He Bought A $750k Business From A TWEET (Here's What Happened Next....) w/ Chandler Reed

Summary

Podcast Summary

Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business

Episode: He Bought A $750k Business From a TWEET (Here's What Happened Next...)
Host: Brian Luebben
Guest: Chandler Reed
Date: March 13, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the gritty, real-life process behind buying, turning around, and scaling a small business—specifically, how Chandler Reed bought a struggling commercial contracting company after responding to a tweet, navigated the chaos of a distressed business, protected his downside, and ultimately stabilized and grew the company. The conversation is brutally honest about the mess, the mistakes, and the lessons learned, providing practical strategies for anyone considering acquiring a small business to replace a traditional job.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Buying a Business from a Tweet—The Origin Story

[01:22-03:27]

• Chandler was working his “dream job” in finance for a major commercial real estate developer when he saw a tweet from Sam Rosati offering a business opportunity tailored to someone with multifamily real estate experience, hustle over capital, and Tampa access.
• Chandler connected immediately: “I was 25 at the time. That was certainly me.”
• He brought in a mentor as an investor and closed on the business in April 2021.

2. The Reality of the Deal: What He Actually Bought

[03:27-05:53]

• The company, once a $10M/year commercial lighting retrofit contractor, had shrunk to $750K in top-line revenue:

  “I bought an absolute stinker, which I didn’t know at the time […] I literally bought the exact business we tell people not to buy.”

• Previous owner drained resources to launch a new company, leaving the original business as a "lifestyle business" with no real profits.

3. Deal Structure & Protecting the Downside

[06:34-12:19]

• Structure: 25% cash down, 75% seller earnout. No personal guarantee (PG), minimizing risk if the turnaround failed.
• Chandler explains:

  “The way the owner got most of his money was tied to our success. So the better we did, the faster he got his money.” [06:34]

• Discusses avoiding personal guarantees, strategies to shield assets, and the benefits of phantom equity (investor receives proceeds without being on the cap table or signing a PG).
• Earnouts aligned the seller to stay and help with the transition:

  “The seller stuck around, he helped us out because he wanted to get paid back faster. We were able to pay all seller financing back within 25 months.”

4. The Turnaround—From the Trenches

[13:11-20:15]

• Year 1: $900K in revenue, profits used to pay down debt.
• Year 2: Jumped to $3M revenue, attributed largely to a hot real estate market post-COVID.
• Year 3: Revenues dropped back due to market slowdowns and interest rate hikes.

  “As a project-based business, we absolutely rip when times are good and we absolutely do not rip when times are not good.”

• Chandler diversified service lines—adding EV charging, low-flow plumbing—making the business less cyclical and more resilient.

5. Within “The Year One Plan”—What To Actually Do After 90 Days

[17:10-23:47]

• First 90 days: Observe, get in the trenches, absorb everything; don’t make major changes.
• Post-90 days: Start with low-hanging wins (tools, uniforms, small process tweaks), communicate transparently with staff, and prepare them for a period of disruption in pursuit of improvement.

  “You have to stick with me for some short pain, some uncertainty, some changes... but I promise you, a year from now, our lives are going to be way better.” [18:05]

• Focus on business process improvement one problem at a time—avoid the common mistake of trying to fix everything at once.

6. Annual Plan in Action: Sequencing Growth Initiatives

[21:14-23:47]

• Identify top ROI opportunities and prioritize one at a time based on gut and team feedback.
• Example: When the opportunity for an EV charging project came, Chandler rallied his team to learn by doing instead of launching multiple initiatives at once.

  “Don’t spread yourself too thin. Attack one thing at a time. Once you think that vertical’s maxed out, move on to the next.” [23:47]

7. Leadership & Team Buy-In

[24:31-28:00]

• As a new owner, spend time “around the campfire,” earning respect and buy-in from legacy employees.
• Value frontline feedback: A project manager suggested charging new prospects a $1,000 evaluation fee to avoid wasted travel costs, which improved both margins and perceived authority.

  “That was a beautiful idea that came organically from a member on our team who had been working at the business for 10 years.” [27:40]

8. Career Capital—Transferring Skills from W-2 to Business Ownership

[28:00-32:46]

• Both Brian and Chandler stress how prior job experience preps you for entrepreneurship in unseen ways, from industry contacts to operational insights and sales know-how.

  “I understood the market, I understood the client. I had contacts I could bring that to. It got me really comfortable.”

