chris munn thank you for joining me today on acquiring minds thanks for having me well chris you have been a financial analyst a multi-family real estate investor entrepreneur and now you're an acquirer of small businesses and judging from our our pre-call a couple months ago uh are really passionate about this discovery as so many of us are when we when we learn about the path of acquisition entrepreneurship so what we're going to do today is basically hear hear about your journey your your acquisition you when we talked you had a second business under loi i don't know yet if that closed i'm sure i'll find out here in the next few minutes um and uh and and so why don't you just kick us off chris with with whatever you know start wherever on your background and we'll go from there sure so like like you stated my name is chris munn uh i always start that i grew up in detroit i'm a very passionate detroit sports team fan um so i grew up in detroit uh my whole life basically and then i left for college after college i moved to new york worked in finance a bunch of different roles but my last role in new york i worked at a hedge fund and then i moved down to atlanta to do corporate development corporate m a for a oil pipeline company where we bought and acquired assets cash flow assets uh so that was kind of my first little peek into the uh entrepreneurship acquisition world while i was there i did acquire some multi-family properties in michigan that i still have today and then shortly after that i did my first small business acquisition um down in tampa so that's kind of what led me to you and what led me to this interview here so i'm sure we'll dive into more of that great so when you say in that first job or the or the second job at the pipeline company it was your first peek into small business acquisition did you was it actually a small business acquisition or or just kind of like how the the kind of using leverage to in in cash flow to acquire assets or just tell me more about your education on this topic yeah so at that at that role my job was i did a lot of financial modeling and a lot of financial due diligence on either companies that the pipeline so a step take a step back so there was a oil pipeline that goes from houston to new york city oil and gas and it's full so it's like at capacity so there's really no opportunity and it's regulated so there's no opportunity to just raise rates and make more money so the only way the business could grow was through acquisition there was no like organic growth possible unless they built another pipeline which is ridiculously expensive and if you've seen anything and then there's nobody wants a pipeline near them so i kind of that that was my team my team was we were tasked with finding opportunities doing the due diligence on opportunities whether it be a small business or an asset of another business um to acquire and those were always cash flowing assets so sometimes they were small businesses other people in our space that we would like to acquire sometimes they were big assets oil and gas assets that were cash flowing that we would look to acquire and i was responsible for doing the financial due diligence and the modeling for those acquisitions so that's kind of where i started to understand okay here's what leverage is here's what you look for here's the kind of multiples um you may pay to buy these businesses or to buy these assets here's how to integrate them into your current fold and that that's a huge task i think that sometimes goes overlooked in the small business acquisition spaces the integration of the business so i learned a lot and that kind of gave me my peek into oh this is a real thing um people buy small businesses obviously those businesses were a little larger than what i'm acquiring but um it still gave me the the nuts and bolts of kind of what to look out for and it just gave me a a good glimpse into what the life was like um were other people on your team or other people who were exposed to this model of using leverage and cash flow to make acquisitions similarly enticed to go off and do this for themselves so so what do you think what do you think um why were you the weird one uh i always knew i wasn't gonna work for another for other people uh like since i was probably seventh eighth grade so that was always my goal so even my career path of the finance world like i don't love finance i'm not like to be honest i did it because it was a good way to make a good amount of money while i was young because i had other things that i wanted to do so and i know if i wanted to do those other things like okay yes i may i love sports i would love to work in the sports world but the salaries there didn't match what i could make in finance and i'm like if i'm only gonna work for 10 years or five years or whatever it may be just maximize that time even if the work sucks so like i said i worked at a hedge fund i literally i worked every day till 11 o'clock at night like that's not an exaggeration i never left work early and but that was for another goal right so i think that's that i was already uh it was predetermined before i got to that company that i would be different so i think it was just that fact and so why why was real estate first if you if you this experience this really fresh experience that you were getting was kind of more around business acquisition why the detour into real estate and just kind of give me give me the quick story there yeah so honestly i kind of got into real estate by mistake so i obviously i think anybody who knows anything about alternative investments probably learns about real estate first it's super common there's a house on every block right and so when i was younger maybe seven eight years ago maybe my grandmother passed and uh my family you know had to sell her house and so uh this is a funny story but so i'm like okay this is this is perfect this is my perfect foray into real estate i know my grandmother's house i'll buy it i have the money blah blah blah so my cousin was the real estate agent i'm like this is easy slam dunk perfect way to get into real estate so i go to uh the cousin i put in an offer i made sure i had the best offer and someone in my family i won't say who who was responsible for making the decision did not sell me the house so i was understandably uh upset it's it feels like you're still like i couldn't oh i said yes i still hold some resentment about that because that's it's it's i'll go back in a minute but it yes i still hold resentment but so from that point i was like oh well i'm i'm i have to show you now like i'm you know that's my i have i don't know what's wrong with me i have that uh gene and i was looking at houses and i happened to come across an apartment building um and that it just started from there i just read as much as i could talk to as many people as i could and i was like you know what people that start with houses always say like oh multifamily is