Mark Olivito, welcome to Acquiring Minds. Well, it's great to be with you. Excited to be here. Mark, you bought a small, very niche services business doing just about $100,000 of SDE. You've tripled it and intend to keep reinvesting into it, holding and growing it for the long term. It's called Paverart and we're going to hear that story today. But, your acquisition of this business was after a successful run in the food industry. So, let's start there. Please give us some background on you, Mark. Leading up to why you eventually decided to strike out on your own and buy a business. Sure. Well, you know, I'm a I'm a New Jersey guy. So, I I have a career in manufacturing, really consumer products, consumer packaged goods. So, my career kind of took a I started big and then went progressively smaller. So, over the course of 20 years, big food manufacturing, sales, marketing and then moving towards general management. So, I started at Kraft Foods, which at the time, early '90s, while I was in college, was the largest food company in America. Spent about 3 and 1/2 years there, then went to a smaller, but still major food company, Sara Lee Foods. They were a publicly traded company as well at the time. Uh did a stint worked there for about 5 years. Did a stint in consumer package marketing services sales, a company called Catalina Marketing. Behavior-based marketing, really hardcore direct sales in the marketing space. And then one of my old colleagues, uh a mentor of mine, used to be president of Sara Lee Foods, recruited me away from that world to move to a startup food company in Memphis, Tennessee. Uh gentleman, still friends with him to this day, uh lifelong mentor, a gentleman by the name of Wes Jackson, recruited me to leave New Jersey and go to Memphis, Tennessee to join a startup food company called Monogram Foods, small little $5 million company. Uh I had a nice run there, 8 and 1/2 years as the chief marketing officer. We grew it to about 330 million. 5 million to 330 million. Yeah, they were were probably, if not the, definitely one of the top five fastest growing food companies in America. And then you know, today they're well over a billion dollars. So, nice company. Uh great 8 and 1/2 years and Wow. This was from 32 years old to call it uh 40 years old. Uh and then I was approached by a private equity group to take a run at buying a little food company back in New Jersey of all places where I literally about five 5 miles from where I grew up in New Jersey. So, uh was able to buy this company. Yeah, I had to say yeah, it was a chance to kind of fulfill a lifelong dream, which is to own a company. And it was the classic nice little business. It was 14 and 1/2 million, 2 and 1/2 million of SDE. Uh we maxed it out with the 504 loan, uh real estate $5 million, and then $5 million of the 7A loan. And then seller financing and pulling together a group of 27 investors. That was my first acquisition. I'll pause there. So, that That took me up to about 40 years old, and then uh opportunity to buy my first business, which I did at that point. And so, let let's just hear a little bit on this last this last acquisition that you called your first acquisition. But, you said it was a private equity group that reached out to you. Uh so, on the one hand, that sounds like kind of you know, the hired gun uh pattern where you you're brought in by a private equity group with a target they already have to run said target. But, but you characterized this as your own acquisition. So, so kind of elaborate a little bit. Yeah, it wasn't a It was kind of a hybrid, I would say, Will. It was uh Okay. They needed somebody to be the CEO, number one. And then the the deal was There was an LOI under So, it wasn't It wasn't a search that I conducted. It was a search that the PE found a company, a target company. They put it under LOI. They were trying They were chasing this little company for call it a couple of years, two to three years. Financed though through SBA acquisition debt. So, the dynamics of the deal was to max out the 504 loan I guarantee my wife and I which is fun when you have those cold sweats thinking about guaranteeing 10 times your net worth, right? So I had to go through that whole process, pull together all the investors. So I came in post LOI to pull the deal together, get the SBA deal on it, guarantee all the debt. So more than a hired gun, it felt like ownership. It certainly felt real from a risk perspective that I had all my skin in the game and then some. And then I invested in it. I was one of the lead investors as well. Well, well we know that your equity must have been over 20% if you had a personal guarantee on it. So you had a material piece of the business. Exactly. Yeah. Great. And then and it was right at that low 20% range. So you know, the Acquiring Minds podcast didn't exist in 2014 or it would have looked a little different. All right, Mark. And so and sorry, how did that story end? It ended well. We did all the hard work that you need to do to buy a food manufacturing business. It was really my show. It was, you know, go in there. It was let's see, it was 65 employees. 100% of them immigrants. So you had a Korean management team. You had a Hispanic workforce and you had a mix in the office and the management team. But it was lean and mean. It was capacity constrained. Customer concentration. Key man risk. So even though it was a prototypical from a size standpoint, 14 and a half million, couple million dollars of SDE. There was a lot of the risk that I see in smaller businesses. So you know, there I think there's a little bit of a myth out there that the bigger you buy, the perceived safety increases. I'm not sure I agree with that. I didn't see that in the business. I saw all kinds of risk. Worked to de-risk it. But long story short, we did all the We invested in CapEx. We expanded margins, built a culture. People started making more money. We did a nice job with it. It was We took it from two and a half million dollars of SDE to over 4.6 million. And then we had a good exit. We had the opportunity to merge it with another company. So, it was about a 3 and 1/2 year run at it. Only regret is not compounding the investment for 10 years, 15 years, that type of thing. But, so when you have It's one of those things when you think about buying a business, when you have other interests, i.e. multiple investors, at some point you got to figure out how to either recapitalize the business or get them a cash out through a sale. So, no one's going to cry for a nice exit. But, that is one of the things when you're an operator and yeah, I bought the business at 40 years old. So, from 40 to 43, I guess it's an enviable position to have a great exit. But, the problem is when you're 43 and you have an exit, what are you going to do with the rest of your life if you're not independently wealthy to just call it a day. So, even if it was a let's say it was a seven a whatever multi-hundred million-dollar exit, which it wasn't, I'd still be doing something. So, part of it is the thrill of the game. So, but it was a good exit, no doubt. And great. Great, Mark. Well, well, you you've already hit on a couple of themes there that that I know we'll return to over the course of this conversation, namely how, you know, just because you're over $2 million in SDE or EBITDA does not mean this is a mature business with you know, with all kinds of without the key man risk, without the customer concentration, without all of those things that we try to diligence in in such smaller businesses. And then also your interest in compounding in kind of your long-term view and how so many people are eager to exit, talk about the exit, fantasize about the exit, and you've just made a point that I think drives your philosophy today in Pay for Art, that exiting maybe isn't all it's all it's cracked up to be unless it's truly truly such a monumental amount of money that you can not do anything for the rest of your days. the the private equity world, if I can riff on that for a little bit, there's all sorts of you've had a lot of them on your podcast, Will. The Yeah, there's fundless sponsors, there's independent sponsors, and then there's private equity groups that actually manage a fund that they get paid 2% management fees on. And then there's all kinds of permutations in between them all, but when you're dealing with outside capital, they want a return and they're notoriously short in their horizon. If they can take a nice win in 3 years, they would rather do that than double their money and get twice as much money if it takes them 10 years. So, IRR, internal rate of return, is notoriously tied to that time time horizon. And the longer that time horizon goes out, you might double the money, but if that if that depresses IRR down to the 15 to 20%, they'd rather have This was like a 70% IRR, so it was a fantastic deal. Uh we did significant, you know, we 10x the equity that went into the business, but the fact that it was 76%, you can't do that unless you're in a short-term time horizon. Yeah. And Mark, I've asked this question before. Why do you think that the private equity industry is is so focused on exiting what seem like really solid investments? Why doesn't the same calculus that you just articulated for yourself apply to them, namely that Well, if I have a great exit, great, but then I just got to go turn around and redeploy that capital again and and it's it's really hard to find a business that's solid and growing and has it has continued great growth growth prospects ahead of it? It's a good question. I'd I'd be speculating, but I certainly can speculate. I think it's all about private equity spends And again, I hate to broad brush cuz there's so many different flavors of private equity. Notoriously, their energy is on finding the next deal and then raising another round of investor capital to deploy in this next deal. That's There are some private equity groups that focus on actually building the business post deal, but I would say that's the exception. So, they're finding So, if you go to investors and try and raise for a next, let's say it's a $10 million acquisition, and we're dealing with the lower lower middle market here, to have an exit in their portfolio allows them to tell a story. If they've got 10 companies under management and they haven't had one exit, you know, they They a little antsy with that. That's my experience. So, they want to have an exit to put points on the board, to show a win, and then to keep raising that next round. Um now, if you're a funded private equity and you're managing a $100 million fund or $300 million fund, they're that's a game of deploying as much capital as quick as possible because they're making money on 2% management fees. So, they will notoriously overpay for an asset because they until they deplete that fund and put that capital to work, they can't go raise the next fund. So, there's different dynamics and the first question with private equity is are you dealing with people that are actually managing money or are they going deal by deal and trying to raise money for the deal that they found, kind of like an independent fundless sponsor type of model. So, understanding that those dynamics. And by the way, a lot of this isn't taught when you start figuring out search, uh a lot of people learn the hard way on this in terms of understanding the landscape. Um obviously now, it's a lot easier than it was back in 2014. That was great, just a little taste of of kind of the the nuances of private equity which uh yeah, are are not uh covered very much, at least not on this podcast. And I and I'm just as I listen to you talk, recognize how how naive I am, how how much I need to learn about um all those various flavors. But returning to your story, Mark, so so you said it yourself at the top, it's kind of like you you've kind of as you've gone in your career, you've gone smaller and smaller businesses, but essentially more and more entrepreneurial, kind of the spectrum from corporate to entrepreneur. And here you are now, kind of at the very far end of doing something uh uh on that spectrum and doing something very entrepreneurial. So, after that that exit, um you it's I think I know you buy the business in 2018, so you're kind of let's 2017-18 time frame. Connect the dots from there to finding and buying Paverart. Yeah, so maybe uh let's say about 9 months later, I was I'm always searching, right? So, even when I'm working, I'm always looking for a deal