rafhael Quinn welcome to acquiring minds happy to be here will thanks for having me Raphael you've got a fascinating story both professionally and personally you're sitting in your office looking out over the Panama City skyline there so that's correct bit bit of a teaser we've had two pre- calls and there's so much to cover Beyond just your story as good as it is so a lot of philosophy and learnings that have come from your 12 13 14 year Adventure here so let's get right into it start us off please rapael with some background on you sure so my name is Rafael Quinn I grew up in Santa Cruz California uh went to school at UC San Diego studied economics you know growing up I was always interested in business I remember um I love trading cards but not only just the trading cards like the the baseball cards for the images and whatnot I loved tracking the stats on the back and I love most of all my Becket price guide so every month we'd get the Becket physical price guide and I could actually see they had little arrows going up and down on on on the baseball cards and that to me was like my mini stock market so my first business I ever did was actually renting tables at card shows I was probably about 11 12 13 years old my mom would drive me up to some you know kind of Hotel little Lobby room and they would have their tables out there and I would buy buy and sell my cards so so that to me was my first intro to business uh study economics Rafael we we are very close to the same age and um I remember those card shows I remember Becket monthly I remember tearing into those Becket monthlies enthusiastically to check the prices of my the Enterprise Value if you will of my collection of baseball cards against what the the current market value was so um just just a couple of kids in the 80s couple of aspiring business guys in the 0s Upper Deck came out with its baseball set the Ken Griffey uh Ken Griffey rookie card card number one of that year and uh that was just a defining moment in my life you know so I was always into that into investing um stock market studied economics and went to work in financial services I worked at fiser Investments they're a high net worth asset manager out of out of San Francisco and you know my mom is Panamanian so growing up I spent my entire childhood in the us but I would travel to Panama every year to visit my grandparents my uncles my cousins um and I always had this idea that this is where I wanted to end up living I was really you know I wanted my kids to grow up with a big family around them I knew that that's what I was looking for so at you know 25 26 years old uh I came down to Panama I interviewed for some jobs in Investment Banking and uh asset management and um and quit my job at fiser sold everything I remember listing everything on Craigslist and and made the move to Panama you know so at 25 26 and you been 2005 that was 2005 so I was probably had just turned 26 years old when I did the move and uh initially worked again in high net worth asset management but at a bank down here in Panama um within about two years that bank got bought by HSBC so there I had a at that moment that was a major liquidity event in my life I look back on it it wasn't that major but to me it was it was interesting I had some stock in the bank they had had some Employee Stock plans especially for people in the Investment Group so I received some cash there and um and you know back then that was like 2007 2008 Panama was just booming we were going through just this massive real estate construction boom there was a moment in time when the country ran out of concrete they could not produce enough concrete to build all the apartment buildings they were building you would look around the skyline and you just see those huge cranes for putting up all the SK all the all the high-rises all over the place um and it was it was a moment where if you were into investing there were a lot of opportunities you know from buying pre-sale apartments and then flipping them as they would go up in value there was just a lot of speculation in the market and and I did that for a couple years after I left the bank once the bank was bought I just kind of invested my money um and would put together their deals with investors in different projects here um well I I I kind of actually remember that time as well I I I may have been that may have been when I visited Panama City but I went to Panama for about a week and um and and yeah I mean it was the skyline of Panama City is is really distinguished in in Central America it was at that time I assume it still is I mean it's it's really impressive lots of tall buildings um you know it so so it it really kind of Screams business and development this is this is kind of 15-year-old my image of penama city is 15 years old point do it still do it looks closer to Miami than it does to any other Central American city I would put it that way you know it is a highly developed City uh a lot of action a lot of business going on here I love it I love living here so you know it was it was through those Investments and and putting deals together that a buddy of mine called me up and said hey I know this guy he's doing a real estate project he's going to do about 250 mid-income homes and he's got the land he's got his part of the equity but he needs to raise 50% of the capital for the project and I put together an investment group we went into that project but I was the representative of the group so so the developer and I would meet on a supposedly monthly basis but we really hit it off we you know he was a huge Warren Buffett fan he'd been to birkshire at that point like eight nine 10 times already uh he had read everything he'd written we we shared an affinity for investing and those monthly meetings turned into weekly meetings and we now weren't really talking about the real estate project we were talking about all these other things that we wanted to do and we wanted to invest in um and well he's my business partner today that's how we met so you know one day and is he a native Panamanian he was actually born in Colombia but he's lived here in Panama since he was about 7 years old so for all intensive purposes he's Panamanian at this point um and one day he was you know it's funny somebody asked me the other day they live outside the US and they were saying you know how do you find businesses to buy outside the US and I was letting know I said you know it's it's funny because if you're in the US if that's the only place you've looked for companies you don't really know how good you have it there's such a an elaborate deal flow Network to find opportunities that doesn't exist in Panama and especially 13 years ago you know it did not exist he was literally walking down the road and he saw a flyer kind of pasted up on on a billboard thing that said you know I sell businesses and it was a Gmail email and he emailed the guy and he got a list of like eight things and you know it was whatever it was a it was a fruit stand it was a they weren't very highly sophisticated businesses but he looked through all of them and one of them was an industrial sales company selling lubricants and filters B2B here in Panama and um he had an initial meeting and then he invited me to look at the opportunity with him and I knew nothing about lubricants I knew nothing about filters but the company was selling for about you know 3 and a2x on earnings and I was so used to looking at the stock market where everything was 15 to 25x or looking at real estate investing commercial real estate where back then I was getting maybe an 8% cap rate here in Panama and I look at this at three and a half times earnings and I go this this is a no-brainer we can't lose right I always say we were we were more lucky than good back then we were so naive in what we were doing we didn't even see how it could go wrong right and after a few meetings we did a due diligence we acquired that business and we didn't he continued developing houses I continued running my other investment projects that I was doing in that sense we didn't quit our day jobs because we simply owned this as an investment it wasn't a holding company it wasn't any of those things it was just an investment a oneoff invest between two guys who hit it off and and wanted to do a deal do a deal together and for me that was something I was doing in general I was meeting people doing investment so it was very much what my day-to-day was like um as during that time of my life um but when we bought that first business and I got to give him a lot of credit because these were his two rules not mine and again he was coming from that waren Buffett school he said one we're not going to work there so we're going to delegate at management and that made plenty of sense to me cuz I wouldn't have known what to do running a lubricant business and two we weren't going to collect a dividend so we were going to retain our earnings which again we had taken on a bunch of debt to buy that first company so there weren't going to be many earnings to distribute anyway we needed to be paying off our debt but those two