $13,000 on email marketing and generating $1,000 in revenue. I had to cut that one out really quick or bringing on a life cycle retention marketing consultant, whatever that really is, for $7,500 a month, locked in for three months. And they just gave me these really pretty decks and we're like, now it's time for you to implement these. And you know that, yeah, that did not pan out as expected and there were a few more other things as well. But you know, the business was cash flowing. So I did have the flexibility to kind of throw money at a lot of different things. But really I think the most important thing as, as an operator is to get in the weeds, do as much yourself as you can, learn about the business, kind of don't just try. I think it was my years in private equity where I, I saw a bit of a throw money at your problems approach.

[Walker Deibel]

That's an important topic and one I wanted to give a segment to. So. Thank you for letting me interrupt. I want to go back to your Hormozi quote. I'm reminded of a Steve Martin comedian Steve Martin quote. I think he maybe even wrote a book that with this title be so good they can't ignore you. Something like that. And so thematically similar which is just if you're work hard enough or are committed enough or just keep at it enough at, at some point the world is just going to yield to you. You just through sheer will, you can, it's almost like you can sheer will power yourself to some success. Let's not overstate this. But I, I do think certainly like in your case, in a market where you know, there's demand. This is a multi, multibillion dollar industry. You know, there's demand. It hustling your way to does feel like there could be a linear relationship there.

[Dom Smith]

And I think being in an industry where, you know, there's a lot of operators out there, but very few that are very aggressive or you know, it's. I am told when I go. I met with a big beverage company earlier this week that everyone listening here has consumed their products and would be familiar with. And you know, I was just in the meeting being very excited, animated. You know, we were like answering each other's questions and they were saying to me like, wow, it's, it is refreshing to not have you know, an older worn out person in like a raggedy suit coming in here and you know, just saying the same script. I, I think the point being operating in an industry where that is the standard, it is a lot easier to stand out. That's not going to be every industry, but a lot of these unsexy legacy industries that your listeners are operating in and looking at it can be easier to stand out if you bring that energy.

[Walker Deibel]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and it's not going to be every industry, but it's a lot of industries.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah.

[Walker Deibel]

In some ways that is, that is

[Dom Smith]

the whole, the whole.

[Walker Deibel]

Another just underlying this whole project of ETA is that the, the boomer transition. Right. A lot of these businesses are owned by people who are now retiring. So as, as the, as the young blood with a lot of energy, you can, you can differentiate your business just with that, just with the, the vibes. Y just with vibes. Okay.

[Dom Smith]

The.

[Walker Deibel]

Your waste quote, unquote wasted marketing spends. You know, my response to hearing you talk about that is that's the cost of doing business, especially in a marketing forward business which yours is. Which I also want to touch on for a second. You are going to waste money on marketing. That is the nature of marketing. You cannot just throw money at marketing and have it all work even in this digital. Now so much of marketing is digital and it can be tracked way better than ever before. There's that, that old cliche. I know that half of my marketing spend is wasted. I just don't know which half that was from the pre digital era. But in some sense that remain. There's a lot of that still remains. Or maybe it's not that I shouldn't say that you don't know what's wasted. Maybe now it's easy to identify what part of your marketing spend is wasted, but there's still Going to be a lot of experimen fermentation where money is wasted or is not ROI positive. So that I, I feel like you just gotta, you just got to expect some of that. Again if you're, especially if you're in a marketing forward business and going back to just diligence these businesses. It's something that business buyers should be aware of because you'll often see sellers try to add back a marketing spend. That was a quote one off. Oh, I spent $15,000 on this marketing spend. It didn't do anything. So let's add that back. Yeah, it was just a one off. No, you don't let. Because you should expect similar spends under your own ownership business buyer that you're going to dump $15,000 in things that go nowhere. So, so marketing spends one off. Marketing spends in their totality are not one offs. They are a recurring motion of the business, recurring spend of the business. Anything to say to that?

