Nickolousky, welcome to Acquiring Minds. Thank you for having me. Nick, this interview is going to be a challenge and that is because you have had a very eventful last four or so years. Some big splashy numbers in there. So much so that I actually pushed back a little bit on your initial email to me saying, "Hey man, I'm a I'm a little skeptical here. Uh these numbers are hard to believe." But as you explained behind those headline numbers, there is a roller coaster, there is some heartbreak, there is of course good fortune. So, I'm going to do my best here to wrangle your head spinning story and along the way will as always try to learn a little bit about each of the various industries that you have participated in. Awesome. So, let's get to it, Nick. As always, some background on you first, please. Well, you're not the first person to call me difficult. Um my wife would definitely My wife would definitely agree with you. And if you're going to wrangle me, it's because I have ADHD. So, stoked to be here, man. Okay. Yeah, I So, I graduated college in 2012. I was a little bit older. I was 27 years old and it was right around the time that President Obama was elected and the Affordable Care Act was happening and I knew I wanted to do something that was going to be really impactful. So, I thought I'll get into health care. Um I grew up with a twin sister who was severely developmentally delayed and so we always had health care in our home. She had died almost, you know, a number of times, pneumonia. There's a point where she was intubated in the hospital for 6 months. Like it was a roller coaster and I thought, "Hey, if I could work in an in a field that would provide valuable services like that to people who can't provide it to themselves, that would be awesome." Now, I can't handle blood. I'll faint at the sight of blood. So, I decided to go into administration and I was an administrator for a number of years. I worked for several different companies. Um I started my career in Idaho and then Washington and then I went to Texas and I learned a ton and I was very successful and I kept getting promoted and then I took a job because I was very arrogant within the organization and um ended up failing at that and getting fired. So, that was my first real kind of taste of failure, but it was an amazing experience cuz I, you know, I learned a lot about myself during that period of time. Um and at the same time, my wife and I were uh pregnant and our our son was diagnosed with something called Trisomy 13, which is a a terminal diagnosis. And uh we were told he wasn't going to make it to term and he he was born. He ended up being born and living with us for 7 days. Um but during those 7 days, he came home on pediatric hospice, which is it's just an insane kind of situation to be in as a parent. Um and I had been working in home health and hospice. So, I go from this like administrative I'm trying to take care of these patients and these nurses who are caring for the patients on hospice to all of a sudden being a family member taking care of my son on hospice. Um so, as you can imagine, it was this life-changing experience, horrible and beautiful um all in the, you know, in the same span of time. But after that experience, I became like exceptionally passionate about home health and hospice. Before I thought I'd get a few few years of experience, I'll go back and get my MBA. Now I was like, this is the thing I want to do um at least for the next 10 years. Uh so, I worked in home health and hospice. I worked for a company that um ended up giving me a little bit of equity. Spoiler alert, I ended up getting fired again from there and in 2020, I decided it was time. I was done being reliant on other people's generosity and bought my first company, uh started another company on the side and subsequently sold both of those companies over the next 4 years and over the last 6 months, I've been trying to find my next thing, just trying to figure out kind of what I'm going to take my next swing on. So, that's my life in a short. That that was very well done, Nick. That was that was a great uh story, although there's so there's so much in there, clearly. Um I want to double-click on a couple things. First of all, um as I've the few conversations that we've had, I don't see an arrogant person sitting in front of me. So, when you say you were arrogant cuz you were being so successful, um have you gone through a big change or have you just learned to hide your arrogance or getting fired twice, did that humble you or what? Say more about the fact that you called yourself at one time at least arrogant. Yeah, I mean I am a This sounds weird to say. I am a humble person. Um that's probably the wrong word. I'm an insecure person or can be an insecure person, right? So, it's like you're always kind of doubting yourself, but I worked in this organization and when I joined them, they were like a 20 million, 15 million dollar segment of a publicly traded company. By the time that I left them, they were a 150 million dollar segment of a publicly traded company. And the first opportunity that I was thrown into, I hit it out of the park. I did exceptionally well. And the reason I did exceptionally well is because the opportunity played to my strengths. It was very analytical. It was very much a process problem. It wasn't a people problem or growth problem. And looking back, I know that, but at the time I didn't know that. I thought, "Oh, I could run this. I could do this anywhere." So, I ended up going from Washington to Texas, did well in Texas and then I convinced my boss and my partners we we call each other partners. We weren't actually like partners, but um to buy a small home health company in Southern California cuz I wanted to get back to Southern California and I thought, "I've been successful everywhere else. I'm going to knock this out of the park. Why would I not knock this out of the park?" Mhm. And when I get there, I realize really quickly I'm in deep trouble because this agency, as what we call them, it didn't need somebody who was analytical. It didn't need somebody who was like smart and good with the numbers and sitting in the back office, you know, running through the spreadsheet and finding all the efficiencies. It needed someone to go out, boots on the ground, pound the pavement, knock doors, and drive business. And that at the time definitely was not my skill set. I didn't know what to do. And so, I just kind of reverted thinking like, "Well, if I find some more efficiencies, if I if I cut a little bit more, um this will be successful." And, you know, obviously it wasn't successful and ended up being one of the worst acquisitions that they had ever done um up until that point. And I I say I got fired. I didn't actually get fired, but I was going through those those health things with my wife while she was pregnant and and the uh the founder of the home health and hospice segment came down to visit me and he's like, "What are you doing? Like you're you're traveling. Things aren't going well here. Why don't we give you 3 months to like to spend time with your family. Um you can find another job closer to home and and we'll help you during this transition." So, it it wasn't like a firing in the sense that they came one day and just told me I was an idiot and fired me. They were very gracious with the exit, but, you know, it was still a failure on my part because I didn't recognize the things that I that I wasn't good at. Yeah. Yeah. And to And so, to be clear, that thing was that you uh didn't weren't a salesman, weren't somebody who's going to be good at business development or didn't realize didn't have the strategic insight to know that's what the what that agency needed. No, I knew it's what the agency needed. I just didn't have that skill set. I didn't know um how to do that and I wasn't innately comfortable with going out and selling, which is weird cuz I was a Mormon missionary for 2 years and that's all I did was try to sell try to sell God, you know, door-to-door. But Yeah, I mean that's the that is the canonical, you know, sales boot camp is the Mormon mission. It is. But, you know, I always said like the only thing I'm ever going to sell is God. I don't I don't want to sell anything. This is terrible um going door-to-door. I love people, but the sales piece was always just really hard for me. And so, when I got thrown into that situation, I didn't really have a good corporate tool set to draw on to understand this is how you build a sales and marketing strategy. These are all of your A, B, and C accounts. This is how much business is coming from each one of these accounts. This is how you qualify an account. This is how you actually create um a strategy to check in with your reps. This is how you are measuring your conversion. Like I just didn't know any of those things. I know them now because I went and worked for another company that taught me those things, but um yeah, it was a skill set that I that I did not have and I I was too afraid to lean into it. I I just Yeah. Okay. Okay. And how much your your gracious uh boss, quote unquote partner, uh gentleman mentioned the travel that you're traveling a lot, meanwhile you're having this challenged pregnancy, I guess. How much were you traveling? Um I was traveling probably on average, well, out of state, I was traveling once or twice a month, but I was driving an hour and a half each way Mhm. um to my to my job. So, it was That was really, really hard on my family cuz I was not getting home until, you know, after 8:00 and I was leaving before 6:00. And then you got to tell us a little bit about the a little bit more on the next stint and how that one also didn't end in the way you would have liked. So, So, there was an in-between stint. I I left um the first company, which if anybody knows The Ensign Group, they were a very they are a very large skilled nursing facility company. They incubated essentially this home health and hospice company that has since spun out publicly to become The Pennant Group. It's important for later. Okay. Um and and you know, at the time I I probably led one of the worst acquisitions. That's what that was one of the worst acquisitions that they ever did at the time. So, I leave them and I go and work for this company named Seasons Hospice. And they were phenomenal. And, you know, I was I was kind of down on myself, obviously. I had failed. I I didn't know kind of what the direction was. I had just got I had just lost my son. Um it was a really hard time in my life, but I had