a dream i would love to get to the point of that and so i said why not just skip a step and and you know you don't know what you don't know so i did it and this your grandmother was in back in michigan in the detroit area in detroit yeah in detroit detroit and so is that why you also then looked there because you're not living in detroit at this point you're in you're in yeah yeah yeah so i was i was not yeah that's why i looked there i knew the real estate market was yeah and so i didn't know everyone i talked to said look you got to know your market and i know that even living in detroit like one block can be a good block and literally the block around the corner is not so if you don't know that and you're not on the ground um that's always hard to know so i felt comfortable okay so you you acquire this building did you acquire did you um bring in investors yeah so i had a few family just family and friends it wasn't really like a big investor thing but i did i put up the majority of the money but i had family and friends come in um and we still hope we still have that building today it's it's about to be five years uh we just got it appraised because we're gonna sell it this summer um but it's it's going well surprisingly and then you also bought a second building right i did so maybe two years after that uh yeah two years after that i bought a second building which was like three times the size of the first one i felt more comfortable it's a newer building so a lot less maintenance i learned some things from the first one and i bought a second one uh the whole time i was looking for smbs but opportunity came across my desk and i said you know this is a good deal i'll take it out to it and that one's going well too so i kind of feel like i lucked up a bit because i'm not some real estate expert but um you know you gotta you gotta pay to play and you gotta be in the game to win so that's kind of how i approached it and and how big our unit how big are building one and building two in terms of units so the building one is eight units in the and building two is 22 units so i have 30 units okay so you acquire these 30 units and but in as i recall you're you're flirting with the idea of making this your entrepreneurial full-time pursuit yes but you choose against it why so a couple reasons so one to start there was not my ability to generate deal flow wasn't great and i was getting a lot of all market and deals off market deals i was finding um weren't that great either and so this was coming at a time where as i mean we're sitting here talking 2022 there's a ton of money in the markets and in real estate all that does is uh increase uh values of the real estate which can be great if you own but it also decreases the amount of yield that people are willing to accept on a building so where people may say hey i want to make seven percent on my money eight percent on my money when money is flush people are willing to make one percent um or just nothing so some people are willing to make negative cash flow because they think it'll appreciate in the future and that was never my strategy going in my strategy was always i want to buy for cash flow i want to distribute that cash flow um and that kind of became very difficult to do in the market so uh the deals were getting tighter and i kind of just sat and said like okay yeah i either have to like truly max out on finding deal flow because it's not coming to me um in the current state or i can you know go with what i know with uh the smb world and i just when i just sat down one day and i said you know what i think there is a lot more value for me to add in the smv world and i think i could be i think i would be better equipped to find not only deal flow but to actually do these acquisitions um and real estate is expensive like is there's no way around that compared to smb it real estate is you can pay 20 times cash flow for a building you could pay 40 times cash flow and that smb world is three to eight that's just a big difference so i just found it more attractive and i you know i was still young so i just sat down and said what do i want to do and smb just one hour how old are you in this time frame uh 30. i think okay 30. and this was how long ago there four years ago okay yeah so you you even though you did this second deal you actually i mean you were already excited about smb acquisition um but this absolutely this second building kind of the opportunity presented itself and you grabbed it um but that didn't yeah i was i was equipped to do it so i said why not yeah but that didn't um for for all the reasons that you just shared that that wasn't going to be your your final path you were still really excited about smb acquisition the entire time so when did you when did you get kind of more um like what how did your learning progress from that first job at the at the pipeline company where you're exposed to this whole model to actually getting serious about it yourself are you on twitter are you just on biz by cell every night looking at what's out there like how did you how did you continue to educate yourself yeah biz by so i was not active on my twitter my twitter was not an smb twitter that's a mistake on my hand because it's a super valuable resource but it was literally just biz by sale and the two books buy them build and the harvard business guide to acquisitions that's literally my education yeah well those are the big three i think half my guests those two books and that website and that's the that's the trifecta yeah yeah that's that's literally it and and now i if i could do it now it would definitely twitter is like an amazing resource and they will point you to the best resources and stuff like your podcast which i think are great but at that time yeah that was it so you're looking at deals on biz by cell i know you're in la now at this time you're still in florida so just geographically catch me up to speed are you looking at deals while still in florida and are you looking at deals in florida like what like you orient me geographically yeah so i was looking at deals in the southeast basically um that was kind of my focus uh but on business myself i would look everywhere just so i could start to get a feel for what's out there uh what kind of valuations who are the brokers whether i found any nationally or anything like that so my my focus was southeast but on biz by cell i i literally would i would go every state and just you know see what was being offered just because you know it was it was like getting reps in i guess so um and just try to model stuff out and see what worked and see what stuff i like and so you were asking brokers for businesses that piqued your interest you were asking for the information modeling them all kind of about even if you weren't necessarily serious about that particular building business you were you were putting in the reps learning yeah absolutely so i would i would try to i would try to find