rules guided us and those two rules are very much buff its philosophy if you go down to it in the sense of he delegates his manager to CEOs he retains his earnings to continue building Financial stability and acquiring more companies and that was how we began about I would say N9 months into that acquisition we were really enjoying it you know we we bought a business the owner operator left the company um but he had a general manager coo type role that we promoted to be the number one at the business he had about 10 years experience there and we promoted him and he was running the company for us and it was performing as had been advertised you know and we were beginning to make payments on our debt and and and moving forward I want to ask some follow-ups here so first going deep back into your personal story and your motivation for moving to pan you said you you liked the idea of a big family MH say more about that what does that mean yeah well so my mom was from Panama so her entire family lived in Panama my dad grew up in Rhode Island so so he had family back on the East Coast but he lived in California um and you know I grew up as an only child I have a half brother but he was born when I was already 10 years old so I spent those first 10 years of my life as an only child uh focused on my Becket price guide and my and my baseball cards you know and and I remember coming to Panama and you know my mom has three brothers they each have uh three and four kids so it it's a large family of cousins and seeing them all be able to interact together and grow up together and that was something that was just very appealing to me you know the grass is always greener on the other side coming from being an only child that looked great to me you know they were probably sitting there going boy I'd love to live in California right um and I wanted that for my kids you know I knew that I wanted to get married have kids and I wanted them to grow up with other cousins and siblings around them um and that's where I've ended up you can see the pictures behind me I've got I'm married I have three kids uh my cousins down here are we're very close so my kids play with their kids we go on trips together we spend weekends together and it's just I this was the right fit for me on in more in more ways than one you know professionally obviously it worked out well lifestyle it worked out well family it worked out well but I'm I'm so glad I I made that choice to just put everything on Craigslist and move you know well it's interesting Rafael because you made this big person you made a big decision based on kind of a personal family kind of emotional reason right and but for a guy who was so business-oriented entrepreneurial from such a young age you did in some sense um make a sacrifice you're obviously crushing it so in retrospect it wasn't a sacrifice but us being at least at least by reputation the mecca of business you were leaving for a guy who saw himself into you were leaving the meca of where your draw you or Draw anybody who really just wants to be a capitalist a career capitalist um because I guess the this desire for a big Latin family was Stronger it was and to also follow that professional line fiser is a great company I had a very good entry-level position at fiser uh I had a great couple years there and also I didn't enjoy my quality of life much and I always tell people entry-level positions suck in general right no one enjoys their quality of life at entry level especially in asset management or Finance but I would look at my boss's boss and while he was making a ton of money and had a ton of nice things I didn't think he had the greatest quality of life for me so there was a decision there as well on the professional side of I am leaving this because I don't see a future here that's going to really give me happiness yes it's going to give me a lot of economic benefit but not happiness and when I moved to Panama I obviously took a big pay cut because the pay scale in Panama is much lower than it would be in the US that being said cost of living is also much lower so when I comped it all out and looked I said yeah I'm going to make less my total take-home pay will be lower here than it was in the US but I actually think I'm going to live a better life and I don't think I was thinking F far enough ahead to actually know it's funny how you just said that I mean it all it all comes back in a circle we ended up investing in the us and we're building our holding company back in the US so it all I ended up going back to the mecca of capitalism anyway to invest with my partner um but this is where I chose to live it it seems like you basically are having your cake and eating it too you got you got the the family that you wanted and the lifestyle that you wanted um and also the Economic Opportunity you ultimately have not had to really make a sacrifice there we did not we did not yeah cool awesome thank you for that digression all right now back to um this business tell us a little bit more about the terms of the of of the business so the size of the business and revenue employees give us more of a picture of that if you can and then how you put a deal together in Panama what are the sources of Leverage and Equity Etc right so that company had about 25 employees back then two locations again it was it's a distributor you know Panama is a small country we don't manufacture much here so we but we're a a logistics Hub so we import a lot and then we distribute those products so we bring filters from the US we bring lubricants from Spain and we sell those B2B to businesses in Panama construction transport the canal um sugar refining hydroelectric dams those are the types of clients that we're selling to so the business had about 25 employees was doing I want to say about 5 million in revenue and was earning about 350,000 a year this was 13 years ago but those are the numbers I have at the top of my head uh we paid about 3 and a half X for it we put 10% cash down we financed 90% where did that 90% come from private lender here in Panama again I had been putting together deals at that point for about 3 years I had a pretty good network of people that I had raised capital from so we offered or we received terms of 5 years interest only bullet payment at the end but we could prepay the loan as we went and we had to give up 100% of the shares of the company as collateral plus personal guarantees of our own to pay it back um I would never recommend anyone do 90% leverage on a transaction I've never done 90% leverage on a transaction again and I just would not recommend it um so many things can go wrong in a deal where you're just going to be out of the game really quick at that leverage you know at that level of Leverage we I mentioned earlier we were we were lucky you know the one thing we did very well on that deal is we paid a very good price we paid three and a2x that gives you a lot of of room to move around for things to go a bit wrong and you can still at least make your interest payments also getting at interest only for those first five years is critical cuz you're not having to amortise that Capital down therefore the cash flow being pulled out of the company wasn't too high um but were you going to H were you expecting to refinance at the balloon payment or literally pay the whole thing be able to pay the whole thing off pay the whole thing off and we began paying it off by the second year you know once we got our feet under us in that first year we open a second distribution center for the company uh we open two more retail locations for the company that's kind of what we used that organic cash flow in that first year and then from then we focus on repayment okay and one other thing for the audience who may not know Panama is on the US dollar So when you say these dollar amounts you literally mean everything's in dollars correct we don't even we don't have a currency of our own we've been dollarized since the country was founded and just just the visual that this was on that this listing was on a a flyer tap tap to the the side of a of a what a wall a fence a telephone pole I wasn't there when he saw it but it it was just kind of plastered up and it what didn't have the listing of the company it just said I sell companies and the guy was ex I mean that's a whole other story that guy who brought us the deal so he was a business broker it was funny just to get the SIM so the information on the company he wanted us to pay him $100 to make sure we were serious so I remember we paid the $100 for the Sim we actually closed the deal and he got his commission right and then I don't know probably 6 n months later let's say we want another sim from him and he asked us for another $100 haven't we proven that we're we're serious at this point we just bought a company through you you know but um yeah it wasn't it wasn't as organized as the US market I'll put it that way for sure okay and so the in 25 employees 5 million in Revenue that's um again let's do some contrast between us and Panama that's I assume a bigger company in the universe of of P of the panaman