adrian pinto thank you for joining me today on acquiring minds yeah thank you very much for having me happy to be here you are the new owner and now president of georgia escapes a commercial landscaping business in atlanta you bought the business in july so it's been about five months and one of the things that i really like about your story is that you were a finance guy new york investment banking private equity and during that time you saw these eight figure nine figure blue collar businesses that had been built by blue collar people largely through acquisition and you said to yourself that seems fun that seems possible uh i'm gonna do that and here you are five min five months into uh into doing something similar into this this journey of what will hopefully be a blue-collar empire so we are gonna we're gonna hear that story and we're gonna hear whatever your you know your first learnings have been in this in this first half year um pursuing this so start us off with just adding more color to what i just said give us your two minutes on your background and what led to this decision to want to go out and buy a business yeah sure so i am from erie pennsylvania which is a small town in pennsylvania um really kind of grew up around small businesses i mean erie has a couple large manufacturing companies but that's really it so i was always kind of interested in the idea of entrepreneurship seeing friends of family members friends and family members with you know small businesses i from there went to penn state so stayed in pennsylvania and immediately after college went into corporate finance working for ge after about a year there i realized that corporate finance wasn't necessarily for me and i wanted to see something that was a little bit more transaction oriented i while i was at ge was happen to be part of a sale of one of the businesses and so that was kind of my first insight into investment banking and after that experience i realized that that was something i wanted to try myself so i was fortunate enough to get an opportunity to go do industrials mergers and acquisitions at credit suisse in new york and i joined an anal analyst class there so i was there for the two year program and then at the end of the two years i was given an opportunity to join a private equity firm also in new york called greenbriar equity group grants greenbrier yep greenbrier is a six billion dollar industrial focus pe fund they primarily look at industrial services i would say so transportation logistics distribution and then a lot of kind of business services and so that is a kind of you know that's essentially made up of a lot of blue-collar businesses like you talked about we looked at plumbing and hvac in electric electrical businesses and um you know you know precision manufacturing and things of that nature and um you know so it that gave me kind of more opportunity to see these industrial businesses essentially um and then finally uh after greenbrier i went and joined a in european family office so still doing private equity still looking at a lot of industrial businesses but i left greenbrier to go do that for the family office of a prominent family based out of sweden so give us give us an example or two of some of these stories that you you observed of these blue-collar businesses that had just been grown through acquisition to really astounding values yeah so i think what was interesting was i got to see it from both sides so when i joined greenbrier as an associate you get assigned portfolio companies of the existing investments that they have and then you also spend kind of half your time on new investments so on the portfolio side we owned a business there greenberg owns a business called witcraft which is an aerospace components manufacturer based out of connecticut and it happened to be one of my portfolio companies so i ended up spending quite a bit of time with the founders and what i came to learn was that witcraft was built by two partners who both of both of which had kind of come up with an idea in business school that they wanted to go out on their own and wanted to acquire a business and kind of run it together and so they found a relatively small components manufacturer based in connecticut um were able to kind of raise some funds and did that acquisition themselves and from there they proceeded to do like seven or eight more acquisitions of similar size and ultimately built it up to a size that was you know pretty prominent player in the space and that's how greenbrier got involved and ultimately acquired it but you know the stories that i had learned from colin cooper his name was just about you know you know the process first of doing the acquisition but also just kind of the um the grind associated with the early days and building it up to what it became i just was always really drawn to that and um was always really intrigued and the thing that also um really i guess because it drew me to it as well is that colin's background was in finance also so he was an investment banker prior to going to business school um and that you know so he kind of came from it came at it from a similar perspective as me which that to me was in a situation where i was able to see that and say oh this is actually possible not just for engineers or operations guys but you know someone with a finance background could do this too and so as i mentioned that was kind of the portfolio side of things at the same time then on the you know new investment side of things i was uh i did i looked at a lot of the business service acquisitions at greenbrier they don't really silo associates really so you kind of see everything but i just so happen to spend quite a bit of time on the business services side and so there were a number of investments that we looked at ultimately passed on most of these but um they kind of all hit similar themes that we you know we're talking about here so one that really strikes or stands out to me was an hvac company and i remember learning about it and meeting with the management team and basically hearing the story which was that you had a guy that started a really small hvac company and he realized just how fragmented it was and how it predominantly the whole market is just mom and pops and so this guy um went all across the united states just acquiring you know one million of ebitda here two million of you but there and ultimately built you know a business that was hundreds of million in revenue incredible and you know again a huge player in the space and so i think at that point when i saw that that was towards the kind of back end of my time at greenbrier and so that's when i started thinking you know this guy's obviously smart really driven hard worker but he's not smarter than i am necessarily like he knows his industry and so is it you know is it possible for me to do this too like certainly i don't know hvac today um the way that this guy did you know that was i didn't have a degree or a certification and certification in it but yeah i felt like these are pretty simple businesses and so if i could kind of get my head around the underlying work that they're doing i could probably figure out the other sides of it and then utilize you know this kind of private equity playbook of just being aggressive with m a aggressive of pursuing growth opportunities and try to bring that down basically to this kind of smb level you know just on hvac in particular hvac in particular it's a very talked about target acquisition for many acquisition entrepreneurs a very popular trade and so it just it surprises me that with the attention that it gets that it remains as fragmented as it is i guess there's just always new mom and pops cropping up and so there's always just kind of a churn in the industry and opportunities for more rolling up and buying up but i'm just you know i'm surprised i'm surprised these very popular industries persist in being so fragmented yeah i think that's an interesting point i mean and we can talk about that a little in the landscaping space because i think it's similar there too i mean i would actually draw a lot of parallels just in terms of the market because um in the hvac space there are a couple big private equity backed guys now that are you know enterprise value of multiple hundreds of millions um but you're right for as big of a market it is there isn't a 10 billion dollar public player you know and you would think because of how attractive it is how sticky the revenue is you would think that that would exist and it may ultimately at some point you know you may see the private equity guys that have invested in these companies you might start seeing them kind of do some mergers of equals and put them together um but today it hasn't um but you know that it's an interesting business too and the fragmentation i thought always that was interesting because what the the company that we looked at what they would do is they would build partner networks in areas that they didn't serve so they would say hey will we're not in you know florida today but whenever we get work from our big blue chip customers if they have stores in florida that they want to serve i'm going to send it to you and what that does is a it allows them to kind of stay with their customers so the customer doesn't ever have to meet a new provider which you know no one ever wants that and b it allows the this business to build basically a pipeline of m a opportunities so it was really interesting because that company a lot of their m a that they did were previously just people in their their partner network so they just had this like organic pipe m a pipeline constantly growing while they were you know serving their customers so they had like a pretty unique way of kind of going at m a i thought so so they would send the business to this florida