businesses that i think would be attractive to acquire model them out see what see what worked see what i liked about the business and then go back to bizby or excuse me buy them build or the hbr guy and then just think about okay this is the due diligence list what would i ask what are the main drivers of this business just stuff like that um that's really yeah that was really what i did you know i've heard many guests say talk about reps and and and others talk about the reps but i don't think i've actually crystallized that into a a tip on acquiring minds that i should but ever you know that is such a part of the search game is like just looking at deal after deal and not just looking at it not just looking at the listing on biz by cell but asking for the memorandum and then and even doing the financial modeling and and you really you really need to do that and you'll be so thankful you did because after doing that a couple of dozen times the other thing i hear people say on this topic is like you know i i after doing that for a while i could very quickly decide if a deal like was worth my time or not yeah so um not only does it obviously make you ultimately choose the right deal but it also saves you time if you can invest that time up front because you stop wasting your time on things that are just obviously bad you'll develop a nose for that an instinct for that 100 and same thing in real estate i would start to see stuff i'm like that doesn't work um but with the smb world absolutely and i think more than getting the practice in it's the confidence that you gain over time from doing the reps and so you see a deal and you know you've done them everyone's scared to take the jump right it's a huge jump to take and it's it's no different anybody who's acquired a business has been scared to take the jump but the reps lower the fear you start to know what to look for you know you're they're always going to be unknowns but it helps to build your confidence on yeah this is this deal looks good i think i can do this um and i think i can do it because i've looked at 15 others just like this and this is why this one sticks out so the confidence more than anything actually i think was what was important for me yeah that's that's a great point so what size business are you looking at and yeah so tell us the story of the of the business you actually acquired yeah so i was looking for businesses around 700 000 to a million dollars total enterprise value at the time so what i end up acquiring was a business that was 800 000 enterprise value and about 250 260 000 of sde and so it's a commercial cleaning business they do a lot of what we do a lot of specialty floor work which is kind of our how we make most of our money so that's going into a building four times a year every quarter and doing the waxing of the floors or the stripping of the floors whatever it may be and then nightly commercial cleaning as well so a lot of recurring revenue um and then you have the floor work is a lot of reoccurring revenue um which is great so um that was something that you know was important to me uh trying to have something that was somewhat reset recession resistant um something that had re recurring revenue a reoccurring revenue would be great as well i just felt a little more comfortable in that space than i did like let's say d to c or something that is just completely foreign to me um it made me a little bit more comfortable so uh so yeah that was the the parameters of the first deal and so i probably look for seriously look for maybe nine months before i found it and where is the business it's in tampa pinellas county florida so tampa st petersburg area oh but you now live in l.a that's right yeah i live in l.a now but did you acquire the business when you were still in tampa and did you was it a geographic specific search so no so i acquired it when once i was here um i was looking there uh and what made me confident in being able to do it so california i don't is not business friendly in my opinion so i did not want to acquire business in california so that was number one so that was kind of out i moved here for reasons that have to do with my wife's career so we were out here and um i knew i didn't want to buy a business here i just don't don't like the labor laws don't like the employment laws and so what really gave me the confidence to do it right or wrong was the the fact that i bought apartment buildings in michigan and that was a huge concern of the banks when i was going in they're like you're not here what are you gonna do if like there's a fire at the building or you know which i thought were really silly questions because i'm just like i don't know call the fire department like if you have toilets out like if my toilet goes out literally in the bathroom right there i'm not fixing it so i'm calling somebody so i was like i don't know who you think i am but i'm not you know bob the builder here so doing that gave me a lot of confidence and the fact like okay something can be run run remotely i'm in i'm in tampa a lot so i won't act like i'm not um but i don't physically live there i'm not physically there every day like today i'm not there but i am there a good amount but i also felt like if there are weeks that i'm not there um if i buy the right business then you know there should be no concern i should be able to run it i will say that yeah that i mean you fair point about uh builder bob and fireman fred or whatever but but yeah i have to say to to acquire your first business that far i mean from florida or to california i mean that's about as far in the continental 48 that you have a distance as you can find um that was it that was uh a lot of confidence to do that yeah i mean it was your first acquisition on top of you know first business acquisition yeah for sure wasn't a it wasn't a you know i didn't take it lightly i'll say that i certainly didn't take it lightly and there was a lot of uh you know thought but i knew i was here and i knew i didn't want to acquire here yeah and so i said okay you know for the time that we're here i don't know how long we'll be here but for the time that we're here i still want to acquire and that you know that that little the the apartment thing really sealed it if i wouldn't have done that i wouldn't have bought the business yeah i would have been too scared to do it yeah um but you find ways to make it work and i'm sure a lot of your guests say like as you grow your job as the as the head of the snake is to work your way out of the business and you know if you want to sell to someone else down the line you want to almost have no day-to-day responsibilities that's what a true you know acquisition would look like for somebody playing and with bigger stakes so i'm like in my mind i'm saying okay i've done this before i've done something remote and if my job is to work myself out of the business then i shouldn't be scared of this this should be something that i i'm