• Advice: Audit your skills and seek acquisitions where your strengths fill the business’s gaps:

  “If you don’t know what you’re good at, you should NOT buy a business.” [32:46]

9. Looking Ahead: Consolidation and Vertical Integration

[33:12-34:40]

• Chandler is in the process of buying out his partners and looking to acquire suppliers/subcontractors (vertical integration) to improve margins and increase enterprise value.
• Inspired by the “Bezos” model: “Let me look at all my expenses on my sheet and turn those into income.” [33:12]
• Also in talks to acquire competitors and enhance service offerings.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On protecting downside:

  “The only guarantee you can make is that you will fail. The name of the game is how do we just make sure that there’s a floor to the failure and no ceiling to the upside.”
  — Brian [05:53]

• On the reality of inheriting a mess:

  “People always joke in this industry, ‘You don’t want to buy yourself a job.’ And I bought myself 10 jobs.”
  — Chandler [05:09]

• On making changes after acquisition:

  “All the changes that I am doing here are obviously trying to improve the business, but I’m also trying to make your lives easier... a little short pain, some uncertainty... I promise you, we’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
  — Chandler [18:05]

• On career capital:

  “Not only the industry, but the skills. If you did B2B sales, what type of business can you plug those skills into right out of the box? [...] You don’t want to reinvent the wheel.”
  — Chandler [29:28]

• On knowing yourself:

  “If you don’t know what you’re good at, you should not buy a business.”
  — Brian [32:46]

• On growth strategy:

  “Throw all your ideas up on a whiteboard... Come to a gut feeling with your team. Once you settle on one, attack it hard. Don’t spread yourself too thin.”
  — Chandler [21:14]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Origin Story: Buying via Tweet – 01:22
• Business Background & Numbers – 03:27
• Deal Structure & Downsides – 06:34
• Turnaround Timeline & Growth – 13:11
• Burnout, Humility & Market Reality – 15:23
• One-Year Plan & Team Engagement – 17:10
• Sequencing Growth/Problem-Solving – 21:14
• Team Buy-In & Implementing Ideas – 24:31
• Career Capital & Skill Alignment – 28:00
• Vision for Future & Vertical Integration – 33:12

---

Where to Follow Chandler Reed

• X / Twitter: @ChandlerReedSMB
• Newsletter: Link in X profile

---

Final Thoughts

Chandler’s journey offers a candid look at the reality, risk, and reward of small business acquisition. His story is a masterclass in resilience, due diligence, creative deal structuring, humility, and leadership—providing both strategic frameworks (“protect your downside, upside unlimited”) and tactical advice (immerse yourself, prioritize one thing at a time, value your team’s input).

Whether you’re stuck in a W-2 or already eyeing deals, this episode is a playbook for not just buying, but surviving and thriving in business acquisition.

Transcript

[A]

What's up, Action Academy family? Welcome back to the Action Academy podcast, Corporate America's least favorite podcast where we help you buy big old commercial real estate deals and small businesses. Today's episode with Mr. Chandler Reid is an awesome one. We are going deep into the trenches, ladies and gentlemen, because Chandler actually bought his first business from a tweet. Yes, you heard it right, a tweet. He replied to it, he ended up buying it and it was an absolute mess. So today's podcast episode is the year long turnaround process that he utilized to go from buying this business to stabilizing it to now finally growing it and having it on its feet a few years later. You're going to learn how to hire, how to manage, how to delegate in ways that he protected his downside to stay in the game as he went about scaling the business. Guys, if you are interested in small business acquisition, that is what we do over at the Action Academy community. You can check us out in the show description, in the show notes as well as actionacademy.com Guys, let's get to the show. Add some value. If you enjoy it, please help us share it with other people that are trying to buy a small business. Let's get to it. Mr. Chandler Reid, you purchased a small business from a freaking tweet. What happened here, man?

[B]

That is correct, Brian, first and foremost, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on the podcast, speak to your audience and hopefully help point them in the right direction and really take back their career in life into their own hands and just really get after it. It's an exciting space, a lot of exciting stuff going on and I'm happy to be a small part of it. But yeah, getting back to your question, I bought a business off a tweet. That is correct. Or I guess now, at the time it was a tweet. Now it's a next post or an X, whatever you want to call it. But so I had no idea what self funded searching was, what business acquisition ETA was. I thought the only people that were buying businesses were private equity firms, Fortune 500 and the. I didn't realize a regular everyday person could search or in my case find a tweet about buying a business. So yeah, I guess to catch everyone up to speed, I'm sitting at my day job. I was working on the finance team for a really prominent commercial real estate developer here in Tampa, Florida, working on the Water Street Tampa project, which was quote unquote, my dream job. I saw the writing on the wall of wow, this is a long way to climb up the corporate ladder before I get started getting any carried interest in our firm's developments that we're doing, man. What else is out there for me? Lo and behold, a tweet comes through from my now business partner, Sam Rosati, basically summing up to the effect of, hey, I have an interesting deal here in Tampa, Florida. The ideal candidate to buy it needs to know multifamily real estate, which I did, needs to have more hustle than capital, which I was 25 at the time. That was certainly me, which you can read as, and we'll get into later was a disgusting hairy turnaround. And then lastly, needs to either be in Tampa, Florida already or can relocate here immediately. And I read the tweet and it hit me like a lightning bolt. I'm like, dude, was this tweet written for me? Like, I check all three of these boxes and I guess just. Long story short, four months later, I end up bringing in my mentor, a guy who I met at my first job at a school to be an investor. And the three of us closed on this business together. And that was in April of 2021. So getting close to our four year anniversary right now, which has been crazy to even say that out loud. I can't believe it's been that long already.

