Jordan Carter, thank you for joining me today on Acquiring Minds. Thanks for having me, Will. Good to be back. Jordan, you're a partner at Search Investment Group, SIG. Regular listeners will probably recognize the SIG name. Your partner Robert Graham was in the recent debate about self-funded search versus traditional search funds, which got some attention. And you and Robert together were actually on an early episode of Acquiring Minds talking about self-funded search, advocating for self-funded search. It's a big big part of your philoso- philosophy as it as it pertains to search. Uh so, I'm sure we'll get into that, but really the headline for today is about your own search. Uh you are a former searcher and and CEO of the business that you acquired. Um and that business is called BNA. It's in the grant space, so grant research, grant writing, grant administration. And you'll tell us more about BNA in a minute, but your search was long and difficult. And it really informed how you feel about self-funded search and the work that you do now helping and investing in other searchers via SIG. So, with that stage set there, Jordan, uh please start us off with a quick bio on you. Sure, Will. So, I grew up in North Texas and went to school undergrad at Southern Methodist University, SMU, in Dallas. Um didn't know what I was going to do when I graduated, so I did what a lot of undergrads do when they go into business. They they study undergrad business if possible. Um one of the the highest optionality career paths out of that uh undergrad is investment banking. So, um I went to go do that for a few years. Um moved on into private equity investing. Uh both of those stints were in New York. And then uh did uh business school for my MBA at Wharton. And then came back to Dallas to search full-time to acquire a company. Uh bought it in the middle of 2020, so July 31st, 2020. So, that's the high-level quick quick and dirty background. Great. And tell me how you discovered search or, you know, the um bridge the gap between living in New York working in PE to moving back to North Texas or to Dallas and searching. Yeah, so I actually first discovered about uh search funds period, just the bigger just the word search, uh from a colleague when I was in private equity. He was actually looking at going into business school to do an MBA. And uh I asked him what he was going to do there, and he passed me uh this the search funds study to take a look at, and I just was enthralled. I didn't know that was possibility. I had only known at that point what I had known, which is, you know, finance. I was working there for several years, and I figured you're just going to have to uh to just climb that ladder and and uh continue to to build experience over time. Um and at the same time I had read stories about people like Steve Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone, at age, I think it was 28, where he founded Blackstone. Uh he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers back in the day. So, there was a time in our recent history where people were younger and were entrepreneurial, and they were encouraged to take those risks. And I and I believe search funds is an avenue through which over the past few decades it has enabled that drive to be expressed. And it it's just the people who look at this and get excited about it. I think that's what's happening. They're tapping into that underlying drive. So, for me, that was where I first heard about it, uh and I went on to business school to spend time and make sure that was the right path for me. Cuz it was the first time in my life I experienced something where I felt a calling. I felt like this was it. And uh you So, you went into business school with an eye like a eye on search. Your attention was on search, and you were going to figure out figure this thing out if if it if it was for you. Yeah, absolutely. So, I I tried to triangulate it through a couple different ways. So, I thought, do I just like operations? Is that what I think is interesting about it? Or is it really the the risk and associated reward of stepping into a business and having ultimate responsibility for everything? Failure, it's your fault every single time as the business owner. Was that it? Or was it I just wanted to be, you know, in operations? Cuz in private equity, I did enjoy spending time with the management teams after we bought the company. I I would say, can I go spend time over there? And they know they said, "No, no, no, we have to go do another deal, another acquisition." Cuz when you're on the investing team, that's your job. And no matter what people say in private equity, unless you're deployed at the company every single day, you're you're not getting operational experience. Mhm. So, yeah. But so, you were drawn to operations. So, and what did you conclude? That you liked both the operations and the risk reward profile of search? Well, I did an internship with a private equity portfolio operations group. So, I I directly tested that out. And that was definitely not for me. Uh you know, it was a it was an okay internship, but once again, you're slotted right in the middle of a company. You're helping senior leaders out to drive certain initiatives, but somebody else in and another group of people really are making those calls. And uh the the real eye-opening point, Will, was when I sat down with essentially my principal over that summer internship, and I asked him. I said, "What do you want to do in 5 or 10 years?" And I didn't tell him anything about what my career aspirations were or thoughts at that point. And he he looked at me and said, "I want to go buy a small business and run it as a full-time CEO owner-operator." And I just left that day, and I just thought, "Wow, if that's not a sign, I don't know what else is." I was trying to kind of see, you know, see, was it operations? Is it is it really search funds? Which one is it? And the opera- portfolio operations group guy was telling me he wants to go do a search fund, essentially. Yeah, that's excellent. And um and you got into business way back in undergrad, as you said, cuz it was kind of didn't know what else you wanted to do. So, you you probably weren't somebody that did saw themselves as an entrepreneur early in life or even into undergrad or maybe even shortly after undergrad. But as the as the search idea you were exposed to it, and the possibility of it really crystallized, clearly that that entrepreneurial aspect of it is in fact I th- I think you in a word, that's really kind of what drew you is is that it's entrepreneurial. Is that fair? And so, now you I I I suspect you do see yourself as an entrepreneur. Yeah, so if I look back, you know, I did give a high-level overview, but in high school I started a business in uh myself and used PayPal as the as the payment medium doing kind of customized uh computers. Back when with the PC world was a little bit more entrepreneurial. There's all sorts of little brands starting up, and I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to put together the you know, the chips or solder chips or assemble the you know, all the the boards inside of a of a desktop um you know, PC. But I found people through forums that did, and I put together a website, and put together kind of the payment platform, and the marketing, and and advertising to to make that a thing. It never got big, but it was definitely good money for a high schooler. So, uh I certainly had that entrepreneurial drive to do something. I was proud of that company. I was proud of what we were able to do, even if it was only, you know, let's say a couple thousand dollars um you know, over a relatively short period of time. Uh but uh certainly going to college and getting into kind of that track of everybody else is going towards finance. Everyone's go you know, the the top of the class in the business in the undergrad business school was going into investment banking and the prestige of that. I was certainly at that time, without really knowing what else I wanted to do, drawn toward it. Um so, that was my that was my foray into the woods, and I came back out of it and found what I truly do believe has been my calling. Um and I'm very blessed to have to have made it through that um that or crossed that chasm. Yeah. Well, um you you there were still many other challenges yet to yet to come but before you you were a successful searcher. So, okay, you're in Dallas to search. Right? Um so, tell us So, how old are you? Uh what what year is this? And, you know, sort of give me the kind of sketch a picture of us for us of your search at as you were kicking it off. Yeah, so I want to share something about uh my my psychology personally that I experienced, and maybe this resonates with some people. Uh you know, you hear that I went to business school to go to go really pursue or or learn or evaluate whether I wanted to do a search. And I did spend time with two search CEOs who had successfully acquired companies. Um uh groups. Lucas Braun and Ryan Robinson of OnRamp, based in Austin. And then Jim Westerman of Raptor Technologies, based in Houston. And so, during my 2 years at at Wharton Business School, I got to spend time with those uh search CEOs and be right next to them. And and I certainly had the experience of within the first, you know, 36 to 48 hours, I came home and I said, "This is it. This is exactly what I need to do." So, it kept every time I pulled the thread from reading that initial search fund study from my colleague next to