Matt Huggins welcome to acquiring minds thank you glad to be here Matt back at the beginning of your career you were on track to earn a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford that sentence just kept getting more impressive you didn't pursue that path though and instead got into small business today you own a hold Co with a projected 20 million dollars in annual revenue in growing we're going to connect those dots in this interview before I ask you for your background Matt give people a picture of how the story ends so what does peak group companies look like today yeah I'm glad for the last bit of clarification uh I don't know where it ends honestly but I can tell you where we are now and that's we're um like you said a hold Co I've got two brothers who are Partners in the the parent company and we own a set of of companies that are mostly focused on the in the Water Business um water infrastructure water equipment operations related to um uh you know Municipal Water Systems industrial treatment all kinds of water related stuff so we've got we operate in I think uh I think we're up to Six States now and um we have 50 something employees 55 56 somewhere in that range um we have two semi-unrelated businesses that uh that came to us via uh buying out our father and then um building uh uh starting to build a small manufacturing business connected to to what he does um so like you said we're projecting 20 million dollars in Revenue um it's a pretty diverse uh set of work that we do in a couple pretty concentrated uh types of customers so great that's great Matt thank you for that so let's get some background on you going back to uh your your days as a potential professional academic uh let's start there what what why did you step off that track yeah it's a good question um I mean I got on that track somewhat accidentally you know I graduated from undergraduate uh I went into undergraduate not knowing what I wanted to do I chased the uh pre-med track for a while and then I shifted over to some engineering and ended up kind of getting into a Groove in the chemistry Department doing some research and enjoying that work and when I graduated uh with a bachelor's degree I had no idea what I wanted to do hadn't thought about what work looks like and uh I like school I'm in a Groove let's continue with that I could be see myself being a chemistry professor for example um but as I thought about grad school you know I realized I know very little about how my brain worked or anyone else's brain and I thought that'd be an interesting thing to study and so I applied to a Neuroscience PhD program at Stanford and uh they let me in and my intent going in there was to to get a really you know valuable degree and um turn that into a tenure track uh doing lab research but being there I met a ton of cool people I had a great time um the science was everything that I expected it to be but I was meeting with these professors and watching career trajectories um you know from the very beginning of them imagining myself on one and it just there were a lot of things about that world that didn't uh appeal to me um I did a rotation with a a PhD or a professor who um who who did everything right had a really great career was respected had a um and he was at the tail end of that and when I talked to him about his research and where it started the things he studied and where it ended and how he had put 40 something years into it you know the needle hadn't moved very far he had spent a ton of time and a ton of money and a ton of energy and he was rightly proud of the progress he made but at the same time it wasn't uh it was it was incremental and that really was eye-opening for me um and then I also realized that by Matt by incremental you mean an academic or a professional scientist wants to discover and kind of add to the Corpus of scientific knowledge and after 40 Years of straining he just kind of added just kind of a Teensy bit nothing that really moved the needle that that's what you mean that's what I mean yeah we knew more things uh as a scientific Community about how these particular uh cellular Neuroscience or neuronal processes were working but um but what I don't know if it's hard we didn't figure how the brain worked in 40 years right yep so um anyway and so I also realized that when you leave grad school with a PhD you end up in a postdoc program somewhere who knows where it's wherever is hiring and then after that you end up chasing a job somewhere or going out to the job market and whatever departments have openings that year are the ones that are available to you so um you know the outdoors are important to me my family is important to me I have some hobbies that I've always been pretty keen on and the idea of getting a tenure track position in um at the University of Kansas was also you know known not to disparage the University of Kansas but it's not where I wanted to live and the control of that was something that um you just don't have in academics where you end up yeah great makes sense makes sense so so if you're not going to go down that track what you look around and what turns you on at that point right that's the question and I I knew I was uh I knew enough about living in California now to know I didn't want to live there permanently either I grew up in the mountains I grew up in Utah um and wanted to get back to the mountains um my dad had a small business uh it's a Distribution Company uh that's focused on uh process electric heating equipment and that's what he did as I grew up so I watched a small business uh from that perspective and while he wasn't hiring or really interested in growing his company he gave me a he said sure let's try this you can you can pop back here to Utah and we can see if we can gain some traction um and so that's uh because it was available because it was where I wanted to go um and it seemed like it could develop into something that that's what I ended up shifting to so end up back in Salt Lake City and um I didn't know anything about business I didn't know you know I was supposed to sell and grow this business he had been doing it for decades and hadn't grown it didn't want to grow it it provided the living he wanted um and I struggled to figure it out um really you know I I tried outside sales you know going knocking on doors cold calling you know this was in the early 2000s so email was a thing but it wasn't you know the the digital marketing uh it was not a thing um you know I from scratch kind of built our first websites using HTML and CSS and stuff I don't really know how to do but that's the state we were in um and it just like I said never gained traction um but while I was doing that uh I kind of stumbled into a poker game with some old high school friends and they were telling you know I'm not a poker player I've never put a dime in a slot machine I really dislike casinos um but it is fun to play poker with my friends and um some of them were talking about uh internet poker being a thing and uh I thought oh that might be a way for me to learn how to be better and so I could perform better in these uh just weird social poker games we were having around Salt Lake um and that became really interesting uh once I got into it I started reading about it and getting into online uh forums and um within you and everybody else Matt this was during uh online poker's heyday that's right I was playing on poker stars and Full Tilt and uh ultimate bet and all these that people have heard about from usually uh not a very good perspective in hindsight but um played a lot and I ended up playing millions of hands um I developed a style where I was playing 20 games at a time and um it I I have small edges uh and and I could just play hour after hour and make a really good hourly living doing that I did that for about five years um and it resulted in enough income for uh my wife and I we had our first daughter um our first child our daughter and we I wanted to move to Montana to go fishing and thought that jived real well with my poker career and so we moved to Montana um and at that point you started to see the writing on the wall with the poker online poker industry wasn't going to stay the same the the skill level was was really coming up in uh people were learning how to play it they had a lot of software tools to do it and so my style of playing a huge number of hands with small edges just making good sound fundamental decisions but not really exploiting uh people started to not work as well and uh there was a law passed I believe is in 2006 maybe it was a little later than that the timing is it fresh on my mind but I saw the writing on the wall and started to look around for for the next phase and um start to look at small businesses Matt before we get off poker uh how much does being a professional poker player uh professional online poker player playing 20 hands at a time millions of hands for five years how much does one earn doing that give us give us some dollars here just so we know are you barely getting by