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, I mean it can be a little bit painful even when you model for the EBITDA compression, to see it happening and to see things not working. And I have thought of a lot of these things as one time and I've thought, you know, when I eventually sell this business I'm going to have a little bit of explaining to do and have to walk through each of these things and explain what I was doing and why it didn't work. Another point that I wanted to get to is it's related. In my personal life I have not very closely managed to a budget and I've never, you know, I have, I came into this with zero operational experience. I was just doing underwriting for you know, six and a half, seven years. So. So it's very easy if you have cash flow to throw money at a lot of problems. Another example of this is we didn't have a CRM. So I went to HubSpot and I was told it was going to be, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month to get something set up and then a one time implementation fee that got way blown out. You know, $15,000 later it was basically failed and I had to walk away from it. But you know, point being these things when you're, you know, even though $800,000 of earnings or a million dollars of earnings sounds like a lot, it's very easy to chip away at that. And for me this is kind of, it's been a learning experience and now I am much more judicial in my spend and I have experienced what is likely to work and what's not. And as a business owner, another thing to be aware of and sorry for jumping around to so many points. I just want to make sure to hit on the big ones that I've come across. You're going to get approached with people all the time that promise you the world and that try and sell you anything from courses to managing your marketing spend, whatever it may be. And you know, I have gotten, got a lot of times doing that. It never, it never really pans out how you would expect. So you know, if, if you are considering bringing on that consultant or agency, definitely make sure that you do your diligence and, and that you're very thoughtful in the questions that you ask or you know, how you're going to measure their success and how you can get out if they aren't performing that sort of thing well.

[Walker Deibel]

And let's explore this Dom, because this is where you had started to go because the private equity format is certainly to do exactly that. They, they a private equity buyer is not going to go get in the weeds. Maybe a smaller private equity shop, an independent sponsor model like we see at Mines Capital, maybe, but even they are likely not going to want to be doing that. It's, it's, it's delegation and it's, it's either to the existing team or bringing in, you know, new new parties to grow the business. So what is the disconnect between the model that private equity uses and you basically trying to import that into your business? Was it, were you just not judicious enough to use your word and who you selected or is there something fundamentally that does not translate to doing this?

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, I think with the private equity model, the quality of the people that you will have doing this third party work is going to be a bit higher. They're going to be working at, you know, the top tier consulting firms and whatnot. And that's not to say there aren't good freelancers out there to help you with whatever your business needs are. But I think, you know, there is something there. What I've found is just that no one, it goes back to, you know, just the force of will point that I was making known is going to care as much as you do. And the more informed that you are, maybe you eventually outsource it to a third party or hire and delegate whatever the responsibility is to somebody else. But it's going to be impossible for you to manage or track or really, you know, fundamentally understand what and how people are doing their work unless you go through the process of understanding it Yourself. So I think for a small business, you really have to spend your time, you know, founder mode, like Isaac Zimmerman talked about on your podcast, getting really in the weeds. And I really like his model, by the way, of, you know, having a lot of conviction in a space, having it be his life's work. I'm taking a little bit of a different approach where I am hoping to log a win on this and meaning exit at some point, at some point, take some chips off the table. At that point, I will hopefully have some kids. And, you know, this is all,

[Walker Deibel]

you

[Dom Smith]

know, we'll see what actually ends up happening. But I'd love to, you know, spend that time with the kids and really be there before moving on to, you know, my next project. And I know, so.

[Walker Deibel]

So wait, Dom, why. Why do you want to sell? You want to sell so that you can have this experience, be a win, full circle.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah.

[Walker Deibel]

And have a balance sheet that will allow you to take a sabbatical with the kids sort of thing. And so versus why not build this? Build this, kids come along and then you do what your previous owner did, which is the business coasts for a couple of years, but you still own it.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, I would say it's probably less so, the sabbatical with the kids more so having a balance sheet to do this again and again. I think this will be the first of many. I. I hope to build a portfolio at some point. I may want to go, you know, upscale or, you know, upmarket and do the independent sponsor route. I spend a lot of time listening to your podcast here as well as the Mind's Capital podcast, just getting ideas and, you know, the world that I came from previously is in deal making and I still like, you know, chasing and evaluating the deals. So. And that's, you know, that's kind of what I'm good at as well. I think I am finding that I have some skills and qualities that work pretty well for an operator too, really just around project management and keeping track of many things simultaneously and, and, you know, staying on people. But, you know, I, I don't think this is my necessarily forever business and that. That's not a ding on print. Moz. I went into this buying the business with the intention of selling it.