partner and then eventually having developed a relationship over months and years go to that florida partner you know one party would go to the other and say let's transact right exactly because you know this to your example the florida partner would be a mom and pop that you know didn't have scale didn't have the same margins and so these guys were in a much better position to ultimately acquire them but as opposed to them having to you know build a you know they're a new location in florida to serve that customer they'd they'd say no we'll just funnel it to that mom and pop we know we're not going to lose the broader business to this mom and pop because they're not a national player just the florida stuff for now but eventually now we have a new person that we could acquire essentially yeah very cool yeah back to you so you you see these stories you're feeling inspired i guess so now now take me through the decision to go out and do this yeah so i remember after that that hvac instance i remember that was you know i was basically uh i was on my way home one evening from work and i called a friend of mine who was in business school and i remember kind of saying to him like you know i just want to go out and buy my own blue collar business like as opposed to you know doing all this grinding work in the pe space like sure some of it you do is investing in these companies learning about them that's really interesting there's a lot of other stuff though that you're doing and i just was kind of sick of doing some of that and uh you know i was telling him like i just want to try to do this myself and i remember him saying like oh like you're talking about like a search fund or eta and that was not a concept i happened to know about um but by chance he was in business school he was like the president of the eta club at his business school and so you know he was became all you know very well versed on this and so i remember in that car ride he kind of explained to me the high level of it and i was like oh wow i didn't even know that was a thing like you know it was possible basically and so it's so funny you're talking to the guy at his business school who's literally yeah and he's like oh yeah we share we i i know something about this yeah yeah it's funny because clearly he had been looking into it himself you know and we were he's a good friend of mine but like there's just nothing something we never had talked about in the past um but so he you know he turned me on to some of the very basic materials you know the stanford white paper the the harvard book on it um and i remember so i remember kind of learning about the concept continuing to be intrigued and then simultaneously learning about um you know some of the funding opportunities and then that really piqued my interest because then it was no longer just oh this is a cool idea it was oh no this is possible and you know and financially like you know for basically you don't have to stretch on the finance side to be able to do it and so were you kind of under the impression as many people including me are and were that you had to basically come out of pocket to find to buy the whole thing well i'd say i was i was i had the wrong um i had the wrong view but i looked at it a little differently i you know having just done this stint in pe everything you think of is like oh four times leverage five times leverage yeah so in my mind i was like oh a bank will just look at a company's earnings and say oh we'll apply you know four times leverage to their epitha but then you quickly learn like a banks don't lever up you know they don't provide traditional debt to uh uh cash flow debt to small businesses like that and b you know it's it's not clean ebitda like you're used to seeing in sims um on the pe space where you know you're getting investment bankers that are sending you these booklets and stuff like this is much different um and so i quickly learned that my view of it was not going to be possible but in fact it actually might be better because in the pe space right you you know these days let's say you buy a company that's for 12 times like you'd be pretty happy if you could get six turns of debt on it so 50 and so when i came to find out that you could do um uh ltvs of 90 in the sba space you know utilizing the the 7a loan i was blown away and i mean that that's when i was really like oh wait like this might be something that's worth kind of digging into did you did you while you know that one might salivate it wow 90 leverage did it also give you pause like wow that seems like really risky given that kind of 50 was your typical benchmark coming from pe um yeah well i think what gave me pause was when i first learned about the notion of like a personal guarantee because also you know in the pe space you you utilize um legal entities structures so that you you know the pe firm's never on the hook if a company goes bankrupt right that's kind of the whole point and so when i quickly found out like no it doesn't really work like that like with these type of deals like you're guaranteeing it that i think definitely gave me pause you know i'm newly married within the last couple years and so you know we realize like at some point we're going to want to buy a house and you know all of these things and so the idea of putting up a personal guarantee was like it was something that needed to be talked about more than just like a snap decision certainly yeah okay so you learn what a search fund is you learn what eta is you learn that you can get 90 leverage and so all of this is just good news after good news so you decide you make the decision to leave your ju to talk me through the actual decision to to go out and start looking for a company and and um and leaving you yeah so when i was at so when i was at green bar in my third year you know they kind of came to me with the opportunity to potentially stay for a fourth year you know they kind of said are you interested and i had a pretty good relationship with them so i like to think that i would have been able to stay um but you know i knew what that life and the work required was to be a good associate or senior associate and it's a lot of hours and things like that and so once i kind of realized that this is what i want to do it was also pretty evident that like i wouldn't be able to do it at greenbrier um and so i had pretty candid discussions with them and we kind of i think mutually agreed that it's probably better to part ways and so they were very flexible in terms of giving me an opportunity to look for another position and so what my whole plan was you know find a job that will be much less you know much fewer hours and more flexibility in my life so that i can search on the side i can you know on the weekends you know whatever during the day if i need to take a call like that's all possible which you know is not the case in traditional private equity or in banking or something like that it's nearly impossible yeah um and so i was fortunate to land this position with this european family office um great people and uh you know i had basically from day one kind of had this intention of like i'm gonna be looking for a business while i'm here and um obviously i'm gonna try really hard in my job and i'd say based off of my reviews that you know they were happy with my performance but um it was definitely nice to be able to have the flexibility to kind of do this on the side and then i should also say like covet has been obviously a a nightmare for a lot of people but from a searching perspective it literally couldn't have been a better thing because instead of being in an office environment all day where people are walking by your computers or you know knocking on your door and asking to talk like i was at my home and it you know it's literally the perfect situation for looking for something on the side right because i can have a call here and there it's it's just made it so much better um so basically i ended up spending all of 2020 you know working for that company um and then searching on the side and so i i kind of i kind of formally launched my my search in end of first quarter 2020 so like right when covid started basically yeah and uh i had some initial hits probably within the first couple of months and i think some of that probably was like enthusiasm associated with just starting it you know i was like oh my god this deal is great in hindsight like probably wasn't that great um but neither of those instances when i did submit lois but in either of them were they accepted for various reasons and you know there's some learnings from those experiences but basically after kind of summer 2020 through the end of the year i was getting nothing it was you know very slow on the search front and it was starting i would say to get a little bit discouraging and i should probably preface by saying i was only looking in atlanta and the logic from that was that my family i have family down there now um my wife is from the south so we wanted to move somewhere further south but still kind of be in a city and so atlanta checked a lot of boxes for us the downside of that though is like when you're searching in one city even a city with like the size of atlanta i mean you are obviously limiting your options and so um like i said that whole kind of fall winter time i basically was finding nothing um which was pretty discouraging um but you were searching from new york so you were still in need i was yeah but yeah you you and your partner were gonna have plans to go down to atlanta exactly and i'm sure there's things that i'm sure if i was on the ground in atlanta it would have been a little bit better you know to meet people maybe things would have gone faster the flip side is that was also like right in the beginning of the delta variant of kova kovit