are you at you know are you uh you know a millionaire not a millionaire but um you know we would I would work it out in in dollars per hour on average um I would track expected dollars per hour hour looking back at hand histories and then and then realized and you know it started out in the hundreds of dollars an hour you know like a maybe what a low end attorney might make you know four to five six hundred dollars an hour um and over time like I said is the is it got harder to put money into it and as it got um uh the the quality of play increased the number of people who were were um were professionals and were earning money out of these as that percentage increase it really declined quickly over those years so I'd say by the time I left uh or decided to quit I was probably not making much over a hundred dollars an hour um but had started you know many times that okay well so you moved to Montana drawn by the fly fishing um your wife's amenable to that and you have a child and you start to look around at small businesses as an opportunity uh why was that just your kind of default position because uh you'd already worked a little bit with your father and you you'd seen him grow growing up have a small business why why small back to small business yeah that's a good question it just seemed natural to me it's what I looked at um I never applied for a job in Montana uh I did apply for a job when things weren't really developing with my dad's business kind of in that when I was figuring out poker um I thought well maybe maybe I could get a job um and so I applied for one job and it was a place called Myriad genetics in Salt Lake they're adjacent to the University of Utah and I sent him my resume and they called me in for an interview and I met some people who were really happy with the work they did it was a really great environment um I really thought well maybe I could get into this uh you know I was the research I'd done was electrophysiology and they had the state of the art in that equipment and they had this program where you work for us for four days and then you get to do your own science on Fridays and um anyway I was kind of getting excited about it and interested in it but then when they made a job offer and I saw the you know just just how little earning potential there was relative to what I you know wanted to earn uh really was deflating and that was the last time I thought about getting a job so I think to answer your question about why I looked at business um is I just valued my time and my hobbies and I had also economic uh I guess aspirations and and getting a job didn't didn't really wasn't conducive to either one of those great makes make sense so so when you start looking around at small business in Montana do you imagine yourself buying a business is that something that's even on your radar the the possibility of doing that or are you thinking you're going to start something it was to buy a business right from the beginning was the idea um you know I I tinkered with some friends talked about ideas we could start businesses but um I was never really convinced that I had uh the background or that was the right path for me I I actually met a friend uh pretty early on when I was in Bozeman and he had a similar mindset and had bought a couple rental properties and he and I would elk hunt together and things and talk about you know how can we buy a business that will be passive enough that we can just do this all the time right um and so that was the kind of framework was let's let's go buy a business that doesn't that's got flexibility that that you know provides more Economic Opportunity than than a job and and see if we can make it you know kind of a lifestyle or semi-passive type business um and so he and I together looked at several businesses the first one we even made an offer on this business it was a cigar kind of a route business it had these um vending uh little uh humidors that would sit on the counter at convenience stores and Fishing lodges and places like that and you would the the owner would stock them with these uh proprietary cigar Blends that he would bring in and and then you would just do a route and take an inventory and and charge the uh you know the gas station or whatever um that seemed like a pretty pretty approachable pretty low-key opportunity and uh we weren't able to make a deal with him but we did make an offer on that and um uh saw you know that was the style of business that we were really mostly looking for um we were introduced I I met a broker uh business broker someone who was very early and you know he was barely a business broker um and uh I met him through my accountant and just let him know what we were doing and looking for and randomly or out of the blue kind of uh some months later he called and said hey I've got this listing that I just became aware of it's a it's a it's a utility company it's near Big Sky Montana in a ski resort town uh which is was about an hour from my house um and that ended up being the first you know business that we bought um I got with my partner at that time or the guy that I just described Kevin was his name and um we looked at it and didn't buy it the right way but we bought it and um that got kind of got us started on this path so tell us about this business a a utility company in a ski town give us some numbers and then fill in what this what the business the services it actually provides yeah yeah these are really unusual businesses actually um I didn't know it at the time that they were as unusual as they are but uh so the listing included um a commercial building it included some uh heavy equipment you know a backhoe and a grader and stuff like that it included a uh I forget the terminology for it but it was a cable company essentially it was it's really one services to one condominium complex there's 215 condos I think is the number 216 in this development and the developer had set it up as he built out the condos for him to own the water and wastewater and cable utilities to all the the residents all the all the condos and so in the condo docks he said you have to buy cable for me and you have to buy water for me and you have to buy sewer you know this is a separate business not just part of being in the HOA um and so the developer was selling off these he had finished developing the development um and uh was selling that so we provided cable service we provided uh yeah Water and Wastewater um and the thing that's unusual about these businesses is that um they're kind of capped on the upside and kind of uh protected on the downside uh there is a it's a it's a regulated uh entity it's it's a it's a monopoly obviously when you're sure your water pipes come from one one company you you don't have choice you can't just put in a new pipe right and buy water from someone else and so in order to protect residents uh and you and owners customers there's a Public Service Commission in Montana and they are there to do two things to make sure that the utility companies that provide these types of services are uh are healthy and providing the right level of service and to make sure that the customers aren't being overcharged that the uh by nature of being a monopoly that the um that the utility companies don't just crank up the pricing and and gouge gouge the users so we have these regulated utilities and that was the water and sewer system cable is not regulated interestingly um you can put a satellite dish on your house or you can you know otherwise get uh that kind of content so we had regulated unregulated and then these um you know just kind of traditional assets some real estate and equipment um you asked for numbers I think the total we paid for the this I think the listing price was uh 1.6 million dollars and I think that um uh you know there wasn't a whole lot of negotiation beyond that it was I'd have to go dig up the details but but we ended up right in that neighborhood and what is what what is sales and profits look like in business that that's that the whole the entire business is just servicing 200 and 200 plus condo units right um I have to go back I don't remember the cable company very well you know um kind of just maybe just the beginning to answer that question when we looked at this we we ended up dividing the business into a reg buying these assets into multiple entities and we set up one to hold just the regulated assets because the way you have to run books for these insta you know types of companies and Report um I I remember that business better it's the one we continue to operate uh the the regulated utility the cable company got compartmentalized uh we ended up in a lawsuit with the HOA uh uh Owners Association um and it it pretty rapidly disappeared as a as a business um and then the real estate we ended up handling it just like you know commercial real estate we rented to a property manager uh we sold off the equipment so I don't remember all the economics of those things but the economics of the regulated utility um you know the the way