Kelsey lyric welcome to acquiring minds good to be here well thanks for having me Kelsey you are the co-founder and CEO of 365 Holdings a holding company of e-commerce DTC businesses you were an early guest on acquiring minds you are also a co-founder of holdco conf the unconference for holding company operators and entrepreneurs and as part of the conference you recently surveyed holdco entrepreneurs to better understand this whole phenomenon of small business hold codes today we're going to hear what you learned from the survey results but first Kelsey would you give us some quick background on who you are please for sure and again thanks for having me back on a number of years ago my business partner and I uh bought our first e-commerce business uh prior to that we had some small companies but never really achieved much scale if you fast forward from that first e-commerce business to today we've got a sizable team and a sizable portfolio of various e-commerce businesses selling mostly direct to Consumer a little bit on Amazon we tend to get lumped into that uh e-commerce aggregator uh World although we have not raised any outside Equity Capital we're self-funded and bootstrapped uh we are an e-commerce uh platform that buys and operates e-commerce businesses do you share Revenue numbers across the entire portfolio is that something you can do Revenue typically not the head count we're just over 100 uh globally and we're heavily vertically integrated so in there we have everything ranging from executive kind of leadership all the way down to production workers uh and Global contractors doing things like customer service or accounting we're incredibly heavily vertical uh in our supply chain so we make some of the things that we sell and we also pick back and ship many of the things that we sell for reference multiple eight figures of Revenue okay Kelsey um and so tell us about the Genesis of holdco conf a couple years ago I met uh John Wilson I think also who has been a guest uh on your uh show the Wilson companies here in Northeast Ohio and I realized John and I um had some similarities uh similar point in life personally with like uh family and age and kids and similar businesses revenue is in the neighborhood head count was in the neighborhood all of our problems were certainly uh very similar when it was financing or shared services or Acquisitions or hiring like we just became fast friends and we met you know through the magic of the internet um and we realized that we both went to various industry conferences I would go to e-commerce events he would go to Plumbing or HVAC events we'd both find Our Place ourselves at things like SM bash or Capital camp but there really wasn't a specific home for hold codes if you kind of identified as a primarily multi-business entrepreneur if you said you know I own multiple companies I'm the founder of a portfolio of businesses I'm not really private Equity but I'm also not just a sass entrepreneur I'm not just a restaurant owner whatever whatever category you might be in there just wasn't a home for that so we set out to launch the home for that called hold coconf which is an annual event where holding company Founders Executives investors entrepreneurs meet for two and a half days of fun and learning because the challenges of running a portfolio of businesses are different than the challenges of scaling uh even a roll-up just in one industry uh is just very different and the topics that we cover uh for a couple days will hold go conf is trying to bring the best and brightest together from small business holding companies to share best practices build relationships uh have a lot of fun while we do it and kind of support small business hold codes awesome Kelsey two follow-up questions first interesting to hear you say that part of the ingredients of your Chemistry with John is that you found that the problems that you have were similar what you'll often hear about Blue Collar businesses field business you know field crew businesses is that if you look under the hood of these businesses you know be it Plumbing or HVAC or foundation repair or disaster remediation that there's a lot of similarities like there there's a lot of overlap and the problems are the same but I wasn't ever sure that that actually extended to other categories of business so interesting to hear that in e-commerce holding company a quote digital business and John's business which is plumbing plumbing um actually do under the hood kind of have a similar problem set I forget who to credit it to but somebody refers to um the everything tastes like chicken layer of business uh meaning that Finance is finance you gotta reconcile your books hiring is hiring you gotta have a process for bringing in good people uh leadership and management and accountability whether it's something like EOS or just some other system of daily operations those transcend Industries so certainly um John and I might disagree on the finer points of um how he tightens a wrench on something or how I you know run a Facebook ad and that's where our topics diverge but that everything tastes like chicken layer of running a company uh really is homogeneous in my opinion I think in his and others of the experience of being an entrepreneur running more than one business um there's a lot of commonalities there in our opinion it's great