me uh on the desk at in private equity to spending time uh shadowing really search CEOs, I kept feeling the calling get louder and louder. And uh what what was, you know, interesting about that that background is that when I graduated in 2016, so I was 30. I went into business school at 28. I graduated 30. And I actually did a summer abroad at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. It was a sister school of Wharton and I took the opportunity, I would recommend it to everybody, to go do it. It was an awesome experience meeting in a totally different class group and demographic profile, if you do get that chance. Uh so, I actually finished in August of 2016. Uh that was my technical graduation date. I came back. I took some time to think about going the full-time route, really assembling my um you know, my finances and everything because I did spend my business school focusing on enjoying business school, making good friends, you know, networking and and certainly those those internship experiences. But otherwise, I didn't I didn't start searching while I was in business school. I know a lot of people try to do that. I didn't really attempt to do that. I wanted to make sure I enjoyed those two years. So, in towards the end of in the fall of 2016, I started a consulting entity to conduct independent consulting, doing market research projects or strategy projects. One of them was exploring the value chain. Basically building out the value chain for a certain division of a large company that was backed by a pretty large, well-known groups. And that's a lot of work. You got to There's a reason they're outsourcing that work. It's it's tough and there's no there's no real end. You just have to keep going and figuring out the deep deeper deeper elements of that value chain. Uh but yeah, so I started an independent consultancy in the fall of 2016 and continued that uh through the end of 2017 while I was ostensibly part-time searching. And that was the beginning of my search. And was this because you needed to generate income? Why why didn't you go full-time search at the get-go? That was exactly right. So, I thought that I had to have uh enough cash to 100% purchase the equity required for a business acquisition. So, I had not heard of the concept of raising outside equity capital, especially significant amounts, you know, over a million dollars of equity capital for somebody who's, you know, coming from a modest background and you know, maybe had some savings or a 401k from, you know, early career years, but you don't have I don't have over a million dollars in my bank account when I'm going out to search and I don't think most searchers do. So, uh yeah, I I wanted to to build a base of beyond my burn rate. Um you know, I was single at the time, didn't have any other major financial commitments other than just a roof over my head and food, right? But um needed to build up a base because I thought, well, it's easy. You just take 10% or divide by 10% and that's the largest business purchase price you can afford. And so, that's what I went forth and and you know, charted forward. I talked to a lot of people a lot of other searchers and I'll tell you, back in 2016, 2017, it just was not as heavily evangelized that there is and there's there weren't groups, right? There weren't even formalized groups to to raise equity capital for people. So, you were trying to not only support yourself, you had, you know, your living expenses were low at the time. So, but cover that and then save 100, 200, 300, 400 or whatever whatever you needed to get to to buy a two or four million dollar business. Okay. I did that, Will, and I also liquidated my 401k not at once, but over the search period, I basically called my 401k liquid. I said, that that thing is for search. And you know, I did I had a reasonable amount in there, but uh you know, for for me, it was it was all in. And but that that developed over time. I will say, you know, for starting part-time search fall of 2016, beginning of 2017 and I acquired my company in in the middle of 2020, there's a story there, right? I went through a psychological metamorphosis, if you will, of commitment. And for somebody who had gone into, you know, gone into a two years to ostensibly think about it and and evaluate it and still come out and think, oh, well, I can do part-time. Let me do some part-time consulting while I'm searching. It's it developed a longer journey than it probably had to be, certainly. That's that's so interesting. So, what do you think Yeah, I mean and I'm glad you you you kind of made my point for me. So, you were already drawn to it. It's kind of you went into business school already knowing about it and saying to yourself, okay, I'm going to learn something really learn something about search while I'm at Wharton and then you come out and you're doing a part-time search. Why why do you feel that you were not on, you know, didn't have a sense of urgency about it? Why did it take you a long time to to commit? Yeah, so so building up the capital base for what I thought I needed and that's a big point because people just don't need as much cash as they think they need. They just need to cover their their burn rate and save enough to be able to put in the minimal equity injection, not the whole thing. When you think about it that way, uh I was needed I thought I needed to earn more than I needed to earn to be able to to go full-time and just cut it cold, cut the independent consulting out, just shut it down. Uh but I also did tell myself a story at that time. I said, which I think a lot of part-time searchers do tell themselves the story. Well, there's a lot of baby boomers. It's a you know, there's a silver wave and and uh and when you said you were doing part-time, how how part-time was it? I'm curious. Was it fully half part-time, 20 hours a week or what? So, the issue with doing consulting as a part-time role, especially for high-level clients, you know, Fortune 100 or, you know, 500 clients are inherently demanding. You're basically as an outsourced arm of a multi-person team. So, you're this you know, this resource doing this special project. I would partition out maybe 20 hours a week and it would become 30 or 35 because I would bid projects at a fixed price. And last time I checked, if you don't do a good job, it doesn't matter how much time it took. You Your reputation's on the line as an independent consultant. So, when in doubt and when there was that natural search anxiety of looking at deals or I looked at several SIMs, I you know, killed them, had some broker calls. You know, what else do I do with the rest of my day? Oh, you know, I should go pick up that project. I should go take another draft review through it because it's due Friday. So, it became a filler in many ways. Sometimes it would it would be part of my week where I could partition it out and I felt other times it just crept in because it can always be better, right? Anybody who's put together a presentation or an an Excel analysis knows that it's really never done. It's done when the the project is over. When it when the deadline hits. So. Sure. So, there were I mean, it was really I mean, there'd be weeks where you'd put 30, 35 hours into it. So, your search would only get 5, 10 hours, maybe. Well, I would definitely work more than the 40 hours. I was working maybe 60 to 70 a week. So, that's another aspect as well, taking care of your psychology. So, at that time, you know, it was very it was definitely a roller coaster for me um mentally to go through that. And imagine, right? You're trying to build a capital base while trying to uh pull down all these different deal overviews and you're reviewing their finances and getting on seller calls and nothing is hitting and and you're not even getting LOIs signed because you can't. You're looking at the deal and you're like, I can't even buy this company, but I spent 4 hours on it this past week. And that's just one company. Um and you're not your sleep is suffering typically. I mean, you're not doing 40. You're you're typically doing more when you're taking on a part-time search and you're actually trying to do both well. Yep. Uh I and uh and it creates you it it makes you a worse searcher. It makes you a worse consultant. You you end up being uh I mean, if you have three jobs, right? You're just pulled three different directions. And True. Something something's got to give during that time period. Yep. Uh and okay, so when did you realize or when did you decide to stop doing the consulting and go full-time because ultimately your search did end up being a full-time search. So, what was that evolution? So, after about the about 12 months or so of essentially launching my self-funded search website vehicle and getting out there and you know, sending blasts broker blasts of emails, I I said, that's it. I think we got enough cash. Let's let's go. Uh that plus the 401k being able to be liquidated was was enough. And I uh I also felt that kind of never-ending cycle of consulting where you kind of do do projects then you get paid and then you go do another project you get paid. And this is not what I wanted to do. That was not my dream was to start my own consulting entity uh and and build that from the ground up um doing special projects. I I just I think that was uh um really to to develop the cash base. So, it was really the fall of 2017 and I would say effectively January 1, 2018 was truly my first day of full-time searching and not looking back and just saying, just