to add on in terms of growing a business where I'm uh leading. Found I closed on Paverart August of 2018. So, I exited the last business in November of 2017. Uh discovered Paverart, maybe it was mid-June of 2018. So, it took a couple months to close that deal. I did not put debt on it. I wrote a check for it. Uh found it a classic biz by sell. Uh I was looking for a number of deals, found a meat distribution company that was doing a million. I saw I saw evaluations that were just all over the board. They were seven times, eight times. Uh so, the classic, you know, buy as large as you can. That was That was my mindset. Let's see if I can find a million to two million dollars of SDE. Buy it at a four multiple. And call it the seven months of full-time work that I was looking. Valuations were seven times, eight times. I I just couldn't find anything. So, what started to get to me was, all right, it's only been seven months. This thing could be every bit of two years. So, the search and the time horizon. You know, I am not one to sit in my attic for two and a half years and looking at listings. And then, you know, I would come out of my skin. The opportunity cost for me not being in the game just from a mental, psychological thing. I give all the credit in the world to people that can endure a two and a half year search. I am not that mental. I've got to be operating, right? So, I would rather buy a small business and see what kind of damage I can do in a good way, hopefully, right? Uh then endure and trying to find this very specific criteria of SDE, revenue, and all the things that we read about and buy then build. To me, that was not in the cards for me to try and endure that type of search. So, I had a seven-month taste, let's say, of trying to find that classical model. Uh then I found Paverart. Stumbled across it. And the more and it it defies everything that you should do in search. It's capital intensive. It's manufacturing. It's project-based. It's small. It's key man rate You name it. We check off every box on what not to buy. Uh but I had to do that calculus of do I do this for 2 years? Search and find that criteria? Or do I go in and start to wreak havoc on a business in a good way? And obviously I chose the latter. Well, Mark and so you referred to Buy Then Build, the book. So I guess you'd read that at the time. Okay. Cuz that was I think that was right in the time frame when it came out. Kind of 2018, right? Exactly. And and of course then you have all this experience growing small businesses, exiting them, working with private equity. So you've you've just got also a lot of hard-won knowledge at this point. But were you were you plugged into or aware of kind of the capital S search world or or ETA, entrepreneurship through acquisition, as a thing people were doing and the business schools were teaching? Or were you kind of out there solo kind of doing your own thing, figuring this out? You You're referring to back in 2018, correct? I was not plugged in like I am now. Uh I was not you know you're in my weekly routine. So I commute 82 miles down to Pave America and I give all the people all the credit in the world to you. You know, I listen to your two episodes a week and it's educational. In 2018 when did you start your podcast? 2021. Yeah. So obviously I didn't know about yours. I wasn't in that scene. So the answer is I I kind of knew it was a thing. But if you were to forget about Pave America, if you were to compare my knowledge of the space now just through listening to your podcast and others that are like it to where I was in 2018, you know, you're talking about an A student versus a D minus student. So I knew it was out there. I knew people were buying businesses. I did that with a private equity group in 2014. But search funds and and independent sponsors and all of those the nuances of it, the answer is no. Uh found a listing uh took a look at the listing 60 days later we owned a business. So I knew that I knew that it was out there. I knew you can get SBA financing. I guaranteed it with my wife $10 million. So I knew it was a thing. I'm not I don't think I would have done anything differently. Would I have not bought Paverart if if if I found Paverart in 2023 and I was coming a year off of the eggs the previous exit. I still would have bought Paverart. So, I don't think it changed anything. But, uh yeah, the the knowledge that we have now it's really hard to put a value on all the free knowledge that's out there now on this world of ETA. It really is. Great. Well, I'm I'm glad you find it so valuable, Mark. That's um gratifying to me, of course. So, you you've already articulated why you were willing to overlook the for lack of a better word weaknesses of Paverart. Project based, very small, key man risk, you know, every every box it checked every every box you want to avoid it checked. Um but, you really you just you had this itch to get in the game and see what damage you could do. Given that it had all of these weaknesses, what was your confidence level? I'm just curious about Yes, I understand not wanting to be in your attic and search forever and ever and ever. But, at the same time it seems like you are taking on a whole lot of risk to buy this business especially since you uh snuck in there. You struck the check for it. I mean, you you you you bought the thing in cash. So, so give us a little bit more on your psychology and your and your kind of appetite for risk that allowed you to get over the over the line and do this. Yeah, it's uh you know, I gave you the laundry list of things that why you should not buy Paverart. Obviously, there was a laundry list that was 10 times bigger why I did buy Paverart, right? So, quick little story one of the early reads that I had before even going to see Paverart. You know, you do the you do the website, you take a look at it, you get a first impression of the brand and the business by looking at a website. In 2014 when we moved back from Memphis to New Jersey, we did an outdoor living project. So, we did a patio, we did a fire pit. Paverart, the name kind of explains what we do. We turn pavers into art and we're really the only company that does what we do in the country on a national scale. We did a patio, we did a fire pit, we did a retaining wall. And I see this listing called Pave Art and my first impression was, boy this is cool. Why didn't we look at this back in 2014? The company's been around for 15 years. I send the link over to my wife to go look at the the website. It wasn't within 5 minutes, she calls me up and she says, who is this company? They're in New Jersey. And she's like, why didn't we do this? Why didn't our contractor recommend that we buy a nice little compass rose? We just spent I I forgot what it was. Let's just say it was $20,000 doing an outdoor living project. If you're telling me this stuff is a couple thousand dollars, three thousand dollars, we absolutely would have put one of these compass roses in our backyard. So the light bulb goes off, right? All right. When I'm going through the purchasing decision that we made to do that project, there was no discussion of design. There was no discussion. It was kind of a a a sniff of opportunity, if you will, that we would have been in the market had we known about it. So that was a step one. And then step two, I'm walking through the shop, you know, small little 8,000 square foot shop. Dirt everywhere. There's grime everywhere. The stuff is heavy. A paver, concrete paver that's 2 and 3/8 inches thick, it's 28 pounds per square foot. And we're using 1 square foot to make the design. So it's 28 pounds that you're lifting, right? Uh big old dirty complicated machine called a CNC water jet. So very very specialized technology. There's not many craftsmen out there in the country that know how to fix these things. So I saw that as a risk as well as an opportunity, kind of like a built-in mode. Um as I start to learn about the business, the general manager and co-founder who's still there with me today, Mike Bull, great guy. He saw every project that went through and he was there before day one. He's just he has photogenic memory. He's rattling off project after project. The Philadelphia Eagles, Philadelphia Eagles at their entrance, we did that logo. We did the Carolina Panthers. We did all these residentials. He's he's rattling off project after project. That's fantastic. Yeah, I mean, the body exactly it. The body of work across the country. It was national. And from pro sports teams to homeowners to the LSU Mike the Tiger design 20-ft that's sitting in their plaza. Uh to little businesses with PAVERART and engraving. If you ever walk down a university and you see engraved bricks, you see your name, class of 1997, we do that stuff, too. That's a smaller piece of our business. But a body of work across every market in the country and we're not installing anything. So, we're not geographically constrained. So, we make this stuff in New Jersey. We package it up in a way that's proprietary to us and we ship it to California or Washington or wherever it is. So, a national business in scope hitting every single market. It survived the Great Recession in 2008. Launched in 2003. The first job we ever did was appealing to me. It was four intersections in Wildwood, New Jersey that were actually a replacement. Uh landscape architects and the town council. So, you got the mayor, you got the whole town. They installed four decorative concrete uh intersections. One was like a sailboat. Long story short, they didn't last 2 years. They were basically kind of like a colored concrete, a decorative application. It didn't last 2 years. They tore them up. And then they said, "You got to find something permanent. Let's keep the decorative concept. Let's come up with something permanent." And then that was the start of PAVERART. The founder who passed away uh rest in peace. He came up with PAVERART as a concept and the first job that we installed way back in 2003 still stands to this day. So, that origin story of the company really appealed to me. Mark, I actually think that we should give the audience I don't think that we should assume people exactly can visualize what it is. So, give us 30 seconds on exactly what are you making? Art out of pavement, but tell us more. Give Give us the Philadelphia Eagles example. That Give us a couple examples. That'll help. The Philadelphia Eagles, their their logo, which is an eagle, right? Long leaf eagle. Can you actually take concrete pavers two different colors? Let's just say it's white and light gray and cut all the Think of it like a concrete jigsaw puzzle. We're going to cut all the shapes, all the different colors, and assemble it together almost like a mosaic to build that logo. So, when you walk in and you're on the ground, typically what you see when you go to a university or a pro sports team is what I call a sea of pavers. It might be gray pavers as far as the eye can see. As you're walking 50 yards into the stadium, you get almost a solid in the ground stopping power of a design that Oh my god, there's the eagle or there's the Carolina Panther, the logo made out of concrete pavers, and that's what we call paver art. Or it could be at a house. You might be Well, you might be a Grateful Dead man. So, the Steal Your Face logo. You want to put 15 ft in the middle of your driveway because you want to be unique and you're proud of your affiliation with the Grateful Dead, and we're going to put a 15-ft Grateful Dead Steal Your Face logo in the middle of your driveway. So, it's You can kind of picture the consumer. This is someone that wants to be unique. They want to bring the art that they they find personal to them and meaningful, and they want to put it into their patio or their driveway or in front of their pro sports team uh entranceway, so to speak. And does that give you It does. It's helpful, and I think the key word there is mosaic. So, you're basically because kind of like tile work, it you know, it was done by the ancients, you know, using tiles, and you know, walk into a church and you see a beautiful floor where there's real artistry and and kind of yeah, artistry on the in the the design of the floor that you're walking across. This is that modern using pavement custom often a logo of some kind, right? And That's exactly right. anybody's still having trouble, just go to paver Google paver art, and you'll see countless examples on the website. But it's really neat. And I think it I think it's important