it's really interesting Kelsey um and then the second question was hold codes are hot um this I've had many hold co-entrepreneurs on this podcast those episodes always really perform well but the idea of owning multiple businesses without uh you know applying this label to it um is nothing new just like I guess search and buying a business is nothing new but do why do you think that it kind of became trendy in the last year two three there's certainly a pocket of the internet that has some overlapping influences uh I think you and I might have emailed about this but there's probably an intersection of like um Tim Ferriss Robert Kiyosaki and like Berkshire Hathaway or value investing and if you put all that into a blender you might get an entrepreneur that wants to run like a lean portfolio of businesses that can compound uh retained earnings and it's certainly easy to see um some big names uh that have holding companies many of which have been guests on your podcast I could rattle off the list of well-known names like Andrew Wilkinson at tiny uh or the Higgins at chenmark or B short permanent Equity is a long list of I think people that have um aspirational holding companies and during Adventures on that list there's others of they publish content on the internet they've been on podcasts and it's very easy for somebody interested in ETA to when they approach uh buying a business to say hey one is fun but two or more sounds like a real party we should we should do this portfolio thing so I think that there's an intersection of kind of culture I do think a little it comes down to the media that many of us might have consumed over the years uh both financial and otherwise and then the prevalence of some really aspirational really impressive Stories being told about doing this at scale there's also plenty of stories in any given industry about building one big business I think there is an awareness that deals are hard to find and it might be easier if your target is some Revenue metric call it 50 or 100 million dollars whatever it is it might be easier to get there cobbling together a group of things then to find the one um sports car or the racehorse that you can grow to that level or take to that level uh so I think there's kind of a Confluence of factors that makes it popular for uh Holden entrepreneurs and it ranges from culture to these impressive names that are uh building in public to a degree and sharing some of their successes I agree with all of that and I'll just add to that Kelsey I mean I really liked what you said about you know if if one is good two is better sort of thing I think just with the increasing popularity of search and the idea of ETA buying an existing business it's it was inevitable that people would eventually say to themselves you know further along the path more mature in the business that they bought would say themselves will can I buy another one of these and what does it look like if I if I really scale this pattern of buying a small business and you know do it again and again so it's almost like less trend D and more just inevitable I mean it's kind of The Next Step as a as a business buyer that you're going to kind of arrive at one of the debates I've had about this notion of focus versus um cold so I have a friend who has a very large very successful Financial publishing business and we just had a fake Twitter beef about this it was kind of fun but um is throughout the dialogue of giving each other a hard time about him focusing on a very big very successful business I admire a lot and him kind of uh teasing me I realized that um in many small businesses I would include the ones that we own and operate um you can get um 90 of the results with 10 of the effort and yeah 100 of the effort can get more than 90 of results but there's some breakdown of that marginal effort and for a high strung entrepreneur that is trying to maximize their time you might find yourself running a three million dollar septic business and you realize you can do it in 20 hours a week or you can do it in 40. but the financial result is within you know a small percentage point maybe you should work half time and go find something else I've certainly seen that happen in my business where could we put more effort yes is it marginally accretive no it should probably move on and capital allocate that time or those dollars to the next project because many small businesses have a constrained total addressable Market you can only grow it so profitably and so inevitably if you want to grow you end up diversifying I love that uh point and I'm going to say kind of a similar point but not from the kind of the resource allocation perspective but from the ego perspective you know if you're I I think that um an ambitious entrepreneur who has big plans for him or herself you know to to buy uh to to operate a three million dollar septic business that can be fantastic and great but they might have a larger appetite or a larger self-image than that um but they still love this kind of world of small business and they love they love the idea of buying that business that first step but a holds co-path or a holds covision is a is is a way to play in small business but do something big not do something small and so it kind of scratches the the ego itch I think for a lot of really ambitious entrepreneurs as well I would also