that the it's based on rates that are approved by the Public Service Commission and the formula to determine those rates is is basically what is the cost of the infrastructure what does it cost to deliver Services what is a reasonable rate of return on that the equity invested and per the state um they believe that uh you know eight to ten percent is a reasonable rate of return uh on that could be invested and you show them what it costs to operate the utility and how much money you have invested uh and then they there's a more or less a formula it's a little it's not nearly as functional as that made it sound there's a lot of politics involved um and there it's it's a retroactive uh situation um where you go ask them for rates based on last year's expenses operating expenses they set your rates and they don't guarantee you that you're going to get the return that they've that's been incorporated into the calculation they just you now have an opportunity to to realize that return and if things happen in that next year infrastructure breaks or um whatever happens the uh you don't get to go back and and true up your return you then just have to go file another case and um ask for the rates to be adjusted again and for a small utility like this you know our Revenue at the very outset was about 200 000 a year um and that uh was what's termed the revenue requirement that was calculated uh through this this process um so Matt so the um this this business what did you like about it because what I'm hearing is so so it's nice to have a regulated business where the government wants to see you continue to provide services so it's kind of like there's there's kind of a backstop in the government who doesn't want to you know see you fail so you're not going to go to zero in theory in theory yeah but then there's the cap the ceiling on the potential so it's kind of this banded this kind of this banded um return or or opportunity uh which is maybe fine maybe that's what you wanted you were looking for a lifestyle so you could go elk hunting but then it sounds like the the cable piece was outside of that um and that didn't go well and then you've got commercial real estate so I guess I would say it seems like a pretty complicated deal for your first and very small now I don't know what your expectations were if you just wanted a lifestyle business so you could hunt all day maybe you you know you weren't hungry to go out there and buy the you know buy as much business as you could um so maybe respond to that why did you like this business I I feel like you know cigar vending routes uh seems a lot more appealing than this yeah I agree I um I don't know uh it you know we were naive uh we thought that we thought that this would be passive that this would be basically an annuity you know the pipes are connected to houses the the the systems operate on their own they don't need a lot of a lot of input and you know you send people a bill and they pay it and and you go fishing and it felt like that's or we naively thought that that's what we were buying um and we hired an engineer to help us look at the uh you know the the condition and performance of the the assets the the systems in the ground that deliver water and handle the Wastewater and you know we had some accountants and advisors that we thought would help us handle the uh rate case side of things the Public Service Commission process I just talked about and we thought we had a team put together that we could just buy this and and then forget about it and just collect the checks um that wasn't the case uh it was hard and like you said it was complicated we ended up um in lawsuits we ended I think we had one of the longest if not the longest rate case in the history of Montana in front of the Public Service Commission I've not checked that in detail but our we had an attorney who his whole career was Prosecuting these rate cases and and that was what he claimed was that this was the longest one you know in his 30-something year career and probably ever um so it was not at all passive it was definitely complicated and um we just weren't smart enough uh to see it going in that that's how it was going to be yeah well let's Linger on it for a second Matt because because a lot of people listening to this will have yet to have bought their first business and so you've gone on to now buy multiple others and um you know you you look back at this as your young naive self but but uh a lot of people will have yet to pass through that themselves so so I want to hear kind of what it was like so you had like like emotionally um so it ends up being this mess you'd you'd come off of five years of self-employment you know on online poker you've got a young family um like are you freaking out uh or is it okay what what is the adjustment to Life as a small business owner feeling like because it's quite a departure from sitting behind your you know your computer screen playing 20 hands of poker yeah I guess so um especially when you frame it that way uh you know my memory of it and you know it's been 15 years now uh so my memory of it is that it was really uh alarming and that we had uh plenty of concerns about where this was going to go but it just the stuff needed to be done and we did it uh you know we uh refinanced this through um we found a local Banker we went to several Bankers we talked to Banks about you know we were Vaguely Familiar with the SBA um and we were able to find a local a small bank with a bank president that would talk to us and that under was willing to understand the PSC aspect of it and the ability to change the rates uh when um when things don't go well and and and we just got a conventional uh relatively conventional commercial loan but it did require a personal guarantee um so we had that um pressure and there's really no turning back it was just you know what do we need to do next um we you know emotionally you ask I I don't I don't direct access to that I don't remember I I do know it was stressful and that it was time consuming and it was not at all what we signed up for uh okay all right did you did you go out and hunt and did you have any of that extra time that you had been hoping for or no was that all consumed by you know lawsuits and HOA negotiations yeah yeah we were we were juggling at all um you know we're kind of jumping ahead on part of that story but we ended up having to rebuild a whole large portion of our wastewater treatment system uh early on we were out of compliance with the environmental regulations uh relatively soon after we took ownership and that led to a down a pro a path that ended up in us doing a construction project and because we were unable to find the right the type of people the support we needed we ended up doing it ourselves and I have a distinct memory you know I called one of my friends or my my partner Kevin I shot an elk I was in the back country um and he was at that construction project we were working on it together and I would leave and say okay I'm gonna go hunt the afternoon and I would you know backpack in somewhere and hunt and then uh run back out you know a couple days later and then you know he would go off and do something and uh so we were juggling all of those things uh and I I you know had to pull him off the job to help me haul meet out of the back country at one point and um you know another just brief story some of uh my wife and I have a really good couple really good friends um and we met them when our kids were at daycare and I think that the first connection was when I stumbled into daycare to pick my daughter up out of there um you know in in camouflage and uh you know face paint and smelling like four days into Back Country um and so I was picking her up from daycare and running her home and then you know dealing with these lawsuits in the evening and so yes juggling at all well I I've heard um a lot of stories a lot of my guests talk about juggling at all but never juggling going four four days into the back country to to go hunting and wearing camo and face paint that's that's pretty intense um but I guess that was your passion and that's actually kind of the life that was a big part of a big part of your whole story in fact I because I know from our pre-call is that being an Outdoorsman is a huge thing for you I mean it's it's uh it's really you've in fact as successful as you've been in this holtco in this business these last 20 years um or 15. it's really all been to enable an Outdoorsman's lifestyle Fair um I would add to that uh family lifestyle you know my the daughter I was just describing she's a freshman just finished her freshman year in college and um you know our son is is about halfway through high school and it's also been able you know to enable flexibility and time and and time with kids and um and all that early on the the outdoors activities you know I had an obsession with rock climbing for years and um you know just a sequence of obsessions of uh that have that that tone and my kids became one of those obsessions as