to say that it was patented, right? So, because why You said you had the CNC What was it? Water water what? Water jet. jet. Water jet. So, high pressure water cut. High pressure water cut cutting as a bit of a moat. Um but all but still why couldn't somebody else why couldn't a local GC in wherever just copy what you guys are doing? What what There was a patent. Tell us more about the competitive moat you saw there. Yeah, they they they could and they try. They a lot of guys will say they can wield a saw in the field and try and do something and they can in a small degree. Um when you get to things like text, if you want to do the letter M or the letter S, you've not only got to cut the letter M but you got to cut something to put in. So, excuse the cruelty uh the but you got a male female female part connection there. So, you got to cut the M and you got to have it inserted into the neg- the reverse negative. That's really hard to do with conventional tools. Uh the other thing with doing it on site is you got an environmental risk. We have a lot of contractors they're the exception but they do call up and they say, "You know what? I got your price and I tried to do this myself. I went to the university. I tried to cut their 15-ft logo in by myself. It took me three times. They were frustrated. We got all the environmental risk. I regret the time I ever tried to do that and pull that off on my own." Uh so, they they can do simple things and a lot of them will try. Uh but it we excel in we take the risk off of a job site. So, if the Philadelphia Eagles or whoever it is wants to do something, we build it in our shop and we actually pretend like we're at the stadium or the home and we build it on our factory floor to make sure it's built perfectly. So, for a landscape architect that specifies paver art, they love the fact that we're taking all that job site risk and we're pulling it under our roof and we're building it on the factory floor and we give them a proof of completion photo and they know when they get it. We've already proved this thing's built perfectly before anybody even tries to install it. So, there's some certain there and people pay for that obviously. And in terms of installation kind of any kind of GC can do it. Like the installation isn't so tricky for people who work with pavement. Yeah. Yeah, if they if they install concrete pavers, they can install our stuff very easily. They've It takes all the cutting away from them. They really don't have to do a lot. They got to follow a schematic that we send them, and we kind of break it down in a really easy-to-follow kind of paint-by-numbers type of thing. So, they install it, and you know, the bigger design, the longer it takes, but it takes all that work off them. So, contractors all across the country call us, cuz they don't want to try and pull something like that off. The marketing of it it the key for us is to get to the end-user decision-maker and say, "I want this." They call PAVERART. We engage in a conversation, and then we loop in a contractor. And a lot of times, we'll add value. They'll ask, "Can you recommend someone to install this? We need a contractor." So, a lot of times, the project starts at PAVERART, cuz they're trying to figure out a design, and then we go to our network, and we say, "All right, who's in uh our zip code here that we know of that we've done business? You want to call Will in Washington, D.C. He's installed our stuff before. Great guy. Here's another one if you want another recommendation. And then, do your own search, but we know these two guys really good at what they do." So, we can add value to contractors by bringing them business as well. Great. And when you talk about, you know, you gave the examples of somebody in his driveway, you know, the Grateful Dead uh logo, or what was it the What What did you call it? The face? Uh Steal Your Face. Steal Your Face. Yeah. That That's the the bear? It's the skull It's kind of like a skull and crossbones type of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. And the or in the backyard for you guys would have been, if you'd known about it, a compass rose. Um so, B2B versus B2C. What What percentage of your business is consumer, and what percentage is is uh are businesses? It's probably a good question. It's about a 30% will be what we call the residential market. It goes to a home. And then, the balance goes to commercial. And that commercial could be broken up to universities. Schools are a big piece of our business. Uh could be corporations. Google, we did Google's logo uh at one of their locations, so that type of thing. So, 70% 65% commercial, 30% residential. And then of that, we break it down by looking at how much is coming to us from a contractor that wants to sell or that's doing the install versus the direct end user. 98% of our inbound calls are from the end user, not contractors. So, one of the challenges we have with our business, contracting is the number two most failed business in America behind restaurants. Mhm. So, really challenging business. They're typically they start out as landscapers, cutting lawns. They move into construction if they're trying to grow. And their business acumen might not be well developed, their capital base. So, you know, it's a big push in the industry to figure out how can you educate contractors, add value to their business, and try and work with them to become more successful business people. And And exactly what type of contractor would you would you say is is is your ideal kind of channel? They're typically in the landscaping world that have moved into design build construction. So, they start out cutting lawns, then they move into building patios. So, hardscape installers, that's really the people that are certified in hardscape install. Yeah. And you had said that one of your experiences, I I think prior to when you partnered with the private equity fund, so this was when you grew helped grow the business from 5 million to 330 million, your role at that business was CMO, correct? Right. So, you're So, marketing is a is a big part of your expertise, right? It is. Well, let me let me define if I can a little bit what marketing looks like in a consumer products company. If you're in the food manufacturing world, most people think of marketing, the perception is I turn on the TV, I see that ad, that's marketing. That is, that's true. But in the world of CPG, marketing is either to the trade, the trade being the Walmarts of the world, the the actual customer, or it's to the consumer, the people that are turning on the TV and looking at something, the end user versus the trade. Historically trade accounts for if marketing was 100% made up of consumer versus trade, trade's going to be 75 to 85% depending on the business. That's where the money's spent. Mhm. So, my background in marketing was what we call customer marketing or trade marketing. So, how do you set pricing? How do you set promotion? How do you build those budgets? And then how do you interact with the customer? And it's also much more responsive. Very difficult if you want to do a TV ad to measure what's the impact on sales. But with data, if you want to go run an ad at Walmart or any retailer that you shop at, Safeway let's say, and your everyday price is $2.99, reduce it to $1.99 and do a feature, you can see the volume right there directly as a function of that. So, as good marketers, if you can measure it, that's always preference to being not non-measurable. It also erodes margin and there's this what if analysis that goes on. So, my background in marketing to get get to your question here, Will, is on the trade side, uh but then I also incorporated the consumer later on in life. You know, and as you get to trade marketing can be a drug for food manufacturers. Cuz think about it. If I can 10x my volume in 1 week, if I'm normal easy math, I'm selling 1,000 units through the cash register a week, and if I can go to 10,000 by doing a feature and display, why wouldn't I do that? If I did three last year, if I can do five this year, I'm going to grow 20%. And then maybe I'll do seven next year. And then at the end of the year, you look at a 52-week volume chart and you got like a irregular heartbeat. Uh yeah, you got pricing going all over the board. What is Does the consumer really know? It becomes a drug that people try and wean themselves off of, but it's very measurable. It's very quantifiable. You can measure not just the revenue, but you can measure your Are you making enough volume to account for the decrease in margin? Cuz the manufacturers fund all that. Retailers don't lower the price cuz they're good guys or gals. They lower the price because the manufacturers are incentivizing them to do it. Yeah. So, it's a very I'd recommend if anyone's in the manufacturing world to do a stint in a quantifiable customer marketing type discipline. The other thing that's important with that is you start to deal with operations pretty well. If you can 10x your revenue in a week, you better tell the people they're going to manufacture that in a plant that they're prepared for that kind of volume increase. So you got to start to have some liaison work with operations and get involved in production. So that it's good experience from that regard. So a little bit of a a side side view there. No, that that was That was great, Mark. And and you can guess where I'm going with that. I was trying to see if that ties into what is part of the opportunity you saw in PAVERART because as you said with the story with your wife, it was like both of you saw that one of the potential opportunities here was that neither the the lack of awareness that something like this exists and lack of awareness equals, you know, bad marketing. So what what am I Am I right there? Did you see your marketing chops Granted it you as you just explained it it was less consumer marketing chops than trade marketing chops. But did you see that skill set being applicable to growing PAVERART? I did. I saw not so much confidence in myself and my historical skill set because it's different, right? What I did see though is if we did the Eagles, we did the Carolina Panthers, we've done thousands of compass roses in backyards, we've done church design If I saw all these markets, we've proven that we can sell successfully in every single market. So I saw an opportunity there to figure out let's pick the best one or two or three type of thing. If we've successfully manufactured and made people happy in different markets, then I thought that was an opportunity to figure out is there a margin difference? Do the analysis on All right, are schools more profitable than churches, more profitable than households? And then go figure that piece out. Uh if you just had the awareness increase, now the question was how do you do that? How do you increase awareness? So we we spent our time on digital. PAVERART, it's art. It's very visual. If you see a picture We tell contractors to sell PAVERART is not complicated. You're building them a Let's just say it's a 1,000 square foot patio in the backyard, Mr. Contractor. Open up Instagram, open up the Paverart Instagram and do three flips of the thing and that consumer that's like my wife, if she sees a compass, she's going to say, "Oh yeah, I want that. Let's find out how much this is and let's see if we can get that in the backyard." Literally that easy. So, I thought it wasn't a hard sell if we can get somebody to actually see it. So, the question then became how do you actually reach the consumer in an efficient way, cost-effective way? So, we had to go learn digital marketing, website management, SEO. We had to go learn all that and that's a work. You're never going to learn that in a short amount of time. It takes time to learn all this stuff. Sure. Well, I hear that, Mark. On the other hand, if it's such a compelling sell and and if you just get the image in front of your wife or somebody on Instagram, they're they're going to you know, a lot of people are going to say, "I want that." I guess you'd hope that and also you have these really high visibility installations that you know, Philadelphia Eagles. I mean, what a what a what a showpiece. You would hope that it might have sold itself and and it that would it maybe it would have I guess where I'm going with this is it was still a very small business, not very profitable even after a good decade and a half of life. Did that give you concern that maybe it it was it it wasn't going to be as growable because it maybe it would have grown more on its own in those first 15 years given how compelling you kind of thought the product was. Shouldn't it sell itself? Shouldn't it have sold itself more over the years? Yeah, you you'd be You'd have to question anyone's intelligence to see a 15-year-old business that's never broken a million dollars in sales, Mark, and not to say, "Why am I going to be any different, right?" Yes, so Uh absolutely fair. Paverart had I think one of the unfair advantages that Paverart had, why it survived for 15 years, unbelievable founding team. Mike Soroka, the founder who passed away, Mike Bull, our general manager today, he's also my podcast who co-host. And then Ken Bull is a co-founder. He's the CFO or chief operating officer at Five Below, one of the most successful retailers, publicly traded retailers in America. And he told a story, we had him on our podcast, I don't know, it was 6 months ago. He and I didn't know this when I bought it, I might have shied away, but he actually pitched Pave Art to venture capitalists to get an investment, a growth infusion. He told the story on our pod and I almost fell off my chair. 