just maybe add the mathematical reality of um if you do go fishing for bigger businesses and you're competing with independent sponsors and smaller private Equity um maybe even the success ratio of stringing together a handful of 1.5 ebitda businesses could be a lot easier than finding one that is three four or five million there's a lot more buyers for those that are a lot more sophisticated and have better access to Capital and resources there's a lot of reasons uh that will push people to wanting to build a hold code we're going to better survey that next year that was one of my learnings from this year's survey just before we get into the survey itself uh the survey results themselves um let's hear the counter arguments or the what the detractors would say about uh about this hold Co phenomenon for sure uh it's Focus um the uh the canonical um thing people point to is like the the thought you have in the shower uh and you can only really do it for one business when you're when you're not thinking what is it you think about what is The Epiphany that you have at the gym or again in the shower when you have five minutes and if you have two three four ten businesses uh statistically speaking you're just less likely to find that on lot and so I do think if you have a platform business that has really scalable levers and really really high quality attributes uh a single business with 100 of an entrepreneur's Focus uh can go farther than a hold kill and can be a better decision based on your opportunity set your risk appetite and your skills and I fully agree that's a good thesis uh on the on the other side of the argument and I'll add to that too that one of the things that I see the detractor say is a lot of people are kind of putting the cart before the horse here with their with their hold Co Vision let's buy that first business make sure the transition is okay learn how to operate you know there's a lot there's it buying that first business is extremely challenging is this as this podcast talks about Ad nauseam um so let's make sure you can do that and indeed like and want to do that before you talk about buying 10 of these 10 of these guys yeah we've gone through iterations of hold covision uh up down and sideways anybody that's followed like my journey at 365 it's been an interesting Road um there's been some very recent uh people I look up to that have unhauled code and kind of focus down on a single business uh I would agree with your assessment if you're listening to this as a Searcher uh leave the hold code thing second just like find a company first and um let's talk about business number two once business number one is chugging along I'm with you great all right Kelsey so so give us a minute just on set the context of this survey methodology who who you pinged to participate yep uh I looked back and realized that there's many um organizations or communities that I follow or I'm a customer of that produce a report so an e-commerce a member of e-commerce fuel each year Andrew Darien publishes the state of the merchant and if you're an e-commerce you're gonna read this thing I submit survey data so do hundreds of other people I read it like like it's a very important document Stanford search Fund in your world is very popular the guys at Sig did the self-funded survey if you're up market and you're raising Capital you might read The McGuire Woods uh survey there's industry surveys everywhere um and I realized that in this pocket of Entrepreneurship called hold codes there was a lot of questions that were the same people would come to our conference hold coconf seeking some of those things I'd see it happen in Twitter conversations I'd see it on search funder and just the conference isn't enough to to handle that so we wanted to publish a report and begin to annually collect some data from self-identified hold codes and try to get some consensus on some of these things as a better north star or a way to point people towards an answer excellent and and yeah um I think that they are really powerful um kind of stakes in the ground marketing tools for the organizations that put them out so uh well done on jumping on it so um all right so so tell us kind of what what are the aggregate response um data set look like how many people responded so sure uh real quick I have a printed copy of the survey for anybody that's watching on video um but if you want to download the survey go to oldco survey.com you can download it it's free um that's where you can go reference all this um in the intro we we break down the aggregate of the survey respondents we had just over a hundred uh survey respondents uh and most of it was a little bit of marketing from social media for the hold code brand and some Outreach that John and I did uh asking people directly if they would participate great so let's get into some of the the key findings Kelsey sure uh kind of take take us through what was what was one of the the findings that jumped out at you for sure uh the first thing is that um most hold codes are smaller than we think so it's easy to go on the internet and see uh a giant name like constellation software or permanent Equity or insert your favorite um you know successful hold code you're following um and then you get down to somebody like Kelsey or John Wilson or even an anonymous Twitter account you see all this