[Walker Deibel]

Okay, is this the first time that you're a manager of people? And regardless, how has that piece of this been? How. How are you as a manager? And. And what more can you say about the people component of this, which you hinted at is actually, you know, been a big feature of this whole. This Whole project.

[Dom Smith]

So it wasn't my first time as a manager. I. At Aries, I ran our internship program, recruiting program. I did a bunch of stuff outside of my job description, like helped with integrations of acquisitions that Aries, like, as a business, made other private credit groups. So I had experience managing people, but not, you know, I had experience managing Ivy League grads. Very highly motivated, high pedigree, you know, strong engines. Don't need a lot of just, you know, rallying and motivation to get stuff done. Um, it's a totally different game, especially in the. The blue collar space. You know, the first day, literally the first day I closed, one of the workers came and talked to me and asked me. He said, hey, I'm thinking of moving out of state unless you pay me more. And by the way, I'm a pretty important employee. And, you know, that was scary at the time, unexpected. And I thankfully had a response ready to go for him that I wasn't. You know, that's not off the table eventually, but I'm not going to make any changes for the first three months. I just need to get familiar with the business. But, you know, thank you for flagging that you might be moving out of state. And that employee is still with me, by the way. And, you know, he's been earning a lot of overtime, but compensation has stayed the same. But it's a. It's a whole different skill. Like, you are almost a therapist in a lot of ways for your employees in a way that I was not expecting. I spend a decent amount of my time just being there for. It's mainly my production employees that vent to me about other people, you know, not pulling their weight and feeling like, oh, if I'm having to step in and do this other person's job, I should be compensated double for that. I'm like, that's not necessarily how it works, especially for sending that other person home. So being there emotionally and dealing with the people, it is hard. It can be exhausting. You have to be a little political about it as well. And just like, you know, think of. It would be very easy to. To be very harsh and snippy in a lot of situations. And, you know, that's just not the type of manager that I want to be. I want people to be able to approach me and come to me with their issues. And, you know, I always say I have an open door and people, you know, I. I think they like me as a manager, but. But I'm not perfect and still definitely learning.

[Walker Deibel]

Tom, you're where Is revenue today? How much have you pushed it in your. And how long have you owned it?

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, it has not been terribly long. We might have to do a follow on episode in a couple of years to see where I'm at. But it's been, let's see, I bought the company in February of last year, so it's been less than a year and a half. And revenues were just about flat last year for the full year, 2025, which I viewed as a win. And that's exactly what I was budgeting. And I brought on a sales guy at the beginning of the year. It was a little shaky. I had, you know, the battle scars of spending a lot of money in a lot of different ways and it not panning out. So I was very focused on being in the weeds and managing that sales guy. He came in with a lot of experience and existing relationships and we're starting to see that really pan out. That customer that I mentioned that we had previously turned away or that the prior owner had turned away, we brought them back on. So between, you know, all the things that I've mentioned, fixing the website speed, I've been selling through a few different channels, reestablishing relationships with bigger customers, just improving my relationship with all customers. And then that sales guy, it's now really starting to hit. We're up about 30% top line. That was year to date through April and now May is probably going to be a record month. We're closer to like 50% year over year because we're starting to see those revenues hit from, from the sales guy. There's a, there's a bit of a sales cycle, so it takes a little while. It's just a little painful when you have to, you know, see that J curve troughing. You're not sure exactly when it'll turn around, but overall it, it feels like we were, you know, just coming out of that J curve. And it's very rewarding, very exciting and it's to the point in your, in

[Walker Deibel]

your LinkedIn post, Dom, you said this has been an extremely rewarding experience that I think I'll look back on is the defining period of my career.