15 presentations, 15 pitches, and he went over 15. I'm thinking, man, this this guy's one of the most successful financial minds out there in the world pitched it and went over 15. That's pretty humbling, right? And they they all they all said the same thing, it's not scalable. You're just not going to be able to grow this thing to a rate that we're going to get a return on our investment. So, uh that validates kind of your line of questioning there, Will. Um but look, what I looked at is 15 years, they did survive. The classic word that I heard in my first 6 months was survival mode. Everything was about making next week's payroll. Everything was about keeping the train on the tracks and servicing the customers. The one machine in a manufacturing operation, if you have one machine and it breaks down, and you don't have a lot of high-tech people around you to fix that machine, you're at risk right there. If you have one guy that gets hit by a bus, the classic key man risk, you're at risk. So, in the first year and a half, my concern was not growing the business, it was building more resiliency in the business. How do you How do you build redundancy around machinery, around people, build out the team? We couldn't even think about growth, to be honest with you, until maybe 18 months or so. But I imagine a lot of this kind of risk that you were seeing everywhere was also opportunity. So, you know, really professionalizing the business and and fixing a lot of this, you know, getting it out of survival mode once and for all and getting it to be an established business. Um that alone would unlock a lot of value from a purely kind of enterprise value perspective. That's right. Well, and speaking of enterprise value and the money piece of all of this, Mark. You So, you it has $100,000 of SDE. Um So, for a guy who That might be That's a little generous. It was It was less than that. It was It was probably closer to 65, 75, somewhere in that range. Okay. So, so really, and you know, that's you know, that that $65,000 of SDE can probably be eaten up by two two projects gone wrong. So, I mean, really tight you know, tolerances here on on any profit at all coming out of the business. So, I think it's important that we just, you know, surface that your own balance sheet was what enabled you to do this. You had come off You had come off an exit. You struck a check to buy this thing outright, so you don't have to get a loan. And you're presumably with such a little bit of amount of money coming out of the business, you're not going to even worry about it paying you. So, so, so fill fill in the blanks for us there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and then the you know, so that not only do you buy the business, you you've got to appropriately capitalize the business once you buy it. Whether you have debt on it or not, it doesn't matter. But, you know, I threw $150,000 in the bank when I bought the business. I didn't want to sweat making 3 weeks' worth of payroll and then having a lull. It's amazing how many and you've had a lot of them on your show, they start with a very thin bank account. And And think about it, it's it's tough enough. Now, I had supreme confidence in myself. I had 20 years of general management experience, and we can go into that later about how much experience should you have if you're going to think about running and owning a small business. But, the last thing you need to do, no matter what your experience is, is sweat the bank account. Ooh. So, Uh yeah, so I had capitalized it where I wouldn't have to kind of sweat a bad week of sales. And in small business, you can have six six consecutive weeks of bad sales. Uh so, but you capitalize it appropriately going into it. But, you're exactly right, you know, could somebody come in to pay for our If they needed that $65,000, that's not the right business for themselves. You had a guest on a few weeks ago. Uh I was the kind of the horror story where she couldn't get her head around not taking a paycheck out of the business. Mhm. If I would caution if anyone can't envision themselves from a need or a philosophical standpoint, if you can't go without a paycheck for three or four weeks or five weeks, it my opinion, but I think that's not right for you. You've got to be the leader really does have to eat last. Now, I'm not advocating people don't take money out of the business. I'm not advocating that. But if you can't even picture forgoing 4 weeks worth of pay in a rough time, you got to question if this thing's right for you. This is not a job. These are This is ownership. It's it's a cold, hard reality. But you know, you're you're right. My personal balance sheet was certainly an advantage. There's no doubt. And then we we we started cash flowing at a nice clip. And then we plowed all that money back into the business as well in terms of expansion projects. Yeah. Well, we're we're going to get to to the growth that you've enjoyed here in a minute. Um, so but can you give us then Mark, just lay out the entire terms of the deal, what you bought it for, and and so on? Is that something you can do? I'm sure. It was purchase price 750 after escrow and kind of like a quasi earn back. Let's call it 710. And then I capitalized it with about $150,000 in the bank. So, 900,000. Call it 900,000. 850, 900. Yeah. For a business that's thrown off, call it 70. But and so, you know, if you look at that on purely return basis, that's less than 10%, but you're not thinking about it in these kind of these kind of IRR, ROI terms. You're thinking about this as as an entrepreneur. Somebody who's going to take some raw ingredients and grow something grow something substantial. So, what it looks like today has very little bearing on on your on your overall goal and project. You're exactly right. So, when when people ask me about it's always the same you know, why'd you buy a seafood manufacturing business? You know, it's it's kind of odd. And why'd you buy paver art, a hardscaping construction type manufacturing business? Then they start doing what you do. They're like, you this and you Look, I can tell you it's a high multiple. It's what? 15 times?" I get it. I can do math, too, right? So, but look, you you can't you know, the origin story of an successful exit after 3 and 1/2 years, that kind of scars you when you want to run the thing for 15 years. I'm not looking at it over 3 years, you know, so it's The question's not did I overpay for the business? Look, I'll I'll save you the trouble. Yeah, I overpaid for it. Over 20 years, what's this business going to be or 15 years? So, that's really the calculus that you've got to do. If you want to be an operator and a dirt under the nails operator. Now, if you want to put an Yeah, I'm fascinated by the whole discussion of can you put a GM or an operator in business? I think that is If that's the thought process, I want to put an operator in and I want to go do a roll up Look, people are successful with that, so I'm not denying it. That's but it's hard for me to get my eyes around it. I will say the intent of what So, why did I overpay for the original in-going intent, PAVERART was going to be one of many. I was going to kind of do a holding company and try and tack on businesses that might be complimentary or might not, and I would work a couple of days a week at PAVERART and then while I go buy other businesses, I went into PAVERART with a partner. I was 2/3 and then she was 1/3. And then after 4 months, she realized that it wasn't the business for her. Too grit manufacturing. So, I ended up buying her out pretty much at the cost basis. So, that did derail things a little bit from my strategy and I said, "All right, I've got to now dive in and commit myself to this thing and see what we can do uh over the next few years here to to see if this thing's going to be able to grow if I work with the team and do all the things I think we can do with the brand." And was she going to be the operator in the business? Is that why her deciding it wasn't for her was kind of derailed the other strategy? No, she wasn't going to be the operator. She was going to be a active I'll call it an active investor while we go out and tack on other businesses to it. I was going to be more of the hands-on you know, call it 3 days a week. She would be there 1 day a week. And we thought that could be enough juice to allow the thing to grow. So, it was a blessing in disguise that when she said, "Look, this I made a mistake. This wasn't the right business for me." So, I bought her out and then I dove headfirst into it. I kind of I punted on the idea of doing a holding company roll-up uh because PayForIt didn't need a full-time additional person there. So, and then I played that role. It It did need a full-time additional person there and you played is what Yeah, it was naive. Yeah, so if you want to call that that that premise or thesis if you want to you know, use a private equity term but that was a naive thesis that you could But put two new owners in, call it service the business for 3 days a week. Just a flawed premise right off the start when it was that lean. It needed more than that and learned that after about 4 months. So, the exit of my original partner it really was a blessing from a standpoint of it got me to say, "All right, we're going to throw our We're going to go headfirst in this thing and see what we can do with it." Mhm. And remind me, is your wife involved in the deal or the business at all? Yes. Okay. She is. So, we really Yeah, she she does the bookkeeping. She does She does the catchall. Anything that I think that I throw at her. And she does a great job and she's got a food background experience too. We met at Kraft Foods. So, we've worked with each other uh in different degrees over the course of 21 years. So, yeah, she does the bookkeeping. Uh she does all the administrative. So, yeah, she's We've essentially added two full-time people in the business. My wife and I. That's right. Okay. And well, Mark and so now this is a good time you We've touched on it twice now. Let's Let's lean into it. Just your thought about long-term hold versus the private equity model of of exiting. I You've already kind of said it but let's Let's give this some some air cuz it's something that I just really resonates with me. I It It might just be kind of a personality thing. Some people think in five term five-year increments in their career and they they don't want to commit to something for forever and ever. And other people it really resonates the idea of building something for the an indefinite period and you know, there's there's examples on both sides. Warren Buffett buying businesses to hold forever is kind of the canonical example. Um so just just riff on that on that a little bit. Yeah, I think there's no right or wrong answer on that question. It depends on the person. It uh You know, the private equity world is going to be notoriously short-term and they're all going to say 5 to 7 years, but if they could do something in three, they will. Uh if they're measured by anything that resembles IRR, that's my experience. Um I don't I wouldn't say that's generalizable, but that's generally short-term in nature. If the operator or the person that's in the ETA world, I believe they should have a passion for operations and being real hands-on. They