content uh from survey respondents most hold codes are self-identified hold cool entrepreneurs uh are much earlier in their journey and are much smaller than even I imagined so a couple of insights the survey was obviously done over the internet and it was um Anonymous so we sourced respondents from Twitter LinkedIn search funder and Outreach to our networks uh and our survey sample size is a function of our Outreach so there are obviously many more hold codes or um entrees that didn't respond and we're only working off the data that we have we have some survivorship bias there um but out of our 100 plus survey respondents half weren't even eight figures in revenue and some of them only had one business so to the average search funder or acquiring minds listener you just assume every hold code is obviously eight figures obviously has two or more businesses yet we had people responding to a survey where many of them were much smaller in revenue and not um dismissing them uh by business size they're just anecdotally smaller and some legitimately call themselves a hold code with only one operating business now certainly their business plan is to grow uh but again today they are functionally a single holding hold go yeah well I I guess that ties back to our point about um how much aspiration there is swirling around this concept people kind of uh self-identifying as old co-entrepreneurs even though maybe technically they don't qualify it's super easy to get the echo chamber of listening to the acquiring minds podcast and everybody's rolling up everything and all multiples go to the moon and there's no businesses left yet the reality is most of these hold codes that we're all following myself included are might be smaller than you think fascinating uh and and does that square with your kind of anecdotal experience of the of the folks who came of the attendees at holdco conf last year there's definitely a distribution um of small to large and um our survey set internally for the conference last year anchored slightly larger uh that also might be um uh some outliers to the top pulling that number up what about I I hear I see here in our notes that you had an observation on head count for sure uh back to your comment earlier about John and I having a relationship and even starting a conference together and having very different businesses uh in a guy in a truck business which I would call John Plumbing HVAC um all those traditional service businesses uh Revenue per field employee is a great metric and many people overly simplify that down to just Revenue per employee and so you might look at Google's revenue per employee or Facebook's Revenue per employee uh and it gets to be incredibly deceiving so we try to use many insights in the report um as a measure against size and so we we reported again sometimes head count sometimes against Revenue sometimes against number of portfolio companies but we're breaking down these insights and we realize is headcount is just very deceiving some businesses just have lower Revenue per employee or higher and that tends to get into a function of like do you own restaurants or do you own software as a service is that metric gets to be incredibly deceiving unless you're very much Apples to Apples um it's just not a very insightful uh way to compare things and did you come to one metric to rule them all that you liked uh we end up defaulting more often than not to Global Revenue as the best way to analyze that looking at our notes Here one of the other things that you observed was how you know it's not just do you have one business or do you have multiple there are there is a spectrum like like with anything of of hold codes and things change depending on the size of old code that you are what did you find there I think one of the questions especially if you're maybe in the acquiring minds audience and you're one of those smaller operators buying your first business you're trying to get Tate figures uh one of the common questions is likely when do things change when do I graduate from SBA financing and I go get you know a big boy bank loan with no PG when do I hire a high uh highly compensated uh head of Finance when when does my business really evolve in growing a hold Co that's easier to answer industry specific if you're an e-commerce you can go join an e-commerce Community if you're in plumbing you can go to Industry conference there's a better trodden path of just growing a single uh service or product business of Industry Norms of when successful competitors have done things it's less obvious when that happens in the hold code space and that's one of the things we wanted to key in on is what are the revenue benchmarks when you should start poking your head up to make meaningful changes in the business so so a couple things happen uh according to survey data really around 50 million is a good place to start thinking about meaningful changes and then certainly these changes are ubiquitous at nine figures uh I had thought some of these things happened earlier we frankly as an organization are not at 50 million yet we've tried to make some of these changes uh I thought they happened at 20 or 25 or 30. um but really it's 50 million when a couple things happen so one the presidents of outside Equity uh in all of our survey insights you're much more likely to have outside Equity