gonna have to face a challenge but if i meet that challenge then you know i can go ahead and and say like yeah i don't i don't run this day-to-day this is run by these people day-to-day i oversee them but um i think it just creates a better business environment and it helps me to uh it helps me delegate to be honest so like if i was there i know i would micromanage and i would be all over stuff and i can't do that and at the end of the day i shouldn't do that so it's kind of affordable my natural personality yeah it absolutely it forces me so there are a lot of people who you know run sites you know in different parts of the country it may not be the main business but they may have a plant somewhere or distributor somewhere and that's how they have to do it so i treated it like that sure and i guess being in california and not one wanting to acquire being in la and not wanting to acquire anywhere in california meant that wherever else you might acquire is going to be a plane i mean you're going to have to get on a plane yeah so if you're getting on a plane even if it's in neighboring arizona st you're still you may as well like it's a plane and so an additional few hours in the plane actually so yeah no that's exactly right and i take when i go i take a red eye i leave at night i'm there first thing in the morning i don't miss a thing so it's a three and a half hour flight four hour flight here phoenix is an hour flight so that like phoenix is pretty much as close as you can get to la for a big city so um it didn't make that much of a difference to me well and let's talk more about with what it what it's now like to to run it remotely because i think people will be really interested in this so the other thing that strikes me about this is um to your point like the ideal is to eventually work yourself out as the head of the snake out of the business if you want to if you want to then at some point sell your business to somebody else you need to have extricated yourself from the operations um but what that typically looks like is a larger business i mean you've gotten revenue to a point where there's a management layer or at least a general a general manager or some sort of operator in there but your business you know probably at that size can't support a general manager correct me if i'm wrong talk to me about who is there on the ground in tampa yes so i do have a general manager okay um that runs the day to day now this is something that i'll you know you don't know until you do it but if i could go back i would have bought a bigger business like that's without a doubt and so we talked earlier about uh you know what i'm doing now and that that is the reason so to i don't know if we're gonna get into it yet but i have not closed on okay um the second business but within three months of owning this business i mean i say you know i should have bought a bigger business because to have a true management layer um to have the true scale that you need to get yourself completely out you do need more revenue and you do need more cash flow and that's up you're 100 right about that so that became my focus and unfortunately we went through kovit right when we acquired the business and so a lot of it was just stabilizing what we had i didn't have time to go and try to find another business i was just stabilizing um and that took time that took a lot of time and we went through some pain with kovitt for sure um but now um like i said the the business we have under contract now i won't talk too much about it but it would probably 4x the size of my business and so that would allow me to like take the next step um on the path of you know having a having a sizeable business that somebody may want to acquire one day yeah yeah that's kind of how i look at it chris when you've when you were looking going back to the first business acquisition now yeah i assume that you you you knew this principle of like you know buy a little bit bigger if you can because you're gonna because small businesses don't have enough margin to play with to invest in the business and so on the very thing you just said i assume you knew that when you bought this business and so this first business and so why did you buy on the small side yeah so i did so i knew that and part of it was not knowing my capabilities and trying to take too big of a bite um but going back to almost going back to getting the reps in thing so i did know that to your point i did know that i did know you know the bigger the better but you know that there's some balance with that right so you can't just go out and buy a 50 million dollar business that's not what people do and so i should have known this from my apartments because with my apartments i felt the exact same thing i bought a 8 unit excuse me and i said six months later i'm like i should have just bought a bigger building but the questions and the struggles that i had to go through to get that eight unit i don't know if people would have given me the credibility uh to go buy a 22 unit building right off the blocks so i kind of felt that's probably it might just be an insecurity it might be real i don't know but i felt that same thing when thinking about a bigger business i'm like okay if i want to go buy maybe a four million dollar business well like what are the banks gonna say what are they gonna have to come back to me about and uh i felt i got i had such a hard time getting my first apartment building and i had a really hard time getting my first business that i'm not sure i could have done it so it's kind of a fear and maybe it's irrational but i just think that there are there were some forces that were working against me as they work against everyone but um i think that kind of made me say okay let's just start here and then we'll we'll go on to the next step on buying the first business what were when you say it was really hard for you to get this deal why so the bank was not great to work with and there were times i'll just be i'll just be completely honest when i think when sometimes when people see especially when my apartment building a young african-american male in his 20s coming in and saying hey i want to buy a business i just don't think that resident like people pattern match i have everybody the smartest people in the world pattern match so when they see something that comes in that doesn't match the pattern it's like ah no this isn't right and so nobody explicitly says that but that's the sense that i get and my wife is she senses the same thing in in her space and so being a woman so i understand from her perspective too so i just think some of the questions and like my to me my background is like i you know i i don't have an mba but you know i worked on wall street like that is usually a rubber stamp for some people like oh worked on washing like yeah he knows everything like yeah i i see that with with people with colleagues that i have and the ability to raise money that they have