almost need to have a chip on their shoulder that says something bigger than, you know, financial freedom is one thing. That's important. We all want that. But do you have something else that's driving you that that burning uh that flame in your belly to do something. And that could be, you know, for me, it's, look, I want to take people in the blue-collar world and I want to I want to prove that we could have small business in America in a gritty world of manufacturing like we are, specialized, that if they stay with me in a growth company, small business, and then we grow and do what we can do over the next 5, 10, 15 years, they're going to do a hell of a lot better than going to work for Amazon. I believe that and I'm we're pretty darn close to proving that now. So that's kind of an example of do you have a fire in the belly to do something like that that extends beyond? And if that answer is yes, when I was at the food company, it was, I think we could be the greatest little food company in America. That doesn't mean biggest. I think when you walk through our plant, it's going to be like a Disney. You're going to feel a culture. I call it heart and hustle. You're going to feel a performance standard that is top-tier in the industry. You can measure that by margins. You can measure that by return on investment. Whatever measure you want. But we're going to have a culture that is sustainable and is really motivating to work at. I've taken that to heart. So those are things that don't happen over 3 years or 5 years. You need a long-term window. You need a lot of reinvestment. You need a lot of risk appetite to do that that of thing, but you got to have if you've got that, if you want it more than just I want to cash out after 3 years and have be financially free and do whatever it is, passive investments, then you're not going to be thinking 10, 15 years, you're going to be thinking shorter. Um so what So I think both are successful. The owner needs to decide, you know, what drives you to get into uh the entre- the ETA space. You know, for me, it was The one thing I will say, well, when I bought the first business, the uh food company in New Jersey, I was I just turned 40. Within Ah, jeez, it might have been 30 days. The the the realization hit me really quick. I was ready for this at 35 years old. I was ready from a skill set standpoint at 35. Um so by, you know, the kind of like the only regret is not doing it sooner. Mhm. But you've got to be would I be honest with myself and you if I said at 30 I was ready? No, I wasn't. I didn't have the chops. I didn't have I'm at the disciple of the, you know, Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour rule. Yeah, it takes 10,000 hours of really not just work, of defined practice at getting better at your craft to really be able to master something and to step into the unknown and the risk of small business and especially when you're dealing with leverage. That is not for the faint of heart. You better know what you're doing. You better be able to deal with the general management, you know, people coming in and you know, the the personal tragedy and especially in a blue-collar world, you're going to see it all. And if any of that is intimidating or you don't have experience, I would not recommend it. Uh it's a great What I would do is go work for a small business in that type of industry that you're going to do. Do it for 6 months. That's the best use of your time you can do. Just to get a feel for it if it's right for you or not. Mhm. But to to go back to your original question, that burning that flame in your belly to do something beyond just an exit, I think is important. And if you do that and you find kind of the joy in the grind or the process, that's going to propel you and by nature you're going to want to do that for a long time. That was great, Mark. Uh there was so much there. So, your aside from the two follow-up questions. First, I I do want to talk money for a second, and then I want to return to kind of your why, your fire your fire in the belly. But, just on the money thing, let's highlight two about uh what we kind of talked about earlier. If you have an exit, even if it's a great exit, you know, a really stunning IRR over three or five or seven years, you then still got to redeploy that capital. How do you think about the financial implications of holding a business for decades? Uh for for me to hold a business for 10 de- for a decade? Yeah. Yeah, so just speaking purely on the money piece, why do you like why it pained you to sell the other business, uh and so why do you like the idea of holding on to a business for the very long term from a money perspective? Well, let's let's say the old food business. Yeah. Business that we bought doing 2 and 1/2 million, and we grow it to 4.6 million. We did it with a couple million dollars of equity, heavily leveraged. Within 5 years, it would have been debt-free, and we'd be throwing out a $3 million a year dividend on $2.5 million dollars of equity. There's a pretty good reason to hold it, right? Imagine putting $100,000 into a stock, and then getting back $150,000 a year as far as the eye could see. Not a bad investment, right? And then selling it for 50 million, you know, the type of thing. So, if you buy and that's the beauty of leverage. You don't really If you buy a deal, now here's the case for leverage, and I and I lived in that world. We bought the food company with 80% leverage. If you don't screw it up, and that's the key thing, do no harm, you know, the Hippocratic oath. You do no harm, figure it out, don't don't let those risks materialize, build relationships, walk the plant at 6:00 a.m. It's amazing how many people have a startup at 6:00 a.m. in the food manufacturing world. You won't find the owner or the CEO at the plant at 6:00 a.m. And that no plant in America starts at 6:00 a.m. when they're supposed to. And they usually don't start there because the owner's not there and kind of creating that culture. So, they they Now, why do people not show up at 6:00 a.m. in a cold, wet seafood or meat plant? Because it's cold, wet, and it's 6:00 a.m. That's why they don't show up, right? So, this is hard work, right? This is not sexy work, but um yeah, to there's a raw financial aspect to it, you know, you $2 million into it, you pay off the debt, and then you're throwing out $3 million worth of dividends a year. That's a financial reason. But um look, I think one of the rules in private equity that I kind of grew up with is don't don't entertain buying a business unless that owner is 65 years old or has a catastrophic life event, divorce, uh com- terminal illness type of thing. They're just not going to be motivated to sell, and you're going to be just grin- If they're 55, they're going to be doing the math that I did at 43, which is, all right, I'm going to sell for this, three, four times, five times. After taxes, you're going to be doing the math, and I've got 35 years to live. That That's going to be a very difficult deal to do. You got to wait until that person's of age. So, not really directly answering your question, but how I look at it is financially, there's a case to be made. Um but again, you got to love operating. What are you going to do with your time? That That's a big thing. So, you sell, then you Are you going to play golf every day? Or, you know, what are your hobbies going to be? Now, spending time with family and all that's great, but if it's a sport and you love it, that there's a case to be made that you get more enjoyment from doing the thing than cashing out the thing and then doing some leisurely activity. To me, that would drive me nuts. It's kind of like sitting in my attic trying to find a business. It's just I can do it for so long, and then I'll burn out. Well, not not all of us are are are as lucky as you and me, Mark, that we we really like what we do, and you know, we don't we don't want to retire cuz I'm you know, I'm sitting here playing all day. Uh so, why would I want to give that up? Um That's right. Well, but and then, Mark, so so let's just take it home uh with the example here of Paper Art. So, you you're you're 900 grand in, and you also with the opportunity cost of not taking I don't know if you've said this yet, but I know from the pre-call you haven't really taken anything out. Uh well, you can correct me. Or it was Well, just tell me now. distribution. You're taking one distribution. a couple hundred grand out. You have a couple hundred grand. Okay. But are you And are you paying yourself salaries? No. Okay. So, just a single distribution, no salaries for 5 years. Um so so then there's the opportunity cost of not earning salary elsewhere. So, you know, more if you if you if you really want to be strict about how much you have in this financially, it's more than 900. What do you think that this could be? What's your When you fantasize, strictly money, strictly mercenary here, when you fantasize about what this could be in another 10 years generating in in in SDE or EBITDA, what does that look like? Well, the you know, and I think it was two distributions, by the way, but regardless, it was let's say we haven't gotten a third of our money back, right? Of what we put into it. We're about a third of the way there, let's say. But it doesn't mean the business is not making money. We did one major expansion project. We added We went from one machine to another machine. That was a call it a $135,000 project. And then we added a brand new machine, and then it built out a new a completely new location across the street. And that was about a $450,000 project, right? So, we we generated cash flow, and so we there was no other money that came out of our pocket to fund all that. That was all internally generated cash. So, if it was a fancy statement of cash flow, you know, the business is throwing off real cash. We just redeployed that. And look, and then part of my thought process is I don't feel bad for not taking money out because the question is a great in I don't know if you're a fan of Moneyball, Brad Pitt. That's a movie. There's a There's a great scene in that movie when they they trade away the All-Star, and they're like, "The question we should be asking ourselves is do we believe in this thing or not?" So, at the end of the year for a business owner, when they've got 100,000 of SDE or 700,000 of SDE, are they going to put it in their pocket or redeploy it in their business? That's the test of do they believe in this thing or not? Yeah. So, that call it $550,000 of CapEx that got internally generated that we plowed back in. Well, now we got three machines, two and a half locations. We got a We got some moat around us that if anyone tried to get aggressive and try and come after us, they're coming after a different business than they were 5 years ago with one machine, three people. Now we got nine people. I mean, if you do a before and after we I think we've proven over the course of 5 years, blood, sweat, and tears, it's a different business. So, yeah, back to your point, where could it be in 10 years, 15 years? I don't know. You know, could it be north of 7 million and a couple million dollars of EBITDA? I would hope so. Um I don't really obsess about it. I you know, we got to do the right things now. We We've reinvested a ton of money in the business. We've gotten wages up. We've built out the team. We've got over $15,000 of marketing investment every month. It's hard not to stumble across Paverart if you're in this world and you're doing a search. So, and we haven't even gotten real expertise around us for things like SEO and things like that. So, I don't know what the upside is. What I do know is, you know, you asked the question on a pre-call, Will, what is the total addressable market? Yeah. And I was doing some analog you know, with 80 million homes in America, single-family homes, just just residential alone. If you just take the top 15% of them from real estate values, call it 800,000 and over, and you start backing out like 3% conversion against that really defined market, we've got a $14 million annual revenue if we just capture 2% of it. So, the beauty of a national business, you're shipping all over the country, is it's a big market. It really is. Even if you just say million-dollar homes and above, Yeah. you know, and then you look at a million-dollar home, and maybe a million is not what it used to be, right? And so, go a million and a half, but when interest rates go up to let's just say they go