[A]

That's insane, man. What was the. So walk us through a little bit of the deal details. So what was top line? What was sde? What was the multiple. How do.

[B]

Yeah, so set the stage with. In its heyday, this business was doing pretty close to 10 million bucks a year. SE was probably about a million and a half. So they're doing 15% SE margins. It's a commercial contracting business. This business would go to large apartments, large warehouses, large hotels, and replace all of their inefficient fluorescent or halogen, all the old school lighting with new efficient LED lighting. And obviously there's huge energy savings with that to be had. At the time, LEDs were like a pretty like nascent technology. Today you can go to Home Depot and buy an LED light for two bucks. So the business itself has gotten a little bit commoditized and the previous seller kind of saw that and thus started a smart home installation business that had recurring revenue streams. He raised Series A, series B financing for it. He's crashing it, doing well. But he gutted his time, attention and resources and even employees from the old business to his new business. And thus when he took it on the market, his investors were basically telling him, dude, you can't keep messing around with this lighting business. You got to focus 100% on this new smart home business. You got to sell it. And thus he took it to market. No one was really biting because the business was in really tough shape. I think when we bought it, it was doing around 750k top line and just basically a lifestyle business where he was just writing off expenses. So it wasn't making any money at all.

[A]

So from 10, it went from 10 million top line to 7,50k.

[B]

Yeah. And that was.

[A]

And that was the first business you bought.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. I bought an absolute. I bought an absolute stinker, which I didn't know at the time, which I'd learned after the fact and through my time with the SM Bootcamp stuff, which we can talk about later too. But I literally bought the exact business. We help people or we tell people not to buy. Yeah. Which at the time, dude. So I can tell you, like, I was obviously naive, number one. But number two, I viewed it as a real life MBA experience. Like I said, I was 25, ready to hustle, and hey, if we made money from it, that was just gravy on top of it. I was looking to get my hands as dirty as possible. People always joke in this industry, hey, you don't want to buy yourself a job. And I bought myself 10 jobs. But I was looking forward to that because I wanted to get that experience.

[A]

Yeah. I think your story is also a good example of. And we can zoom out a little bit to where you're at today, because spoiler alert. And all worked out and you survived and you're still building small businesses and doing very well. I think it's a good testament to just resilience. Everybody's so terrified to get started and make mistakes, but I tell people the only guarantee that you can make is that you will fail. The name of the game is how do we just make sure that there's a floor to the failure and no ceiling to the upside. So you got metric risk. So, yeah. How did you go about turning this over and getting this right side to where you can start to learn how to properly do this? Because originally said 10 million, I was like, damn, man, you bought a solid business to begin.

[B]

Nope, I bought a. I bought a pipe dream to people. I basically was like. Because with my time at the commercial real estate development firm, obviously I knew lighting like I was a client. So I'm like, hey, I have a big network and book of business I can bring our lighting projects to. But I also saw where The Puck was heading in the commercial real estate industry. Every team, every sizable firm has started their own sustainability department. Esg, lead certifications. It was all coming. So I'm like, hey, these people were, at least were buying lighting products from us. They're buying EV charging stations, they're buying solar, they're buying the low flow plumbing, they're buying smart thermostats. Why don't we start doing that too? So that was part of my growth plan, if you will. And to go back to your point on capping the downside and leaving open the upside, that's exactly how we structured the deal. So as you can imagine, if I would have taken this to any SBA lender, they would have just laugh me out of their office. Yeah, so the way that we structured the deal was basically 25% cash down and 75% earnout, which is obviously a pretty sweet deal, right? Not personally guaranteed. The business was basically tied to the success or the way the owner got most of his money or the seller got most of his money was tied to our success. So the better we did, the faster he got his money. So that was a way that I checked that box and I was like, hey, at the end of the day, I'm not coming out too much money and I'm not going bankrupt and they're not coming after my assets.

[A]

Can we, can we talk really quickly? I want to double click on that about two different defensive metrics that we can use to even if we buy a shit deal to make sure that we're not getting out of the game. So number one is at what point can you, what is a personal guarantee and at what point can you avoid signing a pg? And number two, talk about earn backs, clawbacks, like rollouts, all this different stuff that you can do.