this amazing boss. Her name is Beth Imlay, still like one of my favorite people in the world. And she liked me for whatever reason and and really worked with me to develop a lot of the areas that I was deficient in. So, I got to this location and very quickly became apparent they didn't need the analytical side, even though that's what I thought when I took the job. Um they needed business development, and so I threw myself into learning that world. And over the next 2 years that site ended up becoming of They were like a $300 million company. Um that that ended up becoming their fastest growing sites for the next 2 years. Um and I was able to work through a lot of like I just learned a lot from them that I'm that I've now able to carry with me. Um from there I left and I took a job with some friends who had started a home health and hospice company. And they had offered me the prospect of equity. Because at that time I was I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but my wife wasn't comfortable with me making the jump. And you know, I thought I was ready. I thought I was ready in 2012 when I graduated college. Um but my wife didn't think I was ready, you know, and of course I thought all these negative things like how could she not believe in me and what does she not think that I'm good enough? Looking back, I wasn't ready. Like I just was not ready. I needed to learn a lot of things from those corporate experiences. But um this seemed like the best of both worlds, right? They would offer me some equity, but I'd also be kind of going on with an established company. Um and what they offered me was 3%, which in my mind was like they're a $50 million company now. If we get to $100 million, man, I could have $3 million. That'd be incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Um but but in order to get that 3%, I needed to um sign essentially on the loan for the next acquisition. So, they were they were a compa- You can think of them as a as like a privately held roll up. They weren't a private equity funded roll up, but they're privately held roll up. And so each one of the deals that they did, essentially they're trying to do through the SBA. So, they wanted me to sign on the dotted line for the next acquisition that they did. To take the personal guarantee, this audience a phrase this audience will know well, to to to personally guarantee their next acquisition. And in my mind I'm thinking, yeah, that's that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. This is a a fairly large company. Um if that's the slug that I need to take in order to earn that equity, great. Well, over the next 2 years they had some operational struggles. They they purchased some companies that unfortunately had IRS liens and Medicare takebacks and the the long and short of it is massive cash crunch. And not in my area, but still within within the company. And um we ended up having this conversation in December of 2019 where they said, hey, okay, we're ready for you to exercise the um the loan agreement that we had in order to get this equity. I'm like, okay. Um and they said, but we want you to purchase one of our existing entities and with that money we are going to fund working capital. Um but but we will we we will pay down the note. Um it's just that this this is your slug. And for me I was like, that that doesn't sound like what we talked about. Like what what I thought I was doing is purchasing a company to expand the company, right? Not playing kind of this weird shell game of buying an existing entity um that they already owned so that they could have some cash flows, but they were still going to pay off the the the note. Like it just didn't make sense to me and And also they they were they it sounded like the initial pitch was sweat equity for 3%. And now, right? I mean you you earned your 3% by by coming in and working there. And now it was like you were also going to have to put capital in. So, you were now buying 3% and it doesn't seem as sweet a deal. Yeah, and and again, I didn't have a ton of experience before that, right? So, looking back I'm able to say that now. Yeah. Yeah. But at the time I didn't I didn't know that. Um so, I didn't ultimately just didn't feel comfortable. I was like, I have the same downside, but nowhere near the same upside. And so, in December I said, hey, this isn't my notice. I'm not quitting, but I I need something with more equity. And I'm going to look for something and if we can figure out something together, great. And you know, we had brainstormed about, well, maybe we could do a DSO together. Maybe we could, you know, start something else together that gives you more equity. Um and we were in the middle of those conversations. My wife is pregnant and in February, February 19th of 2020, I get a call from one of them that says, hey, can we meet um for lunch? And I'm like, uh yeah. That's weird. Um and I tell my wife, who was in labor at the time, I'm like, that's weird. The guys want to meet. And uh that that that doesn't usually happen, but you're in labor. And she's like, well, you know, this is our third fourth kid at the time. She's like, uh we're not going to the hospital yet. Why don't you go grab a lunch? It's really close by. And then we'll figure out what's going on. So, I'm like, all right. All right. So, I go By the way, now that I've had my own uh second kid recently, it is remarkable how dramatic the first labor is. And then the second labor, and I can only imagine by the third and fourth it's like no big deal. Yeah, this is your labor. I mean, and my I mean, my wife is amazing. She's like she's the strongest person I know. So, I'm grateful for her. Um but yeah, we were like, okay, we know this we know that how this game goes. Mhm. So, I go I go I have I have lunch and the long and short of it is that because of the cash crunch that they were in, they needed to take an investment. And one of the strings of the investment was they needed to cut their workforce. And because they knew that I wasn't long for this position, they had to eliminate my position. Uh which was like, what the heck? You know, my wife's my wife's literally in labor today. What are you talking about? Um and I said, am I fired today? They're like, no, no, no, it's not today. Uh February 28th is your last day. I'm like, okay, well, that's nine that's nine days from now. How generous. So, Don't be crazy. Not today. Nine days from now. It was it was nuts. And I you know, so I go back I'm fuming. I talk to my wife and um thankfully she calmed me down. She's like, hey, we'll figure this out. But if you're if you're checked out for the next day while we're delivering this baby, you're never going to have that time back. So, don't be an idiot. Let's focus here. And thankfully I was able to Wow. The presence the presence of mind of a woman in labor saying that is pretty pretty strong. Yeah, she's pretty incredible. I'm very lucky. Yeah. I'm very lucky to have her. Good for her. Good for you. Now, these guys, um do you feel it sou- it sounded like your first time being quote fired, you still have goodwill toward those folks. They were gracious with you, whatever. This second this second round where they say the guys who say let's get lunch, uh do you do you feel like they also were trying to um act in good faith or do you feel less warmth toward them? Um I think they were trying to I didn't think they were trying to act in good faith. I think that they made a lot of stupid mistakes. Okay. Um you know, I gotten really close with them as well. They like couldn't even look me in the eye Yeah. had lunch, you know, they felt terrible. Yeah. I think that they could have handled it differently and better. Um but the situ- but I also now having been on the other side of it and owning a company and just understanding all the pressures that you have there, they had real cash issues. I mean, it was they were in a really really tough position. So, I get that they had to make I get that they had to make difficult decisions. Um however, having been on the other side of that now, I've had I've gone through some things that tested my resolve and tested when I say, oh, I care about people or I would never do that. And I've passed the test for myself. So, I know how I would have acted in that situation. And there's no way I would have fired a guy who I felt had sacrificed and wife was in labor and given him 9 days notice, right? Like I would have totally handled that differently. Yeah. But at the same time I also understand it's it's it's a really hard difficult situation to be in when you're running out of cash and you're trying to make save the company. Wow. Okay. Um well, thank you for for sh- sharing all of that, Nick. Um And by the way, before we move into your story of acquisition now, uh I caught on one of your Twitter threads that you are the son of I think either way, your words, poor immigrants. My father and my father's uh an immigrant. Okay. You you just didn't want to use the word poor. Did I Did I mischaracterize that? you know, very poor. Very poor. Yeah, I grew I grew up very poor. Um and my father is an Halusky? What what where is he from? Give us Give us Give us 30 seconds on just that cuz that's I assume is very important context, too. My father is full-blooded Ukrainian. He has never been to the Ukraine. During World War II as the Germans were marching through the Ukraine in their conquest of Russia, they and this is well documented, they took back Ukrainian teenagers as slaves to work in the factory. And I use the word slaves cuz that's what they used. Um and so, my grandparents were actually taken back as teenagers to Germany to work in the factories. They met there. My father was born in Germany in 1947. They couldn't go back to the Ukraine, and again, this is well documented, because people who returned back to the Ukraine were viewed as traitors. And they didn't want to remain in Germany, obviously, so they went to Brazil. So, my father actually grew up in Brazil living on dirt floors and came to the United States when he was a teenager. Um and has been in the United States since I don't know what year, 1970. Um and he was a professional soccer player and served in Vietnam. he culturally Ukrainian or Brazilian? That's a hard question. He identifies as Latin American. Yeah. I bet. I mean, your formative years in Brazil. Brazil's a, you know, strong culture. Very strong place to grow up. So, you And he's a professional soccer player. So, like all of his best friends are you know, Brazilian or Mexican or, you know, Latin American of some sort or, you know, European, Middle Eastern. So, he's a very eclectic guy. Love him. And and and where what's the Mormon connection here? He converted to Mormonism. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, he converted to Being on the other end of a of a Mormon mission? Being on the receiving end of a a knock on the door? Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't missionaries. It was a friend of his who in this message really resonated with him that said, hey, "Ansel, have you ever wondered where you're from, why you're here, and where you're going? And it was just something that hit him like a ton of bricks and he ended up investigating and converting to the church and is is now a very very faithful member of the of the LDS faith. Um but he's always been a very religious person. Just very very religious. His mother was the same way and he grew up as Russian not Russian Orthodox Eastern Orthodox. Um So yeah, he he's he'd always just had a religious bent to him. He was always searching for something and in the LDS community he found community. Mhm. Great. Thank you. And your mom? Uh my mom was also LDS but she is actually Jewish. So uh that's an interesting From here? She's from the United States. Yep, California. Okay. Wild. I mean unusual. Let me use that word instead. is. Great. All right, Nick. So it's COVID time. It's February 2020. Um you This is the point in the story where you buy your first business. Yep. Why? How do you get How do you get turned on to entrepreneurship through acquisition? How does wife decide that you're ready to be an entrepreneur? How do you decide that you're ready? Give us the the origin story of your acquisition path. I don't know if this will resonate with many people. I think that it will but have you ever had those moments in your life and moments the wrong word, period of time in your life where you just felt an extreme sense of urgency. Like time was of the essence. Sure. for me that's how I felt at that point about entrepreneurship. I was like it's now or never. Mhm. I I I've got to buy a business. I've got to become an entrepreneur because if I don't do it now it's just going to get harder and harder the longer that I wait. Luckily I had Nick, how old were you and how many kids did you have? I was 34. I was 34. And we had 34 with We had three boys. Um so we had a at that time we had a somewhere in the ballpark of a 6 3 and new month old, right? Six six-year-old, three-year-old and and and newborn. Great. Thank you. Um And luckily after that December conversation I had already started looking cuz I was like, all right, I uh my brother-in-law had said to me years ago uh I don't ever want to be at the mercy of someone else's generosity. And I had that's just like stuck with me and so I thought, all right, I'm not just going to wait around for them to figure something out. I'm going to go look. And so I started looking for businesses to buy. Given that experience where I got fired um at my first company, I didn't want to buy something that was going to be heavily dependent on me as a salesperson. I also didn't want to start a company from scratch cuz I knew that was a skill set that I just didn't enjoy or have. So I wanted to buy a company. That was um important to me. And so I started were you plugged into ETA? Had you read the books? Had you done all of the Had you been sucked in by SMB Twitter? Any of that? Or did you just kind of come to this path on your own? No, I came to this path path of my own. Very very lucky because um the guys that I've been working with previously they did all of their acquisitions through the SBA. And so everything that they did was like creatively negotiated and I had a front row seat. I I I had seen it on the corporate side and seen what it was like to meet with a seller and do due diligence and negotiate the LOI and do the purchase agreement etc. But I got a front seat with them to see what it was like going through the SBA and like not having a massive corporate line of credit and not having a bunch of money to put down. So I was very lucky in the sense that I had these like creative deal structuring um examples that I could go back to and draw on that I didn't I didn't see in the corporate setting. So I knew I'm like, okay, I know that I could buy a business either with a mix of seller financing and the SBA or all seller financing or or all SBA. Um and buying a business just made way more sense to me than starting from scratch. I did start to get into the SMB space during COVID just because we were all locked down and it was like, okay, I'll go on Twitter like everybody else. But um yeah, it was it was less I I didn't get the idea from from the SMB space. All of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh, there's a bunch of other people out there that are doing similar things to what I'm doing. Great. Um okay, super. And what was your if if you can share, what was your cash position at the time? How much money liquid did you have to put toward this project, if any? So very lucky. Um we had probably at the time, I want to say $50,000 of savings. Which doesn't sound like a lot of money but for us felt like a ton of money uh back then. Uh what we also were in the process of selling our house which had appreciated pretty significantly. And so we knew we were going to have an additional $250,000 post sale from the house. And we weren't earmarking all of that but in my mind I was like, okay, I've got probably 150,000 to 200,000 that I could put down on a business. So I was using that as my basis for kind of how large of a business I could end up affording is a 150,000 200,000 down payment. On a you know, which is going to be 10 15 maybe 20% so you're looking let's call it roughly at a million dollar a business with a purchase price of a million bucks. Call it. Yep. Exactly. That's All right. What else? What else about your your search criteria? Tell us how you approached this uh thinking about it. Um So excuse me. So for me I this is something I've like created now but looking back I was also doing it. This is my my framework. I I talk to people a lot where there's a lot of self-assessment that you need to do when you're identifying your business. People like to think about the business, the deal. What does the business look like? And I think that that's incomplete. There are two parts when you're buying a business. There's you and there's the business that you're buying, right? And many times we just focus on the business. Well, you know, what's what's what are its margins? Does it have a moat? Does it have recurring revenue? What are the customers like, right? But we spend less time here, right? On us. What are we good at? What are our skills? What's our experience? What's our risk profile etc. So um for me there's like this let's call it five-part criteria. I look at risk profile. So what are you comfortable with in terms of risk? What's your personality like? What's your experience like? What is your skill set? And what's your available capital? So that's my framework now. I didn't have it necessarily back then but I knew that I wanted to buy something that I had direct or analogous experience in. I didn't want to buy something new. I was like, okay, if I'm going to buy something I want something with the highest level of probability of success and I just thought buying something outside of my sphere of influence experience would have been dumb. Um I wanted to buy a services business um and I wanted to make sure that I could add like real value to it. That there was an opportunity to scale. I knew I wanted to buy something with with strong tailwinds. I think Paul Graham has this quote that says the uh business is less important than the industry that you that you invest in. Because if you're riding the wave like you can be dumb and and still be really successful just because there's a ton of demand. Yeah. Uh so I wanted to have something with strong tailwinds and the two areas that I looked at in terms of tailwinds were the industry and geography. So pretty quickly I mean I was already on the healthcare train but then pretty quickly I was like, all right, there's a couple geographies that I'm interested in. Boise became one of them because Boise's growing like crazy. So there's strong tailwinds there. Uh Utah was another market that I looked at because there's strong tailwinds in Utah. Um and it was in particular those those two markets that I was looking to buy a business in. Nick, let me let me jump in. So hold hold your hold your place. Hold your thought. You're in Southern California at the time? Mhm. Okay. So you're so you're you're prepared to move. You're clearly going to look might be moving to Utah or Boise. Yeah, I mean so again this was February and you have to remember what it was like in the beginning of COVID. Everybody was freaking out. Um and I I don't know what it was at the time. I just felt like I wanted to get somewhere that was going to be less restrictive than California because and I'm grateful for it looking back. You know, they closed schools for like two years. My my kids would have been homeschooled. My wife and I would have been figuring out how to educate them and I just think that that would have been a a very difficult experience for my children. And thankfully, you know, we see looking back that children were the demographic that really wasn't nearly as impacted as the elderly population. And that's the second component to this is like I am kind of grateful I got fired because what was I working in in February of 2020? I was working in healthcare. Had they like had they waited two weeks, I probably would have been traveling a ton or dealing with outbreaks or just dealing with everything that was heavy during that period of COVID. And instead I got to spend time with my newborn son and look for a business. So like you know, there are there are silver silver linings to crappy situations for sure. Um but yes, we were already planning on moving. Great. And and when you said you wanted to therefore focus on based on the analysis of who you were and the value you wanted to bring, you wanted services but specifically healthcare services. Yes. To be clear. Okay. Healthcare services. So you're saying within the industry obviously healthcare's an enormous industry. Did Was it Was it more dialed in? Was it sub niche within within healthcare like hospice or home care or home health or just anything across the entire universe of healthcare? The Yes. It was it was niched down. My thinking was I didn't want to do