that i don't have yeah and so i think going into those banks and i think they pattern match and they see something that doesn't match the pattern and they're just like no this is you know they'll just ask rational questions like how are you gonna you know how are you to manage this uh you've never managed anything before and it's like anybody who's jumping into smb space has never managed the business that's the you know that's the point you know that's what the sba loans are for is for um you know if you had a perfect candidate then you know we wouldn't need you here we could just rubber stamp everything so yeah um that was that was and continues to be an issue that i faced i think in the industry there's not a lot of diversity not a lot of women and so i think the pattern matching especially at the banks is real yeah um and so i sense that and so was your your thinking maybe subconscious maybe totally conscious like let me i'm just gonna get what i can here to get in the game i might have to build more credibility than you know a white guy yeah but that's the game i'm gonna have to play so i'm that's that's what i'm doing yeah that's been the i mean that's to me been the game my whole life it's like i may have to do john may have to do x i may have to do x plus y right and then that might get us to the same place um but you know i'm willing to do that i don't you know i don't i'm not going to cry about it if that's what it takes that's what i'm willing to do but it does yeah a lot of times you're just like look let me just get in the room yeah and if i can get in the room then i can you know and i can try to show my abilities once i'm in the room but so yes it's a it's certainly a conscious uh thing that i think i have i've experienced i mean i was lucky to grow up uh in detroit and um i was surrounded by 11 family that you know encouraged me and gave me a lot of confidence in what i could do so the outside distractions don't deter what i think i can do i just know that sometimes i have to do a little bit more uh to get the same results and so now on you're on the second deal so do you feel like that you the fact that you acquired and have been successfully running this first business in fact is giving you credibility and and just catch me up on the second deal where are you at with it sure so so like i said second deal the same geography same industry it's about three times the size of the first deal and i do think that there is some credibility now that we've done it we're in a space we have a business that does exactly this uh but i still you know there's still questions that i don't you know that i think are irrational you know banks come and say oh well you run a business that's one million dollars how do you think you could run one that's three million dollars it's like you know that it's that's how it works guys like you know people grow and that's how people you know grow in empire you don't grow it by just adding one plus one all the time sometimes you need some exponential stuff so but i do think we have a lot more credibility and i'm a lot more confident when i talk to the banks um about what i'm willing to share what i'm not willing to share what um how i'll answer questions how i won't answer questions uh i'm just a lot more the first time you're going through it you don't know what to expect with banks and the banks can be brutal they can ask a ton of questions they can ask them 10 different ways to make sure they're getting a consistent story but this time i'm like we're going to move at the pace that i want to move at if a bank wants to work with that great if they don't want to work with that that's fine as well but you know that comes along with having credibility and doing a deal when you're doing your first deal you can't dictate terms uh the same way so that's been helpful and just getting in the room and getting in the game and knowing the lingo has helped a ton so i certainly think it's helped with the credibility maybe um a slightly ignorant question are you not working with the same lender like wouldn't you you know develop a relationship and be able to go back to that same sba lender yeah over and over they get to know you and they themselves feel increasingly confident in you yeah that would be ideal like that that is i mean that's what we're trying to do now we're trying to find a lender who understands exactly what we want to do uh we want to buy in this space in this geography and grow this business through acquisitions mostly um you know we'll have organic growth as well but and i want a bank that understands that and it's like yeah we get that we totally understand that let's do it uh i would have loved to go back to the first bank but that literally the the experience was awful um and i would i wouldn't i wouldn't give them even though they didn't get my i wouldn't give them my business again let's look at that one okay chris we're um we still got a few minutes but i want to be uh efficient here so just going back again to the the fact that you're you're running this remotely uh don't mean to beat this to death but so so the the first acquisition had you said what 250ish 230ish did you say yes 250 250 sd 250 sde and that's after paying a general manager yeah so yes after paying attention manager yep great so in theory you could pocket all of that the 250 and not be working on the business i mean if you really want it to be absentee and sort of as passive as possible you could do that okay yeah you can do some form of that and so when you're going to tampa now to check in with the business what sorts of stuff are you doing are you just kind of putting in face time are you making strategic moves or what yeah so a lot of it is meeting with owners sometimes i meet with owners of other businesses or meeting with uh trying to get try to gather more business whether that's through organic sales or that's through acquisitions so that's one thing i do of course the face time with the team is always important um i like them to know that i'm there and i'm around and we have a really good relationship uh i've built it so that we have a lot of uh esocronius communication so that they don't feel like they have to be anywhere at any given time i don't feel like i have to be anywhere at any given time and that has helped a tremendous amount and i plan to carry that along to any other business that i i acquire i think that's very important for people especially now with the whole work from home and work remote um not being all and all the time i think my team really appreciates that so that's something that we've implemented but it's just checking in um and business i would call it business development whether it's internal business development or external so that's pretty much what i consider my job and your general manager you have a good relationship with with that individual and yeah and that individual just it really is just running the day to day in the operation so