[B]

Yeah, 100%. So the, the double edged sword of SBA financing, it is typically the most accretive debt that you can put on a business. It has the longest amortization, it has competitive rates, it is a total bear as far as like the paperwork and all the stuff that you have to go through. And, but that the other side of that sword is it is personally guaranteed. So they're going to be looking at all the assets that you have and let's say, hey Chandler, you default on the loan, we have to get made whole. So, you know, your house, your securities, any other kind of real estate investments that you have, those are on the hook for personally guaranteeing the loan. Now there's certainly to your point, there's some games that you can play. If you have a spouse, you could put those assets in her name, you can open up a trust, you can shield a lot of those assets. And if you live in a state like Florida too, you can home homestead your, your personal residence. So no one can touch that if you go bankrupt. So there are some.

[A]

Yeah. And you could go under 19% equity.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

You get a HELOC. You get a HELOC draw on that, bump yourself under it. So there's certainly games you could play. So it sounds scary. If you know what you're doing, you have the right experts in your corner. They can help. Definitely help you guide through that.

[A]

Have you, have you heard of phantom equity?

[B]

Yes, I have heard of phantom equity.

[A]

Yeah. So we're exploring that right now. It's. I don't see any podcasts talking about it, I don't see any YouTube videos talking about it, but just all the rich people know about it secretly. Um, and I just learned about it. We've done a phantom equity deal, but phantom equity, essentially, like we're going to try to do some of the rest of our acquisitions with it if possible, to create a financing strategy to where essentially you're coming on as almost just, it's like a investor, like just a personal note and you're just saying, hey, this is the fees that I'm taking. I'm going to take this percentage of revenue, this percentage of profit and then in the event of a sale, I get this percentage of the cash proceeds on close. And then it's, it's basically a promissory note and you're not on the cap table, so you're not signing a pg. And so I think it's freaking genius and I don't know why people aren't talking about it.

[B]

Yeah, so that's a great point. I think it is something that we're seeing a lot of people start to use and go through. And at the end of the day, if you're writing a big check into an investment that is using an SBA loan, anyone who is on the cap table, 20% or greater has to sign that PG. So it's a great way for investors who want to get into these deals and own a large percentage of the upside not to be on the hook for that first home guarantee.

[A]

Yeah. So let's talk about earn backs, clawbacks, stuff like that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So basically how we structured our deal was so that 75%, the seller note was structured as an earn out. So it had minimum payments that we had to meet Quarterly or basically a percentage of our gross profit, whatever number was greater, we owed that to the seller. So that a lot of times you hear these horror stories of a seller's, oh yeah, I'll stick along for the next two years. I'll help you transition. I'll be a consultant and everything. And the day that wire, the day that money hits their bank account, they're in Mexico sipping margaritas and blocked your number. So this is a good structure to use to where, hey, yeah, you're going to be making this fixed amount of money for the next whatever it was, five years or so, or, or hey, you stick around, you help us out, you introduce us to your old clients, you help us solve the problems that you face, you already navigated and solved. And you're going to be making potentially way more than that in a much shorter timeframe. So that is how we ended up structuring our deal. And our minimum payment or payback would have taken us five years. And luckily the seller stuck around, he helped us out because he wanted to get paid back faster. And we were actually able to pay back all of our seller financing, I think within the first call it 25 months post acquisition. So pretty much like less than half the time it would have taken us. So as it sits today, we're a debt free company, which is pretty cool.

[A]

That's amazing. Yeah. And doing stuff like that, I think just talking about those over and over again, I always try to make a point to mention like these strategies and also how we can creatively bring them in. And then also always trying to have some element of seller financing because it keeps them economically aligned. So even if you are doing SBA, still trying to find a way to get 10, 20% seller carry just so that seller that says, hey, I'll stay on for the next six months or a year, they're full of it. But if they're seller finance, then they get benefit from them staying on. Yeah. Or like a holdback period. Like it saved, saves a lot of people that I know.

[B]

Yes, exactly. It's critical. I always recommend you gotta have at least some skin in the game from the seller else. Going back to my point, they might block your number and be drinking margaritas on the beach somewhere.

[A]

Cool. So you get debt free, so you get a debt free business now. So you guys figured it out like you went through it, you learned you got your real life mba. What happens next?

[B]