well and uh so that was a big deal through the middle years obviously yeah okay well let's let's um Move Along here so so you were telling us about the construction uh project and is this is this the one where you start a business because you can't find local service providers who do it well enough let's let's um go move through here a little bit yeah yeah I think that's important because that's really the the jumping off point is we found ourselves owning this thing uh this this company this utility and everything was going wrong we were in in court we were in uh violation and we thought we could you know prior to the transaction we thought we'd just hire people to do to solve these problems for us right they're engineers and construction companies and utility services and uh people who would just help us um we could hire them and it turned out that that wasn't the case there are people you could hire but they wouldn't they were unable or unwilling to do uh what we needed or wanted done um and so it was we just figured it out ourselves we went to the uh the the environmental regulation folk and got certified as public water system operators and public Wastewater system operators you need to have a credential to serve to operate a water system that serves the public right we couldn't find anyone with one of those that would work with us in a reasonable way so we went and got our own credential um the financial folks that said they could help us prosecute a rate case at the Public Service Commission uh when push came to shove they didn't know how to do it um There are rules about the way you calculate these rates and um someone in this accounting firm had had heard about this and claimed yeah I can do that and turns out they couldn't so we had to do that ourselves and um it was just a sequence of things like that um as I mentioned we ended up hiring a friend engineer uh he designed a wastewater treatment plant replacement because we the core of our wastewater treatment plant failed um it kind of been covered up in the transaction uh the previous owner had made it look like it was in better condition than it was and shortly after we got a hold of it that became evident so we had to go get more money and we had to learn how to do a construction project um so anyway long story short uh we were we learned a lot of things really fast and we re recognized that there were other people who were in similar situations you know every HOA that's in the county you're not connected to a city has a water system or a Wastewater system and the ski resorts have water and wastewater systems and there's lots of these weird little uh uh Community or public utility uh systems that that are being poorly served and so we met a few people who were connected to that and set up a company to do uh you know provide services to those those folks um another important Point here is uh the the design of the wastewater treatment plant upgrade uh involved equipment that was proprietary right you have to buy this same stuff uh or you need to buy it from a dealer who's granted a territory and that dealer handled that transaction in a way that we really didn't like it wasn't really focused on uh delivering value to us it was focused on extracting value is what it felt like and it really rubbed us wrong um and as we set up this business to provide services to these other utilities we thought well we could probably provide equipment to them as well and so we went searching for manufacturers and for competitors to this proprietary technology um that we had purchased and in that process um word kind of got around you know uh it's not a very big industry in Montana and some of the engineers you know talk and the owner of the business that we had bought equipment from that we were kind of setting up to compete with became aware that we were you know doing what we were doing in terms of field services as well as talking to these manufacturers he called me up one day and said you know rather than set up to compete um I'm pretty ready to retire why don't uh why don't you come in here and we can talk about you buying buying my business which was not something we had been thinking about but um as as he said it it was something we were clearly interested in and um so that ended up being our second acquisition um we went in and then talked to Steve and um worked out a deal so let me let me pause you there so at this point we've got a the initial acquisition uh which was waste water and cable uh a cable system serving this one condo Community all together then you divide those into two businesses you've got a water Waste Water System servicing business which you've started now because the own the servicers that you try to engage to help you were crappy so you said that's right you looked at the market and said we we can do well you I mean you basically had to solve your own problem and then you said let's make this a service that we offered others so that's that's a third business when you started from scratch then you have a similarly bad experience in trying to acquire equipment related to the water treatment and decide we're gonna we're gonna start this business too word gets out in in the dealer who gave you the bad service said hey just buy me I want to retire anyway so now you've got an acquisition one you've started from three Acquisitions one you started from scratch um and all of this in the span of what how long after um not buying the cigar vending business is this right so 2008 was when we closed on the utility system uh the the private utility and 2010 is when we uh close the deal to buy the equipment manufacturer so okay yeah two years of uh that we've just covered yeah so so zero to hold Co in two years now I know I'm joking because it probably doesn't feel like a very powerful impressive holds code yet um but technically but technically there there you are with a handful of businesses and honestly none of this was premeditated it was opportunistic you know things would fall into our lap and we would say how do we you know what makes sense here you know Steve called and said what do you want to do uh are you interested in buying me out and I thought you know what's the Worst That Could Happen my initial thought wasn't this was what I was waiting for this is my break we're gonna get this guy's business it was yeah I'll put on my best hoodie and go see what he has to say right uh try to act professional and you know the terms he laid out it just you know we were like yeah maybe maybe not um but anyway it was just a sequence of kind of accent accidents and these just decisions that would have present and we would make what we thought was the best and it resulted in more complexity over and over yeah that is kind of how this happened you know and Matt that's a great point and kind of a theme I wanted to um get to eventually so let's just get to it now yeah a lot of um a lot of people listening will have grand plans and there's certainly nothing wrong with that I don't that's not where I'm going here but it is striking to see somebody else's career who ended up in a really great position and you're not you like as you said your story isn't ending you're only halfway through or whatever you're very much in the middle of it yeah um so you still got a long way to go um but sort of um by accident uh and or or you know not by accident but not without some grand plan or map that you were following so it's I don't know if there's anything if you want to respond to that or if there's anything more to say about it maybe it just is what it is but it's just interesting to contrast how you've built a holds code and a successful career and buying business is growing small businesses versus people who do it with a lot more intention yeah you know I've only recently stumbled into this whole uh Community you know your podcast the Twitter uh folks that that are well known in this community and that's the striking difference uh you know I I'm I'm excited to have access to that and see how these people have done it and it's prompted a lot of ideas for me in terms of the next chapters and people we could work with Etc but it is unrecognizable to the person I was then um is not very little uh in common you know another example of this is um you know we took ownership of the equipment sales company it had a territory of just some counties in Central Montana and a couple lines it had really two manufactured relationships and our intent when we bought it was um unclear we're just like okay this kind of works let's see what happens we had a friend who had just jumped out to North Dakota to do some construction work um the the Bakken oil field in Western North Dakota that people might have heard of had boomed and infrastructure was going in like crazy and so I remember might as well try this yeah jumped in my pickup truck got my 20 degree below zero sleeping bag to sleep in the back of it because there were no hotels there was nowhere to stay out there it was just the wild west and went for a drive and started talking