all the minutia and the details she's on top of she's awesome i can't say enough about her she's she she's everything you would want she takes responsibility she takes accountability she treats it like it's hers so uh all the day to day the hiring the firing um knowing what people get paid negotiating cop all that kind of stuff i leave to her and she manages that with the team which is a blessing i know everybody doesn't without her i wouldn't need to be there for sure did you did you diligence her like before you bought the business did you did you understand and appreciate how central she was to everything well i knew she was central right i knew like because the previous owner didn't do a lot day-to-day either and so i knew that this person was central but you know you don't really know what they're going to be like until you start so that's always a huge risk and it's a risk that we have going into this next business they have a they have a gm and they've been there a long time and so you know i'm like okay they obviously you know some things you can just assume they know the business they know how to run it they're doing a good job um because they've been there over a decade but will i get along with this person will they fit into like my plan that's the stuff that you really don't know until you take over and which is what i was saying a lot that i learned at my my last corporate job was the integration of businesses is a huge huge huge component integrating the team is a huge component that i think gets overlooked sometimes with these acquisitions because you're taking over a completely different enterprise and may do things differently than you and may have different values than you do so it's very important to kind of get a feel of the people in the culture that you're taking over because you know it can be a clash and uh you may have to let some people go or they may not like your style and um you know it's it's just a it can derail an acquisition for sure um especially losing people at this at the businesses the size that we buy these key people losing them is can be a death meal so you might not be able to replace them or you might not be able to replace them in a month it may take three four months to find someone so you really have to vet you know who is running this business what what are they incentivized by what do they value and try to match that you know i i was just having a conversation last week with an acquisition entrepreneur and they uh bought in to their industry and then rather that they they quickly learned or or concluded that rather than acquire to growth they would just do organic growth because kind of what you're talking about well not not exactly what you're talking about but just the the cost involved in acquisition i mean there there's there's just there's more risk first of all to your point like integrations can can just be explosive yeah and even if an integration works there's just a lot of time and cost involved in that integration those so those are resources and so their conclusion was rather than investing those res if we invested the same resources and energy that we would that we would and you know doing an m a process and then doing the integration and all the culture fit and all of that stuff and then doing it again and doing again if we just took all of that energy invested in organic growth and building out a sales team with the with the the platform business that we've acquired we think that's a a faster path to growth and that's what they did and it worked well not saying it's it's a universe it's it's a universal rule but it was it was a great decision for their playbook yeah no i i will say and this is from my experience acquisition growth can be fast you can go from two million dollars in revenue to 10 million dollars in revenue in six months and you would never do that organically but it's not clean and so that 10 million dollars comes with a lot of costs so if you go from two to ten organically that's as smooth as it could be like that that revenue came through through your channels through your funnels you were able to control what customers you went after what margins you went after uh what geography you went after all that kind of stuff so that makes it very clean uh so organic growth is very clean um in my opinion it's slower but it it could it it can be right for your business for sure like if we could grow organically as fast as we could acquisition i would rather do it organically i'll put it that way i just don't think that we can grow that fast organically especially with stuff that's recurring revenue because you have to get your customers off of the contracts that they're currently on and that doesn't happen every day right so it's not you know you may be able to sell somebody a new kind of hand soap tomorrow they're not they don't love their hand soap but you know whoever cuts your lawn if somebody else wants to cut it you're gonna have to be either unpleased with who cuts your lawn displeased with who cuts your lawn now or some event has to happen so that's why i think for our business organic growth is a little slower but we focus on both because the organic growth is clean and we go after the customers that we want and that's important to me and of course and many of these quote unquote boring businesses these you know these these blue collar sweaty businesses that were many of us are interested in buying the market it's a growth market it's a pretty stable market so you're you're basically kind of always stealing customers i mean you're just that's how you're yeah that's how you're to you yes it's hungry hungry hippos it's like whoever gets it gets it so um yeah you're stealing from other people that's 100 and whether those people you know retire or go out of business or whatever you're still in growth and you know it makes the organic part a little bit more difficult so you know we focus on it for sure but it's you know it depends on the industry i think and and what your goals are chris with the few minutes we have left i want to touch on two more topics just just um i like to just get a taste of the industry itself that you that a guest has acquired into just to educate people a little bit uh on that particular industry and then i want to talk about your um annoyingly successful twitter uh growth so first on on the business uh the business itself so um you said it was eight hundred thousand dollars enterprise value so does i i assume that's kind of that puts it at 800 to 1.2 million in revenue is that about right when you when you acquired it yep yes yeah it's just yeah it's just over one revenue okay and so uh and so margins then are what 25 if you had if you had or 20 to 25 percent 25 20 20 to 30 depending on what kind of customers you go after and stuff like that but yeah somewhere between 20 30 would be great 20 to 25 usually 20 to 25 for a business that doesn't have super high barriers to entry and you're kind