Yeah, so when we bought the business like I was selling news and I think in our first year we increased it a Little bit. We did about $900,000 top line. Basically all of our profit, which is the double edged sword of the earnout. It's like all of our profits were going to pay down the seller note more aggressively. We were, I was taking no money or investors taking no money, but we weren't like ringing the bell by any stretch of imagination, but we were paying down our debt, so building equity, so that's always good. Then year two we go from $900,000 to $3 million. And I thought I was going back. We were talking earlier, I thought I was the next Elon Musk. I'm like, wow, why didn't I do this earlier? This business stuff is so easy. And lo and behold, it was primarily driven by how hot the kind of commercial real estate market was coming out of COVID Our revenue and our demand was intimately tied to value add transactions. So someone's going to go buy a stinker of a property, they're going to raise a bunch of money to go fix it up. Our projects are on that docket. And we saw one of the craziest run ups in that transaction volume going into kind of call it late 2022. Then when interest rates were raised at the historical acceleration that we've ever seen, it basically ground that transaction volume to a halt to, to levels we haven't seen since the great financial crisis. And all of a sudden, as a project based business like us, I'm happy to talk about recurring businesses versus project based businesses. The project based businesses absolutely rip when times are good and they absolutely do not rip when times are not good. So we saw that revenue decrease down to 2 million bucks in year three and year four. We stabilized right around like 1.8. And so it was a little scary, right? Going back to it, I thought I was hot shit or how to. Sorry, you can bleep that out if I'm not allowed to cuss on here. But I thought I was hot stuff and I got humbled a little bit, right? But looking back in hindsight, I thought the world was falling. I was down on myself. But in reality that going back to that real life mba, that was the best thing that could have happened to me. As a young entrepreneur really learned, hey, it's not always up and to the right.

[A]

A quote that I really love is that us as entrepreneurs, whenever things go wrong, we blame the market and everything's then we blame ourselves and we say oh yeah, I rock. But in reality it's inverse. It's like whenever things go wrong, it's probably you. Whenever things go right, it's probably the market.

[B]

Yep. I gotta get a slice of humble pie that those couple years. But yeah, it's going all the way. I guess up to today, business is going great. So number one, we, in that time I know we talked about earlier, we really diversified our project lines from just doing those lighting installs which are into ultimately tied to that kind of value add transaction volume. So we started doing the EV charging stations, we started doing low flow plumbing installs, both of which were much less cyclical. As in, hey, if they want to be charging stations on site, they're going to do it no matter if they just bought the property or not. And then on the water efficiency side, like the ROIs are absurd on those. So those projects do even better when times are bad because they're struggling. Hey, I need to increase noi. We've got to hit our business plans. Lenders knocking on my door. How can we start improving performance? And so those projects really helped weather buoy us through the storm, keep us afloat. And now today we have these two crazy headwinds where folks are starting to buy value add properties again, which is obviously a good indicator for us. And also our other project lines are really starting to heat up as it sits today. I think right now we're tracking to match that $3 million kind of top line that we did. And then from there continue hopefully doubling from here on out, which will be pretty sweet.

[A]

And now the debt's gone too. So then that's also a defensive metric. So now you guys are 100% owners and that's amazing.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

So the topic and headline of this podcast is going to be how do the one year out plan? Right. So you buy the business and then what happens afterwards? Because we, I think we've done a lot of episodes on basically first 90 days don't touch like. Yep, sit on your hands. You're not God's gift to entrepreneurship. You have all of these ideas, just talk to your team, learn what they're doing and then go onwards and upwards. So I think the first angle that we should hit on, you know what to do. Actually once the 90 days is settled, the dust is clear and now you really have to actually drive the business growth and you have to get where you want to go in the business plan. Talk about that, what you just said, project based versus recurring base. Because every business should benefit from a little bit of recurring revenue. And also recurring revenue impacts the enterprise value Significantly more than one offer project 100%.

[B]

Yeah. So you're going to be valued a lot higher depending on the quality of your revenue, which is the highest quality revenues. So it's going to be recurring. Hey, you sign a contract with the next 12 months or however long that contract is, you can bank on that revenue coming in every day, which is on the project side. Yeah, you can have some crazy up months, you can have some crazy down months, but at the end of the day, once you finish that install, once you finish that service, you're hunting for that next deal to keep the money coming in the door. But going back to your initial question. So, yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head the first 90 days. My, the way I think about it is your job is to hop into the trenches, get your hands dirty. Whether that is, you have a janitor on your staff. You need to be mopping right there on the floor next to him. Learn his name, learn about his family, or learn her name, learn about her family. Learn every single nook and cranny of your business, how it works, how it ticks, and be a sponge. Absorb as much information as you can. Once you get to that 90 days and you're like, hey, the dust is settled. I've identified some improvements, some leverage to pull, how I can really start making this business humming. I would always recommend starting with some slow hanging fruit, some small wins first. So maybe that's getting new tools for your team. You during your time in the trenches, you realize, hey, there's some stuff that can be improved that would just make their lives easier. New uniforms is another great one too. That kind of shows like, hey, I'm investing in the business. I'm trying to look out for my team, equip them with the best stuff that I can. So tackle that low hanging fruit. And then once you get that done, it's like you're probably gonna be making some major changes. It might be some disruption. So I think always you gotta bring it to the team with a kind of a spoonful of sugar, if you will. A little Mary Poppins reference there. Okay? All the changes that I am doing here are obviously trying to improve the business, but I'm also trying to make your lives easier. And you're gonna have to stick with me for amount of short pain, some uncertainty, some changes, like stuff will be chaotic, stuff is going to break, that's part of the process. But I promise you, we'll see the light at the end of the tunnel. And this time next year, our lives are going to be way better. We're going to be Doing much better. And overall, it's just going to be better for everyone.