and so no one was really meeting anyway so again the dynamic of being remote was also fine because of covet like it really worked out for the best i think but um so around december of last year i uh so about about a year ago i um signed an agreement with a buy side advisor and the whole idea basically was that he is from atlanta he's lived here's a life has tons of contacts and he knows people selling businesses and he will kind of get me an early in on some of these businesses like a proprietary look essentially and i would pay a success fee and so um to me it was like a no-brainer i was like okay now i can have boots on the ground basically without having to do it myself and i'm happy to pay a one percent success fee which was the agreement we worked out especially if it's truly a proprietary deal i think the the downside of that was i didn't i didn't do a good enough job of making him aware that i was going to continue to search myself and so there was a handful of instances where he would send me listings of publicly listed businesses you know whether it's on biz buy sell or something and say like hey here's an opportunity um you know this would be basically covered by our search agreement though and i'd have to say like you know i'm sorry but no like i've seen that too like that's not helping me you know like i really i hired you to kind of help me on proprietary things that no one else would have access to that did cause some tension certainly but ultimately in february of 2021 he came to me and said um a friend of his is selling a company and before they kind of broadly market it he wanted to go out to some of the people he knew in the industry to see if uh any you know they have enough clients that would be interested so that's how i first came across george escapes um adrian let me let me jump in with a question why so why would i i actually don't know really anything about buy side advisors if somebody like him has his you know value proposition is that he has access to deals why wouldn't he just become a broker i mean that's what that's what brokers claim to do um i think that he would be a broker like i think he would sell a company if you asked him to i think i know he he i would say he he would what he would tell you is that he specializes on the buy side of those transactions yeah so instead of being someone brokers work for sellers and he works for you right exactly so and i think the brokers in my opinion without knowing a ton about the industry but just those that i've dealt with brokers are a little bit better at kind of marketing and the sale side of things you know they get the materials out there they're good at handling inflows of questions stuff like that i think that the buy side advisors for the most part they're they're better they have a good network of people that they can kind of get you in roads to or again so they say and then they are and i will say that he did do this um he had a pretty good handle on um sba lenders both in georgia and even nationally that he had some connections with so again in his defense like there was a couple banks that i spoke with some of which weren't even interested in george escapes some were um but then he basically passed me like three or four hot you know hot leads basically on the banking side where he was like hey i already prepped these guys they like the business you know go talk to them so that was truly helpful and i think that you know his relationships on the the lending side did uh did help great now so you see okay so tell us about george escapes he sends you this this deal actually rewinding a second agent i remember you telling me that what you really wanted were you really looking at the electrical hvac plumbing or really kind of aiming yeah and that's important so what did you like about those and then how did how did you open your mind a little bit yeah sure sorry um so uh the reason i looked at those goes back to the greenbrier side of things where like those are the businesses that we looked at there and i remember that they had attractive elements i also just remember that anecdotally private equity firms were interested and so i was thinking okay well that's always a good sign too right yeah um so that was kind of how i initially approached it and but the overarching reason for those was um the market domain the market dynamics so you know these are large fragmented markets they have kind of gdp plus growth um there's a lot of m a opportunity there's not a lot of um cyclicality they're pretty stable so even during covid you know most of those businesses are doing well and i figured you know if a business can stay stable during covid that's obviously a good test of this so that that was the reason ultimately i went after those initially what i came to find out like almost immediately was that um in georgia at least if you don't have licenses for a lot of those businesses you just can't own them like lenders won't lend to you and i know that i've heard stories where people get around that by kind of signing long-term contracts with like a general manager or something that does have hvac license um which maybe that's possible but the lenders i spoke with said it's not worth the risk to them you know if that guy leaves something happens to him like the business shuts down or you're right or has at least has to stop and so um i just unfortunately kind of walked away from that pretty quickly um and that probably answers why these these remain so fragmented it might i mean i mean at the same time though i guess the the businesses that are a few hundred million of enterprise value like they would have all the license requirements so i don't know if there's any reason that they can't kind of scale up a little bit more but i think it does answer the question why um you know so many of the fragmented business having businesses haven't been acquired by searchers um because there are certain requirements out there um and so adrian one other uh question or two on your search you know you for somebody who was kind of first introduced to the concept um via somebody who was at the was the president of their eta program at a business school i assume it was one of the well-known new england business schools yeah you know they're what they're often taught is like um full-time search and national search especially i mean if it's a traditional search fund and so you were you know you were breaking both of those rules which is great you were not full-time you were doing it you were squeezing it in and you know your after hours and weekends uh or at you know in covid maybe maybe the occasional call during the day occasionally yeah uh and you were looking in a single geography now the whole national search and full-time search thing while the university programs traditional search funds really preach that of course that's probably not what the vast majority of searchers do but given that that was your introduction to the whole the whole concept um i'm interested that you you flouted that norm yeah i mean so for me um i think just the situation that we were in you know what my wife does for a living and stuff we knew we needed to be in a big city so that kind of narrowed moving to denver or something to do one of these you know do a search out there which you know you see people going to some of these kind of emerging cities to do sometimes um so and then you know we thought we thought about the family side of things which i said like kind of led us to the south um and then like i said we kind of just centered on picking a city and i guess part of that was as much as i was drawn to doing search i think maybe equally as drawn or at least close to um the you know was the idea that like i don't want to just live in the middle of nowhere just to find a business like it's important to me that both my wife and i have you know the network and stuff around us that is you know that we need and so that you know that's kind of why i picked one city the other reason is frankly um given that i had a job at the time which was you know getting paid well and it was very stable and i was doing well in it i didn't have any rush you know there was nothing that was really like forcing me to do this by a certain date or i ran out of you know search funds right you know and i i mean i can only imagine honestly the stress that that adds because as i was mentioning like those couple of deals that i did submit lois for and that died had i um not had an income going on during that like that deal fatigue would have been a real thing and i can imagine causing some stress and potentially leading frankly to uh unwise decisions like i could 100 see someone just kind of settling for a business because they're they've been doing they've been searching for two years and it's just really stressful and they just can't wait anymore i totally get that but i just felt like it's better you know while i'm living in new york it's better to have an income and just kind of do this on the side and it'll help me kind of make the right decision as opposed to maybe a rash one excellent okay so you see georgia escapes yeah back yeah so yeah so when i first saw george escapes i remember thinking like initially i just remember thinking oh i'm not interested in landscaping and i think that i had preconceived notions that um commercial landscaping was probably a lot like residential landscaping which means there's a lot of pricing a lot of kind of pricing wars amongst different companies um not you know i probably didn't fully understand that the notions of the long-term contracts in the land landscaping space and um probably a variety of other things frankly but as i dug into the industry first i remember immediately kind of thinking like wow this checks a lot of the same boxes right like here's a you know multi multi-billion