to people um about you know what are you doing with your employees where are you going to house them and they started building man camps but then they needed to serve water you know drinking water and they needed to treat the Wastewater and um anyway so just another opportunistic thing you know we just jumped out there and people were just happy to to hire anyone who would show up to do the work um that led us to have to hire our first employees right and um in hindsight it was I our first employee we hired because we thought he wouldn't be too demanding on us as bosses he wouldn't have too high of an expectation of what the company would would uh would want from him uh he said we and he's really really going for a players there Matt oh man it and it ended predictably right it was fine for a minute he filled a hole and then he quickly outgrew it outgrew him and um he was a nice guy and ended up having to let him go in a really awkward conversation and um anyway uh just as an example of the accident is we were so reluctant to do things like that and wanted to do it in the least demanding way on us right it was it was a very um I don't know it's just a different mindset than where I'm at now yeah well um you know to to just I I think things to tease out from this the first is there's a concept in the world of tech where a mark injuries in the famous venture capitalist I promise this is going somewhere the famous the famous venture capitalist Mark Andreessen as an investor you've got a potential venture to invest in would you prefer an incredible Market or would you prefer an incredible entrepreneur um and he answers incredible Market because an incredible Market where the demand is just so strong pulls out of the team of the entrepreneur um you know pull it pulls it out of them it pulls their talent out it pulls their their hunger out and um it's just I've always that's always stuck with me and it feels like a little bit uh what you guys were experiencing in Montana and North Dakota where the service provide well North Dakota is just exploding with man camp so that's just a supply demand situation sounds like a little bit in Montana they're just the service the service provider is there just I don't I don't I don't want to stereotype but maybe it's just a little sleepier a smaller population not as demanding and so it was just there was just there was just a lot of you know you're the market is pulling out of you uh yeah more than you actually intended to give it because it just needs it needs this from you there's a hunger there the market is kind of like hunger hungry for you so that that's kind of interesting the other observation Matt is we should give you credit for you take initiative like when opportunity strikes you do go after it so so You know despite the fact that this is quote accidental like not everybody chooses to start up a a service business because the current market is so you know so disappointing in its offerings not everybody chooses to like you know throw their 20 below sleeping bag in the back of a pickup truck and drive to North Dakota to see what's what you know so so you you guys are um interested in opportunity and take the initiative to to strike when it's there that that differentiates you from others in the market so it's not all by accident that you're sitting here today sure fair enough but it did it did feel that way um and they weren't all wholehearted jump ins it's like well you know we got to do one thing or the other here let's let's do this one uh because it seems a little bit better okay all right okay so you're doing you're you're you're part of the you're so so sorry what was the business that resulted from the North Dakota what's going on in North Dakota oil yeah we expanded the equipment we were selling uh we went to these man camp operators or uh Constructors and developers and we said basically we'll do anything you want uh with related relation to these things we sold equipment we helped design equipment systems we installed it um and then people wanted then there was no one to operate it and so we started to hire operators and we set up a shop there and um and built a uh I guess our first Branch remote branch in Williston North Dakota to operate these systems um but really the answer yeah they needed a whole bunch of things done and we knew we could figure it out it's not that we were experts or we had done it 100 times or we had a business model that said this makes sense it was yeah we can figure it out and here's what that's going to cost to make it worth our while and uh so it enabled us to really learn on the Fly um how to do this this thing yeah so okay well so bring us up bring us up a little bit to to where things kind of settle out a good kind of yeah to take the Pulse of of where your hold cooperation is at a certain point yeah we start to grow um the the North Dakota Market uh started to fade um you know the price of oil dropped and uh the infrastructure caught up to the the population that was needed to support the oil field at the same time development around back home near Bozeman and Big Sky was was taking off um my partner at that time that I've mentioned a few times you know at that point he you know we had enough employees that I wanted to start providing things like benefits right and that was just uh a bridge too far for him it was too corporate as soon as I said we're going to provide a 401k he said yeah I'm out I need to um that's way too way too corporate for me uh in fact you know my memory of it is he sent me down he sat me down one day and said you know I'm at the point in a man's life where he needs uh you know an adventure in a hot Spanish-speaking country and so that got us started down uh a pretty short path to me buying him out and um becoming the sole owner of this group of companies um and so continue to grow those um fast forward a couple years ended up wanting to bring my brothers into this business I have two brothers one of them had been working in the business for a long time in the field doing operations and our other brother uh had been working for my dad came along to that same business I I started with a little bit and but at a time when it it worked a little bit better our dad was near retirement around 2020 uh the beginning of that we um completely restructured and actually set up a hold Co they'd all just been independent companies prior to this and so we set up a parent uh brought my brothers in his minority Partners we bought our dad out and combined this all into this uh this current structure and so now give us again a the kind of the cross section of the holds code what are the Holdings what are all the operating companies please yeah so the the the um the utility stuff we talked about is not in the whole coal I still own that still operate that but it's outside the Holt go it's got um that the partner I just mentioned buying out of our operating or our sales and service businesses he's still involved over there so that hap that's separate within our holding company we have an equipment sales company it's called Advanced pumping equipment um just uh last week it closed on the acquisition of one of our biggest competitors over the last 10 years we've just brought it in it was called Russell Industries we're going to continue to operate them separately but they're really one company and it provides equipment um uh Design Services as well as and then distribution um for really kind of technical engineered systems primarily uh and for a lot of the years we operated our Field Services Under that company just for Simplicity but a couple you know a year and a half ago the beginning of 22 we spun off everything we do in the field into a separate entity it's called Peak Water Services it um uh not only does contract operations this is just Perpetual contract certified operations to small utility owners whether those are cities or what have you but we also do some design build work uh we can you know we're we're building Wastewater plants with the intent to then become the operator um you know we don't we're not a construction company for the sake of constructing things but for clients that are people who we already work for who are building a new facility and that can turn into a long-term operating contract we'll build them a treatment plan for example um that company has uh five uh locations five shops uh Wyoming Idaho two in Montana one in Williston North Dakota that I mentioned and we're working to set one up in in Northern Utah so that's Peak Water Services um then we have um we started another company we haven't talked about yet but there's a niche type of construction uh rehabilitating manholes and lift stations and structures that are used in water and sewer utilities you can imagine a city street uh every three or four hundred feet has a manhole that gives a human access to a sewer line right and the concrete that those manholes that allow the access it it breaks down over time it gets leaky and the sewer gas is corroded and if you have to stop traffic