[A]

Yeah, dude. An area that we really crapped the bed in this year in our business is that we had a problem which was like, marketing and lead flow, and we were trying to triple marketing and lead flow. And I had a lot of resources to throw at the problem. And what I did, because this is a lesson I just learned, too. Like, we all just are learning lessons, and I talk about the failures as much as I talk about the wins on this podcast. And I threw every single resource at marketing and sales. So I was like, let's try doubling down on Instagram and do YouTube and do this and do that.

[B]

And.

[A]

And so there we tried to attack it from seven different directions all at the same time. And that's how we learned, hey, this is, like, the worst way to solve a problem. We need to do one. One thing at a freaking time. Solve the problem in a vacuum. So do you have any stories about solving problems in a vacuum or which problems you decide to solve first and how to compartmentalize and do them in order? Like, how do you determine which ones to solve first?

[B]

Yeah, sure. So I would put them all on a whiteboard and say, hey, what is our, like, highest ROI opportunity out there? And then to your point, And I felt into the same trap, because when I got the business, I'm like, all right, let's start doing solar. Let's start doing EV charging. Let's start doing water efficiency. And if I just would have put my head down and really just focused on, hey, we're doing lighting right now. How much further can we go on that? How much more juice can we just squeeze out of just doing lighting? Like, we would have probably made way more money versus trying to spread myself thin trying to do all these things at once? So I would always recommend just throwing all your ideas up on a whiteboard. And it's not going to be an exact calculation, right? Like, it's all just projections at the end of the day. But coming to a gut feeling with your team. Get your employees buy in. Because oftentimes these folks have been working in this business for a really long time. So their insights are they're going to know a lot more about the business than you are in the early innings. So go to your team and say, hey, of these ideas that I have, or potentially even other ideas that I'm not thinking about, what do you think that we should be doing right now that could help improve the business, help grow the business? And you're Going to get a bunch of great insight and feedback and then once you settle on that one. So for me that was the EV charging stations. So our next kind of like the biggest project line that we moved into after lighting was EV charging. And for me it was funny because it was sitting on our whiteboard and one day we just had a client come and was like, hey Chandler, do you guys do EV charging installs? I'm like, yes, we do. And I go back to my team, I'm like, hey guys, I know we've been talking about this for a while. It's right here on our whiteboard. We got a month to put together a bid to do an EV charging install. I need hands. All hands on deck. Let's go and figure out how to do it. I'll be candid with you. It's going to be messy. We're probably going to have to your point. What looks like lost money is really, I would just say like a learning expense, right? Helping you build up and really become better. It's inevitably it's just going to happen. It's going to be sloppy, it's going to be messy. But it did take us probably six months, I think from the first opportunity we got on the EV side to really get the process in order, understand what our clients were looking for, get our cost dialed in and then we started cranking them out from there. But I guess just summing it all up, it's don't spread yourself too thin. Attack one thing at a time. Once you think that whatever that vertical is, once you think that is blood dry, or you have it stabilized at its maximum output and capacity, then it's all right, let's move on to the next thing and one by one just take them down like dominoes.

[A]

I think that's sad because it, it's either is this thing, is this thing maxed out? Most of the time it's probably not maxed out. So it's just if it's not maxed out, do I have somebody sitting in this seat driving the car? And then you're moving on to the next thing. So at least somebody needs to be like, you need a throat to choke and a chest to poke. You're like, this is you. Like you are doing this now. And I think that you said something that I don't want to have glossed over, which was rolling up your sleeves and getting in with the people. Because especially for any service based business or blue collar job that anybody is probably most likely buying, you guys probably aren't Buying like data centers or stuff, like, or white collar jobs. You're buying like a service company. Like I bought a kitchen hood cleaning company.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So whoever's the operator of that company needs to be getting on route. You need to be with your guys, you need to see what they're doing, you need to roll up your sleeves, you need to help them out. And then that's how you get the support and the buy in from your people. And then I think that another thing that you mentioned that I really love is then you said, hey, like, what do you guys think? And that way they feel like they have ownership in the company and they have ownership in the success because it was their idea. And they're probably coming from a culture before where they had all of these ideas and they never felt listened to or seen. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

[B]