over 50 million of Revenue uh the sophistication of your debt stack goes up dramatically uh many sellers staying on post close and operational rules looking maybe more like a traditional private Equity kind of world Equity scenario um leadership positions having like tangible real Equity grants not just profit sharing or synthetic profit interests of some kind uh and then hiring um Executives to lead m a uh that handful of things like really is incredibly rare below 50 million dollars in uh Global Revenue your point about the outside Equity at 50 million do you think what do you think the um the direction of causation is there maybe there is it holding companies only get to 50 million to get 250 million you probably need to have worked with investors and brought in outside Equity or once you get to that level you're kind of a sophisticated enough business that you're just gonna it's just from Pure kind of capital allocation math you're going to start seeking outside Equity to to accelerate your growth uh I don't know that I have a personalized answer to that because it is a bit chicken in the egg and it's a bit um a function of the strategy of the hold co-founder uh so I don't know that I have a conclusive answer uh to that I suspect it's a bit of both okay on to the next finding which I'll see one of the other main topics that is a constant conversation um is how to build a team how to hire and incentivize and train leaders or operators in this entire notion of HR so you're scaling hold Co what services are the parent company what services are at the appco are we doing shared services uh what level of seniority there's just this kind of how do we staff this machine uh is a an ongoing topic uh what was a surprising Insight is that even some very small hold codes again those seven figure uh hold codes report using profit sharing and Phantom Equity to incentivize compensation of leaders even early on in the journey which I would not have anticipated being the case uh quite frequently the first real executive hires tend to be either Finance or operations that's not surprising to me at least uh once those bases are covered marketing and HR are the ones that quickly follow the takeaway to me if you're listening to this and you either have a business and you're trying to to go hold go or maybe if a very small hold go is as you're thinking about the things you can delegate as an entrepreneur and the way you can staff up what it's the data seems to say is the first move is finance or Ops the second move is marketing and HR meaning as a Founder you need to retain marketing and HR longer and you need to be more comfortable running those functions yourself until you can afford to hire somebody to help with those that's an interesting thought or our observation because a lot of people in this world come from financial backgrounds uh and and so interesting that this that the data suggests that that's also one of the first things offloaded to to an employee theoretically it's the place where um HQ as it work can add value to the operating companies so if you presume that you have a decentralized model and you have operators making decisions on things like hiring things like marketing spend and maybe those decisions are perhaps pushed down the place you could add value at the senior level or at HQ is through high level uh CFO coo type of work at 365 what was the sequencing of these leadership positions that's a good question um I think for us it would go um marketing first because e-commerce sends me a marketing forward business uh Finance was retained retained a little longer um HR was the last thing we brought in um for us Ops and supply chain has been kind of a winding road but again e-commerce native I think you move marketing to the front end uh in my world I think that's probably different for some others great now one of the things you've already touched on it one of the things that comes up again and again in thinking about hold codes is a centralized model or a decentralized model centralized being where the mothership or corporate or whatever you know where kind of where the holds cooperator founder sits is providing shared services to all of the hold codes to all of the hold code Port codes the portfolio companies logic being that you should be able to get some scale from that so if you have one HR person to you know manage hiring at your four different portfolio companies it's a great use of resources because you just have to do that one hire for four businesses but then you'll you'll hear detractors to that logic as well and that it just isn't ever quite as clean as the logic would suggest so what did you see here uh in the data uh nobody reporting large revenues so we're gonna go back to that 50 million dollar bogey virtually nobody there is using any semblance of vertical integration uh the trend of building a decentralized hold co uh where operations are pushed down uh is very much in the data uh many leadership teams are very small just two or three people so I think the canonical reference being you know however many people are in Omaha you can you know feed them on a couple pizzas at Berkshire uh seems to be true of scaled hold codes in the small business space uh just a handful just using your your own holdsco again Kelsey um maybe e-commerce is different again because um you know there's less moving