of sub scale that seems like pretty good margins when you're comparing the kind of these types of industries can you weigh in yeah so it's a lot of it comes from the so the regular nightly cleaning not a lot of money in that so you go to somebody's you know go to your office building and take the trash out and vacuum the floors not a ton of money in that anybody can do it people are willing big big companies are willing to take five percent margins because you know it grows their enterprise value right so they just want the contracts so that stuff is hard like at airport those people that clean in the airport those margins are under five percent yeah yeah so it's ridiculous but the floor work is not so low barrier to entry everybody can't do it you can't just bob just can't come and strip the the wax on your floors and we re-wax it so that's kind of where if you're in the commercial cleaning space you have to kind of make your make your bones is doing the more specialty work it's not going to be every night but it's reoccurring and that's where you can kind of run your margins on the higher side 50 or higher on that kind of work 50 or higher okay yeah yeah absolutely yeah so your average ads are 25 and so yeah so it's it's hard to grow a business just doing that yeah because you want to be you want you want the nightly cleaning to get you in the door and then you can sell them on oh yeah you know this needs to be power washed really badly and your floors need to be done and that's where you once you're in there you can sell that work it's hard to sell that work without being there every day and for companies that do that type of floor work is is it is there um portfolio of offerings similar to yours where they're they kind of have the the janitorial the nightly janitorial stuff that is kind of lower margin and but it's kind of the trojan horse that serves the other side of the business is that a common format yeah it's common a lot it's it's becoming more common i think people are catching on to it and they just called it call it building maintenance so they don't really call them cleaning companies anymore they'll say like a facility maintenance company or a building maintenance company and the idea is like whatever maintenance recurring maintenance that your facility may need they can provide whether that's uh power washing floor work cleaning any stuff like that they can do so chris you're you um so you know i'm out there as many of us are trying to grow our twitter followings i'm doing all right i'm at whatever 23 2400 uh but it's it's hard uh or i i i actually i don't think it is for everybody i don't think it is for you and so when i see twitter savants uh you know i i get a little um a little envious you have i checked just before a call uh 30 000 followers and i think you were ha maybe i'm wrong but i feel like at least 10 000 of those have come just since we talked two months ago anyway when did you start where were you when you started um seriously going after twitter yeah so i i came across a tweet that was offering online writing basically online writing help and i used to like to write a lot in high school and so i was just like i should do it i should learn how to write i enjoy twitter and i was like i wonder how to write for an online audience and i always appreciate it uh brevity and writing yeah so twitter is like the perfect place for that and so i had no real goals or real ambitions with my twitter but i took the class in early october of 2021 and i had 200 followers those were just my friends you know that people that knew me personally right um people that i actually met in real life um and so i took the class and it taught some concepts about virality and brevity and how to get an audience and how to nurture your audience and stuff like that so i just kind of took those little nuggets to heart and started writing on twitter and the first month or so it was like right into black hole you know you're not talking to anybody i was talking to my friends so they didn't care about what i was talking about but eventually it started to pick up and you meet people in the community that enjoy your stuff and send you encouraging messages positive messages so yeah i've grown yeah i'm at i think i'm at 30 000 now so i've grown from october to what is it april um so that's six months seven months so i've seen like 30 000 yeah but i i i look at i look at what i tweet and i look at who like or i look at what resonates with people and i try to just double down on content that resonates with people and this worked surprisingly yeah but you know chris i i've taken a a course i think and i've and i've seen people write threads about how to and a lot of that advice is um the same it's you know stick to one topic see what works do more of what works like you just said um you know develop a brand around yourself and i'm trying to do all those things and i say and i see a lot of other people out there trying to do those things as well so i think there's still a little bit more magic to what you've on you know you've unlocked for yourself than you're giving then you're giving yourself credit for um i mean that's that's just because i and i've seen a bunch of accounts grow really quickly but that that's particularly impressive and so did you just make a decision to like the topic that you were going to go after which was kind of going to be entrepreneurship small business yeah so i'm interested in business so i try uh the way i think about it i have like three i have like a funnel it's a three tiered funnel and my top tier is just business so i could tweet about anything in the business space that's with my audience and my second tier smaller gets smaller down the funnel is entrepreneurship it's a little bit more niche than business but it's something i enjoy and then the bottom of my funnel is uh entrepreneurship through acquisition so that's the most niche but i'll i can get the most affinity by tweeting that kind of stuff um i'm sure like your audience like your audience probably only cares about entrepreneur entrepreneurship through acquisition right exactly that's so you have a ton of affinity there i don't have as much affinity as you do there so that's kind of a sacrifice that i've given up for trying to you know grow the twitter a little bit more and i just tweet general business stuff from time to time that that comes to my head or i see on the internet or whatever so um i think about it like that so i don't have as much affinity as smaller accounts and accounts that are very uh specific like yours are um but you know it's it's value in both i think i see some small accounts that people love and i see some big accounts that don't give much engagement so it just all depends i just try to be consistent on twitter and tweet and and so but this funnel concept with kind of broad at the top and more affinity at the bottom that imply funnel kind of implies directionality like are you trying to