go. From this point forward, don't ever look back. No more consulting. I promised myself that was it. Full-time. Can you share what your what your financial position looked like? Like what your 401k had had and how you how much you were able to save up from the consulting? I think the 401k was probably in the 80 to 90 thousand dollar range. And then consulting in my in 1 year made about uh 150,000. And so, net of taxes, you know, you you think about that as cash in the bank that you're then able to to deploy um Yep. deploy out. That's that's the the combination I I had. And again, right? I thought I needed uh all of that to uh to devote to a business purchase. I wasn't at that time thinking of anything really large. I was thinking uh like a lot of people probably, let's go for something a little smaller, maybe $500,000 SDE and and uh build some experience and and uh you know, it's not not as much to bite off, a smaller team can manage this cuz it's the first time in my life that I would be actually managing my own team. Managing my own business. I mean, as many times as I've heard you say to me both uh recorded and offline that that's a wrongheaded, I still feel the pull to do exactly that. For for all those reasons. You know, 500,000 in SDE seems seems good. Let me do this the first time and then, you know, later I can be more ambitious or or the or the business that is that I acquire, I'll grow organically. So, here you are top of 2018, you've got uh whatever two 250 grand um to help you out and buy a business. So, how does it go? So, you're doing so you do So, yeah. How do things change once you go from part-time to full-time? So, full-time it just even after the after the first few months, well, talk to anybody who's made that transition from part-time to full-time, the only the only word is regret. You just look back you look at your part-time um you know, put the financial position aside, right? I mean, there there's a reason to build up a base. And if you truly have zero, if you have zero, you probably should build up a financial base before you do a self-funded search because the chance that you're going to find an SBA deal that's going to require you to put in 10% of the equity check is reasonably high. So, we talk about not going too small, the paradox is if you go too big, you're in commercial debt territory where they don't have that requirement. You don't have to put in a penny of your own money. We've helped someone do that, right? With Search Investment Group, but um but the chances are you're probably going to end up and you could very likely end up in the SBA range and you're going to have to put some money in. So, so put that aside for a second and think about it from that standpoint of, all right, if you have enough to be able to devote to an equity injection and you can cover your burn rate, there's nothing of course, nobody would would disagree with this that there's nothing like doing something full-time. Um you know, you can that applies to really every avenue of life. You can do any other analogy, but I was able to move faster. I was able to form relationships with brokers. I was able to develop my processes better. So, I I tightened up my investment criteria checklist to be relevant to the market in which I was operating as opposed to trying to bring in what initially was my private equity investment criteria checklist. And that was too rigid, right? For this space. Um you have to be able to more loose with some of those criteria or nothing will pass. And Yeah. just the iteration. You talk about startups like lean startups, you have to iterate and iterate over and over again and you'll figure this out. So, that's that just sped up uh immensely once I had launched full-time and it just kept going. I kept learning. I kept adapting and moving. Yeah. And it was and it was yeah. And the E E so, you had a target industry at this point. So, during the part-time search you'd already narrowed down an industry or industries that you were interested in? No, actually. I was I was generalist. So, I was going for anything that I felt like I could understand and uh would want to operate for 10 plus years. So, that's a personal thing. Some some industries you just don't want to touch. You're just personally not interested and you couldn't get excited to get up at out of your bed and show up to work and run in there with your arms over your head and and lead a team. If you're not in if you can't do that in an industry, just mark it off your list. Doesn't matter how Yep. how beautiful the industry is or how great it is for investing. So, uh it was I was looking at lots of different types of industries. Uh logistics, third-party logistics. Um I really wasn't looking at health care. Uh technology, software. I can talk about any any one of these. Um there was you know, some of that logistics was uh was distribution. Um professional services, certainly B2B. Uh I also was interested in business to government services. Uh my private equity position prior was government-related uh acquisitions and uh uh government contractor type companies. And so, I certainly was interested in that angle as well, but I didn't want to close myself off. There's that element of optionality that a lot of people still want to retain when they're doing a search. And you just open your your opportunity set to a lot of different industries. You don't want to miss out, right? So, it's still 20 Okay, so top of 2018, your search accelerates dramatically. Um you're iterating on your processes. So, you're getting better and better and better at a much faster rate. Um but it's still not until 2 and 1/2 years later that you close on B&A. Um so, kind of give us the give us the kind of short version of those 2 and 1/2 years. Um particularly the low points which I and I know there were there were some. Yeah, so so definitely iterated. I will say that having a generalist approach with and you're just one person, right? So, you're a single searcher. I had multiple classes of interns that were there to to support me on special projects, but they can only do so much, right? They can't take a uh a amorphous document and find those little things that are unique to that company that that make it not able to survive in your process and therefore should be let go. They can fill out a criteria checklist and I had did have them do that uh sometimes, but even then, you know, they would miss something or they thought it was customer concentrated and it wasn't or they thought it was, you know, not recession resistant and it was. And so, you know, it's hard to to manage that process of trying to teach interns, but also gain value from them uh from their contributions. So, I did have teams of interns, but getting back to the point, you're one person. And if you're spreading yourself across multiple different industries and just saying, if I like it or if I fundamentally believe the industry is somewhat healthy, I'll take a look, uh I do think that probably negatively affected my deal flow at that time from brokers. Uh I always say this, you never know what deals you're not getting shown. People only know what the pipeline is that they have. So, I can go look at my CRM and say, look at all these deals. Look at all these SIMs I'm looking at. But if you really graded it, how many of those SIMs are old or have been in other words, have been shopped around for a while and nobody's buying them. They're just left over on the market. Um how many of those have no business surviving at all and you're wasting your time? And uh how many deals are not in your CRM that could have been had you done something else that was more targeted with brokers or uh built relationships or um you know, building out a proprietary deal flow sourcing uh you know, engine of sorts. So, if I look back on that search, there were several deals I I went down and chased that I should not have chased at all. I should have killed very early. And there were other deals I didn't chase or I didn't feel like I could pay up on the valuation that I look back and somebody else got that company and they they locked it up and the broker even called me before uh you know, or during LOI's being accepted and said you you got to get your valuation up. There's there's two other buyers who are in this range. To be competitive, you got to get there and give yourself a shot to get in front of the seller and and then the seller will decide who that person wants to to work with, right? And sometimes it becomes a personal decision if they're all in the same valuation range. And I just didn't believe it. I thought, well, maybe maybe the broker is just just playing games kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, a month later I hear that or couple months later I hear that the the company was sold successfully and I see the searcher on LinkedIn and he's doing really well and I'm just I look back and I go, huh, maybe I should maybe that was a learning point. So, I I felt like I was a lot you give us some examples of both um both categories? So, the businesses that you gave too much time to and you could have and you know, now being smarter you would disqualify much earlier and then and then the latter example you just talked to where you you you see now that you should have been willing to pay up for a particular company. Do do do the criteria uh that led you one led you astray? Do you remember what they were? Yeah, so the answer on companies that I chased that I should not have chased, that I should not have pursued or killed