dollar industry but the number one player only has like one percent of it um you know so it's super fragmented it's growing at four percent per year if you look at the kind of long-term trends of the industry there's not a lot of cyclicality or variability in um in performance and so i remember after seeing that i was thinking like okay this is definitely worth diving into more because the market does look pretty attractive and so um i ended up having a couple of different calls with the owner um and just you know probed on a lot of them some market questions some business questions some team questions because that was obviously very important to me um and as i continue to learn more and more i just remember thinking like this is still checking a lot of boxes like there weren't many times especially early on where you know there was a question mark kind of on my diligence list like pretty much everything you know check the boxes i that i needed it to and then the areas that it didn't those were to me kind of nice to haves versus need to haves um you know you're never going to find the perfect smb business so um it you know this it it fit a lot of the uh the profile of what i was looking for so what you learned in in kind of taking a harder look at landscaping does that mean that you would advise you know your your former self or anybody out there searching now that in fact landscaping is a good candidate you should one should be interested in landscaping companies you you like it as a category yeah i think definitely i mean i think that especially for someone that's interested in services business to begin with then absolutely you know i i think it would be hard to for me to try to convince someone that's right now searching for like a sas business that landscaping is the way to go because it obviously is way different but if you're already interested in services then a hundred 100 um you know i don't think that any of the long-term trends that i now understand five or six months into it um would lead me to you know feel any differently basically today than i've you know then i felt a few few months ago like i'm equally as optimistic and i would say in a lot of ways there's been elements of the business that have been like pleasant surprises you know there are obviously there's been a handful of things that i've discovered both about my business and maybe about the industry as a whole where i've thought like eh that's not ideal versus what i was hoping um but that those are definitely countered by a number of things where i've kind of been very optimistic and excited about it well let's let's dig into those if you can remember them off offhand what are what are the pros these happy these happy pros and these these cons that you've discovered i'd say that one of the biggest cons is ability to win new business in the in in some of the more high like sought after highly sought after areas so i think in the in the commercial landscaping space i would argue one of the kind of sexiest areas to be in if there is a sex area of commercial landscaping is um uh kind of like apartment uh maintenance right so instances where people are willing to spend high dollars on a monthly basis but also at properties where you know that they're going to spend high percentages of their monthly maintenance in annual enhancements so an apartment let's say that they spend four thousand dollars a month on their maintenance they might also spend fifty thousand dollars a year upgrading you know the pool courtyard or something like that and so maintenance in the landscaping space is not the highest margin area but enhancements historically and typically are quite high margin and so when you can balance those two things that's a great you know it's a great customer versus you know let's just say you had the the contract to do the landscaping at like a local small gas station right there's probably some grass some shrubs and that's it and so that's not going to be very high margin and chances are they're not going to spend a lot of money on that on you know upgrades so anyway in terms of you know your question on the cons i think what i've found is that and this is both i mean in some ways it's good if you're that existing customer but the contracts are so sticky but they're also a little bit of an afterthought to property managers at times that if you you know if i were right now to call the uh you know an apartment near me and assuming that they answered and i was able to get someone chances are they would say um either they have a long-term contract so they're not interested or b you know we're not just we're not unhappy with our current provider so no need to switch and that that's a tough thing to kind of get around because you have to make your value prop really strong right and you can only compete so much on price because margins aren't huge to begin with and then you're left with quality but quality it's a little binary right it's either it's good or it's not good you know there's not a huge scale within that for landscaping because it is that kind of afterthought like oh yeah it looks nice but that's kind of the end of it yeah so anyway that come you know that competition aspect i think i underappreciated it a little bit um and again that's probably just my ignorance at the time uh you know on the industry but um i've certainly you know come to appreciate it a lot more in the last five months and i think you know we've made some inroads with a lot of these property managers and i think we'll kind of stay in their ear so the next time that they are bidding out you know properties will i think have a good opportunity to be a part of those bids but definitely challenge to just kind of give someone a call and expect to get really any traction with uh with you know winning a sale so how are you going to generate new business are you just going to have to do a lot of what you just described to just make your funnel wide enough so that you know a few shake out at the bottom a few new new clients shake out at the bottom i mean that's definitely part of it right it's definitely a numbers game to an extent i mean i think for us one of the things that's you know kind of a nice aspect is that um you know we had historically not had a ton of different relationships like the the george escapes historically had been um a little concentrated in certain places on the landscape maintenance side that's one area where we had a few really really good customers um and you know we're in with a lot of their properties some of them were within with all of their properties which is great so it's super sticky you know i think one way to kind of you know one first step basically is to kind of broaden that horizon both in terms of property managers but also in terms of types of properties like there's things that we had never even looked at in the past that are certainly viable candidates and frankly might be more easily more easily won than um you know some of these other things that i've mentioned so i think that's certainly part of it is just kind of expanding what we look at and making sure that we don't sacrifice quality or anything like that when we're doing so but just kind of broadening our funnel and then i think the other thing and this kind of goes i guess to the pros you know back to the pros cons that you mentioned is there's a lot of areas of landscaping where i didn't appreciate how reoccurring the work was so like you know you have your contractually recurring revenue right which is great then there's the install kind of very basic like you call me to do something to your backyard it's very one time in nature you're probably not going to spend money the next year once you do it the first time but between that there is a huge area which you know we used to call it greenbrier kind of reoccurring which is that yeah maybe it's not contractual but if the same customers are spending nearly the same amount of money on a monthly basis on different things then you know you can pretty much kind of uh you know you can rely on that revenue and that that is very quality revenue and so there's a number of areas in landscaping where that exists and so um that happens to be a i would say a side of the business that has been a big pro basically is seeing how reoccurring a lot of our revenue streams are and how consistent um you know we we work with those customers and how we've been able to kind of maintain those really good relationships give me an example of a of a recurring engagement and then and then also tell me what is the breakdown percentages of recurring in your business recurring reoccurring and one-off yeah so um well easy example is um we do work with building companies so that when uh a company is building a new neighborhood let's say that so let's say there's 120 homes in it they bid out that whole neighborhood that neighborhood will take a very long time to complete all the landscaping and all the housing development in it and most you know large builders are doing several neighborhoods at a time right so with some of our companies where customers we're doing four or five neighborhoods at once in those instances that means that you might have 600 homes with one customer in any given year and so that means basically every day or you know multiple days a week you're out there doing the same work and so with these neighborhoods these aren't you know very customized landscape packages right these are very much uniform kind of couple plants couple trees ten pallets of sod that's it and so when you have that you i mean it's great because as a business you know every day or every couple days i'm going out to this neighborhood i'm doing this exact work it's gonna they're gonna i'm gonna my costs are this and they're gonna pay me this and so it's easy to track your margins it's