and tear up the asphalt and dig up the Dig you know excavate out the old structure and put a new one in it's incredibly disruptive and expensive and so what we uh what what this company does Advanced lining is we go into those manholes and we uh prepare the inside surface tear down the corroded concrete and then we rebuild it back from the inside and uh basically uh yeah fortify these you know manhole structures we use the same process to line potable water tanks or sewer tank you know sewer treatment plant uh structures so that is one of the businesses we started that from scratch in 2019 I want to say and it's because we were trying to hire subcontractors who did that work as part of our uh Core Business and they were serving us poorly we couldn't get their attention they would show up not on time we would have warranty issues and we thought there it is again better the same the same pattern yeah yeah so that business is is coming along it's it's grown um it needs a lot of equipment it's pretty Capital intensive um and but we've grown to two full Crews you know each Cruise the core of a crew is uh is a quarter million dollar uh truck and then some other ancillary stuff and uh each one of those trucks can roughly deliver a little over a million dollars worth of of work in a year and so um you know we've been growing that slowly and and hope to continue to add Crews and and expand that over the years so those are the three kind of water businesses um we have this uh like I said the electrical process electrical equipment um things that he things uh for molding or for other industrial processes we don't heat spaces or people it's not HVAC it's uh it's process heat and we um we sell specialty equipment into that we do some of it over the Internet some of the direct sales um so that's one business it's called Gordo sales um and one of our manufacturers that we were a distributor for went out of business and we uh had customers who wanted that equipment and so we went to that manufacturer as they were shutting down during the coveted years and we bought the tooling and uh intellectual property from them just a a very small asset purchase and set up a very small Niche manufacturing business um and and that's the last one in in the in the current hold call well thank you for that that inventory of the businesses Matt my head is spinning so what I wanna what I want to ask is you went after opportunities as they presented themselves through the let's call it 2010s and then I think you said what 2019 to 2020 issue formalized into a holds Co and um and there's clearly this theme of Water Works um so so but not exclusively that at all so have you defined a like direction or a market thesis uh that you're gonna like any kind of more intentionality around where you're going and if the answer is no I don't I don't want to I don't want to bias the quite like if you don't have intention it seems to be that's fine like obviously I don't need to tell you that it seems to be working well to just have opportunities present themselves and then you you go after them but um I feel like it's some level of maturity of a business oftentimes there's just like you kind of reflect and you're like well what you know maybe we could do even better if we really defined where we want to go in the next 10 20 years have you are you doing that or is it all kind of still spontaneous for lack of a better word no I'd say we were doing that uh we're doing that have been doing that over the last couple years we're getting more intentional I think um you know over time and consistently you know this latest acquisition I mentioned things like that are are where we're headed the water industry is nice uh has a lot of nice attributes uh it's got multiple uncorrelated uh or low correlation customers like we can if we sell engineered pumps um we can sell those to municipalities who need them regardless of the economic conditions who need more of them when economic stimulus comes from the federal government it's a it's a interesting Dynamic of when they buy things we sell the same stuff to developers so when Land Development is booming and subdivisions are going into cities and people are jumping outside of cities and setting up whole new communities in the county on on Virgin land we can sell to those folks we sell the same pumps same type of treatment equipment to uh mines and to food processors and so we can be experts in this one area of equipment and we can access all of these different um I guess diverse economies I really like that aspect of it that's one of the things about the water industry that that we really like another thing we like about it is uh the operating you know the the skills required to operate for all of those operate this equipment and work on it are the same and so we can build an operating company that has that kind of diversity and resilience um and and tap into re recurring Revenue you know these are long-term contracts uh we've got customers that have been uh you know 10 years under contract and it renews and we update our pricing but we know their system um and it's required that they have an operator who has these certifications and it's a that's a really nice business so in my mind there's then infrastructure failure is old infrastructure is a trend uh that that a lot of us have read about um you know a lot of people talk about roads and water pipes but it applies to everything in these in these water and sewer systems and so that's I guess a thesis is that um it's a nice stable diverse uh industry that we serve and that it's going to be a growing need and it's hard to get into in that you need the certifications it's specialty stuff it's it's really difficult work um every system is different it's a unique industry that um we've learned how to do a lot of things in that um other people don't want to do or they're afraid of or there isn't enough of a narrow thing for someone to learn how to do it but just by virtue of how we got here we learned it along the way and now we're well positioned I think to um to continue to expand our footprint and expand the depth of services into the the markets we're in so I'm not sure that's a thesis statement yeah yeah and it you're no longer in all of these various uh these various business lines in businesses that you have you're not the utility provider your per your servicing the utility providers so you're the the the the the cap on pricing um no longer applies like I assume you're not looking to get go back there right just to be clear yeah okay that was our initial thought was we might do more of those things but we were cured of that early on and recognize that um yeah this is a much better business model to serve the same same clients or same systems Matt have you I think you said SBA at the beginning oh no you said a commercial It was a commercial loan uh through the through building this whole operation out that you now sit atop um have you taken outside Capital again do you have investors nope well no we're interested in that though I don't know investors I don't know how to raise Capital I've talked to a few people here and there um it's something that uh if I had capital I see opportunities that we might be able to uh take advantage of sooner or quicker but um but we haven't needed to um you know some of the things we haven't talked about along the way but we've acquired uh one-man operations a few times and these are people who built uh you know just little lifestyle businesses where they would sell and service a very narrow very narrow niche of equipment and they would get to retirement and there's nothing to sell you know they're the business and so but they have a reputation and they have an installation base and they have a relationship with a manufacturer that is has Brand recognition and so I've been able to find a few of those folks and get to know them and essentially acquire their businesses as they go into retirement without needing any Capital uh the the general structure that I'd like to use there is um we'll give you a percentage of the proceeds for the work that you you know this type of work in this territory where you've been and you can you know we'll do that for the next five years um but we're not gonna you know you don't have a business that can be purchased per se so we've grown that way um not needing Capital but just making these kinds of deals um so uh phenomenal we've been it's a great a great way to grow and let me ask actually about that because yeah I've heard you mentioned it now a number of times equipment sales and then um and then maybe servicing uh on the back end dealership so I don't uh this is such I'm sure this is like I'm asking um I'm sounding naive and how I'm asking about a very broad uh kind of category but dealerships like the business model of a dealership I I see sometimes I see searchers um interested in those businesses like a trailer dealer or a dealer for a part for a single type of brand like a John Deere not John Deere but something like that can you but I know so