something that required a physical space and required patients to come in person because my brother-in-law at the time had a skilled nursing facility company. I want they had like 17 facilities at the time and there's just a ton of capital expenditures that's required to maintain those facilities. So, I didn't want something that was high CapEx. I wanted something I could get into pretty easily. Um and then grow without a bunch of capital expenditures, right? For them, every time that they wanted to grow, they had to get a new either massive lease or buy the real estate. That's really, really expensive to go through that process. Mhm. So, I knew I wanted services. And then I knew I wanted to stay in something that I either had direct or analogous experience in. So, direct experience would have obviously been home health or hospice. Analogous experience would have been any of those vendors that I worked with ever Mhm. in the home health and hospice. So, supplies, DME, medical billing, medical practice management, coding, um scribe, staffing, those types of things. Those are the things that I was looking at and I had narrowed it down to. The other thing I wanted was something with 15% or more net margins cuz I wanted a cushion. In home health in particular, you can be a well-run agency and be doing 7 or 8% net margins. Those are really thin margins. Have you ever heard what the advice is of the amount of cash on hand you should keep? Uh for you mean like how much working capital for any business? Yeah. I I I've I've heard kind of 3 to 6 months, but that's that's going deep into my Don't hold me to that. Yeah, yeah. That's what I heard as well. 3 to 6 months. Okay. Okay. So, like I started doing the math. Let's just say 5% is going to be an easier number for me to to me where I work with. Let's say your margin's 5% and you're supposed to have 6 months of cash on hand. Well, for me to get 1 month of cash on hand, it's going to take me 20 months. Right? Cuz my my margin's 5% and so in order for me to kind of get Or let's just say I I have 95% cost. It's going to get me 19 months until I have 1 month's cash on hand. So, it's going to take me almost like 8 years before I have 6 months of cash on hand. That's freaky to me because like it just feels like I'm riding the line. And I know people are listening and they're going to say, "Well, it's not necessarily all of your expenses cash on hand. It's it's all of your fixed costs cash on hand because you can flex your non like okay, fine. Point taken." But you still understand what I'm saying that when you have a low margin business below 10%, it's very hard difficult for you to build up a cash cushion. Uh so, I knew I wanted at least 15% in average net margins. Um and then the next thing that I knew is I wanted a business that I could buy myself. So, my brother my other brother-in-law had been a searcher. And for those listening, they know the search fund structures. Let's say you can earn up to 30%. You get 10% when the deal closes, you get 10% if you hit certain metrics, and then you get 10% upon exit if you hit certain thresholds. So, like best case scenario, you go and raise money, you're a search fund, you do all of this work, you increase the value, best case you're getting 30% of that. Um and they can fire you at any time. You like you don't really have much job security. So, in my mind, I'm like, "I don't want to go raise money so I can be beholden to people and not earn as much equity as I want and nor have the control. I want to buy something that I can 100% afford." Um So, those were those were like the main criteria that I had as I was searching for the business. Great. Well, a couple follow-ups on that. First, just on the point about margins. You know, there's a there's a lot of reasons in addition to what you explained to not like really tight margins. One, two one also is that the this phrase I love, return on brain damage. It's like how how how Don't just think about ROI, think about like how much effort it costs to extract a dollar profit from a business. So, let's say you have a business with 5% margins. That to to to make a half a million dollars a year of SDE, you have to be doing 10 million dollars in revenue, which just if it's a services business, that's just a lot of people, a lot of moving parts, a lot of effort per dollar that comes out of that machine. That's that's a pretty low on you know, a return on on brain damage. Yeah. The other thing is that it is that it just when you're you just need you just need to be that much more operationally dialed in. That much You just need that much more operational excellence when your margins are that tight. When you have room in your margins, you have more margin for error. You have more margin to make mistakes because it's not like, you know, a point or two in either direction is going to you know, if you if you go from 5% margins to 4% margins one year cuz you make a mistake, you've just lost 20% of your profit that year. Um so so so you know, a point in either direction really matters when you're in a razor-thin industry. So, lots to dislike about low margin businesses. I um honestly was thinking I wasn't going to do home health and hospice just because I knew the industry so well. Um I wanted to do something outside of it that was still analogous. And this is the exact reason why. I wanted to grow a business. I wanted I wanted it to be able to scale. But in home health and hospice, if I am billing, I am collecting 45 to 60 days later. Which doesn't seem terrible. But here's the problem. If my census increases, let's say it doubles month over month. I've now got to hire nurses to take care of those patients. And on a P&L on the paper, like it looks fantastic. Oh my gosh, our revenue just doubled and we're we're way more profitable. But from a cash perspective, I don't have that money yet. So, how do I front the cost to hire those nurses, to get the supplies, to get DME out to those patients? It's it's got to come from somewhere. So, either my growth is going to be constrained or I've got to go take debt from somewhere else and I I just that kind of freaked me out when I started thinking about scaling. Um so. No, and I I mean I just saw a Twitter thread about this that that that growth in small business at least and probably all business, but certainly down here in kind of non-scalable businesses, growth eats cash. Um so, growth can great growth is what we all want. Growth feels great. Growth looks great. But but um it it's just a it just crushes your actual cash flow coming out of the business. Yeah. Um and you just you just described that well. The other thing I want to just call back before we get too far away from it is your thought about um what we call business buyer fit. So, rather than just looking at Ooh, how appealing is this business? It's how how um do I fit as business buyer into this business? What value do I add? And um it's it's so important in in in fact like at Acquisition Lab, Walker Diebel's Acquisition Lab, full disclaimer full disclosure sponsor of the pod, they spend at the beginning of their cohorts, they spend a lot of time on the personality assessment of you cohort member as you business buyer because they they they so believe that it really is as much about you and the type of business that you'll enjoy running, the type of business that you can add value to that um you should really kind of do this introspective process before you go out there and start looking at BizBuySell sort of thing. It's it's it's key. It made me feel good. I talked to Chelsea Wood recently and I told her I told her my process like the stuff that I just outlined for you. I'm like, "Well, I You've got to know yourself. You've got to be introspective." And thankfully I had situations where I was forced to be introspective, but um she was like, "Oh, you must have read Buy Then Build." And I have not read Buy Then Build yet. I mean, I am now after speaking with her cuz she's like, "That's all we do." Uh and so I I was like, "Oh, that's nice to hear." Like okay, that's validating that at least my thought process is good. Yeah, great. Good stuff. All right. Um okay. So, we got to I'm just watching our time here. Nick, we got a long way to go. So, so let's just jump ahead. We're not going to um spend time on your search, but let's hear about the business that you bought. So, I ended up finding a business in Boise, Idaho. It was a medical billing company that also did medical staffing and medical practice management. So, those things are different. There's medical billing and coding, which means I'm a physician, I go and see a patient. Based on that documentation, I'm then going to bill somebody. Could be Medicare, could be a commercial insurance, could be cash pay, whatever. But there are codes associated with that encounter, that visit that go on the claim that then go to in order for the payer to know what amount to bill. You would think it's just as easy as the physician going and having a conversation and then it's billable. It's not. Someone's actually got to go through that and look and see, "Okay, what was documented? Does it support these codes? Um Did he miss a code, right? Is there something that he documented that maybe we're not actually billing for?" And so there's a whole industry sort of built around medical billing and coding because physicians do not want to do the administrative stuff. They just want to go practice. And so they outsource a lot of the medical billing and medical coding. Um to other people. Then there's medical practice management. As you can imagine, these are the other administrative functions. HR, payroll, accounts payable, uh collections, not just the billing, but the actual bringing of the money in, uh credentialing, uh renegotiating contracts, all of those administrative functions, um they will out they many times will outsource to someone who does medical practice management. Um then we also had an arm that did medical staffing. So, that actually provided staff to physician's offices. So, those are going to be people, you know, a receptionist or a business office manager or, you know, an administrative person. Um and then we also had a scribe program. So, these would be people physicians are just trying to get more billable hours, right? Cuz like it's everything that they do is billable. And in order for them to make more money, they need more billables. Well, if you can take away the documentation with a scribe, they can do more encounters because somebody else is kind of writing their documentation. And so we And what does that look like exactly? Is that where where I've heard where like a somebody's basically FaceTimed into the to the to the room with me and they're taking notes as the doctor talks to me sort of thing? There's a couple different ways. Like some doctors just have um a device on them that they record into that they dictate into and then that goes to somebody to scribe. There's also the FaceTime option. We actually had physical people following these physicians around that would scribe for them. And they were part of a a college program essentially that we funneled to these physicians. So, it was an it was an actual human being in person. Yeah. Sounds inefficient, got to say, Nick. Very very inefficient. Okay. Very inefficient. But also very high margins, actually. That was a very high margin business for us. Oh, interesting. So, anyways, that was the business. and and so, Nick, you you know, this is a business that does a grab bag of things. Now, they're all analogous to use your word, they're all they're all related. You can imagine cross-selling and upselling. And so, maybe maybe it's it's wonderful. On the other hand, um for such a small business, I also imagine it it feels a little spread too thinny. Um so, anyway, how did you think about a business that I that's doing just a million bucks in medical coding and billing versus a business that's doing a million bucks in on this grab bag of services? Yeah, so it was actually doing $5 million in revenue. Ah. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. All right, it was a million-dollar purchase price. Sorry, not not Well, not yet. I'll get to the purchase price, but Okay. Okay. Um I might have said a million dollars as like an example, but no, it wasn't a million-dollar purchase price. So, it was it was it was doing $5 million in revenue. The core business was medical billing, medical coding, medical practice management. That was the core business. Mhm. Okay. Um let's call it three and a half of the $5 million was there. The other one and a half was kind of spread across these grab bags of of other service lines. Um and as I went into the due diligence, you know, at first I was like, ah, that's kind of too many, to your point. Like, I don't want to be spread thin. But as I went went into the due diligence, they were highly profitable lines of business. They were incredibly sticky because of the services that they were offering. And it uh didn't require a ton of administrative oversight. And the administrative oversight that was over it was already also being done on the medical billing and coding side. So, in my mind, it was like, okay, they're running fine. They've got high margins. They're very sticky. We can grow the medical billing and coding side. And even if I just don't focus on them, even if I just get people to kind of run them, they're running themselves, they're profitable. It's it's cherry on top. It's not it's not going to the other service lines. Yes. Yeah, correct. Um and I the reason I got comfortable with medical billing and coding is because for the other home health and hospices that I'd been working with, they were acquiring many businesses. And in order to acquire those businesses, you've got to integrate them. And many times you've got to provide centralized services. So, you you build out a centralized billing team. You build out a centralized coding. You build out HR. You build out AP and accounting and all of those things. So, I had had experience with the buildout of those functions. And I felt like I knew the billing space, not the physician billing space, but I knew billing. And I also knew the medical the practice management space because I had been working on consolidating those services for the companies that I had worked at. So, to me, it felt like a very analogous and transferable experience skill set that I could bring to this business that got me comfortable with not only the core offering, but also these sort of ancillary services that weren't necessarily where I had a lot of experience. Sure. Yeah, I'm convinced. That sounds good. And and what was SDE What did SDE look like? So, at that time, it was um an SDE of $450,000. Oh. So, we're we're back under 10% margins. Correct. Correct. And the asking price was Well, let's just say, we settled on $3.2 million as a purchase price. So, if you do the back of the envelope math, you're like, 450 of SDE, 3.2, that's like above a 7x multiple, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And it was you would be correct. That is correct math, Will. But but um and this is where I'm very grateful for the experience that I had had. I you know, I I knew how to read a P&L. I knew how to actually go through the financials and see not just what the owner was running through the business, because those are easy callouts. It's like, oh, this is her car. Oh, this is her mortgage. Oh, this is her whatever travel. Those are easy. What's harder to call out is to understand what administrative functions potentially are they are they managing inefficiently? Or does she have uh you know, members that have been a part of her team for a really long time that are potentially overpaid? Or are there opportunities to renegotiate um a contract for their service providers? Like like as we started to dig in, there there wasn't just these opportunities to add things back. There were real margin opportunities for us to become more efficient. Um that was the one side of the thesis. The other side of the thesis was COVID had been happening. And all of the surgeries between essentially March and June of 2020 had been held up. So, I was very confident that there was going to be this deluge of of services that we were going to be providing be providing to physicians that would have bumped our revenue in the second half of the year. Yeah. And so I and so I felt comfortable saying, all right, I know that there's operational inefficiencies that I can go in because I've had experience in transitioning many businesses. And we've got this revenue that I think is built up artificially because of COVID. Um let's take a swing at this thing. And and that's why for me, yes, it was $450,000 of SDE, but really I personally underwrote it to about $700,000 of SDE. Not SDE EBITDA. So, I'm like, okay, I can I can be I can get okay with the 3.2 million. It's still a four, whatever, four four and a half x. Yeah. But that just means it's a good business, right? Like I I'm not worried about getting a screaming deal. I think this is a very good business. And what of the fact that if if you're spending $3.2 million on the business, that's going to be outside your price range. I mean, even if you put 10% down, that's 320 grand more than you said you could Yeah, so this is where this is where I like, you know, went into my bag of thankfully I'd had experience with these guys of seeing these creative deal structures. Um so, the SBA requires at least 10% down. So, I'm like, okay, $320,000. But if And and this were these are the rules back then, they're a little bit different now. If you're able to structure a seller note to be on full standby, the SBA will actually take that as a capital equity injection. Um and I was able to negotiate uh you know, of the $3.2 million purchase price, um seven figures of I don't I won't say the exact number, but seven figures of a seller note. And so, the SBA took that and said, okay, you've got an additional equity injection. So, we only actually need 5% down from you. So, I was able to get from hey, 3.2 million, 20% down is going to be $640,000 to about 180 to $200,000 of cash that that I had to inject in the business. Mhm. Um now, I didn't feel comfortable putting 180 to $200,000 of cash into the business because as I got on the you know, ETA Twitter, SMB Twitter, I started learning about the J-curve. Like, I'd never heard of that before. Like, what the freak is the J-curve? It made sense to me because I had seen it, but I had like never actually like put it into place that oh, that's a real thing. I always just thought it's because we sucked at operations. Like, well, we always suck the first 3 months because we just don't know how to transition these things. Like, no, the J-curve is a real thing. Um and so, I didn't want to put all my money down. I wanted to have some cash in reserve just in case Yeah. Um and so, I ended up getting some family members to invest. And they they put some money in, friends and family. And I I gave them some equity as well. Um but that's how we structured the deal. Great. Great, Nick. Well, um by the way, such a big seller note. You said six You said seven figures, but you didn't want to say how much seven So, let's call it minimum of a million bucks, million bucks or more. So, that's almost potentially a third 33% seller note. Um that's a a vote of confidence, you would think. Although sometimes a an overly generous seller note could also signal that a seller just really wants out. You never know. No, this is this is something that I again that I learned not just in the corporate side, but also um in the in the other company that I worked at is the seller relationship is incredibly important. And I would say that to anybody who's looking to buy a business. Um it's one of the reasons why I prefer to buy businesses off market. Now, I think you should always have somebody on your side who's buy-side that is helping you qualify these deals, but if you don't have a good relationship with the seller, it makes things very, very difficult. So, thankfully, I had a very good relationship with the seller, and we were able to negotiate a large seller note that allowed me to, you know, not have to put as much money down. And she was invested in our success. Like, it was it was a very, very good relationship for us to have. Um but if if if you're looking to buy a business, you like, you got to have a good relationship with the seller. You've got to. Yeah, we certainly hear that. Um a lot here. So, good to um have it reinforced. Because we got so much ground to cover here, Nick, you got to blow through Done. the rise and exit of this of this business. So, you started at about five million bucks in revenue. 