easy to seek areas of margin improvement because you can maybe get some volume uh based discounts on pricing with you know with your suppliers um and it's like i said it's very easy to rely on as a company so that that has been an area that i've been really happy with um just our relationships with companies there but also the i think the opportunity i mean if you look at the housing growth in the southeast i mean it's unbelievable you know in atlanta it's like i feel like every day i drive to a different you know different area kind of on the outskirts of atlanta and you just see more and more neighborhoods going up and yeah every time i talk to a new builder you know they talk about the hundreds and hundreds of homes that they have in the budget for the next few years and so that's uh that's been a very pleasant um pleasantly surprising area for me tell us about the size of georgia escapes what what was in in the numbers behind the deal yeah so we do we do anywhere between three and five or so million of revenue um at kind of fifteen to twenty percent margins i would say um that's great and the deal yeah and so when i initially you know got into an loi i thought i was kind of getting in a little a little south of three times but you know in that realm um and you know i've been fortunate because the business has just been growing like crazy kind of across the board you know maintenance the reoccurring side the install side that you know that multiple has come down significantly probably closer to two times maybe yeah probably right around two two-ish times now incredible and did the did the seller not realize did were they not seeing similar growth in 2020 2019 2018 such that you know he he could have negotiated for a stronger multiple projecting you know really strong 2021 and 2022. well honestly so i think that there was an element where people were turned off by the lack of purely maintenance revenue so to answer the initial question we probably do 35 percent of the businesses is truly contractual maintenance within we you know but then the the install side right there truly one time is maybe ten percent of the business so you know that bulk in between is a lot of this kind of what i would describe maybe being a little bit marketing myself but you know that's what i would describe as kind of reoccurring yeah and so i think that that may have turned some people off honestly and i i mean i would be lying if i said it didn't turn me off when i first saw it and purely not knowing what it was um but i mean some lenders you know looking at that mix of maintenance versus true maintenance true recurring versus you know so-called construction revenue you know they might not even lend on it if 100 i mean that was yeah right i definitely you know we had that reaction by or i had that reaction by um one lender certainly i think again i mean i would argue that if the lender took a chance to understand what that business is you would feel differently and i think they're the proof there is look at you know our top five customers in what i would describe as the reoccurring space and look at what their performance was over the last five years and you'd be blown away how consistent it is yeah right you i mean it's it's honestly unbelievable and so um that to me when i was doing my diligence i mean that was really how i kind of got comfortable as just simply looking at the performance of these business these customers over time so um to answer your question also from you know from the owners this or the seller's perspective um you know this business actually so it had it had grown about five percent per year for the past like five or six years so on a you know total top line basis so it had been really consistent growth um you know i i think that i just happen to kind of get in there at the right time where we've seen kind of a big uptick since that you know since kind of that kind of consistent growth period i mean to now be basically have effectively paid a 2x for a three or four million dollar business doing 20 margins congratulations yeah thank you so i've been pretty excited about it no i was just gonna say i mean i think that i mean and this again is like me with my e hat on but what this is one of the elements that always attracted me to the space was the idea that you could potentially get in on a business at two or three times you know but once you generate some scale whether that's organically or through m a you know the multiple expansion and then arb that you get there is incredible right and so that truly is exciting to me just seeing you know where we're at today what i got it for and what i think that the business is going to be worth both in six months and in three years or whatever and so that's that's really exciting to me tell the audience what arb means sorry like arbitrage so like i i would argue you know let's say a business is doing five million of revenue you know maybe that's worth four or five times um purchase multiple let's say four times for easy so if you buy it for three times purchase multiple and you sell it for four times purchase multiple embedded within that is a turn of multiple expansion which is you know pure kind of profit or you know cash flow generative to the overall transaction at exit you know you had said earlier when talking about i think your the first example of the the guys who bought the manufacturing business an engineer essentially an engineering business but they were finance guys and went on to one was a finance guy the other his partner was an engineer okay but yeah it it made you feel like oh okay so i might not have to be an engineer myself to do something like that um you know a finance person could get into a business like this you know i the flip side of that is like looking at where where you are now what you're embarking on and you know buying this first business and assuming there's a playbook to buy more and more and more i see your finance experience and your pe experience is this this great advantage because you know m a and understanding what arb is and how it works as as one example that's that that's that's its own skill uh and a skill that took you you know some number of years to to develop so the question is like what say i'm listening to this interview and i'm not somebody with a new york investment banking or or pe background how well situated am i to to go out and do what you're doing yeah i mean i i definitely think during the acquisition process especially um there was benefits of my background you know of having my background right i mean in a lot of ways the process of building you know some financial forecast working with a lender to put together a cash flow model and you know showing them kind of the payback period and all of that like that's kind of what you do on a day-to-day basis anyway so to me that was the i mean in some ways that was the easy part whereas i know i've had discussions with people that are maybe in operations and you know to them running the business they're like they're so excited they're like that'll be easy you know i run crews of 50 people like you know that'll be no problem but i'm not really sure how to do the acquisitions out of things so for me it was almost the you know it was the inverse of that whereas like i was a little you know nervous i was like i've never run a company before you know and so yeah i've i've witnessed a lot of that you know on the pe side and that's kind of what i pitched to the lender in a lot of ways is like listen i you know as an associate you are kind of the liaison between your portfolio companies and the pe firm and so i would sit out at you know the aerospace company you know help with help with the budgeting process you know walk the the shop floor with the ceo and understand what's going on with the flow lines and you know the lean manufacturing you know pro projects that they're working on but ultimately i never did that and so um that was definitely an area i would say for me where i was a little more apprehensive but i would say you know to answer your initial question i think that learning the acquisition side is frankly probably easier than the you know the business side of things so if you're someone that has experience working with teams you know to or you know maybe it's in operations maybe it's in marketing whatever that is but you know kind of working with people to kind of achieve a collective goal like i think that that frankly is more important than simply knowing how to build a model like i think you could watch a three-hour youtube video and probably figure out some of that stuff and yeah i mean they're you're not going to figure out everything but i think the lenders frankly you know they do help you along the way you know they they recognize that the nature of the sba 7a loan is not just to give finance guys loans right so that they they want to work with people that have a variety of backgrounds and make it accessible to kind of everyone and speaking of of m a and more m a so how do you feel now that you've been in the business you've you know you you really see are seeing what a kind of a blue collar business looks like from the inside about your original vision of buying one and then another and and scaling it out is that vision still um intact or uh are there some chips around the edges so i would say in terms of an opportunity standpoint i feel a thousand times better today than i even felt when i started really you know it's it's crazy i mean i'll you know when i if i'm driving around during the day i just so it just so happens that where our business is located is near a couple different highways outside of atlanta and so it's like a ton of landscaping businesses around there because you can just quickly jump on the highway and get to where you need to be and so you know if you go to