economy than it would be here it is a decent sized company it's definitely not a big company by any means it's still a small and mediumsized business where I put what where I've found this is through experience the the Line in the Sand of kind of small and mediumsized business is in Panama is at a million dollar in earnings pre-tax earnings okay so in the us you can still be buying stuff pretty much up to maybe three 4 million in earnings and you're still paying that four to five five and a2x multiple right and then as you start going up the scale and size those multiples start creeping up and you start competing with bigger players here in Panama that starts to occur at like a million dollars in earnings so if you want to put it in perspective that that was our experience we were able to do three Acquisitions in Panama all of them kind of moving up you know 350,000 in in earnings I think the next one was like 380 or so in earnings then we did one of 800,000 in earnings and we were able to pay similar multiples you know they they went up but they didn't go up too far once we hit a million dollars in earnings once where that was our line in the S we want something over a million the multiples just expanded it was it was very difficult we have we are still yet to buy a company that earned a million pre-transaction here in Panama because the multiples didn't make sense to us okay thanks Rafael and then yeah the not going to work there so the that your partner learned from Buffett Al although it's not it's not necessarily A a big you know Warren Buffett doesn't have a monopoly on that concept indeed on the other side of the spectrum less serious people also kind of have this unrealistic fantasy that oh buy a business put in an operator and the thing will just kick off cash it'll be great and of course that is something that we tried to disabuse everybody of on this podcast and in the world of capital s search in the US the understanding for the most part is that the buyer is going to get in there and own and operate at least for a while uh they're going to have their hands all over all you they're going to be in the business and then probably eventually work themselves uh to be working on the business and maybe even maybe out um but we don't we don't even entertain the F fantasy much that you can buy business and have an operator um run it now that all said of course that model can and does work I've had guests that demonstrates that it works demonstrate that it works um every business of any size is essentially business units self-contained business units that are being run by somebody who is not the owner so so corre there there are um there are examples of this working everywhere throughout the economy so just respond to all of that maybe and maybe Orient Orient your response to the first time person who's thinking about buying a business and wants to do what you guys did which is not work in the business right I think the easiest way to attack that or to look at that is the highest hurdle we still have to overcome to acquire a new company is the management continuity so we look at hundreds of opportunities a year and what cancels what filters the majority of them out is there is no management team that we would want to work with going forward or feel confident in delegating our business to going forward post transaction so I can tell you yes it can be done because we've done it and we've done it now on major transactions uh six different times so so yes it can happen and no it's not easy to find and you have to be very very patient to find it that's the easiest way to answer that so I would say the the part of our job that is the least numerical or or you know black and white and it's much more subjective it's much more of an art is is this person who's going to remain running this company doing it for the right reasons aligned with our values and can we work with them and can we trust them to run the business and that takes time and mistakes and Lessons Learned to see what you don't want to then start to figure out what you you want yeah in my experience as well as you move up in size you inherit better management teams that's it's not always the case but in general you do because you simply have more money to invest in that because you just have a higher Revenue business let's say so you're going to get higher quality of people and a deeper bench of people and that's going to enable you to to feel a lot more comfortable about that decision MH okay when you're buying let's say sub a million dollars in earnings you got to be careful a lot of times you're going to majority of those businesses are going to be owner operator and then just a very flat horizontal org chart of employees yeah all reporting up to them and if that person wants to leave and that's just a very easy no for us right we need to have somebody there at least for sure option one and generally also a secondary option after in case that option one doesn't work a bench depth of who we would feel comfortable with turning the company over to that person will usually for us either be nowadays they are the CEO so everything we've done in the US for example is the owner literally selling to us is staying on running the company um even post transaction they are not rolling Equity they're just continuing to run the business previously in Panama the three transactions we did were um the owner stepped out but had a number two they were always in the operation side of the business because what we were looking for wasn't I'm buying this I'm paying 8 10x I need a ton of growth it was much more I'm buying this I'm paying three and a half to 5x I simply need it to do what it's been doing for this to be a good investment for me so in that case I'm going to lean more to an operations type person than say a commercial type person cuz that operations person while they may not be able to have the Strategic IC thinking you're looking for to just multiply the revenue of the company they can keep the ship going in the direction it's going right which is which is more important for you in according to your kind of mandate it is because of the multiples that we pay yeah you know if you're paying four to 5x or even five and a half X I mean you're getting let's just call it 20% unlevered returns right so now if you're focusing on a business that has been around a long time that does matter I know people say well you can't just look at the past you have to look at the future yes and no you know something that's been around 50 60 years just has a kind of tendency to just keep moving on and going forward I know we have these big high-profile cases of Kodak and Blockbuster that get disrupted but let's be clear the vast majority of businesses once theyve passed that let's call it those first 10 years of entrepreneurial Death Zone once they've gotten past that they usually stick around as as long as they are managed financially uh conservatively right they're not overleveraged for example well and and then you and one of the things many of my guests often talk about is you look for the soft underbelly where where such a business could be vulnerable to disruption so in a case of Blockbuster or Kodak their business models were fundamentally disrupted so you'll hear com commonly from guests like the two big threats that everybody worries about are are sorry the three where that could completely up into business would be China One Two Amazon 3 AI so as you kind you layer those three on top and you say to yourself could any either of those three fundamentally disrupt the business model here and if no proceed yeah and I would and I would add to that a thinking of how easy is it to kill this company so not just disrupt it in the sense that somebody's going to come in and build a better mouse trap or a cheaper mouse trap right but also how easy it to kill the company we're always thinking about that so that's going to come down a lot to customer diversification so does anyone Co customer represent a very high percentage of your gross profit it's going to come down to provider concentration so especially if I'm a distributor how many Brands am I Distributing am I dependent on just one or two and and if they change their business model or decide to go a different route is that going to kill my company um are there any regulatory issues that I might be facing that could also disrupt this from the inside as you can slowly start eliminating those risks or minimizing those risks addon a product that's being offered that you believe at least 10 years out is still going to be needed so lubricants and filters I mean this was over 10 years ago now everyone would be saying well electric cars electric cars could be an issue I feel safer for our model because we still focus on B2B I'm not seeing a lot of yet electric you know the massive turbines in in hydroelectric dams for example these things still need lubricants and filters to function or the processing of sugar uh the large agricultural equipment that type of stuff still needs lubricants and filters um or in the US water heating you know I always say people are