300 three three and a half million of which was was what what medical billing, coding, and physician management office management. What is Sorry, what is it called? Practice management? Medical practice management, yep. Medical practice management. The other million and a half is the other stuff. Take us from there. Okay, this is going to be a 3-minute speed round. Um there's a wrinkle that I didn't mention that I that I mean to mention. During the process, we were we were done with negotiating. I mean, financing was lined up. Obviously, finan- funds hadn't transferred, but what everything was lined up. My brother-in-law who lived here in Boise called me and was like, hey, if you're moving to Boise, we should do home health and hospice together. He had skilled nursing facilities. These are patients who are discharging into the community. It just made a lot of sense to capture those patients and provide services to them. So, I'm like, well, I have this medical billing company that I'm going to go to. He's like, well, could we figure something out? So, I get my other brother-in-law, very incestuous. Remember I told you I'm was Mormon so there's lots of us. I get my other brother in law to come up. He give him some equity. He runs the medical billing company. I start a home health and hospice from scratch with my brother-in-law and three other partners. So my brother-in-law has a skilled nursing facility company with 17 facilities at the time. He's got three partners and we decide to form all equal partners a home health and hospice entity. So I moved to Idaho in May. I've got one one brother-in-law A running the medical billing company partnering with brother-in-law B for the home health and hospice. I'm spending the majority of my time on home health and hospice. We're growing that. In March of 2021 we get our license in May of 2021 we buy a home health and pair it with a hospice and home care and we are off to the races. The medical billing company thankfully did what I thought it was going to do. We had a bump in revenue. We were also able to realize a lot of operational efficiencies and we end up in the in the trailing 12 months of the year that we sold it we ended up doing 1.2 million dollars in profit and about 6 million dollars in sales. Fantastic. Wow. The home health and hospice company Nick Nick Nick let me let me pause you. Just because what you've effectively done is bought a business and installed an operator from day one. Now well It's It's the thing I hate is family member so there there there there is some risk mitigation there or maybe there's some additional risk there cuz that can be sticky. But at least you you know you you presumably trust this person's character. So the but this brother-in-law of yours you obviously felt was qualified. You had the trust. You you just installed him and it was and you were like and you were going to be providing counsel to him. But but what what like how does how does he grow a business from 450 SEE to 1.2 when you the expert the buyer of the business is focused on some other things. Same brother-in-law who was doing the search fund. So I mean he had a he had had he wants he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Um he also had run skilled nursing facilities so he had an experience in health care actually running these small businesses. So I knew that he had a track record where he understood how to how to run operations. It wasn't necessarily the analogous experience that I had but he'd had the track record. Um essentially I served as a board member to him and we met very frequently and we talked about the business and we walked through um how we would run and operate the business. It's It's relevant. In the years before I I became an entrepreneur my job was to manage operators. Yeah. So in these home health and hospice companies we would buy agencies. That's what we call them. Individual locations. Agencies can be anywhere from a million dollars a year to 20 million dollars a year in revenue, right? So like they're they're real businesses. The administrator manages the P&L and my job was to manage the administrators. So I'm not going to say it was exact same but I had experience hiring operators and managing operators who were also running different business lines. So I knew how to have the conversations, how to make them most effective like okay what are we focusing on? What are the goals that we need to actually look at? What are the key drivers in the business? Let's meet on a weekly basis. Let's talk about our cash position etc. Thankfully I had that experience to sort of set me up with the relationship with my brother-in-law. Now was it easy? No, it was not easy. And you know there were family dynamics and business dynamics that got sticky at times but we were able to work through that while I was focusing Did Did Did you give him equity? I did. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Okay. Um while I was focusing on the home health and and hospice cuz the home health and hospice was growing like crazy. Within two years uh we were doing about 10 million dollars in like by the time we sold we were doing 10 million dollars in revenue on a on a run rate. And they've since grown even after we sold to I think they're doing 12 million dollars this year. So I had a very high growth home health and hospice company that I was managing at the same time that we were managing the medical billing company. But in 2022 December of 2022 a couple of things were happening. Number one my brother-in-law who was managing and running the medical billing company was like I want I want more equity than this and I want to like continue to grow. I want to I want to buy another business. I want to be the majority equity holder and you know he was not a majority equity holder in this business. So that those conversations started bubbling up between he and he and I. At the same time the Fed was starting to signal hey we're going to raise rates. Um and so I started looking at that and I'm like man asset prices I think that's really going to affect asset prices. We could potentially go into a recession. I started getting really scared to be honest. As you can imagine right? Like I wasn't managing or running this business on a day-to-day basis and I'm seeing potential economic headwinds in the future. My brother-in-law is telling me he wants more equity and and to do his own thing. It I I got scared and so I was like you know what? Why don't we exit from this? We've done a good job. We have strong trailing financials. It's a strong business. Asset values are really high right now. Let's exit. And so we ended up putting that business on the market and selling it in June 2022 which was a great financial outcome for all of us. He's now in the process of buying a business assisted by you know some of the exit proceeds that he made and I was able to obviously secure a nice win which was fantastic and then focus on the home health and hospice side of things. Nick So you bought the business for 3.2 million. What did you sell it for? Correct. I won't tell you the exact number but um more than more than 2X. More than 2X. More than 2X and less than 3X. I'll give you I'll give you a fairly tight range of what we bought it for. So And having only put in 5% with some you know some investors helping you. So so Yeah man. that delta more than two so more than 2X is 3.2 million an additional 3.2 million on a whatever 100 to what did you say? 200-ish thousand dollar investment. Of course minus whatever you paid to investors and also plus whatever um whatever between two and three that you're not telling us. So considerable. That's great. And in what was it? June 2022 or December 2022? Yeah. June 2022. So in two years Yes. Yep. It almost exactly two years. That's um so that must have brought that old confidence back. I mean that's quite a It did. success. I mean that's life changing. It did. Oh yeah. Yeah. Very life changing. I mean from the perspective of you know you you get a big win under your belt and it it allows you a lot of freedom and flexibility. Frankly I'm kind of bummed we sold it cuz I think it was such a great business and I think that I got too scared. But I also think that there's something really valuable to like securing that first win and and you know giving your family the financial security that that we have now. So I don't know. I waffle back and forth about the decision to sell. Yeah. Well the the thing though too is that you weren't selling and then having nothing to do. You also had this other high growth business that you could devote your your energy you already were devoting your energies to. So it's like you had these two very compelling bets going on contemporaneously. Yeah. So so we sell in in June of 2022 and I'm able to to focus my entire attention on the home health and hospice. Now I did bring on an operator for the home health and hospice because I knew that the startup phase was going to require things that I wasn't good at harkening back to you know my experience in marketing. Um but I you know I was able to there's a mental tax of of having ownership in another business that doesn't just go away um even if you're not running the thing day-to-day. Yeah. Yep. Sure. So I start focusing on the home health and hospice. Now at the same time my brother-in-law B who owns the skilled nursing facility company had grown from 17 facilities to like 50 over a two year span. Wow. And he and his partners who I was partners with had just changed their philosophy. They had made a couple of different bets home health and hospice being one of them and they decided like we should just double down on skilled nursing facilities. So I thought we were going to be expanding into other markets but we ended up only staying in Boise which I was unhappy with. And they were trying to take down some really big deals and they had invested quite a bit of capital and so they wanted that capital out and we we weren't you know we weren't going to bring that capital out anytime soon. So a a year later we got to the point where we actually sold the home health and hospice. We're on good terms. It's like it's a great agreement. Everybody won in that situation. But in a very short period of time within a year all of a sudden I had sold almost everything that I had and took the wins for what it was. I didn't want to sell the home health and hospice. I wish I was still running it. I love that business. I think it's a fantastic business. But um it it it just it taught me a lot about what I want to do next and I've just been taking my time to figure out kind of what that next big swing is going to be. Well can you tell us anything about what the exit was or how what you did what you personally benefited from financially from the sale of the home and health care home health health care and hospice? Home health and hospice. hospice. Thank you. Um we sold to a publicly traded company so I'm not I can't give you