early, I would encourage this is this is basically learning that that I had. Um I would encourage basically trying to right size the actual operation of the company because you people have heard it before. You're not buying the history. You're not buying what the seller or or the the founder owner has been running. So, that founder owner may have they may be the chief sales officer, the CFO, the CEO, the COO, you know, the marketing person, the the coder, the technologist. It's it's they're doing everything, right? And that's the history of the company, but what are you buying? You're buying you know, what you're going to step into and and then build towards the future. There's a reason investors look at five-year projections or 10-year projections or even one or two-year projections, but you have to first in that initial year level set for what you have to do for the company to enable you to run it. So, one example was I was really interested in a software company, a smaller one that had a nice niche product that did not have customer concentration uh and had the potential to be able to be modernized and yet had a really secure sticky position in it with its customer base. I found one. It was just too small and the CEO founder owner was doing everything that I mentioned, right? They were doing everything under the sun. And only a you know, weeks later weeks and weeks later after even doing an on-site visit I visited them actually with an implementation of their software product with a customer and I went back into the drawing board and I looked at it. There was several hundred thousand dollars of of hiring I had to do. And in addition, take technological debt. So, the downside of being able to modernize a software product into a into a cloud version from an on-premise version is that costs money. That costs a lot of money. Oh, yeah. And you look at that now that you've a dollar is negative. So, really this is a growth equity investment. It's it's more akin to maybe VC than it is to to private equity, which is essentially what search funds are. I mean, it's it's micro private equity. You have to buy cash flow. So, sure, the book says it had I think it was $750,000 of cash flow. That's not true. Not going forward. You just can't I mean, the on-premise solution was was falling apart and yet customers were staying with it, which was great, but yeah, you can't do that forever. So, that was one example. those modernization opportunities, you have to you have to ask yourself is it you know, inexpensive to modernize this? You know, is it get you know, the classic getting rid of the fax machine and and putting in some you know, putting in Google Cloud or whatever or is it or G Suite or whatever or in the case of you know, moving from from on-prem software to cloud, is it an enormous on is the modernization an enormous undertaking? Not only financial, but just I mean, that's ripping the guts out of the software product and and so you got to be honest with yourself about that. Go ahead. Yeah, so that that's a good example, Will, of of a company where doing some fundamental things up front and I also also having somebody who was going to be brutally honest with me about, hey, did you do this? Did you look at this? Cuz I I I had never looked at acquiring a small software company before, sub $1 million of cash flow. I'd never done that. Most searchers have never done these things. They've never looked at a you know, third-party logistics company and they don't or landscaping company. They don't they don't know what they're really looking at at first. You got to see a couple to to get a to get a sense of what's good and what's not good. And very quickly you just you just finished 12 months. So, the search goes by really fast and you have to you have to iterate while balancing your learning with with uh you know, decision-making under uncertainty. So, I tried to do that um learned some learned some hard ways on those things. So, I had spent real diligence money on that deal and Will, I actually submitted the first draft of the purchase agreement to the seller. I heard crickets for three days in the middle of night on Wednesday night I got an email that said, "Hello Jordan, I have decided to no longer sell my company. Thank you for all your efforts. Regards." And you know, this was kind of around when I was also having that sense of well, I can make this work. I can make it work, right? Psychologically you convince yourself, yeah, maybe expensive, but there's probably a way to to to to modern or let's do a half modernization and once we get enough cash flow, then then we'll actually truly do a rewrite of the software. So, I just felt like I could just staple it together and I think a lot of searchers do convince themselves of that. They tell themselves the story. This is such a great company cuz it did have some good attributes, but anyway, I I think I'm mixing the timeline up a little bit here, but the point is is that um I had spent real money with the attorneys. I had spent real money on the quality of earnings and it was gone. The seller can at any time just decide they don't want to sell anymore for just no reason. Yeah. But in fact, in retrospect, I mean, this is an example of of one of the the deals that you looked at that you're glad didn't close. So, it was a blessing in disguise, yeah. Yeah, I would have probably been suffering trying to box my way out of a out of a brown paper bag. When really that's I think what it feels like when you have a just a couple hundred thousand dollars of cash flow. Oh, yeah, by the way, you have an SBA loan to pay and you're struggling between um being able to afford that travel to a customer or devoting it to paying a salesperson the the minimal you know, minimal possible salary to get them on board and it's not that would not be fun to fight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you now going back to the the the deals that did go well for their successful buyers, the the one the guy who posted on LinkedIn and you can see that he's doing really well. What had you missed about that business? Like why did you not think that that slightly heftier valuation was justified? Yeah, so so the business I'm thinking about is a you know, blue collar services business uh in a city. Think of like uh window washing, that type of thing and uh you know, had a lot of good basic things that we we know are are you know, good search deals. No customer concentration, a reasonable size team uh and I believe it had a little under a million dollars in cash flow and and I just I I believe it was going for five times. I just thought, my gosh, that's a lot of money to to spend for a you know, smaller deal. Maybe it was $800,000 of cash flow, something like that. And I just felt, wow, that's that's just really expensive. There's no way that people are willing to pay that for for a blue collar services business that is got to be kind of hard to grow. I mean, labor-wise and you have you know, price sensitivity from the the the customers and they start asking for discounts cuz you know, if you're going to do my other building, then that means I want you know, I want a a volume discount and so, you just have all this all this and then the risk, right? Of uh uh this people getting injured and the lawsuit risk. I just couldn't believe that a business like that was truly going to go for five times and I was thinking three to four. Um so, I didn't pursue it, but you can do very well with those businesses and I look back, the two reasons I didn't pursue it was number one, I felt I didn't have enough cash equity personally to be able to cover it and but number two, I felt I felt like that would have put me at risk. I felt a 5x multiple of EBITDA was going to uh over capitalize the company with debt. Over leverage and I I hear that from searchers. They get a little sensitive around putting too much debt cuz the SBA will let you do 90% financing and for a lot of people that sounds kind of crazy, right? So, you can do the models and the math, but it just yeah. Well, I don't know, Jordan. It sounds like it sounds like your thought process was was prudent. I mean 5x for a blue collar business, that is expensive. That and so it's gone well for the buyer and I'm I'm glad to hear that. But you know, you may maybe maybe it's gone well because of his good fortune and really the chances that it were that it was going to go well were were pretty slim and you were right to to pass on the deal and he's just got you know, he got a little bit of a luck um since he's bought the business. I mean 5x for blue collar business sounds sounds pretty pretty rich and doesn't leave much margin for error on your part. Yeah, it the company though had everything else going for it. Again, no customer concentration, a stable uh operations team, a good culture. Um you know, I everything really else it had it had going for it and the thing with these businesses is you don't really see a lot of like like, right? You see oh, this is um these are a bunch of terrible businesses in this industry. You see one that's okay and it's hard as a searcher to think, is that a great business for this industry or is that just a little bit better than okay? Uh so, you know, without getting into extreme detail here, it it was a really good business for a a smaller blue collar services business and had good growth to it. Actually had pretty good margins. Mhm. Um but I just I just couldn't get comfortable especially when I see blue collar services businesses with such good margins. I I