to 9% mortgage rates, is the person that owns a million-and-a-half home going to be worried about putting a $3,000 design in their backyard project? I don't think so. Now, everybody, you know, rising tide hits all boats or lifts all boats. I think we got a lot of runway ahead of us. Um I think I I think it can go north of 7 million pretty easy if we start doing roll-ups and acquisitions. One thing I will say, it's a lot easier to do ETA when you own a business and you start picking up the phone and calling like-minded businesses or complimentary businesses. Yep. They'll take that call a hell of a lot quicker than you were if you were searcher. Yep. That's That's my That's my belief when I was doing the 7-month search versus where I am now. When I pick up the phone, they don't always answer, but my hit rate is a hell of a lot higher. Sure. Sure. No, this this came up in a very recent conversation. Can't remember if it was one of my interviews or not, but when you when you buy a business, you graduate from, you know, from searcher to to business owner. But that can't be understated what a dramatic status change that is and in how the world perceives you and and how you know and and and the kind of the opportunities that that affords to you. Now Now you're in the game, you've done a deal, you're a business owner. A lot, you know, you're completely positioned differently in the world and how people perceive perceive you. The other Well, can I give you a little riff on positioning of yourself as a person? Yeah. I I was fascinated by the the search fund world, you know, the MBAs that are coming out and they you know, they raise a $600,000 search fund or even the independent you know, the self-funded searchers. I did a quick search on Axial and I typed in search fund. I just want to see what the websites look like. I think I looked at 18 of them and all 18 had the word investment and or private equity or something investment equity oriented in there. And and I don't get it. You know, the the world of private equity, another thing another opinion. Private equity to a small business owner, that does not connotate positive images. And now you got this world of search guys, whether they're self-funded or search, and they're calling themselves whatever investments or whatever equity. That is just What So, the question is why do I get a better response rate as an owner versus when I was just a guy out there searching? I think it's I'm an owner. You're You're on their side of the table. Private equity has so many different connotations and a lot of them are not positive and they're positioning themselves, the people with search funds, as investments/private equity. They got to be thinking operator, and they're going to sell to somebody that's kind of looks like them as a as a grinder. So, just a It kind of a soft opinion there, but I did That strike me that they're positioning themselves in this private equity world. I don't think that's uh positive positioning per se. Yeah, I It's It's a It's a really interesting thought, Mark, but let me let me make the counterpoint, which is True. Sure, private equity has negative connotations, but it also has big positive connotations, namely you know, dollar signs in their eyes. Like, it's going to be private equity who's going to pay up for your business. So, doesn't that maybe overcome whatever negative connotations there are? Like, wouldn't if I'm a business owner who's thinking about selling I got to be thinking about selling. If I'm really in my business and I'm committed to it and I'm not interested, then almost no nobody's going to get my attention. But, if I'm like you said, the retire, you know, kind of approaching retirement, having about the next stage of life, aren't I going to aren't I going to take a call from private equity? Aren't I going to want to talk to private equity cuz they're the ones with all the money? Is that search fund private equity? Uh well, but but I guess the point is they don't necessarily know. They just see private equity. So, and I feel I feel I feel like where you're they'll know. Yeah, it goes It goes back to kind of what we started the conversation with, I think, is private equity if they're a $100 million fund that they're managing at their disposal, that's a different call than this 32-year-old search fund Right. that's doesn't have the money to pay his own salary. That's why they raised the search fund. That Those are two different worlds. Sure. If you've got the managed fund or a fund with sponsor, that's private equity, too. So, yes, do I want to take that call for private equity? Yes, but Look, when when someone a self-funded searcher pays four times for the business or three and a half times, whatever their target is, and 90% of that is debt, they can do that with their general manager that's working on site right now that they've known and they've worked with for 10 years. So, what's the advantage? Mhm. You follow me? So, private equity matters and you want to take that call if you're an owner if you're going to get a six multiple. But if all you're going to do So, the first thing I would do if I was an owner is bring in your local bank and let's see if I can get this thing pre-qualified for SBA financing. And let's do my own quality of earnings report. I would have that sucker if I'm planning an exit, small tip. Every business owner I think should be writing themselves an annual report at the end of the year whether they own 100% or 2% of the company. And talk about things like their stakeholders, employees, suppliers, uh investors and write it and be accountable to yourself with a three-page letter almost like a Warren Buffett type thing. Um side note. But back to your point, would I want to take that call as an owner? Absolutely. But I'd want to know am I dealing with a private equity group that can get me a six or are they get or is it a self-funded searcher that's calling themselves private equity that's going to get me a three and a half times because they're going to use 90% SBA? Two different worlds right there. Yeah, really is. Okay, so so the the point the point is cuz I think, you know, a lot of searchers will position themselves as fancy private equity because they they want the perception to be that they're well-capitalized, that they can close a deal, that they're serious business people. Um which is all well and good and that might get you a second look, but the business owner is savvy enough to quickly poke through that and figure out that in fact, you are just a lone guy or gal, young, inexperienced and are only going to pay three or four X for for the business. So so the charade only doesn't last. Right. So, the moment that LOI comes out and they start putting down three and they and they I start asking how you going to finance it and there's loans and all of that, they're going to know real quick that it's an independent buyer. And yeah, they might have investors lined up for the equity piece that they might they might be putting in 20, investors might be putting in a million, what whatever it is. But yeah, I think it comes out pretty quick. But private equity when they position themselves as private equity, I think it sets a little bit of a high it creates a perception that, all right, this is my payday as the owner, when really it's it's the loan guy, like you said. Okay. Okay. That's great, Mark. So, the other question I wanted to circle way back to your when you were talking about, you know, why get in this and and what it what you kind of your why and what your fire in the belly was. Um and how and and I think correct me if I'm wrong, but what it was was really building an organization, a blue-collar organization, where employees can thrive, and uh and you can prove to the world that there is there is a home for blue-collar employees that isn't Amazon, where they can thrive, they can make good money, they can build a career. Was that it? Yeah, I think you're right. I think, you know, one of the side notes, I've got a 16-year-old son who's worked at Pave Your Art for I think four or five years, you know, he started pretty young. Mhm. We developed a program the hardest part about the blue-collar world is finding good quality people. Um I think our society I started a program, website, the whole thing. Uh we haven't really gotten it off the ground, but it's called Brick by Brick Future, which is basically an a customized apprenticeship program that says, look, come work for a small business, learn every area about the business, and I believe at the end of 4 years, let's let's picture a 18-year-old high school kid that doesn't want to load himself up with conventional college debt, maybe graduate with $70,000 of debt. At the end of 4 years, you're going to know everything there is to know about this small business, you're going to get an education customized for this business, technical, you'll get some business classes, you'll get all of that. You're going to be well far ahead, you're going to be on a path to possibly be in a general manager, maybe buy your own business by the time you're 32 years old or something like that. Mhm. So, that is part of it. I think just as a I think this obsession with college and the conventional path, it doesn't play well to the trades. There are people that have electrical degrees or electrical certifications, Plumbers, the trades are really making good money. There's 10 million uh shortages in terms of job openings. So, uh that is part of it is how do you take how do you have a great lifestyle working for a specialized kind of a trade business? Yeah. And then grow them over time and then prove in that it can work. And and where did that come from? Did you did you go Did that kind of develop as you were in and operating PAVERART over time or did you have this vision before you actually bought PAVERART? I I made the mistake of Googling my university and what tuition is today. So, I went I went to Northeastern University in Boston. Yeah, great school, real proud of it. I I'm a believer in education. But the tuition was like $80,000 a year, right? And here I am, you know, a 16-year-old at home, smart kid. Who's got $300,000 burning a hole in your pocket ready to write a check to a professor? Now, the irony is look, I was a CMO for 8 and 1/2 years at a company that is now a billion dollars. I couldn't go get a teaching job teaching marketing 101 cuz I don't have a PhD. I think that's freaking crazy, right? So, I think the world has valued credentials too much than people than than operators that have dirt under their nails that can really motivate a class. So, what started it? I started doing college planning for my kid and looking at this world and look, if he wants to go to college, I'll support that. But I think there's you know, like I said, in 2014, The Acquiring Minds podcast didn't exist. Mhm. In 1997 when I graduated Northeastern, YouTube was not non-existing, Google was not existing or just coming out. So, what's available at our fingertips now is unbelievable. The end of the day, you still got to you know, the the beauty of entrepreneurship it really comes down to how good you are. Is the market going to accept what you're doing and how good are you to grow this thing over time? So, that goes back to the chip on the shoulder. If you got the ultimate faith in yourself as a business operator, as a leader, there's nothing better than entrepreneurship through acquisition. But the motivation's got to be pure and you got to be a grinder, I think, to make it successful. What started it all was yeah, I was Googling my old university doing the college planning. I didn't like what I saw. All right. Well, let let's let's uh we're we're starting to get to to our time here, Mark, but I want to spend a little bit more time on on the nature of small business. We you know, it's been a theme already in the conversation. But the you you responded to me privately about a couple of the episodes and you mentioned one now that I've aired where people are really struggling. And and there are a number of things to unpack there. There's did they buy too small? You know, that that might be kind of a that might be a um kind of an armchair quarterback thing to say, "Well, this person bought too small and that you know, and they weren't prepared for that and and that's why it's so difficult." Uh or they or something you've already said like they're just not prepared for what operating a a small business, a blue-collar business is going to be. Um and there might be other