lunch or something uh out near my office i mean you might see four or five different landscaping companies just driving around at any one point in time and so i literally have like a notes pad on my phone um that when i'm driving i'm gonna buy him gonna buy him i mean i'll just type their names down because i'm like and you know sometimes you find out like oh that company was just acquired for 800 million dollars and you're like okay maybe that one i will uh shy away from but um honestly i mean it's the opportunity i think the opportunity set in the southeast but also just in general it's really incredible just how many um kind of mom and pop landscaping opportunities are out there so i feel great about that i really do um i would say that from a you know like the ability to actually do it i mean i i definitely appreciate now more um the difficulties of you know from a in from an internal perspective of doing m a right so you know when you're in the pe world it's really easy to kind of tell your portfolio companies like hey guys you know in the budget this year like let's put a few deals in there like we should do some add-ons like it would be great to kind of jump start the growth it would look good when we're trying to sell the company to say that you guys did m a um and you know a lot of times they kind of say okay yep yep we'll start working on that or whatever but i don't think as an associate i had any idea of what that really means in terms of like getting it done from a process standpoint internally i mean now thinking about that sitting where i am like the idea of doing an acquisition immediately you know you start kind of going through the steps required in your mind like what are you gonna have to do i want to integrate through quickbooks i'm gonna have to set up you know the combined payroll i'm gonna have to do all this and so i'm def i mean i'm incredibly bullish on it both uh you know because of the opportunities but still just because i'm excited about that opportunity but um i do definitely recognize that it won't be you know a plug-and-play situation right we don't have the pro as a small business especially one that i just recently took over so the processes are not quite in place yet i think to easily kind of absorb another company so it will be a challenge when we first do it and hopefully before then we can kind of tick some of these boxes in terms of you know improving processes that will make it easier to absorb stuff but um you know like i said i am very excited about that i think that that is a great way to uh to kind of get some growth and frankly you know when you look at an industry that isn't sas right it's not growing double digits like m a is it's the best tool in your tool and you're kind of in your toolbox to accelerate growth and so if that exists in your market i mean i think you should got to take advantage of it um you know and then it goes back to the whole scale benefits right like doing the m a fat i mean if i can buy a couple small ones at two times now then all of a sudden my combined business is worth a much greater multiple and so that benefit is uh pretty impressive as well yeah yeah yeah i um as somebody relatively recent to this to this world and to the principles of private equity learning about multiple arbitrage is kind of it's it's it's a mind-blowing phenomenon i mean it you know if you're from the eu it's normal but it's it's kind of a weird thing to think that you can just you know it's truly uh the sum is greater than the the whole is greater than the sum of the parts situation um just like i yeah these two companies together and all of a sudden their combined profit was worth more than than they were individually that's kind of counterintuitive but that's how it works right i mean i completely agree with you and i think when you look at it in the from like a pe lens where you know those businesses are worth 10 to say 10 to 12 times but they're able to acquire businesses for three to five times it's unbelievable it's like you're telling me i'm going to double the value you know the transaction value of the enterprise value of this company just by me acquiring it right how does it you know how does that make sense but that's just the scale benefits that exist out there so um you know trying to bring that down to the smb level is something that i definitely am focused on going back to what you were just saying about kind of getting some stronger processes in place and tightening up tightening up the existing operation before you can um think about doing m a reminds me of your chassis uh twitter thread yeah talk about this chassis concept yeah so actually that was a discussion that i had with colin the guy that i mentioned that founded that aerospace business so him and i have remained in touch a little bit he's just a terrific guy and so i had pinged him a couple weeks ago just kind of saying hey you know i hadn't been talked to him in probably a year and i said you know look i ended up doing your footsteps man i mean tell me tell me one of the last things i talked to him about i remember was hey like i'm kind of interested in doing something like this and i remember him saying like cool like let's let's see what you kind of let's see what you got let's see what you got yeah and so i pinged him a couple weeks ago and i said you know hey i did it and but anyway i was you know i was kind of like what what advice would you have early on so as he thought about what i was trying to get out was basically what did he think about in those early days to set the business up um for future success both in terms of team structure maybe it's processes like whatever it is you know because i think that one of the challenges i see is like you could kind of go a million different ways with your business right i could hire this type of person i could hire that type of person i could try to you know gen focus just on sales and bring in a sales director or whatever or i could try to you know perfect the existing team and you know focus on operations like how do i you know how should i think about this and i just wanted to get his perspective given that in my opinion like i mean he did it perfectly and so his point was you know your goal needs to be 100 focused on building a chassis that you can then take other businesses and put on top of so if you know and i know the one thing he always used to talk about is data so they used you know like an oracle erp system and the the reason they did that was because if they can make all of their data perfect today so they know their costs exactly they know you know everything required understand margins then when they acquire a business it'll be very easy to integrate them into their systems and they can very quickly you know figure out you know where might there be some cost benefits like what can they do to improve that business but it will make that integration process very easy and i actually remember like when we did a couple deals with their their company you know the day that kind of the funds flowed and the transaction went through i mean they had like a you know a day-long integration of their systems and then like they were ready to go and their systems were like combined i mean they just had remarkable systems on their back end and so colin's point to me though was like think about that i think from an smb perspective which is like you're not going to maybe have oracle's million-dollar erp system but like what can you do to make your business today that chassis that other things can easily go on top of so i think a perfect example that we're working through right now is you know we have very archaic payroll processes um which stem from kind of the prior organization and to the point where like literally each one of our employees is filling out a physical time sheet every single day with where they went what you know what did they do took lunch here finished lunch here got back to the office here and they're handing it in but the silly thing is first of all they don't do it until the next day so that data is not even accurate to begin with and second of all we you know we utilize telematics and so we know we're you know we know that information anyway and so uh my whole point was like telematics is a kind of a gps enabled thing that yeah it shows you where everybody is in track basically tracks them yeah exactly and so my whole thing was one if we actually care about where they were we know that anyway right so we can use we use samsara we can run you can run automated reports that come out every sunday that tell you every property that they were at and how long they spent there so that benefit of the the payroll sheets is gone and then the other benefit is you know when time did they get in what time did they leave and i was like well let's just put in a time clock like they're you know we can just let's give them a code they punch it in when they get they they uh they leave in the morning they punch it when they get back and we'll just assign them an hour for lunch so as opposed to them like filling out like oh i started taking lunch at 12 and i finished at one like there's no benefit to me to know that information and so if i know what time they left no time to get back i'll they have to take an hour of lunch we'll say um which they do anyway and uh we already know their location i was like we just simplified everything and so we're you know by utilizing the samsara technology by you know a time clock and then pairing that with we're going to use like adp or one of the payroll processors which today we just have our our accountant take you know these physical timesheets and she processes payroll manually so it's i mean it's an incredibly archaic system and it's not built to scale so if we went and did an acquisition tomorrow and added 10 more people