Yeah. So the last thing you want to do in any new kind of business acquisition, stepping in as like the operator, at least in the short term, is like being the owner in the ivory tower. Like talking down to people, hey, this is what we're doing. Do this, do that. I almost think you need to almost go down to the campfire, if you will, sit on the campfire, get everyone around, listen to their ideas. I think a really good idea that one of my project managers, one of the people who transitioned with us when we first acquired our business was the old business model. How we were doing it was, hey, a client in North Carolina is like, hey Chandler, I need a ev charging bed. Or hey, Chandler, I need LED lighting bed. So our team is all based here in Tampa. We would spend money to go on a flight to go up there or drive up there, wherever it might be. So spending a lot of money for not even a guarantee on winning that contract or winning that bid. And so what our project manager was like, hey, we talked about a lot in the past, I think, especially for new clients. So I guess prospects at that point, not the customers who are giving you a bunch of repeat business. For those folks, we'll at the drop of a hat, move mountains for them. But for new prospects, to save us money and save us on, you know, opportunity costs as well, because you're sending people flying out for an unknown quantity. When you have a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, it's one of my favorite tanks. Hey, I think we should charge new prospects a thousand dollars. Just, hey, if you get call an electrician out to your house and they end up fixing the problem or not fixing the Problem, you're going to owe them that 100 bucks or whatever it is. Obviously on the commercial side, you can scale that up. So he was like, hey, Chandler, we've been swinging and missing on a lot of these ones. Because for me it was like, hey, any lead that was coming in the door, I'm like, let's jump on it now. Come on, it's hot. We're signing it up. And lo and behold, they're fishing for a price. Or they weren't serious about it at all. And he was like, hey, let's start charging people or new clients a thousand bucks. And if we do end up going to contract, we'll just credit that off, whatever that contract value is. I'm like, dude, I don't know. I don't think people are going to like it. But lo and behold, like, it ended up working really well. It obviously covered all of our travel costs, so we weren't coming out of pocket to take these swings. And as well, there's some, like, framing or authority psychology. I don't, I'm not a psychologist. I don't know how to do it.

[A]

But when people are like me on positioning.

[B]

Yeah. When they're like, oh, they're charging us a thousand bucks to come out here. Okay, they must be legit. Sure, we'll do it. A thousand bucks. Isn't that to drop in the bucket for a large apartment complex? But for us, that's mean, meaning meaningful

[A]

dollars, and you're going to be paying for your cost. That got to come out anyways.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. So it was just some reframing, but that was like something I hadn't even thought about. That was a beautiful idea. And that came organically from a member on our team who'd been working at the business for 10 years.

[A]

Yeah. And I want to do a little bit of a pivot here because I think this is an interesting thing to talk about, which is career capital. And so this is a podcast about how to quit your job, especially, like a six figure job. But most of the people that are listening to this, especially this deep, are probably a high performer in whatever they're doing. And you've listed probably seven or eight different ways that your previous job got you prepped for this, whether you were realizing it or not. And it's the same thing with me. So you just mentioned uniforms. My old, my old job was selling uniforms. So, like, all I was doing all day was literally going and selling uniforms to all these companies that I'M freaking buying right now. So that's what my job was. And so I was like the guy that was on the route like delivering uniforms with my. Because I was in sales, I was on the with my Delivery drivers at 5 o' clock in the morning eating a freaking sausage, egg and cheese from McDonald's, drinking a Red Bull, driving out to freaking Rockmart, Georgia to the factory to go deliver the stuff. And so I saw every bit of management. I saw the guys that were ride or die for their managers. I saw the guys that a new plumbing company that's running out of a freaking storage unit or running off somebody's porch and how do those guys respond? And so that, that's how I learned this stuff is like being in the thick of it. And can you name some ways, like from your old job and maybe some advice to people that are working a job right now is like start paying attention for the things that you can take away. Right? Yeah.

[B]

So for me personally, so my before I worked for that commercial real estate developer, I was working for a private equity firm that did value add multifamily transactions. So I worked on site. I knew exactly top to bottom how these apartments were run, what the people were like, what they look for. I was a client of the business that we ended up buying. So I can tell you right now, I didn't know the first thing about light bulbs. I didn't know the first thing about EV charging or low flow plumbing. But I understood the market, I understood the client. I had contacts in there that I could go bring that to. So it got me really comfortable. Yeah, I'm going to have to learn lighting, lighting on the fly. But I know exactly who I'm talking to. I know my ideal client profile, the icp. So it made that kind of jump much easier. And I would recommend for other folks, whether it was an internship that you did during college or odd job that you worked in high school or now that you're out, you're in your career. Not only the industry of if you're doing consulting work, like learning about the business models and how the other people make money, but also the skills that you have too, I think is a highly underlooked one. So let's say you did B2B sales for a software company or you sold uniforms, like what type of business, whether the industry or maybe the kind of existing ownership structure. So let's say the owner was a lead sales guy. You can plug those skills that you're learning right into that business out of the box. You can learn the product on the way that stuff doesn't grow on trees. So I think it's just really important to taking just like an internal audit of what do you know, what skills do you have and what kind of businesses or opportunities are out there that will make it easy. So you don't want to like reinvent the wheel Because I know like, I know a lot of folks who went to MBA school and did like the traditional search fund route, decided to do the self funded search route and they were like, I have no business. When they were working private equity before, like super high white collar jobs. And they're like, I don't really have any business buying a plumbing business or an H VAC business. That's not my world. So I'm going to start looking at accounting firms or professional service firms or maintenance service providers stuff where my skills, my background, my experience fits in perfectly. I'm the missing piece of the puzzle.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that this is critically important to talk about. I just made a video about this today where I call it being a top line CEO or a bottom line CEO. So are you somebody that has a natural proclivity or career experience doing sales and marketing? If so, you do not buy the business that's already crushing it in sales and marketing. You buy the business that is super strong in operations so that you don't have to go learn a new skill set that's the opposite of your disc profile. You go by the strong operations business and you improve the sales and marketing and the same thing. If you don't like talking to people, then you go buy something that's very strong in sales and marketing and you go fix the operations in the back end of it. You get something that's like idiot proof. You're like, dude, how are you guys making money right now? Like, how are you guys fulfilling this? I could come fix it. You're doing note cards. I can fix all of this with AI. Yeah. If people and if my tough love that I just gave to some guy in the Instagram comments, rest in peace to that guy. But he said, how do I know what skill sets I possess? And I brother, I said, sent with love.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If you don't know what you're good at, you should not buy a business.