like all of the specifics but we were about million dollars in revenue and the purchase price of a company of that size is going to be anywhere between .6 and one times revenue. Wow. So that was the sales price and we had about 2 million dollars of debt on the business. So And how much did you own of it? A fifth. I was a fifth partner Great. in that business. All right. So people can do some quick multiplication and figure out do average. People People can do some quick math. Yeah. It It wasn't It wasn't as big as a win as the as the previous company, but it was still I mean, I felt great about it. We built a great company. And this is the full circle moment. Remember the company I got fired from for doing the worst acquisition in company history? Well, my friends who I had started with there are, you know, now executives in the company and had been trying to bring me on for a number of years. They're like, "Hey, how can we get you back?" Well, we you know, we'd really love for you to to join us again. Um they ended up buying my home health and hospice. Oh, you're kidding. It was them. No. Uh and so the and so the company that I had gone through all that stuff with bought it and I I actually just had lunch with the COO and he was like It was very It was very nice. It was a full circle moment where he's like, "This was probably one of the best acquisitions we've ever done. Top two. So, you know, you should be proud of the company that you built." So, that was a really cool moment for me to to have that conversation with him. Well, I I that is a beautiful full circle full circle moment, Nick. Um I want to So, congratulations on all of this. Like I said at the beginning, pretty head spinning. I I think you probably felt disoriented through this through this journey. I mean, it it just goes to show um how sometimes in life and business things can really move fast. A lot can happen in a short amount of time. We all have had dry seasons that are painfully long, but then sometimes we get those exciting bursts of you know, our careers turned upside down for the better. So, congratulations on that, Nick. And but I want to now we're going to kind of I'm going to jump around here for the remainder of our few minutes together. Um but you mentioned what you want to do next. You've been You've been thinking about what you want to do next. You've been getting out there. You've got a podcast. By the way, plug your podcast, please. Uh Nickonomics, N I K O N I M I C S. Nickonomics. It's kind of like the word economics. Yep. Nickonomics, N I K. I assume that's the Ukrainian spelling. That's me. Yeah. Nick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right. Great. Um and you've you know, you're out there. You You've been out there on social media. You Now, you have had you had all that experience in health care and home and home health and hospice and then that's what led you to buy the businesses that you did and now you've bought those businesses and had exits in two different categories in home care in health care. Why not go back to the well again and I mean, your expertise is that much deeper now. Your confidence is that much greater now. Is that something you're contemplating? Are you kind of done with the category? I'm not done with the category. I absolutely would go back into that category. The medical billing space, I have a Let's see here. 3 years left on a on a non-compete, so I can't do anything in in medical billing. Um home health and hospice, I could absolutely go and do something again in that space. Um I just know how much it would take in order to generate the types of returns that I'd want to to generate. I'd have to do a lot of traveling potentially. I'd have to be gone a lot. And I'm just not at a place where I want to miss you know, my kids are two two, five, seven, and 10. So, I I want to be there for basketball and soccer and school recitals and and in my mind it it would be very difficult to do that jumping back into this space. I've had a couple private equity funds reach out to me and say, "Hey, you know, would you want to partner with us and do a roll up?" And financially, it's very attractive and and it is something I'm very good at, but yeah, it's not something I'm eager to jump back into at the moment. Um I think the thing for me that has been distilled, you know, there's this saying in venture that first-time founders focus on product. Second-time founders focus on distribution. And for the last year, I've been going really hard on social media because I think I'm never going to regret building a network or an audience. And it's been so intellectually satisfying to my curiosity to just meet people and learn and have conversations. I mean, the the whole genesis of the podcast, Nickonomics, was because I wanted to talk to cool people. I didn't know how other businesses work. I didn't know what CAC was. I'd never even heard the term. I'm like, "CAC? What What is What is CAC?" Oh. Oh, okay. LTV. What is What is LTV? Lifetime value. Oh, okay. Well, the lifetime value of a customer should be the profit times how long they've been on. No, no. It's not the profit. It's the revenue times how long they've been on. Like, "Well, how is that lifetime value?" Anyway, so it's like just like a bunch of things that I didn't know and I'm having a ton of fun learning all these things because I I think there's a lot of value in learning how other things work and seeing if I can bring my sort of skill set and expertise into other markets, but at the end of the day, I'm trying to figure out what the next big swing will be cuz I think I have a couple other big swings in the chamber, but I'm I'm very much invested in this audience distribution building mode because it gives a ton of optionality. And thankfully, I'm in a financial position where I can kind of invest in that for a period of time. Yep. Well, preaching to the choir, sir. I I didn't start it for that reason, but one you know, having an audience, we all know I mean, it's a it's a cliche at this point. It's It's a very valuable thing. Uh and and yeah, and optionality um it provides optionality. And the other thing like you said that that for me um is so rewarding is just it's it's incredibly stimulating. I mean, it's a it's it's really It's so much fun doing this. Um the and just give us give us two or three minutes, Nick, on medical billing as a target industry for people listening to this right now who are searchers and have come across medical billing companies. Do you think they're good targets? And let's qualify that. Do you think they're good target businesses for people who don't have any health care experience? Uh I think they can be good target businesses for people who don't have health care experience. Here's the pro case for medical billing. Um it's not ever going away. We're always going to need to bill We're always going to need to bill for encounters that physicians have with patients. Period. Um it's also not going to be eliminated by artificial intelligence. I I actually think it's going to be accelerated. I think it'll be augmented by artificial intelligence, but it's not going to be something that just oh, now we have AI and it'll bill um very 100% correct every single time. That's not going to happen. There's so many nuances to the space that I think it's going to take I don't know, 30 years before there's even any LLMs that are probably fully trained to to to really automate out everything within the space. Um number three is physicians don't want to do this stuff. They don't want to do billing. They don't want to do coding. They don't want to bring the administrative functions in-house. So, uh there's always going to be demand for it. That's the bull case. Uh I think the the con I don't know what the the bear Here we go. The bear case for that would be if you are somebody who is just process-oriented and you like sitting in your cubicle and messing around spreadsheets, medical billing is probably not a business for you if you're buying um you know, a sub five or 10 million dollar medical billing company. You're going to need to go out on the pavement, build relationships with physicians, manage a sales team, all those things. They're very sticky customers once you get them, but you still got to go out and grow the business and get those customers. So, if you're a people person, I think it could be a great business. If you're not a people person, it it would make it really, really hard to grow. At the same time, you also need to have very, very good operations. Very good operations because these physicians are trusting you with billing. If you screw that up, they have a ton of legal liability, right? If you're overbilling, for example, that's a criminal charge. That's a criminal liability. So, there are some significant downsides to doing a bad job operationally, so you want to make sure that you have a very well-run medical billing company that you're purchasing that then you're throwing your personality of sales on top of in order to juice business. Wow, that was fantastic. Thank you, Nick. Um jumping around. Now, one of the other things we're not going to have time for this story, but um you have a business partner in Chris Kerner. Chris has been on the podcast about a year and a half-ish ago. Um Chris is a uh just a an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, as scrappy as they come. Um you know, spins stuff up, starts stuff, experiments, loves marketing, loves finding the hack. Um and he So, everybody go listen to buying a Bitcoin mining facility. That was Chris Kerner's episode. You were involved in that uh buying the Bitcoin mining facility deal. Um So, we're not going to tell the story here cuz you can people can listen to Chris's interview, but but give us give us a minute or two on it. Just give us the the very abbreviated version so people know this other stuff that you've gotten into. And then I want to hear about the tree trimming business. The abbreviated version is Chris and I met as Mormon missionaries almost 20 years ago. We've been best friends ever since. And in we've been talking about doing something together for a really long time, investing together. And in 2021, there came an opportunity for us to essentially buy a Bitcoin mining company uh where we started selling Bitcoin mining rigs. And that has been one of the biggest roller coasters of my life. First 3 months, you know, we did $10 million in sales and like a million dollars in EBITDA. And the you know, subsequent 20 months, we've probably lost $800,000 just cuz we're we're trying