it would just be a massive headache to our current process right and so just back to the chassis point is like we're not set up for that today um but i think there's some pretty simple things like that that we can do that will get us a lot closer to being ready to do that and so i'm hopeful that you know over the next couple of months we'll be able to you know kind of cross off all that low hanging fruit and be in a much better position to kind of you know close your eyes yeah you know it's interesting there's there's this kind of there's this kind of there are two modes of thought one is that like you know all these smbs that out there they're so mom and pop they're so unsophisticated you know if if you see a fax machine on premises it's like there's incredible hanging fruit yeah yeah the kind of the fax machine test and then but then you'll hear other people say that that's way overplayed that in fact you know these businesses it's it's um like whatever moving everybody to g suite uh or some or some tech solution like just throwing technology at the business doesn't magically make them more better more profitable businesses overnight but in fact what i'm hearing that is in your case is kind of like well that your case is is kind of more of the of the former thinking and it's bearing that out that everything that you just described is basically some tech solution to some archaic um process that that currently exists yeah so i i yeah i think that's a really interesting point i think that it's somewhere in between and what's interesting to me about that is like when you think back to i think the initial private equity model stemming from like the 80s right barbarians at the gates was the whole idea was go after these bloated corporate companies you go in you acquire them you cut a bunch of costs right this is back when taxes were super high so people were using like you know country club memberships and all these like perks to try to you know get people to come work there right and so you look at like kkr and stuff what they did back then and it was a lot of cutting these bloated overhead costs um and that's how they generated their money the interesting thing about smbs it's like the exact opposite like at least you know with george escapes i mean the business was so lean both in terms of processes and people that anything we do from a tech perspective is going to be incremental costs so like there isn't cost savings opportunities in a lot of instances like in a lot of instances it's actually costing more but it's about like efficiency and then like i said the whole chassis dynamic so you know by going to a new payroll like it's gonna cost more than it costs today 100 but it's not gonna be a huge difference and it'll make it a thousand times more easy a thousand times easier rather on um uh rachel who works for me she's the bookkeeper and it'll also make it much easier to kind of scale this up if we take on more people yeah so a worthwhile cost you know the tracking situation i mentioned that was not inexpensive but there's a lot of benefits to it and if we're going to have you know newer vehicles and stuff like we've got to know where that stuff is and so to me worth it but i do think that there is a dynamic in the smb space where you know if you accepted every different sas solution out there you'd spend so much money and then you would need a you know another sas solution just to aggregate all your sas solutions like there's so many things it's crazy right and you know we get calls all the time from different people oh like you know what if let's talk to you about this crm or this benefits tool or this whatever and so i think that the one challenge almost in the smb space is like you have to be careful that you don't try too much because it would be really easy to do that and then you would end up just spending like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month and frankly i think it would complicate and confuse people like that's been one of my biggest focuses once since starting is making sure that as motivated and excited as i am i'm not overwhelming people with a million ideas and so you know i'm trying to go at this slowly i'm trying to learn the processes before just you know suggesting like what if we change it to this because i don't know all the reasons why we do it today and so like i should learn those first before kind of suggesting changes so anyway now that we're five months in i feel much more comfortable kind of going to the team about different things and saying like all right i have a good understanding of why we do this now but i think this actually does make sense and by doing that i think it's limited the number of things i've tried to change but it's also i think made those things you know more important you know kind of slowing your role and and waiting five five months and really understanding the business you know that's an important part of the transition and that's where a lot of acquisition entrepreneurs stumble is that they're so ambitious they're so eager they they want quick wins uh so they come in day one and they're like you know g suite notion crm let's let's sas this place people um what what was your experience uh i mean did you did you do that and and quickly learned that you shouldn't do that and also just just a point about the kind of like you know here you are this new york guy moving to atlanta buying a blue collar business um you could see how there might be some some cultural cultural uh friction there uh within within the company was there yeah so i mean i i think it definitely helps that you know working at a place like greenbrier with industrial businesses like i spent a lot of time walking shop floors and and you know being immersed into those kind of experiences where i felt pretty comfortable kind of just going into a blue collar office and saying like yeah you're right i'm not going to wear a suit anymore but that's okay it is funny because i bought a truck and i would say historically you know people that work with me would not think that i'm a truck driving guy but you know when in rome you kind of gotta do what they do so um that was it's a gmc okay um but you know so that was definitely you know it was a unique experience um but i felt pretty well equipped for it i would say you know to answer your first question yeah i mean i i you know i watched in the pe space every time we would do a deal you know you would kind of develop like a 100-day plan you know what are your goals for the for the company in the first hundred days and these are things that as the pe firm you're hoping that they do so you're kind of giving them some advice some things that you want them to work on whatever and so i mean i kind of similarly developed this like 100-day plan um where i was like taking notes on things and what you know keeping that in the back of my mind um but at the same time you know especially in the first couple of days you know i would go have discussions with people that i work with and i would ask questions like okay so how do we do this how do we do that and they would tell me and i think i at times um did not remember that whole notion of like like let's go slow at this you know and so i just as an excited person would be like oh that's interesting like everyone have ever thought about doing it this way or oh like what about what about if we tried this and it was pretty evident pretty quickly that like that by doing that people were a little more apprehensive that i was going to just like blow the place up and start over and that was never my intention and i don't you know i didn't want to make anyone like freaked out or anything like that and so um after a couple of days of that and seeing that like that wasn't the best approach i very much scaled this back to where i took notes on questions on things that i thought maybe could be improved upon but i did i waited i didn't just go to the person the next day and say like hey can we talk about these items i waited to see if i could learn the reason we did or didn't do some of these things and i think that was a much better approach because hey you know yeah i ended up learning a lot more about the business that way and then the benefit so it was actually just a couple weeks ago we had a discussion where i took all my notes from the bet like the first five months i broke them into kind of like finance you know the two divisions of our company operations topics things like that and we had a whole team discussion for like three hours and it was so much better because at that point i'm more informed so i'm coming from a place of of of you know understanding when i'm asking these questions so now these are not like stupid questions these are like no i know why we're doing this but let's talk about you know x and i think that that was much better and i think that the team appreciated it a million times more because it was just much more thoughtful by doing it this way so i'm actually i'm really happy with how that turned out but um it was yeah there were some stumbling blocks certainly immediately because uh like i said i was just one of these excited you know ambitious people and i you know talk a lot and so you know it was just one of those things where i was ready to go kind of day one but i think that i needed to kind of you know pair that back so just to i mean that that sounds awesome so just to kind of formalize that into a best practice people can learn from so you basically kind of gathered notes literal notes and and kind of mental notes over the course of close observation for four or five months and then collected your thoughts and you know organize these notes into into categories and i assume you prioritize them and then you gathered everybody together into a group meeting and you said hey guys i've been here