[B]

No, absolutely not. I'd say go, go take a long walk with no phone and the answer will come to you or something.

[A]

Do some meditation. Yeah. Look at what you're getting compensated to do that.

[B]

Be helpful. What's your job? Yeah. Exactly. How do you make Money right now. That's probably a good indicator.

[A]

Yeah. So what's next, man? So you've got this thing stabilized. What's the vision for the next three years?

[B]

Yeah, so I am, right now I'm actually working, going back to SBA financing. I'm in underwriting right now to buy out my two existing partners on this business to become the full 100% owner. And then from there I'm having some talks with kind of concurrently with some of my suppliers, some of our subcontractors that we use on the labor side. And I think I'm going to start vertically integrating and try to roll up some adjacent businesses that we're already using. I know. I think it was like Amazon or Bezos was just like, hey, let me look at all my expenses on my sheet and turn those. Yeah, and turn those into income. So I'm like, hey, I'm paying a lot of money to the subcontractor doing installs in Atlanta and he's doing a lot of other work for a lot of other of our competitors. What does it look like if I bought him, all of a sudden my labor is way cheaper and I can, for lack of a better term, maybe start seeing some clients from some of the other people that he's doing work for already on the same side too, on the supplier side, that would probably be we. One of our water efficiency products that we use is like patent and proprietary. One of the only kind of like 10 folks in the country who can sell them and install them. And he's an old retiring guy, like the perfect profile of a baby boomer business. So I've had, I'm in the early stages of some discussions with him, but after that, just make the enterprise value going back to it a lot more robust by doing a lot of these add ons and rolling up some adjacent businesses and selling and figuring out what I want to do from there.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's smart. Especially because, yeah, it's just like figuring out what your adjacent stuff is. Like, we just bought out a competitor. I think when this airs, we should be closed. I think we're supposed to close like April 2nd, but at a K Kitchen hood cleaning company now we're buying out the competitor to it, the same market. Yeah. So, yeah, fingers crossed. We're going to learn a bunch as we're rolling them into our systems and processes. So then that'll be a whole other podcast episode. But yeah, dude, it's like it's tripling the enterprise value of the business because we're immediately bringing in all these new customers that we can now cross, sell, upsell, do all this stuff with. And it's super cool and interesting. Yeah, man. Awesome. If somebody was looking to partner with you, if somebody was looking to learn more from you, where can they find you? Where can they go?

[B]

Yeah, thanks for asking for that. I would say the biggest one is going to be my ex profile, which I know you're getting more back into as well. Twitter or excuse me, X now literally changed my life. It got me my first business acquisition. It has expanded my network and presented doors that I didn't even know would be there that were open to me. So if you go to my handle is at Chandler Reed R E D SMB. So that's going to be where I'm spending most of my time online. You can go my link. I have a newsletter that I'm trying to ramp up there too. Just sharing everything that I know about buying and growing small businesses.

[A]

Dude. Yeah, I love. I followed you for a few years now, even before this was an idea and you're definitely, yeah, definitely a good follow. I highly recommend it. And like I was just saying to you, I need to be back on on X a lot more because it was just something that I used to be on and then I just fell myself off of it and so now we need to get back to it. So guys, go follow Chandler. We'll put your link in the show description as well as your newsletter and everything. And man, thanks for coming on. This has been like a cool like hard knocks in the freaking thick of it story. Dude. It's been awesome.

[B]

Yeah, Brian, thanks for having me everyone. Appreciate you listening if you made it this far and good luck out there. You got this.

[A]

This has been Shandler and Brian with the Action Academy podcast signing off.