wonder, is that temporary? Is there some is there some impact around the corner? But um I yeah, definitely five is expensive. Five times is definitely expensive, but uh I guess like my search could have been theoretically shorter had I won that. You know, had I put an offer in. If you don't put an offer in, you won't even get a chance Yeah. to uh to pursue it. Jordan, you said you were working you had teams of interns. Were were So, but they but they were doing sounds like um deal analysis, industry analysis. Were they also doing any proprietary outreach? Were you were you doing proprietary outreach? I was doing proprietary outreach. I used the interns uh to help clean some lists. I I went to public library, they have A to Z databases uh of business names uh categorized by NAICS code and SIC code. I found out through calling that uh those NAICS and SIC codes and so sometimes they didn't have websites. That's all you could really could go off of. Um so, you either call or do an email. Um a lot of times those were just wrong, right? They're just completely miscategorized. Mhm. But um we would do we would also send the uh the names and the and the website addresses if they did have a website to an outsourced overseas team to gather and create find out which emails were deliverable and I created uh a uh drip campaign of emails to those business owners to see if I could um you know, get them. And usually on about the sixth, seventh, or eighth email where it's where it was like, hey, checking in, you know, I I know you've seen my emails before. I just want to get, you know, 10 minutes for a call just to see if you'd be open to selling your business. Um and then a brief little overview of myself. And uh that's when that's when sometimes it would hit. The seventh one they said, okay, you got me. And it was just a drip campaign. So, it was automated sending out. Um those I you know, I didn't have a ton of uh good fortune from a proprietary searching, but I will say some initial calls with business owners in industries was incredibly enlightening. The ones that weren't even selling. I talked to a uh for example, an asphalt striping Mhm. and power washing business owner and he said, why do you want to buy a company in this industry? I told him all some reasons of why I thought it could be lucrative or attractive. He said, no. It is incredibly uh competitive. There's always price pressure. It's hard to keep your people. Um this has been one of the hardest things I've ever done and even that I'm making out in this in this metro area, you know, maybe a 5% annual growth rate. I'm I'm clawing tooth and nail to do that. Yeah. is eroding. I just said, okay. And I said, thanks very much. I appreciate your your insight. I mean, I was just having a conversation. He said, yeah, sure sure, man. I'm just you know, I just was curious why you were interested in buying a business in this industry. So, that's where some of those conversations were most helpful if not, you know, for buying an actual business. Absolutely. God, that would be so valuable to have a business owner tell you something like that. On the other hand, I feel like a lot of the industries that that people in search um buy into like landscaping I'm sure you have a lot of owners that feel that way. That if you got them on the phone, they'd say the same thing. Landscaping, are you kidding? It's brutal out here. Uh and yet we you know, you and I both know a lot of people who have successfully acquired landscaping businesses are doing really well with them. So, um you know, as with as with all things, it's it's tricky. You got to be careful not to over index on on one on one person's, you know, experience. Um all right, Jordan. So, so you so you didn't have a great success with um proprietary, but you were doing some. Um when did things get you know, really dis Where did you get really discouraged cuz I know you did? The losing the LOI or losing the deal that was under LOI uh that wasn't the only one. There was another one as well. Um I talked about the software deal, but there was another deal that I got had under LOI that I was spending a um accounting CPA quality earnings money on and uh that one I found some things that just I had to kill the deal uh over and uh just every time you lose an LOI, the later the stage it is the more uh damaging it is to the searcher's psyche. And we say searcher, these are people. I mean, I I was a human doing this. And you're alone and nobody nobody has a vested interest in your search. I mean, you can talk to your buddies or but they're they're busy, you know, they go to work and they have a a job and they get a bonus and they have a 401k and health insurance and you can talk to you know, your your uh significant other and they can just say, oh, that's that's unfortunate or it's too bad or let's just, you know, go get something to eat or something, but they don't understand what you're going through. And uh the seller doesn't care. They moved on or or you had to tell them the bad news. So, you had to make that judgment call and maintain discipline during your search. But uh it still hurts either way cuz you look back and you think, did I just waste 3 months of my life um really devoting all my time and effort cuz you're one person, right? You're a one person deal team. And so, it takes all that. And uh to to pick that up and just get back to sourcing or pick it back up from wherever it was. Maybe only 20% of your time was doing sourcing while you were you know, had your deal under LOI. It just feels like you went back to square zero. It feels like you didn't learn anything. In reality, you did. You did learn something. But um but make no mistake, you by definition, you lost time. You lost that 3 months of your search. So. Yeah. And were you said that, you know, you had maybe kept up 20% of your time was devoted to continued deal sourcing. Do you recommend that percentage of people's time cuz you you you hear this a lot that, you know, people get just fixated on the deal that's right in front of them and they forget to keep their deal engine going, which is really important because that deal that they're they're so excited about looking at um could very well fall apart. So, so what what's the right amount of attention you should con continue to um give to your deal sourcing while you're working on a deal? Yeah, so I I think it's uh actually much, much higher. And we at Search Investment Group really encourage our searchers that are working with us in partnership, we encourage them to Let's say you just get a deal under LOI. You're you should be sourcing 60% plus of your week should be sourcing. Wow. and as you continue down that path the pendulum should swing or the the the bifurcation of that that time and attention should slowly erode into maybe 50% sourcing down to 40% as you get closer. You think about it, I think the LOI to close rate in self-funded search or let's say between, you know, even one to one to three million dollars of EBITDA is actually 10% maybe. So, 10% of those LOIs, maybe less uh actually get to closing for for any number of reasons, right? You could identify something in diligence early on. Oh, that's why that that business can't be sold or uh something happens on the seller's side. There's a range of different things that could happen. But uh I think it's about 10% or less. So, if you get multiple deals under LOI and we we do support people to be able to do that because you can't just keep doing 10% bets in succession. So, if you get three deals under LOI, maybe your sourcing component is less than 60%. Maybe it's 40%. That's because you're chasing two other deals. You got two other deals you have to work on and get term sheets on and and do business and market diligence and and move fast and that's a lot of work. You're going to be you're not going to be sleeping. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, how did you find B&A? I was reached out to it was I was in the Dallas area searching and there's a Dallas area broker who was not wouldn't post to public domains. There was no Inner Exo or uh Axial or um BizBuySell posting for for this opportunity. He really did larger deals. He would do more private equity sized uh um you know, business sales as a sell side uh investment banker slash, you know, business broker. Mhm. And this was a smaller one and he took it on anyway because he said and and as I learned he liked the sellers. He felt that they were really great people and he thought the business was interesting and unique. And uh anyway, I kept up good relationships with investment bankers and brokers who were even up-sized a little bit from what I was looking at. Um and and uh he I reached out to him. I said, "Do you You know, have anything?" It was just part of my standard broker outreach emails. He said, "Actually, I think I do." And this was in the fall of 2019. And he just told brought I went into the office and he told me about a company. He didn't name any names or anything, but he gave some high-level overviews of it. And I said, "That does sound kind of interesting." And he said, "I Yeah, I think it's I'm learning about this whole searcher space. I think it's good for a searcher. I think this would make this would fit." And so I said, "I'm very interested. Keep me posted." And I believe it was the beginning of 2020, about January. He put out the the confidential information memorandum. And I took a look at it, and I I got to say initially I I just said, "Is this the right business for me? I'm I mean, it's like local