going to need hot water in Alaska and that's where we sell water heaters so I don't think that'll change in the next 10 years um so as long as you can find those companies make sure they're difficult to kill make sure you have a very solid trustworthy capable management team in place and then pay a fair valuation you don't need much more to go right for that thesis to work I mean you just have to be patient and really wait to check all those boxes before doing the acquisition that's where the difficulty comes it's the sitting on your hands for years sometimes because you haven't found anything that checks all the boxes is where this gets difficult yeah um which by the way is is also classic Warren Buffett that that so much of the game is um the discipline to be inactive the discipline to to not make bets and to wait for the you know the fat pitch down down the home plate correct so and so perfect um segue to return to the narrative here Rafael pick pick us up so it was going well you guys got lucky your own word that you you were lucky smart but it was things were going well 9 months in in and you and you say to yourselves huh this model is interesting carry on yeah we we liked what we were doing we liked what we were doing and I remember we we decided this is what we want to focus on you know I'm looking at multiple different Investments he's looking at real estate development we're seeing the returns here are better this can be done no one else is doing it in Panama so we assume there would be other companies available for purchase and we make this decision of this is the path we want to go for we want to build a holding company where we use these retained earnings to buy other businesses and it was funny in the beginning we called ourselves a holding company but we only owned one business right so it wasn't much of a holding um a lot of people like that on Twitter Rafael you guys aren't alone right at least at least now when I'm on Twitter I could say that I have multiple companies right but but what changed for us was we started actually introducing ourselves we had a name now alternative Holdings we had business cards and we actually began you know when I would go to a meeting let's say and somebody would say what do you do I buy private companies and it was there was a mental change in the way I would present myself let's say and in one of those meetings guy says I have a friend he's looking to sell a majority stake in his Company call center business process Outsourcing and my business partner and I went we met with them uh and we negotiated our second acquisition so we bought a business process Outsourcing business that was focused in three different areas one was call center the second is what I would call Manpower contracts so it's where you're actually putting physical people to do services for a company that they don't want to hire out and the third part of it was what you all in the US call um billing management for hospitals down here we call it medical claims processing so it's it's handling the insurance claims for a hospital or a doctor or a clinic with the insurance companies getting them their payment so the easy way to sum this company up is you're doing things the client could do themselves but they don't want to and so we handle it for them um and we bought a majority position in that company it was not 100% of it how big was that business give us a picture it was a little bit bigger than the other again it was about $380,000 in earnings but it was a smaller overall dollar transaction because we didn't buy 100% of it the founder wanted to maintain equity and he had a a Capital Partner who invest with him that wanted to maintain equity in that business going forward so that was we did that deal and for us it worked out we were still very early in it we didn't have a ton of excess cash to be investing in other things so so it worked for us um and what year was that 2012 oh that was 2012 and when when was the Industrial uh lubricant 2011 2011 is when we began ah okay I thought there was the G the Gap Is Yet To Come okay the Gap is about to come right now and and so on this business the the BP business process Outsourcing business did you guys yet have this rigorous filter of leaders leadership we need to we need to find somebody who's a good leader no no I wish we you know that company when we bought it the founder actually stayed he maintained shares he was a director and he stayed as CEO initially and about nine months in both sides could see that it wasn't going to work our model of cash flow driven maintain the ship was very different he he was and is a born entrepreneur he's somebody who is just always looking for the next business line to start and all of them were draining cash from the company and we were looking at going look we bought this based on producing this amount of cash we at least need this amount of cash yes we can analyze deals but it's or or Investments it's going to be a much slower process and that didn't work with his speed so we promoted somebody shortly thereafter from inside operations again to take over he stepped down as CEO and went to run he had other outside businesses that he could run as an entrepreneur and he remained though a shareholder and a director of the company so we still have a great relationship with him today but that was how that business moved forward a good a good moment to really emphasize this point that you self identify as an investor not as an entrepreneur rur I see somebody who's built building a holdco that feels like kind of it's gray but I would call you entrepreneurial but really if you you know look in the mirror you see your and with Buffett as your kind of as your Guiding Light you guys are investors first and foremost well ahead of self-identifying as entrepreneurs that is correct and I would say if you ask my partner he would say the same thing um you know I if tomorrow the stock market provided us an opportunity to be buying Top Flight companies at six or seven times earnings I would have no issue and I'm sure he would have no issue either diverting our cash flows to buy those stocks rather than another private company so we will go where the attractive return is that being said we are very focused so it's not that I'm sitting here looking at any type of investment that's around that's not what we do what we have Det determine that as of today in the space that we're playing in this size of company the most attractive returns are buying majority to 100% stakes in private companies selling at 4 to 6X let's call it we believe with our background and skill set to identify the right company to buy and the right management team to continue Taking It Forward we've shown that that's a High um lik hood of providing us a good return carry on Rafael tell us how it went with the boo business yeah I mean that company again and the the first nine months were a little I don't want to say rocky because the underlying business was solid uh we did have some issues I mean this is not I say you know especially on Twitter this everything I try to paint a very honest and transparent view of this of doing this on Twitter I don't want to make this sound easy to anyone so here's some of those horror stories you know 2 weeks after buying the second company the CFO quit that is never a good sign when your head of accounting your head of Finance quits shortly after a transaction that's that's that's not what you want to see and we went in and the books on the surface were perfect and again we had done a light audit the reason we did a light audit there is actually our auditor of our first company was the auditor of this second company so they'd been doing their books for years so we simply back Chann them is this clean yeah this is clean everything's fine we've already been auditing them so we didn't feel the need to do a full-fledged due diligence on this you know chalk that up again to mistake never we never did that again after this experience when we went in and he quits and I actually go into the accounting department and look at at the books what I find is on the surface everything looks fine but behind it he had what's called a bridge account where he was matching things and just throwing the numbers in there to make sure that they all look good on the surface so the first thing I assumed was this could be a fraud and it was concerning to say the least so for the next 6 months I worked in the accounting department I was the head of accounting I had a junior uh she she kind of did all the registry stuff for me so I would look at it I would try and start unwinding what he had done to make it make sense rebuilding our financial statements going back a couple years she would help me with the data entry she hadn't even graduated yet didn't have her her CPA license what's funny is today she is for that whole group of BPO she's our head of Finance oh ni so she's still with us today I have a super good relationship with her because we spent those six months just in this tiny little accounting office working through all these issues I remember I used to sleep with a notepad