[Dom Smith]

Yes, that, that definitely rings true. I, I had, I felt like I was at a crossroads in my life where if I stuck around at Aries, it would have been increasingly difficult every year to leave the golden handcuffs. And I was thinking if I do something, I kind of have to do it now. And I wanted to build something that I was really personally invested in and excited about. And I Think we're on the path to do just that. It hasn't been easy. My wife Lauren, Shout out, she's been extremely supportive of this and interested in it. And we're also kind of talking a little bit about buying a business. We may have to have a whole nother episode on that as well. But we're considering buying a business that she would go in run that's kind of more in an industry that she's interested in. It would not be printing. But again, I think I had a fork in the road and I chose to go the, the more risky path. But, you know, you, I know it's cliche, but you only live once. And people may not think that printing is the most exciting industry, but I find it extremely exciting because it's mine.

[Walker Deibel]

And how would you, how would you say it is for other searchers given that there are a lot of these businesses around? And as I said, some, some searchers that have been on the podcast bought similar businesses. So, so what do you, what would you tell are the searchers whose interest is piqued by this industry or this business type? There's exciting.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, yeah, there, there's. I mean, I find it exciting. It's, it's actually not very exciting, but I personally find it exciting. And there, it's a huge market. There's lots of opportunities. If you see the low hanging, obvious fruit like I did, really good assets, low utilization and then under optimized sales, you're going to be able to grow that business.

[Walker Deibel]

And then on the point, Dom, about only living once and you know, the road less traveled sort of thing, you had reflected that you couldn't see many of your former colleagues doing something like this.

[Dom Smith]

Mm.

[Walker Deibel]

What, what did you mean there? And also doing this alone. You, you had had some thoughts there. And this, that'll be the final question.

[Dom Smith]

Yeah, it can be lone or it is lonely. I think there are some days where candidly I feel a little bit aimless, where, you know, I don't have a board of directors, I don't have a partner, I don't have a distinct mentor, which I should probably work on and get set up. But there are certain days where I have no idea what I should be doing and where I should be spending my time. And I think that is probably a less buttoned up, you know, thing to say for what one might expect for someone with my background. But, you know, I don't, I'm not, I don't consider myself smarter than, you know, the average person. I think I got lucky in my career path leading up to this and now I'm kind of trying to make my own luck through sheer will and grit. But to the prior point on, you know, some of my prior colleagues and I can think of some very specifically that have expressed interest in this path and that, you know, it's not for everybody. You have to really be comfortable with risk. You will not be able to check every box. Every business that you buy, like I said, will have some hair on it and you just have to be able to live with that risk in uncertainty. And everything in life has risk. Even staying at Aries would have had risk associated with it. Any business has, you know, the employees who they trade the risk, you know, they, they don't own the risk. They have stability, but they don't own the upside. Fear the owner of the business you trade. It's a big trade off. You don't have that stability. You're the one that's going to be up late at night thinking about those, those material business risks and there will be some in any that you look at but you get all the upside as well. And that I find to be really exciting and motivating and makes things just a little bit more rewarding and fun.

[Walker Deibel]

Perfect note to end on Dom, congratulations on betting on yourself and on your early successes in doing that. The revenue growth bringing all that new energy and how it's moving the needle significantly for you all really great stuff is this is going the way it's supposed to. Not to say that that it's easy or formulaic, but you are at least in the early innings here being rewarded for the risk you took and the energy you're pouring yourself pouring into this business. So Dom Smith of Print Moss, we'll link to that, we'll link to your LinkedIn in the show notes and we thank you for coming on Acquiring Minds.

[Dom Smith]

Thank you. Well, much appreciated.

[Walker Deibel]

How you can you enjoyed that interview.

[Will Smith]

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[Walker Deibel]

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[Will Smith]

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[Walker Deibel]

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[Will Smith]

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[Walker Deibel]

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[Will Smith]

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