work your your audience who's interested in your broad business tweets down into entrepreneurship throughout are you trying to kind of introduce them to entre entrepreneurship through acquisition by kind of proceeding down your funnel is that the and just okay hundred percent 100 so you're doing you're doing my job i'm out here also i mean i'm not i don't mean i'm not trying to sound competitive but i'm like how do i increase awareness of this yeah and what i'm doing wrong is i'm already talking to people who know about it you know i need to be doing what you're doing which is talking to everybody and then working down the funnel yeah absolutely so i this was a probably a unique experience for me but i said i grew up in detroit i went to detroit public schools so i went to like one of the worst school systems in the country so i don't know any i never knew anybody that had a white-collar job i never knew anybody that was a lawyer or a doctor or anything like that i didn't know anything about entrepreneurship i didn't know anything about finance i didn't know anything about wall street and so for me that's part of what i like to do it for is to introduce people to things that they may not know about because i think there's a lot of talent and a lot of people may be interested in the world of entrepreneurship especially entrepreneurship through acquisition that just aren't exposed to it so you know i talked to some people on twitter one of my buddies smb attorney is on twitter who has good affinity in this space and we talk about it about it a lot it's just there aren't people that look like me in the space like there's not many um they're mostly just white guys in the space which you know i still enjoy the space but there are people that should be in this space that aren't because they don't know about it and so where you know you can tell your buddies and they can tell their buddies and oh yeah i went to college with this guy and he's doing this and like i'm the only person that went to my college that's doing it i'm the only person from my neighborhood that's doing it i'm the only person i know from detroit that's doing it like so me getting the word out about it is important to me um and it's like a little form of giving back that i can do for like people who grew up like i did so so you're really your funnel is not just broadly trying to increase the awareness of entrepreneurship through acquisition but specifically for people of color african-american folks to to be made women because people yeah people who don't fit the existing profile of my typical kids yeah exactly so we were talking about pattern matching earlier at the banks i'm trying to do the opposite right so everybody pattern matches people talk to people they they're they're close to uh people talk to people in their neighborhoods and that doesn't expand the pie right the pie just stays the same right so like you say you want more people to know about entrepreneur entrepreneurship through acquisition you have to talk about something else because that's not going to get new people into the space it's like you know talking about astrophysics like maybe you just need to talk about uh science and then those people may say oh you know astrophysics is kind of interesting um so you know it's just it's a it's a different approach and i'm probably gonna most people aren't gonna be interested in it right i know that but the few that are um i'm happy to help them i do i do a call every i do calls every friday and i talk to people who just want to learn more about the space and i try to help as much as i can because i know i didn't i didn't know anything about anything when i was 20 years old i really did i didn't i went and worked on wall street because i they had free food at some event they were throwing at my school like i didn't know anything about it so i'm just like there's kids out there like me or adults out there like me um who wouldn't have known anything about that i learned all that because i went to college and like that's a a blessing that i had but you know everybody doesn't know that do do that or other people if i would if i wasn't hungry that day i wouldn't have gone yeah it's like simple as that you you i saw on your linkedin that you went to howard the mecca yeah is is there any is there any um inkling in you to somehow reach out to howard and and and talk to people on campus about eta yes so that that is i was just talking to somebody about this yesterday actually um that's one of my goals for this year is to try to do some eta stuff at my at howard um i'm glad you know about it the mecca i'm glad to hear that but yes i'm very howard did a lot for me for sure and i did a lot for my friends my wife went to howard and it's provided us the best network that i think we could have considering where we came from and so um i'm forever indebted to that school so yes that is absolutely i have that on my goals this year is to to get involved with the entrepreneurship program there they do have one and so i want to i want to go and and find out where they could use some help and provide that and just to you know what is so clear to me in this space is that a lot of people who are exposed to acquisition entrepreneurship just broadly it's from their mba program i mean that's that's really where you're seeing kind of a ferment of interest is because these these mba programs are now have eta classes and curriculums and um and and it's really growing within that that world um so it does seem like a great place to to um grow awareness is at the is at the university level yeah so yeah yeah for sure and and yeah everybody doesn't go get an mba most people don't right so of course um yeah it's just creating awareness and i'm glad you're doing what you're doing with the podcast and other people have podcasts now in the space and i'm glad to see it grow and it's a very positive space which i yeah which i also appreciate it's a lot of people willing to help and i just want to be the you know the guy that i'm like oh you know he the guy that points out and shows that you know there are other people in the space it's not just you know in a uh it's not just all boys club or all white guys club or whatever you know people may think from the outside and so you know there's other people in the space and uh i just try to make sure that people know that that's awesome man let's leave it there but tell people chris where they can follow this this um fast-growing twitter account yeah so i i tweet all the time i'm at chris x mun m-u-n-n uh yeah and i try to tweet i've been trying to tweet more about my deals and what i have going on in the day-to-day but uh yeah you can find me there chris thanks so much for the time and for uh this last 10 or 15 minutes got a little bit more personal and tactical on the twitter stuff selfishly very helpful for me so thanks for the thank you for that uh just person to person and thanks for your time thanks a lot will