details. So, I'd like to have you riff directly on this now. May maybe maybe let's let's go um in order there. Small business. So, you you uh have said that that's probably not the answer. Buying a business with 400,000 of SDE versus 2 million of S of SDE or EBITDA like that that $2 million SDE business there's still a whole lot of risk there. So, please take that and run with it, please. Yeah, I I I believe it I wouldn't say it's a myth. There there is a lot of uh logic behind the $2 million. You typically have bigger staffs. There's a lot of risk there. But you can make a $400,000 business work. You really can. Um equally as well as a $200,000. Now, if you can grow both of them, you'd rather have the bigger one. All things being equal, take the bigger one if you can buy it right. That's obvious, I think. The the episodes that you've had on I I comes down to the person. I really do. Are they ready for it? Not just from a mental standpoint, are they good enough? And when I say good enough, I hate to make this sound like cuz you could be good enough and have bad circumstances happen. You could have if you're in the food business, you could have a recall. There's all sorts of existential things that can happen, no fault of the owner, and you can go into bankruptcy. You can You can find yourself in that situation. But when I say good enough, do you have I don't know what the minimum is. Do you have a decade worth of quantifiable achievement? Quantifiable mean you took something from X to Y, and here was your role in that. You work with operations, you work with finance, you work with sales, marketing, and you did this over time, and you repeated it for 15 years, a decade. Um one little side story, I started writing a blog in 2012, and I kind of started documenting my business experience, what I thought worked, what I thought didn't. When I went for the $10 million of SBA financing, the 504 and a 7A, they actually You got to go through a It was UCC, local development corporation. They They do the financing, kind of the underwriting for the SBA. Mhm. They actually said this is the first time someone's given us a link to a blog that they wrote. That was more important than your resume than any of the financials. They spent half a day going through 200 articles I've written. And I had no idea. I just thought, "Hey, there Here's some stuff. You know, ignore the Yankee rants cuz they were making bad trades at the time, right?" But when you start documenting your experience and putting yourself out there, kind of being a little vulnerable, how you view the world of small business, that I found that to be helpful. Now, I wouldn't recommend people just do that for the sake of getting a loan, but um I do think you've got to be ready, you've got to have general management experience. If If you've got functional expertise, that's good. I happen to be marketing, but I spent days at plants, and I did the annual planning process with a CFO. So, I could have been interchanged for a CFO in any of my old previous roles. Now, that doesn't mean I'm a financial person, but I spent enough time with a different function where that mattered, right? I could have been a head of sales, head of marketing, or kind of bluff my way through being a CFO. I wouldn't pretend to be a competent one, but I could have probably tried to figure out how to navigate it. And operations, I had enough experience that when I became CEO of a food manufacturing, nothing nothing really phased me. I was kind of used to the the inner play and how the whole thing worked, the business model. I was able to understand throughput pretty quick to figure out how to expand margins 80% cuz I had experience with that and I had success and I had achievement and a lot of battle scars of screwing things up. Mhm. If you've got a body of work with some achievements and some screw-ups, you're going to be so much more prepared of going into Now, if you're going into blue-collar, you got to be prepared for a totally different set of experiences. Uh it's almost like I've seen plenty of potential physical altercations between employees. You got to be comfortable seen almost fights happen a lot. In my office where we're trying to hash out a detail. So, you got to be Now, my stomach is turning while I'm watching this and trying to broker a meeting to try and get two people to work together that are seemingly going to kill each other. If you can't picture yourself in that world, you probably don't want to be venturing into that cuz I wouldn't say it's common, but that's not uncommon. So, the question is can you get through that type of thing and become stronger on the other side? You've got to be able to picture that. So, if you've got a body of achievement that you can fall back on, it makes you a little bit more comfortable in those fish out of water moments. Um I would tell you as CMO, I never saw that. Right? Saw a lot of other things, but I never saw that. One thing one quick little story going through as a CMO and being cross-functional, uh never forget the story. We had a meat plant in Minnesota. So, if you've ever been to Chandler, Minnesota in the middle of January, it's like -30°, right? And a meat plant is kind of a miserable environment and I spent 8 years there. So, in that type of environment. So, going back and forth and visiting. So, we do a hard day of work and then we go out to dinner at night 5:00 and Chess, shout out to my friend Chess, he said, "No beers, we're going to night shift." And I'm like, "What is night What are you talking about? We just spent a whole day. I'm tired. I want to go to bed." And I'm a pretty hard worker, but this guy can this guy makes me look like a child's play compared to his work ethic. We go back for night shift and we're wandering through the plant at 1:00 a.m. and and the sanitation comes in and there's foam and power washers all over the place. 1:00 a.m. and I'm like exhausted. The next day we show up at 7:00 a.m. for the first shift. And you know, we So, we got like 3 hours of asleep. We do like a a lunch type of presentation to show how the company's doing financially. And it was a Hispanic workforce, so they had interpreters. At the end of this little pitch or presentation on the company performance, I'll never forget it. Four little Hispanic ladies, they go to their locker, they pull out like a a big cupcake, and then they sit in the corner, they got their hard hats on, and they a little they light a candle, and they sing happy birthday in Spanish to one of their co-workers. Mhm. And I'm I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, here I am, I'm feeling sorry for myself. These guys have hard hats on. They're going out into the cold meat plant. We just worked the night shift. If these four people can practice a little gratitude, why in the hell am I feeling sorry for myself, right? Small little example, but when you're in that world, you've got to have that experience to kind of think through it a little bit. Mhm. Mhm. That That's great, Mark. Well, well, I I love that story. Um I want to ask just press on this a little bit cuz people will hear Acquiring Minds, they'll they'll they'll know that stepping into an environment like this is going to be challenging, but it still seems like a lot of my guests underestimate it. And And maybe I do, too. But it's why it's why I ask about it ad ad nauseam cuz I just I just really want people to know and I want to know myself. It's like It's like, I know this is going to be hard, and and then they get in and it's like, "Wow, this is hard in a way I've never experienced before." What do you think that they're overestimating in their own, frankly, in their own experiences that gives them maybe a little too much confidence. I'm not trying to dissuade people from doing it, but I am, I guess, trying to say maybe just it's going to be harder than you think even if you know intellectually it's going to be hard. What do you say to all that? Yeah, I I can I'll give you a quick story. I came in I guess it was 6 7 months ago and I just start talking about the topic is mental health, right? And are you prepared for the challenges? And I just start breathing and I start talking to Mike and and I see Mike's got this and I'm talking about how my mind works at 3:00 a.m. in the morning when I wake up. And it's like if you ever see all those those lottery commercial or lottery when they draw the lottery, there's that ping pong machine, the air and the balls are going all around and I was kind of equating that as an analogy to what goes on in my brain. When I wake up at 3:30 in the morning, I go on my walk and I call it a mental freight train, right? And you're trying to sort out and you get a rapid onslaught of brain activity. Uh all right, payroll's this week, but then I got this other thing and then I got this customer coming in and then it's just like all at once and none of it makes sense and it's a garbled mess. It was a mental freight train. So, Mike's got the white look in his face. He says, let's turn on the microphones, let's talk about this on the pod cuz someone needs to hear this. That's something that I've had for, let's just say it's a decade, this mental freight train and I think in the small business world there's going to be some version of a mental freight train that people have to deal with. It's not a question of if they're going to deal with it. They're going to have Who was it? Reggie Zeller on your episode, the fetal position? The fetal position moment will come. Uh so, what is your strategy to deal with it? And I and I would go so I would build on Reggie's theory, which is a good one. And a small version of the fetal position will come weekly and you got to have a strategy. For me, it's this onslaught of brain activity. So, I go on a 3:30 a.m. walk and I've noticed that at minute 60 it starts to kind of slow down a little bit. At minute 70, the brain kind of freezes and unproductive thoughts start to be able to come in. Now, if I didn't have that routine of the 3:30 a.m. walk going till 5:00 5:00 a.m. I probably would have had a heart attack, right? Now, that's not small business per se, but I think if people think about that level of mental stress and some way to deal with it, whether it's working out. Everyone deals with it differently. Uh just assume that's going to happen. So, why do they overestimate? Your question was, why do they overestimate this challenge? Mhm. Or under underestimate and overestimate their their own kind of preparation for it. We're we're we're approaching it. My theory would be we're kind of approaching it too academically. Mhm. Million dollars of SDE, enduringly profitable, reoccurring revenue, no capital intensive. That that I mean, it's just such a crock of I mean, it's it's so academic. The real world of value creation is the two guys about to come to blows with each other. Being maybe dramatic for effect. But that world is so academic and so spreadsheet oriented. And look, private equity is coming down. If they find businesses that are a million SDE and has all those characteristics, private equity is going to come in and buy those. And then they're we're already starting to see that in a lot of the world. Um I think it's the the Buy Then Build book, uh the community, the financial freedom, we're glamorizing the asset known as small business. And is it a life of potential freedom and wealth creation? Absolutely, it is. I'm in it for a reason. Look, and part of you you heard some of my reasons, but it I'd be lying to tell you that the wealth creation's not part of it. Of course, it is. Um but I do think this academic approach, uh this this glamorization of the private equity world or entrepreneurship through acquisition, it is a it's a danger point in all of this. I mean, you you position your podcast as a it's a great career alternative. Is that correct or Yeah. Yeah. You can elaborate on it. I think it absolutely is, but there is that other side, which is it's freaking hard work and it's mentally taxing. And look, when you're signing the front of the checks and not the back of the checks, that's a lot of responsibility that people got to get their head around. That was great, Mark. Thank you for that. Do you have any other crazy stories either fists or cupcakes or otherwise just just to give one more image that we can leave people with of to to you know envision themselves in in this environment? Yeah, I will tell a story that it maybe not before I bought Pave Art, but maybe shortly thereafter our plant