little about that are those are those good businesses uh what would you say to Searchers out there contemplating that type of that type of business dealership businesses I I think they're good businesses um I don't have a ton of context I haven't looked at the number of businesses you have or these Searchers have but um you know there's a number of people doing Roll-Ups private Equity Roll-Ups in this space you know if we just take pump distribution as as one example um you know when you need to pump water or Wastewater or something from here to there you can't just go buy a pump off the shelf it's got to be designed it's got to be selected impellers trimmed controls configured it's a it's a process and there's manufacturers that have been doing this for a hundred years and everyone knows their name you know some of them that we work with are Gorman Rupp and uh you know you know I'm trying to think if there's any that might have broad knowledge but um you know grundfos is one of the biggest in the world or maybe the biggest in the world these are just and and so but people in this industry know those names right and so when you get connected to a manufacturer and they Grant you exclusive territory rights to one of these lines it's not John Deere but it's got some of the same flavor right uh that there's an installation base there's hundreds of these pumps in the ground and when one breaks they call the dealer they call the guy whose name is on the website right um yeah and so it's it's nice that way they need parts um there are big ticket items you know you can sell a single pump for into the six figures often uh most of them are in you know over ten thousand dollars um and many over a hundred um so and even some into the seven figures they're really uh uh it's it's an interesting type of equipment and um so I think they're good businesses um but there's also a lot of competition and um you know people who you know right time right place at the right time salesmanship that needs to happen you know um yeah sometimes equipment will fail that's been obsoleted or no longer available and so whoever's in the guy's office who's responsible for fixing it you know most recently is is who gets the call so there's a there's a continual sales aspect to it but there's also this just continual feet of equipment um you know I did talk to someone who's doing one of these rollouts someone who had become somewhat of friends with I would say and he made a comment that these businesses just don't don't go out of business um you know they may not light the world on fire but they just are steady and they they're they're stable nice businesses um so they're boring no one's heard of them but they're good but they're good stuff yeah yeah well boring boring stable enduringly profitable businesses you're talking to the right the Right audience right now uh Matt I wanted to ask going again back to the big picture here so with your most recent acquisition you are likely to hit 12 million dollar run rate this year um what do do you have other um Revenue goals or predicted you know predicted Milestones that you'll reach in the next five and ten years I mean is this is this something that grows to 100 million dollars or or at least like you like it like you kind of like you could you could totally see getting there whether or not you want to it would be very difficult in our territory and the our ability to expand into other territories is going to be critical for how big we're going to get um right now we need to digest what we've recently done in terms of growth um you know we I think you know over the next 12 months we'll probably have 20 million dollars in Revenue um last year for the full year we were uh you know 12 and a half million um so that's a big increase we you know acquired this other company with with a new location and we were already thin to begin with you know you uh you commented earlier that um you know the as I described our Old Co that it's it's kind of messy kind of chaotic it's very different spread out and stuff and so we've got to get tighter and more efficient before we take the next level but uh take another uh step up I suppose but if we you know we do have aspirations you know our our Field Services Company um I would like to see it do you know let's call it 10 million dollars a year in contractual Revenue uh we'll do you know that much this year maybe um with that company but it's a lot of it's Project based and it feeds into these contracts that are smaller and I want to build that to have a base contract uh Revenue in that neighborhood and I think we can do that um we need to move into a couple areas we may need to I've met a lot of people in this business I've gone and visited a really nice operations company in Florida the owner of that company was willing to to share some information and talk about whether we could work together and man his business is one that I I would love to emulate um there's another one in in many in Montreal that uh is global and does these operations um uh a similar operations business and I learned some things from them talked about ways we might team up so in order to get to the level you're talking about you know um tens of millions or even more it would need to be in Partnership probably with one of these guys um but I don't need that you know we can we can make incremental progress we can you know take on a state at a time we can get deeper and we can find local partners I'm at a really uh a really great guy recently who runs a similar business a very small one in in Idaho and I could totally see uh figuring out ways to work with him and just grow organically around the edges like that find like-minded people and uh there's definitely a need for this work there's a declining base of certified operators in the country they're you know the old ones are retiring and the young ones aren't filling in and um I think that's going to present a bunch of opportunity what shape that takes for us um I'm open to a lot of things as you probably have gathered I uh when an opportunity gets presented I I'm pretty open to it and um and I imagine that'll continue to happen and as we get bigger and uh meet more people that opportunities won't slow down at least that's my hope yeah yeah well Matt if you are open or interested in talking to Capital Partners people who who would you know take equity and Infuse you with a good chunk of capital to go off and do something they're going to want to know your specific ideas for how that you will deploy their Capital um right so if you had somebody with you know big check writing capabilities saying I'd like to work with you Matt how how what are we going to do with this money what would what would your playbook be because buying you know one-off dealers who are retiring and you don't even it doesn't even require a capital outlay on your part ain't gonna get you there no no I mean the two two main things right now you know if so if you just said hey I'll give you a check um the two places where we could deploy capital is to build out our lining business faster you know buy more of these trucks and and set up new locations um right now we operate on one location in Northern Utah and but there's demand we're running from North Dakota to Washington to Colorado into Nevada um there's that business could grow with capital we would need to add management structure to it we've got some great people there really uh awesome team but they're not set up to scale like that and so we could deploy Capital there potentially with the right partner the other thing is to um is to acquire uh an operating business dad territory so there are these operations companies that that we know and are aware of in adjacent territories and I suspect some of those could be approached and purchased I don't know that but I think so no great uh Matt we're getting toward the end here um you had said you know you've discovered this world of SMB Twitter and this podcast and and you know people who are really interested in in building something like what you've built they are building them um they're talking about it a lot and that it was exciting to discover and prompted some ideas in you what being exposed to this this uh Community if you will of of people um kind of doing what you're doing trying to do what you've done uh what what has it how has it opened your mind how has it shifted your thinking what ideas has it prompted yeah so you know we just talked about uh the access to investors and for most of these years that would was something I never would be you know I knew people found investors and did things but it was just not something that was tangible now it feels tan like possible like I could meet the right people and we could do something so that's one another small one is we recently met and hired a fractional CFO I've got a really great team of people and one person in particular who um has been with me on this whole journey and we've just figured things out and she her name is Jen she has handled um a ton of operational