by my bed CU sometimes I'd wake up at night and I would have an idea in my head of how we could mix unravel something and I would jot it down to then execute it the next day and that that was a blessing because I had taken accounting classes in school I had studied stocks I'd looked at financials but never done accounting and accounting is so important uh in business especially if you're going to delegate management understanding financial statements truly understanding them being able to read them being able to pick out any types of Errors is is a superpower to have uh and I really learned that by being in that accounting department doing that accounting um it ended up not being a fraud it just ended up being a lot of disorganization from the head of finances part we were able to reconstruct those there was no issue um and we moved forward uh that company today has about 350 employees wow we now do we now continue to do call center we continue to do medical claims processing we do um the Manpower contracts and we also do logistic services for the financial sector in Panama so Panama still we don't have a great National Mail system it's pretty much non-existent so if you it's a small country so if you need a new credit card or a credit card being renewed that gets delivered to you in person in Panama also the checks all the documents that need to go through clearing the Clearing House every evening are done physically transported around it's not all scanned like it is in the US yet so we provide those services to the majority of the banks in Panama um and that company has it's nearly 3x since we got it so that's been a that that that's been a solid performer for us where was revenue in 2012 did you say revenue on that business was it was lighter it was probably about 4 million they had decent margins and they were earning about I between 350 and 400,000 or so so I guess you're calling 10% or high single digits decent margins because you're comparing it to a distribution business which has notoriously lower margins that is that that is correct and again let's be clear business process Outsourcing is not a high margin business either because your client knows exactly what this would cost to do they could do it themselves I mean yes some of it can start to have more complexity but if I'm literally putting employees into your company for you because you don't want to have to hire them you know what those people are going to cost so it's not like I can mark this up a ton where the where the economics of that business get interesting is always being very constrained on your management group and building out you know economies of scale over that Management Group if you can be efficient there and continue to add on all these contracts and oversee them with a very tight-knit Management Group that's where that business can become um decently profitable so it's doing call it 12ish million today it's doing a bit less on the revenue side but we've picked up better efficiencies when I said 3xo was more on the profit side it's doing just a hair under a million dollars in profit now okay Rafael um where in 2012 you you've survived the transition uh after six things get really boring yeah so take us into the into your dry spell here and and and what you learned from that yeah we I'm not going to say we were bored because we were taking meetings almost every day of every week to look at companies you know now we were starting to build a bit of a reputation as somebody who would buy companies now what starts to come to us lots of companies that aren't doing very well so everyone hears about these guys who have now bought these two businesses in Panama and now any company that's failing they want to offload it to us they assume that we're turnaround artists so we start getting a lot of those we start getting startups and we're just getting offered we start getting deal flow it just starts to become deal flow it's not the deal flow we want but it rarely is it's just you get flow this is a numbers game you know I say a lot is you need especially early on work put the Reps in get your repetitions done focus on just seeing as many opportunities as you can so you can quickly begin to identify what you don't want so you can get through them quickly to then move on to what you do want um so the value of those years was huge for us now because we saw so many different opportunities and so many things that we didn't want to buy um we weren't bored because we were also continuing to oversee our two companies trying to improve on them some things were going well some things weren't going well trial and error and you know uh it was funny back then you know my business partner and I would go to everything together because there wasn't much more to do we only had two businesses and we're looking at deals all the time so we would like I would spend more time with him than I would spend with my wife and we would just be always together our offices are right next to each other we're in the car together going to meetings we're in the car together going to meet with our CEOs Rafael how are you guys paying yourselves at this time are you taking salary out of the two businesses you've acquired we're taking salaries and they are very light yeah so we still have never paid a dividend out of the company and I don't call our salary it's not like oh I get a salary but it's a quasi dividend we pay a salary that we believe if you combine the two is what it would cost to hire a CEO to do what we're doing for the hold Co um we were both still young you know I was 32 he was 29 we didn't have kids and it was a Time Of Our Lives when we could do that we we weren't living the big life or anything like that um and we drew a salary that's still how we get paid today in the sense that we draw our management company that we have bills out to each of our subsidiaries a monthly amount and then that goes to pay for this office and the employees that are here it's a very small office that we have at the corporate level and it pays our two salaries our travel expenses to go see new opportunities Etc that's how we do it we don't we've never taken a dividend um so we're looking at all the opportunities and we're not buying anything and that's 2013 then 2014 and 2015 so you can imagine you're three years looking at things you still only own the two companies um I remember Point our wives would joke and say we were retired because there wasn't much action you know we're not running the businesses and people would say oh so but you're the CEO of the lubricant business no I'm not that's this guy okay so what what do you do all day I mean it was it was a running joke um and I remember there was a moment where we sat down I still have that document and we again reanalyzed what we were building and we said there's three options we can you become the CEO of lubricants and I'll become the CEO of Outsourcing and we're going to build those two companies to be the biggest they can be in the region right that was one option we can continue our plan of this birkshire haway type model where we're just going to continue conserving cash flow we're paying off our debt obviously we're also trying to conserve cash flow and prepare ourselves for that next acquisition where we're going to continue preparing and eventually that deal is going to come or we're going to do I don't know if you ever heard of 3G Capital 3G capital is a Brazilian firm they have AB inbev they've done the Burger King deal they also did craft hindes with Buffett so where they do more instead of it being one holding company it's more major transactions let's say with different investment groups okay um and we wrote those three options on a piece of paper we wrote the pros and cons of what they would look like and what our lives would look like you know we were very pragmatic in that sense and and I remember sitting there and going I don't want to be the CEO of a lubricant company like that isn't what I grew up wanting to be I want to be an investor um and he was like I don't want to be Co of a lubricant company either you know so so that one it was easy to kind of get rid of um um and and I think we kind of left the 3G capital on the table as a possibility it was more let's just see what comes up that was more of a well imagine a bigger opportunity comes and we can't get majority of it we can't buy it all would we be willing to maybe do something outside of the holding company with other investors and run it like that and we said well we're going to leave that on the table that could happen but we're going to continue on our path you know of building this mini birkshire let's say um and I say that in the most humble way possible because you know anyone who has really knows birkshire understands that is the combination of an insurance company with a float and the greatest stockpickr going forward out of frustration or desperation that three years had come and gone um or or no that just happened to happen in this time frame it was out out of free time I would imagine you know we we had a lot of time to talk we would talk a lot I mean we