government services. It seems like you have to get to know the staff at city government. I don't have any background in city government." Um you know, how am I going to form relationships with city managers and department heads of public works and it just felt like something that somebody else should buy. Yeah. And I was very close to just passing on it for that reason alone. Yeah. You know, just thinking I was going to have a very low crossover. Yeah. So, that's how I That's how I found it. And yeah. Well, and and so how did you And so what what How did you convince yourself to give it another look or to open your mind to to the possibility of of getting into it? Yeah. Also, you know, going back to your earlier point about like you should be excited Not only do you have the qualification or can you figure the industry out, but it should turn you on. Did Did the idea of local business services in in grant services do that? I did like government-facing services. It I should say the company also has a small software product. So, it kind of scratched that earlier itch of wanting to That that other software company that I had that bad experience on was a local government-facing software company. So, I love the customer base. I love the idea of serving, especially municipal government, because instead of serving the federal government, you have multiple customers. You have multiple potential I mean, there's hundreds of cities in in Texas alone. And they're all small, but you they all need the same type of service or software product, depending on the price point. And you can modulate that depending on the size of the city. So, I think it's really interesting. I did always find that It was one of my one of my bullets, if you will, on my one-pager that I would share with brokers was was government-facing services or you know, government-facing software. It was certainly of interest. But I was At the time I was thinking of it more from a standpoint of I thought a lobbyist maybe would need this because it was grant funding opportunities. And I thought, "Well, isn't that kind of messy? Don't you have to kind of get to know people and network and find how the money flows between different governments?" It just sounded kind of messy. And I started convincing myself that maybe this one's not it. Maybe this is not the thing. And what saved me was was talking with um just one or two advisors and and asking them posing those questions to them, "Do you think this is something that I can't handle because of it would require somebody to have come from the city government arena?" Yeah. And they really encouraged me to to continue looking at it. And so I kept it I kept going. And the more I kept going, the more I got interested during that during that process. And at a certain tipping point, I just said, "I want I want to buy this business." Meeting the sellers was great, too, because I learned at that point in my search the integrity of the founder owner you're working with. And that that gut feeling that that instinct you get when you talk to them is is hard to teach to a searcher, but if you get that that feeling that somebody is actually has a um a very pure interest in in the kind of buyer they're they're looking for and why they're doing this, why they're selling, and and all these other things, and what they truly want to do once they do sell. Uh they were taking this personally. That's a good thing. And and I I found it was very unique from that standpoint. The sellers of this business were spectacular. Mhm. And you met with them in person then because this is a virtual business, correct? It is a 100% remote services and software business. Uh and yet it was operated out of out of a suburban in North Texas from the the founder owner's home. And we did we did meet in person. Um so, we actually we went under LOI in February of 2020, and the deal ended up closing in July 2020. So, in between those those months, there was quite a bit of activity going on. We did have meetings in person, but they were social distanced, they were masked at you know, my attorney's office or the sell-side business broker's offices. It was hard to communicate. It was hard to to kind of get close and really even shake hands, right? It was a tough time to to make that shift from Sure. in-person trust building to well, I'm in person, but I can't even see half your face type of thing. But uh What a time to do your first big deal, yeah. Yeah, so so that's I we did get to meet in person, but I I wanted to take them to lunch. I wanted to take them to dinner, and I couldn't because of the situation. Yeah. Yeah. And Jordan, give us a little bit more detail on what B&A does. You you've we've danced around it, but speak directly to it, please. Yeah, so B&A Grant Services and Software started in 2000. Uh the founder owner was a a soon-to-be mother who was who had to leave her city government job in California who had written grants on behalf of the city to seek funding from state and federal sources to fund key projects. So, this could be infrastructure projects. It could be firefighter equipment or vehicles or low-income community centers. It could be really anything that the city needs to do that tax local tax revenue alone does not cover. And and the city needs to be the one that does it. Let's say Let's say uh rehabilitating a road or or intersection signage or things like that. Um or building sidewalks in low-income communities so that people can actually walk on the sidewalk and not in the middle of the street and potentially get get uh in an accident. So, she did that on the side as a as a uh ancillary duty, and she was very good at it. So, when she had to leave the city to to have her first child, uh they called her and said, "Can you please keep writing grants for us? We would love for you to do that. You're so good at it." And she said, "Sure." And little does did she know at that time that became a business. And then she hired a friend to help her do some grant writing as she got more activity than the city referred her to another city that was looking for somebody. Um and it just built from there. So, 2000 all the way to 2020 when I got an opportunity to purchase the business, it had just grown organically. Um I'm pretty sure they had never taken on debt. It was just cash flow organic growth over time and built up to about 22 people at the time that I purchased it in July 2020. 22 people. And And can you share any numbers around financial numbers? So, what the revenue was and what the how profitable or what the margins were? And what I mean, if the EBITDA was, if you could share that. Yeah, so I can give you know, the revenue was in the two about 2.4, 2.5 million dollars of of annual revenue, and uh it's pretty healthily profitable. We had about 40% margins at an EBITDA level. You know, really because it was professional services and um the there's there's a lot of underlying elements of the different aspects of what we provide. So, we have grant research to help cities find grants and identify those that fit their key projects that that according to their five-year strategic plan. Then you got to of course have to have somebody write them to develop these 40-page very detailed essentially think of it as very detailed word documents with all sorts of statistics and maps and and schematics. And then we do grant management once the grant has been awarded to the city. You have to administer that over a period of years, right? It doesn't just get come to you in one check. The the granting agency pays it out over time according to you hitting certain stage gates and milestones and reporting requirements. So, it's a full life cycle company. And anyway, yeah, so it's it had pretty good margins and about 2.4 million of revenue. And about 22 people at the time. As of right now, we're almost 2 years in. It's June 2022. And we're on track to be at about um about 3.5 million in revenue. Phenomenal. Yeah. So, so so what is that? Four Doing my math here. Yeah. What is that? 40% growth 40 in 2 years? Yeah, it's it's about almost 50% growth. Yeah, that's amazing. That's great. Yeah, so we're up to 30 people now and about 50% growth, yeah. Um and and is that through Well, I let's let me put a pin in that question. I want to ask more about growth in a second. But first, um couple of things. The you when you were doing your part-time search and you were you were doing consulting and really not enjoying consulting uh and you know, having saying to yourself, you know, I didn't This is not I didn't set out to start a consultancy and grow a consultancy. That's not what I want to be doing. Um here you are. Effectively, you you own a consulting business, right? Um so can you square that circle for me? Yeah, absolutely. So, I my role in this company is uh to support the team to enable them to be successful, to design new initiatives to help recruit and retain talent, to create new business opportunities to serve our clients better, to be more efficient with our resources, and that's my job. Uh I do not know how to actually be a grant consultant. I've never done grant research. I've never written a grant. Um that's a it's a great question. I actually think it was a good a good background when you think about it. And I did utilize that. When I talked with the sellers, I said, "Hey, I ran my own consulting entity for a whole year, you know, before I Yeah. focused full-time. So, that actually came back to help because they said, "Oh, that's interesting. That's really great. So, you know how hard it is