Parts in some sense if you're doing your own you know picking and shipping picking packing and shipping that that adds a whole another element certainly um but what have you found in terms of your attempts uh at centralization uh yeah we've had fits and starts on our decision making there uh historically we've been uh very centralized and very verticalized because that um there's a thesis around that I think that our opinion on that has uh evolved and we're looking to um this fragment uh the brands into some more uh like divisional structures as we go so we are moving more decentralized at 365. more decentralized yes you're moving more decentralized okay and let's turn to the next finding for sure uh again with a diversified portfolio of businesses uh there are certainly some Roll-Ups in our sample so I only buy landscaping or I only buy SAS or whatever my my thesis might be um many hold codes are industry diverse and we have some some stats on that uh in the survey but I wanted to get a sense of kind of expectations or trends for 2023 is kind of a economic Outlook we're recording this in August the year is half over we started the survey back in January um but I think it's indicative of small business entrepreneurship writ large there is um several hundred portfolio companies represented in the 100 plus survey respondents and again our our survey respondents are these aspirational small business entrepreneurs so I thought it'd be an interesting place to get a diverse pulse on small business one Trend we wanted to talk about is global hiring I think you can't um you know listen to a podcast or scroll a Twitter feed or anything without hearing about you know hiring a VA in the Philippines uh and so we asked about that what was interesting is um we had overwhelmingly strong response people said they many people were doing it um and nobody was dissatisfied however 76 of survey respondents who were globally Outsourcing stated they were still figuring it out meaning it wasn't perfect it wasn't terrible they weren't throwing it out it was a common Trend it was a growing uh Topic in their business but it was not figured out uh most of the talent is being sourced from the Philippines uh and more than half of survey respondents had Global Talent we assumed our audience was us-based entrepreneurs so um that hype apparently is real the success is uh in progress for most small business holders have you guys used uh it's out in the Philippines or elsewhere for sure we have scaled that up ourselves in the last uh two years and we can I would say um I'd like to think we're better than still figuring it out uh but like many things in our business we're still figuring it out uh and I'm a proponent of it I think it's a good thing and and when you guys were solidly in the still figuring it out bucket what was the hard the hardest thing or two to figure out cultural adaptation for our us team of how to effectively leverage um global resources and to document systematize and build process for um a part of the team that's not physically present and has a different operating Cadence and culture than the in-office physical co-located team so could I distill that to the one word of kind of communication which is often which is often the sticking point in a InterContinental uh operation I've got one more um Insight on the expectation I wanted to just get a really rough economic forecast if you will um and so the survey shook out from respondents 11 expected a down or flat year on Revenue uh however 56 percent are worried about a recession and soft demand so said differently um a very small segment of the survey thought they'd have a bad year and everybody else said they were growing yet more than half said recession or soft demand which seems to be counter-intuitive so I'm not sure if old Coast CEOs are optimists uh or Risk Takers or if they answer that saying you know what I'm gonna buy some more Revenue this year and my whole portfolio will inevitably grow and I can outpace a recession where I can outpace um soft demand uh with all the talk about interest rates and cost of capital it was the lowest rated concern on the radar for hold Coast CEOs again maybe we're all just uh risk taking Daredevils um or maybe the one percent um gyration really is um not that critical in the grand scheme of things it's hard to tell but uh soft Outlook economically uh paired with a non-concern for interest rates and expected Revenue growth is kind of the summary for the economic forecast do you think the lack of interest rate concern is because if you're a holds Co recognizing that a lot of these respondents are holds co-aspirants uh not not actual hold codes uh is that versus a lot of my guests who have one business in SBA loan and you know they're debt to the debt ratio is is you know it's a much tight it's a much tighter it's a tighter tolerance there if you're a holds code you got 10 million 20 million 50 million dollars of Revenue uh you know you just got more cash to play with so it's not gonna asphyxiate you if the if the interest rates have in theory if you're a whole good that's five years in and you've bought one company every year you are slowly delevering diversifying and de-risking and yes interest rates are a real cost of doing business but as time goes on and your balance sheet gets better they have potentially less of an impact on