for i've been here for five months now you know here here's some things that look like opportunities to me but i want to hear how you feel about them let's go through this list and was that kind of the way it went yeah 100 and if you looked at my notes to me it's funny because you would see like dozens of things that have been crossed out because those are things that i maybe wrote down four months ago but then a month later learned like oh wait we can't do that because of this and if i would have asked that question i would have gotten that answer but it also maybe would have caused some stress friction or whatever and so i wanted to like learn some of that and so basically what i went to them with was a much more refined kind of list of things yeah um and i think so a i think it was good because it allowed them to kind of chime in give their perspective on different things it also generated a discussion right because now you have five people talking together and maybe someone feels one way about something and there was an instance where like i brought up an idea one person kind of still wasn't all on board with it but two other people were like nah that actually is a pretty good idea and then we had a group discussion and it was great and so i think that was a huge benefit of it the other thing is like and this goes i think to like formalizing processes a little bit in smbs but you know they didn't used to have kind of like an annual like budget or goals discussion and so i also use this this meeting as a way to like let's formalize some of our plans or goals for next year so here are some ideas i have maybe some of these suck maybe some of them are interesting but as part of this discussion let's pick out what we want to focus on next year and sure part of that's financial right so we can set up a little bit of a budget for each of the divisions again something that they never did in the past but now we have a target to you know to go after but also operationally from a process perspective we can use some of these ideas assuming that they like them as things that we want to now target for this coming year and so as part of that there was you know a number of things um whether it be on the business development front or you know improv you know streamlining processes um but you know we were able to kind of pick those i think out of you know this list and not everything we even chose came from my list like by me i think my list kind of um generated a discussion and some of the part part of that discussion ended up kind of resulting in better ideas that you know came about from the groups you know talking so i think it was like a it was a good um i think it was a good way to to bring about ideas but not in a way that would ultimately like stress people out or you know kind of overwhelm people we're wrapping up here adrian but i want to circle back a few minutes to going back to mna and acquisition in the chassis you know one of the things i kept hearing you say about building this chassis positioning the company to be robust and kind of a foundation i mean that's really what we mean by chassis like a have to have this first company be such a strong foundation that it can um more easily absorb and integrate future acquisitions you know i heard you say a lot a lot of it was around like process and systems and tech what about culture like if like if you imagine because i would imagine that the people thing would be the hardest part of all um so if you imagine yourself buying another commercial landscaping business in atlanta do you imagine that all of those people start working together or do you keep them as you know as discreet as discrete offices and you don't really have to integrate people or culture how do you think about that yes that's a great question so i think that the office question has to do with geogra geography so if let's say we're on the east side of atlanta so let's say we found a business that was on the wet side i would never probably integrate because i think that there's a lot of benefits now we have a presence on both sides and if you know anything about atlanta traffic driving from east to west is a nightmare so like there'd be a ton of benefits that um i think that if the other office was close to us maybe you would look to integrate i think that at the size that we're probably looking at if there is an office presence um which i'm sure there would be something but it would be it would be very limited right and i think some you know kind of as you often see in the smb space you know you kind of have an owner who maybe does some account management some sales some estimating often you have maybe one other employee that does kind of the the bookkeeping side of things and then you have some crews i actually think that that structure lends itself really well for acquisitions because crews can be integrated i think pretty easily um you know certainly every business has a little bit of a culture but you know as long as the quality of the crew's work is good i think that you can kind of you know mix crews more easily than maybe you could at a 50-person company where there's all these back office people that now are going to be sitting together yeah um so you know what i mean versus like if you bought if i bought a couple crews they're just going to keep working with their existing customers anyway yeah for them you know for the most part so that actually i think lends itself really well i do think that there's an element of that you know there is still some cultural issues i think you know we're in a unique situation though because um we're growing you know when i took over it was really there so there was you know one person kind of doing finance stuff and then we had one person working on estimating and kind of account management we've since added a number of people kind of on the the manager side of things so we're kind of developing our own culture today anyway so i think we're in a good position to um be amenable to you know another culture you know it's not like we have very rigid guidelines that like it's our way or the hideaway like i think we're in a position where if there's a best practice we'll take it and if you know ours is better than theirs then great you know and so i think that that makes us um you know potentially a more attractive acquirer in some ways because it's not just this big hierarchical business you know a lot of people i think in services companies will shy away from selling or theoretically working for one of these big guys because it's just layer after layer after layer it takes you know 10 10 phone calls to ever get a decision made it just can be really hard to kind of operate in that environment and so um i think that we're you know being much more nimble much more flat i think we could be actually in a pretty attractive choir for a lot of people yeah of course victim of your own success as you as you successfully acquire all these companies you inevitably become yeah right bigger and then some of that goes away so are your your old colleagues from the private equity world uh looking at what you're doing now and being like wtf or are they jealous um well it's funny because that guy that i mentioned that was you know head of the eta club yeah he went he went back to private he's at you know the biggest of the private equity firms now and so him and i will text all the time and you know every once in a while he'll you know have a tough week or something he'll be like man i am i am jealous um you know because i think he still has that kind of burning desire a little bit to have done something on his own but um i think that they're all like really excited you know i think everyone in the i think most people in the pe space see um the value of it see like that it's pot like you know what what someone in their kind of position could bring to a company and i think everyone gets a little burnt out honestly and so i think that like the the desire of someone in the pd space that's been around of a bunch of like ceos and industrial companies they i think that they all pretty much everyone i've told this to that i used to work with their first reaction is like oh wow that's cool like you know i'd basically none of them knew it was also possible and it's it's interesting to you know just about everyone so i think that they're all they're both excited for me but definitely um you know a little bit jealous very cool yeah adrian i found you on twitter what it what is your twitter handle and is that the best way for people to reach you if they have questions or want to want to you know connect with you directly yeah so my twitter handle i'm sorry i was just looking uh a little new to the twitter game i would say i think it's adrian underscore pinto 2 the number two i would say the easiest way to get in touch with me though is you know linkedin adrian pinto georgiascapes.com or my email is adrian georgiescapes.com and you know i'm always happy to have these discussions with anyone that's interested in kind of looking at the eta space or thinking about you know making the jump into into search and it's always fun for me to like you know talk about ideas and to talk about different businesses i mean that was probably the thing i liked about pe the most was just like always getting to evaluate another company so i always enjoy calls with searchers who are saying hey like i'm looking at this business curious what your thoughts are so always happy to have those discussions well i i may personally take you up on that uh at some point 2022 adrian yeah please this has been great thanks you a lot of great thoughts here a lot uh just we we went deep we went longer than i intended to but it was it was because it was just a lot of gold here so thanks a lot adrian appreciate it yeah thank you very much i appreciate it