would just it was how we met we would talk about investing and talk about ideas and talk about different ways and different stocks and we would look at stocks and we would those were our conversations we spent a lot of time together so naturally the what are we doing here also came in but it wasn't so much like we haven't found anything in 3 years we're freaking out we have to lay a path that was not the the impetus of that conversation it was much more just through our natural just spending a lot of time together and talking that it came out but I remember cuz I actually I still have that document today of what we wrote down of what our kind of our pads could be and we once again decided this is what we want to do you know there was a big part of what we've built has been based on where the two of us wanted to end up in the quality of life that we wanted to have and that's why we're doing it it's so important to understand that it's we didn't do this because we saw a bunch of other people doing it and it looked like a way to get a lot of money we did this because we really wanted to build this we wanted to be investors and this was the niche where we saw ourselves being able to do that and earn those outsized returns and actually be a true investor and Rafael when you said you wanted to be investors is what draws you to to that self view because for a lot of people I think being an investor is appealing because there's a lot of money be in being a successful investor but you're actually saying you want to be investors professional investors you love investing but it actually it's not actually the money piece that turns you on is it just the the intellectual game of it is it just the the what the work entails is fun for you sort of thing yeah you I remember I forget who who said this but you know think back to what you did as a kid just for fun and if you could figure out how to do that for work that's what you should do obviously that's like there's Becket mle yeah it doesn't correct I loved sitting there tracking the cards and and and organizing them and then reorganizing them and then seeing see the stats and seeing the prices and I I I could do that for hours alone in my room I do the same thing today except today it's a bunch of Excel spreadsheets of a bunch of different companies that I look at in different ways I still I have there's no analysts that work in this office we don't have an analyst we still do all of our own deal flow we analyze every opportunity we we we make all the investment decisions um and while I have accounting departments and CFOs who send me excels I still build I still have my own you know off-grid file of excels of how I break down my companies and look at their kpis and measure them and track them and try and glean insights of how that performance is going to come and that's something that I could do for hours alone in this office and not get bored I would just get lost in them it's it's it's it's it's pleasurable in that sense to me so when I say I wanted to be an investor it it's simply because that you know when I wanted to be an investor and I was at College I remember my first internship was at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and I was an assistant to a stock broker and I quickly learned I didn't really think I wanted to be a stock broker so then I went to work at fiser Investments and high net worth asset management and in essence I was just a sales a back sales support because a lot of that business is simply selling you know I was assuming I was going to go be I don't know Gordon Gecko and trading stocks for for for Ken Fischer and I realized that's not what that is and I saw the trading desk of a Fisher Investments at that point managing about you know $50 billion um and it wasn't that either um and I continued looking and I moved into high netw worth Asset Management in Panama and it wasn't that either and and this was the niche I was able to find that actually fulfilled that kind of daytoday task of what I enjoy doing right it's great this is so this is great Rafel I love the way you're putting this um it's so clear and maybe it took a while for you to arrive at this Clarity but now it's very clear um and by the way you know your point about just got to put in the Reps um helpful when those reps are pleasure for you cuz when we say put when we say put in the Reps typically we mean just suffer the grind do the gritty work no one wants to do but kind of for you you know your honor Schwarzenegger in the gym I mean he's he's having a good time in there he's not suffering I was at I was at holdco conference in Cleveland my partner and I were there last year and there was a Searcher who was there and she she was you know she was young and she was recently out of out of college and she was a Searcher and she had her committed investors great school Etc and I remember talking with her uh because she was only looking at off-market deals and I said why aren't you looking at broker deals why aren't you looking at off Market deals oh no you know the multiples and they don't add value and this and I go yeah but you just want to get your reps in I mean Brokers have deals even if you don't ever do any of them look at them and keep looking at them and analyzing them and engage and speak to to business owners and speak to the Brokers and and and and and learn it because that's what you need to be doing at this point in time and and continuously so she's asking well what's it like once you already own something and I go well I still look at SIMS every day and talk to Brokers and talk to business owner I that's what I'm doing all the time so she goes so you're just always in search mode and I go I mean I never really thought about it like that but I guess yeah and the look on her face was just abject you it was like that's the last thing she wanted to be doing she's like I don't want to have to be in search mode for the rest of my life I was like well that's what this is I mean unless you're simply going to buy one company and you're going to build that one company of course the search mode will eventually end but if you're if you're going to do the structure that we have and I'm not going to go dayby day working in the companies well then I need to be adding value and if I'm going to add value and how I'm going to really move the meter is spending a lot of time looking at a lot of deals that don't work but on average if we can close one a year or one every two years that will massively move the meter and I know it will add way more value than what I could add if I was day byday trying to sell lubricants and filters yeah you know I would be a terrible salesman so uh that's where we add our value and and luckily I enjoy it you know and I think my business partner does too because I see him when I go into his office if he's not looking at a Sim of a private company he's researching some stock I mean he spends all day long as well just reading about stocks and reading about business this what we enjoy doing yeah um so well that that is such such a great moment uh that you had at hold C confin distillation of you versus so many Searchers because yeah I've never really thought that there could be any other interpretation of the search process than it's just something you got to get through nobody enjoys it how wrong I was if you're an investor the search is the fun part actually it is it is there is a bit of excitement when you close the deal I won't lie it's when you close that deal there's excitement it's a lot less exciting now than it was back then cuz now I know all the things that could go wrong starting the next day in the operating company so I don't really start feeling good until I start seeing those continuous cash flows entering into the holding company account every month once that starts going clean and we're minimizing our underwriting risk on the transaction that's when I I I I I take a bre I take a breath and I go okay that was that was a good one um but the day byday enjoyment of it is the search and also the tracking of the of the opos that we have underneath us and seeing how they're growing and how they're developing and how different investment plans are functioning you know the CEOs bring us ideas and we invest in them and I track those just like I would track a company we just bought and they have their roic tables they and and and what they promised us and what they're delivering to us um I almost look at it like a little report card for each of my CEOs because then the next time they come and ask for money to do something I go back and I see well the last time you asked for money you promised me this and this is what you deliver oh great let's go forward with this you know well no this didn't really work out why didn't that work out let's have that conversation let's see if this next one we're going to learn from our past mistakes or maybe no just stick running what you're running and let's just you know we'll look for some somewhere else to invest that money great Rafael okay so let's get back to the story 2013 and 14 in 15 pass somewhere along the way what you guys