your operation excellent Kelsey were there any more or was that it I wanted to ask you a couple closing questions we can move on to the closing questions there is um a lot to go read in the report uh if anybody wants to get all the nitty-gritty details go download it but those are the things I wanted to uh to share today and give us the URL again yeah it's uh hold Co survey.com h-o-l-d-co survey.com great Kelsey just so last year's hold code conf was the inaugural uh conference the second annual is is coming up when uh September 18th 19th and 20th in Cleveland Ohio great so in about six weeks in Cleveland um just uh what were some of your takeaways from that first event last year just give us a picture for those of us who are not there yeah um I think John and I set out to have fun and not lose money and we were successful at both of those Endeavors so we're proud about that and uh happy to do it again um we really wanted to build an event that um was a lot of fun and and very valuable that really built relationships and didn't just have people sitting in a hotel Ballroom for for hours on end so we use a non-traditional venue um we invest a lot and kind of food and drinking experiences and activities and the lessons we learned from last year is that we could build a little more structure around that so last year we had a bunch of uh Keynotes and some small uh group discussions this year we're changing up that format to really build some better interaction and problem solving amongst old codes that happened informally last year but one of the few pieces of critical feedback we got and I tried to get as much as I could um thankfully everybody enjoyed their time last year um a few pieces of critical feedback was a better structure um problem solving and so this year we're going to try to orchestrate um uh some intentional connections and intentional topics they bubbled up organically but in two and a half days with 100 plus people to meet um I think some intentionality around uh helping people solve the top issues on their mind uh will increase the value add and the productivity of the time people spend together this year and so we're excited about that you know Kelsey one of the the things that we haven't talked about I'm not sure it was in the survey or not but is um I I wonder what the the temperature among holdco operators entrepreneurs is for dealflow itself for access to more opportunities is that is that something you have any sense of it's a great question we had deal flow questions in the survey and I don't remember if we talked about that in particular um that might be a good one to add for next year um our sponsor for the survey this year was axial it was our headlining sponsor for the conference last year they're obviously a deal sourcing uh platform uh there's a recording they we have on our YouTube channel from there's talk last year that talked about some really macro data that's kind of interesting if anybody hasn't seen that and you want to know the deal flow dynamics that was interesting obviously that's from the vendor perspective uh not from the operator perspective and speaking of axial and kind of something you said at the top when talking about the Gap that whole code comp fills uh how many private Equity types are there I would say it's less than 20 percent would be a traditional um fund model based uh private Equity I think all of us call ourselves investors all of us call ourselves quote unquote micro private Equity I have a hold Co um in the hold Coast survey which again survey respondents might be indicative of the conference but not 100 the same uh in the survey uh many of the survey respondents were self-funded did not have outside Capital so I think it hold code conf this year I'm hoping that 20 of our attendees have committed Capital that's a fund or syndication um that are attending tell us the dates again Kelsey the URL and then I think you got a code for the audience uh I do so uh hold code comp h-o-l-d-c-o-c-o-n-f.com is the website September 18th through 20th in Cleveland and uh for listeners of acquiring Minds you can use m-i-n-d-s Minds uh off a ticket uh for a special discount on your ticket purchase and can you tell us what that discount is going to be uh we will do 600 off a single ticket and we need to make a second code of two tickets so just email in if you need help with that it's events at holdcoconf.com but single tickets are all inclusive with hotel and everything and uh it's 600 off of the website price with m inds excellent thank you for uh for offering that to to us Kelsey and if people want to get in touch with you personally what's the best way I'm easily found on Twitter my email is easily guessed and on LinkedIn as well uh and if it's anything about the conference you can just email in uh to events at oldcoachoff.com uh people have been pinging me about the conference and I've been very politely shuffling them over to the events team um thankfully we have some good help there this year and I'm excited about that Kelsey lyric thank you very much for coming on a really interesting look into inside this uh this whole coat phenomenon great again congratulations on a great idea to kind of be the survey around this space I love it appreciate that so much thank you for having me and I appreciate being here 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