manager Brian, a shout-out to him and his wife uh the founder of Pave Art, uh gentleman by the name of Mick Saroka he passed away to cancer and he was working in almost until the last week of his uh chemo. And then Brian, who was an hourly employee learning under Mick, you know, we had two guys in a plant, Brian and Mick. Um the plan was all right, Brian's got to learn this thing rapid speed because you know, Mick passed away, it's all going to fall on Brian's shoulders. So, you want to talk about small business with risk, key man risk? This is playing out, right? Yeah. Brian told the story and he was just communicating what it was. The first night he and we had to build that Eagles logo. It was right around that time, right? So, he's up in bed, he's staring at the ceiling and he's like, "My God, I've got nobody out there to help me. If I don't figure this out, Pave Art as we know it is going to go away." And then his wife in her infinite wisdom as wives can only do a bull response, "Well, you better figure it out then." That's got to be your primary joy. Well, that that made it simple. All right, go figure it out. So, I think that that kind of captures Now, the guy, so what's a new owner going to think about coming into that world? He's talking about key man risk, although he doesn't know the term key man risk. It's my job as an owner to come in and build a business where you've got resiliency. You've got four people out there that can learn from each other and train a new generation. So, I think key man risk becomes visceral when you see it happen before your eyes. Um that was one that stuck with me. A founder went out of business and an hourly guy's got to step up. People are extraordinarily capable, but sometimes you don't know what they're capable of until their back is put against the wall. And that was a good another reason why I admired Paverart, and what kind of what got us through the first 15 years. Fantastic, Mark. Uh we're we're wrapping up here. I do want to ask, especially in the wake of everything that we've just talked about for the last 20 minutes, it sounds like you see or you said you were interested in the concept of GMs hiring man you know, hiring a manager to come and run your small business. You yourself entertained a fantasy of having a coal holding company where you'd only be in in each of the businesses like a day or two or three a week. And um so so you're still drawn to this this concept even though you have also just finished saying like how hands-on this needs to be, you know, dirt under your fingernails, breaking up fights, you know, in your office. It this is not This is not an academic exercise often. This is not moving pieces around on the chessboard. And yet, you are you are you are drawn to that at the same time because the idea of just putting in an operator and you being able to go off and buy another another business, I suspect still still does really appeal to you. So, what given how much experience you have, and given that you you you know, you you got dirt on your fingernails from 5 years of Paverart, how are you thinking about this question? Uh well, I've got the you know, one of my I've never met a deal I didn't like. So, I continue to I look at deals. I take a look at them. I'm like, yeah, I could do something with that. You're a fantasizer. I might overpay for them, right? And we've proven that I can overpay for things. Look, the uh I'll give you what one other thought. Uh yes, I'm drawn to the holding company world. I haven't shut that off. I look at deals all the time. I try and see if something's interesting. I think it does a lot I think where size does help you if you acquire another business as you're operating one. The cash flow increase allows you to build out a better management team, a deeper management team. Versus growing organically, you can do that as well, but it'll take longer. So, I've always looked at acquisitions as a way to build to have more cash flow to build out more resources. That's why I'm drawn to it. That's why I keep looking. Uh I will talk a little bit when people are fortunate enough to have an exit. I think people I I've made some mistakes on post exit getting too fancy. The this world of passive income is getting played out a little bit too much. I put a large portion of my proceeds into pass {quote} {unquote} passive inv- uh investments, real estate management, all this stuff. I I'd be well I'd be wouldn't be doing my service. Yeah, keep it simple. S&P index funds. I invested into a small food company manufacturing run by a husband and wife team. Uh and my first question was who's the parent? Cuz they had young kids, 14, 15 years old. And what do you mean, who's the parent? We both are. And my what I want to know was, are they both going to the baseball game? You got to have Someone's got to be the operator here. And who's going to work 12 hours? Well, I invested in the company and I had those conversations after I invested. Turns out they were both going to the baseball game. Big mistake. You can't These are small businesses and they need an operator hardcore. Um so, I will never invest in another husband and wife team where both of them are full-time parents. One's got to be the operator and one's That doesn't mean they both can't be involved. Look, me and my wife are involved, but she's the full-time parent. If there's a parent for the kids to our two kids, it's her. Um so, anyway, uh uh I don't know if I answered your question at all, but they're they're just some thoughts. I I'm drawn to deals because of their ability to build out management teams. I think if you can build out management teams that is a definite unlock, but you got to you know, it's not easy, but I do know what's easier once you're operating a business to go tack on to other businesses. They'll take the call quicker. You'll have meetings. Uh you you can build it out quicker. So, I am looking at them. I think that's a viable strategy over the next 10 years. And Mark, so tell us now where where Paverart is, if you can, on in terms of numbers. We've said that you've tripled it, but can you give us any more kind of metrics? should We should cross $2 million, and you know, we'll we'll do 25% margins. Uh we're at a point now where we've done a lot of the, you know, the call it the $550,000 we've plowed back in. We've got a team of nine, including my wife and myself. Uh we've got three machines, we've got two locations across the street. So, we we separated out our engraving business from our Paverart. Uh we're looking at expanding again. Um but yeah, we've crossed that that threshold. Uh you know, the world of outdoor living, backyard patio. One thing COVID did do is people realized their backyard can be an extension of the square footage of their home. Yep. So, people are buying pizza ovens, and you know, one of your episodes, what was it? Long Texas and Long Turf? I forget the guy's There you go. Yeah. name. You're on the right track. Yeah, so I am long outdoor living. I don't think that's going away. Uh you know, people will uh people might curtail some of that spending, but maybe not for the $2 million plus homes. And universities are going to keep raising their tuition. They're going to keep plowing money into their hardscaping and their landscaping. Um but anyway, that's where we are financially. Um I don't spend a lot of time thinking about are we going to do two two one, 1.9. We're heading in the right direction. Uh when you don't have debt in the business and you don't have investors, it doesn't really matter. Um I look at the financials maybe once a month. I don't obsess about them. I look at the cash in the bank and working capital. And you know, I do think people should get consumed with the balance sheet. Look at their current assets, compare it to the same time a year ago, look at their working capital. Businesses that are profitable will grow their working capital over time, their current assets as net of their current liabilities. Um and and I mentioned that annual report thing. Yep. People that are forced to articulate their accountability to themselves and all their stakeholders, that's a good exercise to go through once a year. Lock yourself in the closet for 4 hours and and try and do that. And that'll be a good tool when and if you go to sell the business, you can show them here's eight annual reports I wrote, here's the metrics behind it and it's a good little tool. And then I would do the quality of earnings, I would do the I would get a pre-SBA finance approved. And it's amazing how many people are trying to hide money in a small business. They're trying to do tax avoidance and save 30 cents on a dollar and avoiding taxes when they're going to give up that multiple on that same 100 bucks. They're going to So, at the very least do your tax avoidance and then for 3 years clean up your books and do it the right way. So, that that's a lot of problem with these deals. They got to recreate the books and do all that and and just some little top-of-mind thoughts there. Great. That's great. Thank you, Mark. Well, was there anything that we we didn't touch on? We covered a lot of fantastic territory, but maybe there was something you wanted to say I didn't give you the chance to. Uh no, look, I think we covered it all. I think the mental if you can take away one thing that this is hard and just expect the hard, have a strategy to deal with it and try and go into it knowing that it's not an academic exercise. It happens in the real world with the human beings and you know, you what when people buy a business, you should fall in love with that business. If you're going to put your financial life on the line and guarantee a $5 million 7A loan, buy you've got to have that bias towards you put your financial life on on the line, think highly be positively predisposed to those assets. And the number one asset that you're buying is the team. Treat them with the respect, try to do no harm in the first at least 90 days. Everyone's got a debate on how quick you should make changes. Yeah. I'd be biased towards, you know, take your time with it, capitalize it well, don't leave too much too little cash in the bank, try and do that and that'll give you some runway to be, you know, do more listening than talking. That's a key thing that I've learned. Mhm. And wait, Mark, so to be absolutely clear, you get up at 3:30, this walk 3:30 a.m. walk is a daily thing? Uh it's 4 days a week when I'm I try and do that before my commute. The one disadvantage of Paverart, it's 82 miles south. So, I try and do get that walk in for hour and 20 minutes and then I jump in the car and uh I put on Acquiring Minds and then we go from there. You have mentioned a number of places you're available online. Let's plug them all directly. People already know Paverart, go Google Paverart. Um but what about your podcast and your blog and anything else you'd like to plug? Yeah, we you can you can reach me on I'm on Twitter, but I'm not active on it. I would say LinkedIn's probably, you know, you look up Mark Allavido on LinkedIn, you can hit me up there. Uh if you look at Paverart, my cell phone will be on there somewhere on the website. You can reach out to me there. m.allavido@paverart.com is my direct email and I'd be happy Yeah, our our podcast Mike and I do is the Hustle or Bust podcast powered by Paverart. We're nowhere near as consistent as you. We're on like 48 episodes, but we talk about operations. What it's like to be a small business operator and some of the things that we've learned in a 20-year business. And it's the two of you having a conversation, right? Yeah, we're back and forth and you know, we'll riff on a lot of different things, but basically it's what is the life of a small business operator look like and uh we don't come at it from a point of view of being experts. We we're trying to learn like everybody else and trying to give back a little bit. Mark, this was a really fun interview. Uh so, I'm really glad we connected and made this happen. Thank you very much for coming on and giving us an unvarnished view of uh of the whole of the whole picture of your life and and what small business is all about. Look, Will, it's been fun. Thanks and I appreciate all you're doing for the community. I hope you enjoyed that interview. Make sure you subscribe to the Acquiring Minds channel below. We are now publishing twice a week. So, tons of new interviews and stories to come. Stories that will help you along your own path to acquiring a business.