are building crystallizes uh by the way that piece of paper you wrote down on I I assume at some point it'll end up framed on that wall behind you uh sounds like kind of an epic piece of paper in your life um and then what and then in 2016 um let me backtrack one sec during one of those multiple conversations we would have my partner and I we would also talk about what businesses what industries do we want and what industries do we not want okay and in those conversations back then again we were very focused on cash flow so heavy capex businesses were a no we didn't want to be in construction heavy machinery manufacturing again manufacturing pan is pretty non-existent so that wasn't going to be an issue but we knew what we didn't want to invest in and we're pretty much open to look at anything else um just to see if it would work but one of the industries we said that we probably wouldn't want to invest in was restaurants why because restaurants have a high likelihood of failure it's the story you always hear whatever nine out of 10 restaurants fail in the first year I don't know whatever that stat is but when we had that conversation there were three restaurants in Panama we said we would consider buying and uh there are three I'm sure you have these in your hometown of just they've been there forever it's like a part of the local community knitted into the fabric yeah they just everyone goes there from the receptionist to the CEO the grandpa the grandkids the it's just the place you go to and it might not have the best service or the best Decor but it's got good food it's consistent food a good price point and people love it well there were three of those that we identified in Panama and said if any of those three ever came up for sale we would buy him fast forward to 2016 an attorney reaches out to us and says hey a client of mine is interested in selling his business and he is very particular about who buys it he says that he'll only sell it to somebody who guarantees they will not fire anybody and they won't change anything and I told them I know these two guys and that's what they do they even work at the companies they just buy them and they let them go and they let them continue doing what they're doing so I think you guys should meet and it was the owner of one of those companies it's called Athens Pizza uh it's a Greek Pizza Restaurant so just think of pizza salads and jros okay um and there were three locations and he'd been around about 25 years and the logo of it is this guy with this big handlebar mustache by this point he'd trim the mustache down but that was that is the owner the the logo of the company and um I would eat there once or twice a week before we bought it I loved this place and it was one of those three restaurants we'd said we would buy if it ever came up it came up for sale we went to the meeting he showed us his financial statements he said we he was asking he showed us his right-hand woman who had been there with him for about 12 years who was going to stay running the business going forward we shook hands and that deal was in 90 days I mean we didn't have to negotiate price we didn't have to it was just his ask was fair everything was fair he was a straight shooter he really was he was he was a very Class Act guy um in that transaction and and we bought Athens Pizza and you know that business was doing $800,000 and we paid about 5x for it 800 in earnings yeah earnings before taxes I don't use ebbit dah for when I'm valuing a acquisition of a company because I'm focused much more on cash flow his restaurants were heavily depreciated at that point because he'd only done those three locations and they had now been open for multiple years a restaurant company with rapid growth or recent growth especially if it's High versus the base it's coming from ebbit dot is an interesting number to look at because there will be just heavy depreciation initially that will then tail off in that company it didn't really matter because most of of his assets were fully depreciated or were very light depreciation at that point and that was a GameChanger for us that was a big transaction in essence we had just doubled the size of the hold Co it took us four years of looking for a deal 2012 to 2016 and a lot of patience but making that acquisition it really moved the it moved it moved the needle you know and it put us on the map uh that was an institution it is an institution in Panama at that point then you can imagine the next day we started getting every single restaurant that was not doing well came knocking on our door to sell uh we were just inundated everyone just assumed we were restaurant owners at that because it was such a well-known place when people found out we bought it it was it was news in that sense um well that's that's one of those those businesses too that's kind of um not that you were checking this box but you could have that it's kind of a vanity acquisition as well fun to own you know the favorite neighborhood institution a pizza place your kids you know you can take them you know Dad can take the kids to the pizza place that he owns uh you probably you know had had your celebratory dinner there the night you Clos on the transaction all of it you know the part of the kids definitely entered into my mind when we did the acquisition but as far as the vanity part I just I want to touch on that word because I think some people can think of you know a restaurant and it's beautiful the Ambiance and you're going in and you're saying hi to the people and that this isn't that type of restaurant okay this and that's what it appealed to us we loved this business this is important to touch on is we always say we're industry agnostic so we don't really care about the industry but we're very focused on the business economics of the company that we're buying and this restaurant is a perfect example these restaurants had pretty low cost furniture they are not a highly fashionable place it it just isn't that's the reality we've now done an upgrade and made them a bit more but they're still relatively inexpensive to open and and that is really important when you're going to take a risk for new openings cuz the only way to really grow a restaurant quickly is new locations correct so if those each cost a million dollars to open that is going to get really expensive if you make some mistakes but we've been able to open our locations at about $300,000 in Panama a US version would cost more just because of construction cost but to open that at that at that cost level allows you to take risks and to grow your business that was one another interesting thing was that the types of food that we sell are in essence the same 20 or 30 ingredients just mixed differently you know a salad and a jro are pretty much the same thing it's just one has the bread on the bottom and and the Tomato on the top and it just kind of goes like so you don't have a lot of food waste you have good cost to good salt in that sense because you aren't having a wide variety of different foods that then don't move like you would maybe in a high Cuisine type restaurant um the price point per person average ticket was $8 to $9 anyone could eat there Panama is a growing country where low income is moving into middle income and you want to have that Tailwind behind you as those people can move up and start to move for meeting the street cart food to that first fast casual food you want to be in that price point if you're doing it $20 a person you're going to have a much more limited market of who you can sell to and then the process in the kitchen this wasn't a restaurant was some Chef who understood all the recipes and was directing everyone this was an assembly line kitchen where everyone had their position this guy you know chopped this guy added this guy put in the oven and it just moved on this assembly line he had designed the menu so that every dish came out within 13 minutes of being ordered because his whole concept was on everyone getting served at once and fast rotation of the tables so when you look at the business economics of that that's why that restaurant was interesting add to it the fact that it had already been open you know say 25 20 25 years so it had that builtin loyalty of the customer base um and that is your moat at the end of the day you know consumer facing Brands and products uh uh especially food or drink um your moat is that brand loyalty imagine you go to a brand new restaurant just to open up down the street and you get served a horrible dish your first time you're never going back now imagine the place you've gone to you know know 10 times a year for the last 20 years and you get a bad plate you're going to give it another chance you'll probably give it two or three chances before you go boy this place has just gone downhill you know you've got that built in I mean the best example is Chipotle my God Chipotle gave people eoli like three different occurrences over multiple years and people still are going back to the burritos and they're still growing and it's because they have that brand loyalty that is their moat you