to keep the business afloat and and and and around for the next bull market. It's It's very analogous to like traditional mining. Um oil and gas, for example, right? There's boom and bust cycles. And so, you make your money during the boom and you sort of sustain during the bust. And that's been a really weird sort of business experience to go through. Um that was the first. Um but we we started this company called Co-founders where we invest in individuals who are entrepreneurially minded to start businesses and partner with them to run them. Uh Chris is not an operator. He's an ideas guy. I have no inclination or or desire that this point to be an operator and so we find individuals who are hungry passionate have experience find opportunities that might fit their skill set and then we serve as board members essentially in in them running those companies and one of those companies is a tree trimming business called fast tree care in Dallas where we had an idea hey we could probably launch a tree trimming business based on a lot of these growth hacks that Chris has been talking about for the last 10 years and we launched it a little over a year ago and it's been running James Ray is the is the name of the co-founder who's running that business and he's been doing a great job I think trailing 12 months were like a half a million dollars in revenue we're probably doing between 50 and 60,000 dollars a month in revenue at the moment but it's it's small it's just in the Dallas market and it's been a cool experiment for us to have we've also invested in a healthcare startup with somebody who's building some AI technology in the healthcare space and we have a couple businesses that we're launching over the over the fourth quarter one is a lead generation business and the other is a perfume vending business so it's kind of all over the place but it's it's fun well there'd be a lot of places we could spend a lot of time we could spend on exploring each of those the tree trimming business I want to double click on the so so the whole pitch of entrepreneurship through acquisition is that a lot of these businesses are not appealing businesses to start from scratch um for all the reasons that the audience knows but buying such a business can be appealing this tree trimming business getting to half a million dollars a year in revenue in a year and presumably it's continuing to grow feels like a business that could get to a million million and a half two million dollars in maybe not so such a long amount of time so how does that inform how you think about ETA entrepreneurship through acquisition versus spinning up one of these quote boring businesses from scratch so for me personally if I was doing it by myself I would have never done the tree trimming business cuz it's not something I'm confident in doing but Chris like you said is the entrepreneurs entrepreneur so I felt like all right he'd have my bases covered in terms of business development growth those types of things the thesis is there's a ton of boomer businesses right like you see it you see it on whatever Facebook Instagram YouTube whatever 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day that means there's 3 million businesses for sale that you could buy blah blah here's the problem these baby boomers are still tied to covid asset valuations so they want a ton of money for their businesses they're got more demand than they can meet and they're just they're just not open to necessarily selling at the terms that you want to buy them for and they're not necessarily the types of business that you'd want to have their businesses that have a ton of deferred maintenance you may be buying a fleet of vehicles that are really really old and that are that are fully depreciated and you're probably going to have to reinvest in a new fleet of vehicles in the next few years they they've got old systems and processes that they're running on their tech their tech stack is totally antiquated so you start looking at that and you think is it worth me buying this business knowing I'm going to invest all of this money or is there a way I could go out and steal the business essentially is the way I think about it is there a way that I could spin up something that's capital light that allows me to take advantage of the same trend that doesn't make me buy from one of these baby boomers who are retiring at a price that doesn't make sense for an asset that really isn't where I think it should be and as we thought about it we have this model in tree trimming in particular which is we're essentially a lead generation company so we have James and we have a way that we're generating lots of leads some are through Facebook some are through texting some are through calls not a lot of paid ads this is all kind of like our own growth hacky stuff leads come in James goes out he meets with those potential customers gives them a quote and then we sub it out we have we have no trucks we have no equipment we work with subcontractors who have all of that stuff and that's been a very capital light way for us to grow those businesses so I think if you're an entrepreneur and you have an opportunity looking you know that you're looking at and you're like well I could take a bunch of debt and buy this business or I I know that these are the funnels that I can use in order to generate business and I could test it and I have sub contractor relationships yeah I mean why not take the swing right I didn't I didn't have any of those things that's kind of like what Chris sort of brought to the table so so in my mind it's a risk mitigating game if you feel like that's a low risk strategy for you to try out you should try that out but if you don't have any of that stuff I I I don't think you should start start something whole cloth I think you should buy a business that has an operating history that has systems and processes even if it's going to take you time and money to invest and update them because otherwise you're going to you're going to learn it and spend a lot more kind of on this side of things growth hacking than you otherwise would just stepping into a business that's fully functioning yeah and and I think that's a really important point I mean this this this ingredient that Chris brings of the growth hacking that is not that it there's a there's a really a special sauce to that that I mean that is his genius and and it's and it's a pretty unique skill talent that he has at that so it's not one where you just you know learn about digital marketing and you too can go do it I mean Chris is really quite talented at that so so I think people just need to keep that in mind that um developing funnels and this incredible lead generation engine that's not even paid that is a that is some special sauce right there so don't underestimate don't underestimate that last question the which is related to the one I just said but just kind of zooming out more and thinking big picture about opportunities for the people who are listening to this podcast who may have not even started to search do but or or are searching but the point is there they haven't yet committed to a path of buying a business or something else do you have now that you have have a lot of corporate experience that you have experience buying businesses doing some starting from scratch stuff investing in others as somebody who wants to take the reins of their own career and do something entrepreneurial do you have a favorite prescription is are you an evangelist like so many of us here are that buying a business is really the way to go or not necessarily how do you blanket advice how do you what do you tell people to to what do you think is the kind of the the best path for the most people okay I'll try not to be too long-winded the first step is to know thyself like you you you just have to know what your temperament is and I fundamentally believe that that my the minority of entrepreneurs are built like Chris like there's being an entrepreneur you're already in the minority but it's an even smaller subset of people who are like I'm going to start from scratch and build something from like that either you've got to be really passionate about something and have a lot of capital behind you in order to make that succeed or you've got to be really really good at generating business and and closing that business and building systems and processes and scaling so um I I think that's a that's a small minority of people my blanket statement would be you know you need to learn yourself and see which one of those two things make the most sense I would generally recommend buying a business but first I would recommend go get experience on somebody else's dime I don't care if you get paid less I don't care if it's a step quote unquote back in your career if you have the opportunity to go work somewhere that gives you P&L management go do that like understand how you manage costs how you manage people how you manage cash flow collections all of those things fail on somebody else's dime cuz you are going to fail it's just like that's okay that's part of the process of learning and then once you've had some experiences where you have failed and you kind of know yourself really well that's where I would say jump into entrepreneurship like life is long I know it doesn't feel that way but life life is long if you're in your 20s don't be so in a hurry to get somewhere you're not ready for cuz it's going to be a bad experience for you go buy a business that's a that's a much safer route to take and once it's running well and once you've made your money then go expand into things that you're passionate about and then not worry about losing your or wasting money but until then stick to the strategy that's going that's going to get you the highest probability of success and that is going to make your you and your family financially secure for the rest of your lives and then you can go play fantasy business person on Twitter like me okay all right let's let's end it there that was great Nick how can people find you online Nickonomics is the name of the pod but give us more give us more Nickonomics is the name of the pod cofounders.com is the name of Chris and I's company we spent a lot of money for that website or Twitter cofounders Nick is where I hang out the most yeah I would love to connect with anybody who has any questions great Nick Uluski what a ride thanks for sharing it with us great interview appreciate your time sir thanks for having me Will I 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