to win clients and to perform for clients and how demanding clients can be." And I said, "Yes, I do." Yeah. Totally. Um so, yeah, I think it I think it uh helped in a weird way with with getting this one, but um yeah, it's it's a it's a great company. It has a wonderful culture. It is predominantly women operated. And is just it's just a spectacular um uh group of people that do really great work and they're passionate about it. It's mission oriented. You're really helping communities develop things that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do. So. Um And to your point about not knowing how to be a grant consultant. So, you know, that is a that is a big characteristic of of search in general is that searchers acquire businesses that oftentimes are coming completely from outside of the industry, you know. Uh you know, former former investment banker buying a plumbing company um as an example. Or in your case, uh a grant consulting business. So, um I Yeah, how did you Yes, I understand that your role is not to be a grant consultant and write grants. Um but at the same time, you know, all of your staff or a large percentage of your percentage of your staff, that is what they're doing. Um so, there was there any part of you that that made you a little bit uncomfortable or how do you how do you deal with that? Cuz you got to be able to speak the language of your employees, do you not? And so, how how does Jordan Carter deal with that? So, I I certainly dove in and and looked at all the materials. I had many My first 90-plus days was was uh listening to people all across the organization of what they do, what it's like. Uh you when you jump into something like this, I felt like I was very much uh a pupil. I I was learning from you know, the uh who was the the vice president at the time and the sellers, right? They were they were sticking around and I just said, "Okay, tell me everything I need to know. What what are we Let's go Let's break this up into kind of a learning program so that I can uh train into understanding what I need to know about this business." Um it was opaque at first. I was like, "Grants? Municipal grants? What is What is this all about?" I didn't even know this industry existed. Yeah, I didn't either. Yeah. But I will say though, you know, you're going to undergo this training process no matter what company you buy uh unless you came from that industry directly. So, if yeah, you came from, you know, plumbing or landscaping, oh yeah, you're going to jump right in there. You'll know exactly which levers to pull. But most most searchers don't. It's the first time they've jumped into that industry. And you're going to have to just learn it over time. So, I wouldn't I wouldn't even say it's uh it wasn't as as tough to learn as I thought it was when I was first looking at the materials. I just thought I would never learn it. Um but I've gotten I mean, yes, because I've I've had to talk directly with clients with nobody else on the phone about, you know, what we're able to do and and uh you know, resolve issues. And certainly, you have to be credible and and uh be able to have a background on it. So. And and and the credibility piece also just comes into play with your with your people. And you know, I I think that the classic approach to this is what you said. When you when you acquire the business, you just come in with humility, um you know, really a learner's mindset. You say, "I'm here to learn from you all who are, you know, making this business function." Um And and it sounds like from all of the all of my guests that that that approach generally works. Uh that even though you don't know anything, if you're eager to learn, um your new employees will be, you know, eager to help get you up to speed. Um but I suspect there's still some people who feel like a searcher a new acquirer of their business who's coming from the outside outside the industry see them as opportunistic uh or, you know, that they just don't have the cred and um what have you. And I just wonder if in in a business like yours that's actually the the mission is a big part of why people work at that business, if you didn't bump up against that more than say if I bought a landscaping company. You know, that that people that that that work at being a really are motivated to, you know, help local governments. And so, um they just might not be as uh open-minded to we capitalists as as people in other industries. You follow me? I do. So, the way I communicated this was the way that the only way I I really knew how. And I think it's probably the right path for most other searchers as well when they step into businesses in this situation. I told them the truth about exactly how I see myself fitting into the team. That I'm not here to become this world-class expert of identifying and writing grant opportunities or identifying opportunities and writing beautiful proposals that win. I I I cannot do that. But I what I can do is as I as I explained, will support them. I can enable them to be healthier, happier. I did some things early on. I know lot searchers tell stories of this, search CEOs. They say, "Oh, I fixed this one thing that was in the technology stack or in their workflow." And they said, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much for fixing that." Yeah. You're you're producing value. You're helping make my day better. And I I one of those things was uh we had just an extreme amount of detail on the timesheets that was required from from the uh from our consultants to submit their time. It had to be like multiple I mean, you should see some of these timesheets. It was paragraphs explaining what they did over a 45-minute period. And it was almost as if it was a product in and of itself. You know, and that would then be cleaned up, proofread, and printed for the clients. And it wasn't easy to unhook, but just focusing on that as a pain point for really the entire team and solving it and making it much more streamlined. I got it to be a drop-down box. You just click, drop down, click it, boom, go to the next one. Log your next time time log. And they just said, "You That for for months afterwards." They they kept saying, "Thank you. Thank you. That was amazing. I really appreciate it." Wow. So, just showing Yeah, showing that you have a value to contribute that is not their value, but it's different. And that your job is to support them. That's That's how I feel about it. That's great. They they got it. And I I big credit to them for adapting through that change cuz it is it is hard. Yeah. Um Jordan, we're coming down the the coming down to the wire here, but um you mentioned the growth and one of the tweaks that what you just mentioned, the tweak that you made to to improve the business. Um this doesn't sound like a business that where modernization was the big thesis of what you could do as as the CEO. Um it sounds like the opportunities were elsewhere. So, were there opportunities? How has this 40% or 40-50% growth in the last 2 years come? What what it What it What it Tell tell me the quickly what has happened over the last 2 years to to for you to get the success. Cities have to outsource this service and uh cities have to outsource it because it is very typically very rarely used. You don't need a a full-time grant writer unless you are a large city, in which case they they have three to four or five people. They have a grant department. So, most cities in the United States by number, by absolute number, do cannot justify the cost of having a full-time employee focused on grants. And even if you did, that one person will only have so much experience over one career. We deploy a team-based approach pulling from across water, parks and rec, public works, fire, police. I mean, um it it just public public health. So, just across all those different arenas, we have experts of each that have gotten experience that are able to tactically deploy that experience for the client as they as we see fit, as we need to. So, um I say this to say that the uh the the cities can't afford it. And it's hard to build that experience in such a niche area. Most of grant writing is nonprofit focused, and that's much less technical in that arena. Municipal grant writing is much more and difficult and and and uh strenuous to to do and very um you know, demanding and all the fun things about client service that that become very uh tough on the actual consultants and can burn them out. So, the the marketplace for competitors here is actually very small. There's only a few, you know, a few people, a few small um similar-sized businesses that to ours that are doing this. And it's because it sometimes does take 20 years to build reasonable scale enough to actually be worthy of being able to self-fund that cash flow into future growth opportunities. So, all this to say, there are a lot of opportunities to to create new service lines and to also sell our existing service lines into other cities just by doing good work and continuing the mission. And that's special because most market niches, most industries, there's lots of competition. Everybody's competing on price, and you can't get, you know, attention of the the decision-maker. And and yet we can. And if anything, we just need more people. We need more great grant writers who want to make this a passion. And with that, I'm confident that we can go out there and go talk to cities and and sell um the service, which is essentially getting them sometimes 60, 70 Uh we have few clients that are getting a