stuff we've moved from QuickBooks we grew through QuickBooks for a lot of years and we switched over to a cloud Erp system a couple years ago and she drove that and um developing reporting systems but it's all been homegrown we never knew or had context for how other people did it what's best practice you know we can read books and try to imply you know Implement those but uh I didn't know what a fractional CFO was um read about it in some random uh internet uh Source I don't know whether know whether that was Twitter or one of these podcasts but we hired um you know scalable CFO a guy named Josh is working with us there and it's just it's so much um it's almost it's hard to pinpoint the value of it the work he does is valuable but there's also this uh this confidence that comes from having someone with that perspective looking over the shoulder saying yeah you're doing it okay this is fine this is best practice or this is you're not doing it wrong and that's been something that um that I think is is slowed us down over the uh you know maybe limited Us in some ways and um that I've gained access to the idea of it and then we've implemented it and uh we've just hired our first uh uh employee from Sri Lanka um we we have never done any digital marketing and we barely do it now but we have someone now a full-time employee who lives in um you know lives in Southeast Asia and and I think that's going to allow us to do some things uh you know gain some exposure you know things like that um and I you know there's others like that but I think you get the sense or get the the gist of what I'm after you know it's funny Matt because what it feels like is that here you are somebody who's who bought a business to start a small business and then you've built it into a holds Co um and and yet it sounds like there are a lot of characteristics to your business that are a little um under professionalized by your own kind of by your own description um and opportunities you haven't been taking advantage of digital marketing and so what's interesting is that those are the very things that Searchers listening to this are uh looking to bring to companies that they buy the you know bring the professionalization bring the digital marketing um and and you and yet you can do that within your own business even though you were uh you were somebody who who was a Searcher and bought a business at a time granted that was 15 years ago um but um yeah we just we just usually hear about people buying a business than doing this and it's cool that being exposed to the search Community is showing you how you can do that within your within your own business at hotel right we think about that a fair bit that we've been successful despite our lack of professionalization or um you know we've been able to get this far without doing it right and if we could actually figure out how to do it well and efficiently that there's a tremendous opportunity there so it's really the same thinking as a Searcher um it's just you know looking at ourselves rather than the old uh curmudgeon that the Searcher is buying from it's looking at ourselves saying look how how naive we used to be and how much better we can be precisely and Matt just to to close us out here you you know the incept the Inception of this of this career path that you found yourself on was hunting uh with your pal and and saying how can we how can we buy a business a passive business to be able to fill our days doing this um what does your day-to-day look like now I don't do as much of that but I get out plenty you know I've ridden my mountain bike or been on a trail run every day this week um I expect to go on a you know float a river with my kids and fly fish on Father's Day coming up um you know I work long days long weeks but um I use all the time as best I can and it's either outside doing something like that or or focused on these uh you know these businesses and and and trying to help the people in them you know we didn't touch on that at all but the people in these businesses and something that's been a big impact uh had a big impact on me personally and is a really cool thing that that these small businesses can do it's up to us you know when we want to build the business to to fit the people in it and to deliver value to them our employees um we get to do that and and that's that's uh that's a huge factor for me personally and it's informed a lot of these decisions that I've made where it's been you know what should we do it it's often informed by you know what's best for what I think will be best for uh the people who've who've been along for the ride and and who who make it all happen and so yeah I guess it's unfortunate we didn't touch on that I didn't think of it till now but that's something that I would uh emphasize for people who are getting into this is that small businesses are it's really about the people and um and if it doesn't speak to you to contribute to them and to understand them and to try to try to build something for them um I think that would be a a big handicap well let's let's give this a second Matt I'm really glad you brought it up because this is actually a recurring theme but only one that really has kind of emerged more recently but now maybe I'm just really looking out for it now that many people buy a business um not for reasons of necessarily impacting the employees that the whole other set of reasons it's not that they don't want to help their employees but it's just not top of the list it's not what they're focused on and then they get into the business and they find out um not only kind of the power they have to do that but how rewarding it is and in fact and can be the most rewarding not just you know the financial benefits of business ownership not just the the freedom benefits of financial ownership but the ability to impact so many people's lives so intimately so directly um I just keep hearing that so I'm really glad to have you call that out do you do you want to say any more to it or have you said your piece well let me ask you this you also didn't go into this way back in your you know elk hunting uh days uh to to do that how long did it take you to realize that that ownership of small business would allow you to impact people really directly your employees and that you really embraced that and and that and came to Value it when did that Evolution that maturation happen yeah it was definitely a discovery it wasn't something I expected or designed it's just that as we hired employees and they had situations come up um it was just my instinct and interest to do everything we could to help them through difficult situations right and it was rewarding it feels it feels good um it does good and um and it happens for a lot of people it happens more often than you think especially you get to dozens of people someone's always going through something and um yeah and a company can choose whether they want to uh help there or not and um and and it yeah I think maybe it's just a quirk of me and my partners and and the way it was but that that became uh you know something that that was critical and I think has contributed and it continues to be meaningful uh to me um and hopefully to people in the companies you know we don't always speak to everybody there's always someone disgruntled about something unfortunately and and that kind of hurts sometimes but um for the most part we're able to to contribute and um and it's a big deal um uh I think can you give me an example um well one of our businesses has quite a few people who have had legal problems in the past you know uh maybe they've done some time in in prison or jail and we've been able to to give them a second uh opportunity um we have one individual who's been with us a long time he has a he's a role player he's told us what he wanted to do he continues to do that and he had you know it's his story to tell I don't want to go into details but he had some really really difficult uh situations with his son and with um his family and um and uh yeah we've been able to to help there Matt if people want to reach out what what's the your preferred way that they do that um I guess probably Twitter for this audience it's just Matt underscore Huggins um is my handle there and uh I think I have my DMs open and you know I'm not active on Twitter but but I do monitor it and I'd love to expand that community and meet some people there so good deal Matt Huggins congratulations on a uh building a hold Cove for over 15 years somewhat accidentally but opportunistically uh really really interesting um story and um and I I guess I'd say an encouraging one because it shows how you can kind of start small and messy and not with no sense of grandiosity but uh but end up there if you kind of if you if you seize opportunities and kind of and and kind of you know keep your eyes and ears open uh for those opportunities so I I find it really pretty inspirational so thank you sir yup thank you I hope you enjoyed that 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