hundred times return on their investment. For every dollar they spend with us, they're getting a hundred times of that hundred dollars back uh through winning grant awards. We don't get compensated off that, but that's our measure of success. And so so a lot of this growth that you've seen in the last couple of years has been Jordan doing more proactive sales or just kind of industry tailwinds because there's just demand for what you guys are offering and there's and it's kind of been organic. There's so much demand that that didn't change. Uh there's way more demand than we can serve, but I moved several people around in the company that expressed to me that they didn't feel comfortable in their position and they wanted to do something else. And that actually unlocked a good value opportunity. For example, one person was positioned as a manager, and yet she really just wanted to do business development. I put her in business development uh in January of this year, and she's just hit it out of the park. Uh tapping into what someone really wants to do within our company as long as it adds value and is contributed to the mission, I'm supportive of. And I've told the whole team that. If you want to do something different, tell me. Let me know. Let's see what we can do. And certainly it's got to be something related to grants, but you know, there's you can be a researcher, you can be a writer, you can be administrative manager, you can be a people manager, or you can be in sales, you can be in marketing. So I want people to to lean into those natural uh you know, desires. So that actually helped unlock a good um a portion of it. And then yeah, just just getting out to clients and and evaluating our our book of business across the board and and saying what can we do to serve more with our existing platform. We have a research product that is actually scalable. So selling that into the existing channels doesn't create that much incremental more work, but is inherently valuable to all those little cities in you know, the state of California, for example. They they all want access to that targeted research, which is a which is a a really good product that we have internally. So it's a mix of things there. Great. Jordan, at the top when we were talking about your search, you said a couple of times that you didn't realize like you felt that you needed to have all the cash that was going to go to your to to the equity piece of your the acquisition. Um and that you were mistaken in that. And obviously SIG, the group that you're part of with Robert Graham and others, um is a source of equity capital for searchers today. And so um so SIG exists out there for searchers like Jordan Carter of 2016, 2017 to work with. Um Are there are there a lot of options? Like what what what would you tell like let's take SIG out of it. Did Jordan Carter like have what other opportunities to go get and get that capital did he have that he didn't realize cuz you're making it sound like he was he was you were really naive and that there's a lot more capital out there that maybe searchers who aren't super sophisticated about the space don't realize. Well, I really do think, Will, that the standing up in just the past few years of groups that are committed to solving that equity question uh is the game-changer because otherwise you have to patchwork piece it together yourself. Uh and I actually have a story there. In in uh in May, June 2020, I tried to do it myself, right? SIG did not exist. There was no search investment group. I did it myself. I contacted every investor I possibly could on searchfunder.com. Sure y'all know that website. Every single investor, I emailed them. I got a hold of every single one of them. I had an Excel sheet tracking of all of them. And of those Zoom calls, you know, let's say they were 45 minute to an hour Zoom calls each, less than one out of ten actually was even close to the finish line when we were we were raising equity. Uh when we were calling the equity into you know, people actually had to do the wires to into the bank account to fund the transaction. So it was very And and part of that was there's some little investor tire kicking. People say they're investors, they're not investors, and they hide that they're not really actually investing, they're just looking at the asset class. And the other part was people who just wanted an outsized portion of the equity. They wanted 45% or 40% of the common equity on the equity raise. And I said, "Look, I'm not I'm not going for that, you know?" And and I was at the time uh looking to raise that at a 15% conversion to common equity, where I would, you know, have 85%. So we were just way off, and I just they just said, "Look, if you get more realistic, then come back to me." And the bigger the check, I'm talking even like a little bit over a hundred thousand dollars, the more power they kind of threw around over that phone call over that Zoom call. So I personally had a very I would say brutal equity raise process myself trying to just punch it myself. You know, there's that common element through my search of I try to do it myself, try to do this this other thing myself. And I just learned the other the other side of the of the the chasm, I look back and I go, "Was there an easier way?" I think, you know, some searchers spend time trying to build investor relationships piece by piece, you know, one by one just to have those connections. But you never know how they're going to react until you show them your deal. And you show them what you're asking for on the equity side. So I actually think it's a waste of time try to build investor connections. I talked to plenty of investors. And I had known many of them from prior calls cuz I did the same thing all other part-time and full-time searchers do. You know, every now and then call some investors. So I don't know, Will. I It's hard to say because you're right. At the time there really wasn't anywhere else to go. You either patch it together yourself or you just go buy a small business and fund your own equity check, 100% of it. I that's what I felt was was available. That's not the same since since then or the past two years. And so obviously the the origin of SIG was was your vision to fill this to kind of fill this gap in the market. So that was my first half of the equity raise was me punching my way out of a out of a corner, right? And uh Robert and I had known each other from a prior Texas search group networking event, and I was talking to him about my deal. I said, "I got one under LOI, and I'm just having trouble getting, you know, equity lined up." And he said, "Maybe I can help you out." And so he lent some of his investor contacts to for me to make warm intros and reach out to them. And the hit rate went from, you know, one out of ten on searchfunder or less to seven or eight out of ten. And before we knew it, we got the equity raise completed. So that was really the first search investment group deal was my my company. So I Was your own? I felt like I I did everything the hard way, and then I figured out the the better way. And so Will, you asked that question of, you know, if you talked to the previous Jordan, what would you say to him on counsel? I feel like I'm talking to previous Jordans every day. Every time I talk to a self-funded searcher or prospective self-funded searcher, a lot of them are coming from the same mindset I had back in 2016 or 2017 or 2018. And thinking that they can just figure it out themselves and go at themselves and I just look at that and I say, "Are you ready for this? Do you want to do potentially two and a half years? Maybe it'll be faster, right?" But the inertia and the history, the track record of searching, of how brutal it is, says you probably are not going to be. You're probably going to have to learn it the hard way. Cuz that's the only way to do it if you don't take outside counsel. You know, if you don't take outside guidance. Yeah. Which is what I did. Jordan, I we got to cut it there just cuz we we've gone over time. Um but I feel like there's you're a great resource and yeah, somebody who went through their own very painful search and then, as you said, now is talking to other searchers um all the time. You just have really deep perspective on on self-funded search. What's the best way for people to reach out to you? Yeah, you can just check out our website, searchinvestgroup.com. Uh there's all sorts of great info there. And then um recently got on Twitter, so Jordan P. Carter. Okay. Jordan P. Carter on Twitter. all these links to get on Twitter, so I joined. Great. Great. How are the followers? Oh, I I don't think I've I've probably got like 20 at this point, but I plan on putting out some good good content. And um really the reason we started SIG was to help other people, help my former self, really. Yeah. And I hope some of that stuff is helpful, too. We can put out some good content. Yeah. Well, Jordan, thanks for coming on and and sharing your story. That was a really great deep dive into into a painful search. And And it seems like kind of another an earlier an earlier time in search because, as you said, a lot of things have changed since since 2016, 17, 18. Um but you have you have scars from the experience, but you're obviously very, very um wise about about the whole process today. So appreciate you coming on. Sure I'll have you back again at some later date. And until next time. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks again, Will. It's always good to be with you.