know Starbucks has that Mo Starbucks could serve you a bad coffee for a year straight and you're probably still going to go back and give it another chance just because you've had so good experiences there um and that was why that restaurant made sense we were then offered a bunch of other restaurants and they did not have those economics and they did not make sense so we didn't buy them um and that yeah that was that was 2016 and now that business has actually grown a lot as well even though that wasn't in NE as I understand never is your aim in fact it has what's happened with it what's happened with pizza we we now have 20 locations uh 15 are corporate five are franchise the the franchise model built out more of a necessity of cash flow than anything else we were offered a location very early post transaction we had decided to build one more location we found a great Corner local that became available and we wanted to open there and we were offered a second location in a mall and Athens had never open in a mall we didn't have the money to do it because we had taken on debt for the acquisition we were already building one and the mall actually brought us a franchise operator and said he would like to franchise a location from you so that's why we developed it and we've gone on to have that same individual open four different franchise locations with us so a single franchisee yeah we have one other that has one location but it's very close to the Costa Rican border that's more just for distance of management it makes much more sense to have somebody physically up in that area it's called davit it's a city up near coaster R um he just has one single location and together those are the five franchises okay so so yeah it it has grown um what's this what's this what's this hesitation in your voice well it wasn't easy uh we went that growth story and this there's a good lesson in this you know we looked at that business you have to backtrack a bit to understand it to see where we get to but basically 2016 occurs and we go another 4 years without a major transaction okay after the after buying the restaurant we do three bolt-on Acquisitions so smaller Acquisitions but they didn't consume a lot of capital so we start you know getting towards the pandemic let's say and we've accumulated a good cash position now off off the holdco and at this point we've already branched off and begun looking into the us cuz we're just not finding anything we touched on this in the beginning we're not finding anything that earns over a million and that was our new kind of Line in the Sand of what we wanted to buy and we're not finding it in Panama so we start to look in the US we still haven't found anything yet though we have this cash and we look at Athens and we say you know there there is room to grow this business this business has proven itself the economics of it we can do that but we did not feel comfortable with our management team we promoted an operations head to be the CEO and we did not feel comfortable that would know how to run 15 locations let's say um we brought in an outside CEO with a lot of experience of growing restaurants he came in and took over the company and the pandemic hits we're not going to open any restaurants during the pandemic obviously but he you know pivots delivery third party apps maintain the ship um and he we had hired him with a plan of let's get from 5 to 20 locations at that point we were at five we had our three original the one we open in that one franchise location let's go from 5 to 20 over 5 years that was our goal and he came back to us during pandemic and he said let's get there in two years and here's why so many restaurants have shut down in pandemic that we are going to get an opportunity to get Prime locations and what are called second generation locals which means that there was already a restaurant Therefore your capex is going to be much lower therefore we're going to do it faster but cheaper and we're going to end up getting a much better Roi um and we did that we we we executed that I think if you take E I don't think I know this if you take each of those locations and study their rois they were all highly successful so the the thesis there played out what we didn't bake into is the operational headache of going from 5 to 20 that fast is it's disruptive it's it's a lot it was not an easy process you have to build a whole production Center a logistics chain uh you have to have all your admin put together you have to be building out processes and you're just going very fast you're running very fast um I look back and I go it was the right idea to go from 5 to 20 without a doubt I think both my partner and I would say if we could do it again we would have taken the initial five years even if it cost us a little more cuz we probably ended up paying that and then some and mistakes on the operational side because of those Growing Pains plus add-on the amount of stress it caused of in facing that um and I wouldn't recommend going at that pace again you know my hat's off to the people who can grow that quickly or who choose to grow that quickly but it's not our personality again I think that would be the one change you know yeah well and that not your personalities and it also just reinforces I think the the long-term patient Capital compounding oriented model that you have you're not in a rush to make to get rich you're getting rich slowly Allah Warren Buffett that's right and if if that had been represented to us and it was just let's get there in two years because let's get there in two years we would have said no the reason we said yes is because when we saw the plan the Returns on that investment made so much more sense because of those second gen locations that it seemed like a no-brain rum looking as just as an investor it was a no-brainer to run that fast but we didn't weigh the operational headache that that could become um at the end it worked out two two reactions it's fine you know yeah well two reactions to that first um you you probably to in your defense it was also this very much this moment in time you thought that you had this window of opportunity where Co had decimated you all this real estate was coming online and so it either strike now or lose this great buying opportunity and a Warren Buffett you know he would say buy you know buy when there's blood in the streets um right so so you probably perceived a good buying opportunity and and so and that wasn't going to last very long yeah and if I look back I would still say the locations that we were able to to get then would probably not have been available now so in that sense there was an added value as long as those locations remain open for a very long time you'll pick that up you know I'm looking at this still we're about 4 years into that plan so I'm I still can't say that if in six more years you ask me oh that was it was so worth the stress of the two years you know three years because look how it's paid out right now we're just coming out of all the stress and so it's still a little fresh in my mind which is why you saw yeah you saw the PTSD kind of hesitation there on my face right well and then the other thing to just call out as you put it was like you know on paper it looked great the economics of this investment looked great we under estimated the operational lift that it would be I feel like that's a perfect encapsulation of search itself I mean so many people come into this space where they do the napkin math and they're like wow that is amazing let's let's go not not realizing what it's actually like to get in and run a 30 person plumbing company it ain't correct easy and then or even more so they do one and they go wow that yeah this seems easy and 3 months later they do another one and I'm always like how do you have the bandwidth to handle that you know I think it's also one of the caveats with a delegated management I mean we were assuming that that operation had been baked in because we're delegating that operation um and hey it worked out the restaurants are open they're they're all hitting their investment numbers it was just a bit more traumatic experience on the inside to get here than maybe it needed to be but I would still do the growth okay so that takes us up to I guess now has there been any have there been any other acquisitions there well well in Panama no so you know after 2016 we did three what I call bolt-ons uh which were you know we always wanted to go bigger so we bought 350,000 of of of of income then we bought you know 380 then we bought 800 then we said the next one we have to buy is a million um and we weren't finding it so we did bolt-ons in that we bought three companies that were earning much less and it was funny they ended up actually it was one for each of our verticals in Panama we bought the cinnabun franchise in Panama they had about 10 locations and we bolted it onto restaurants we bought a steel cable distributor that sells to the canal to the tuna fishing to the ports we bolted it onto Industrial Sales and we bought a logistics company that was focused on the finance industry bolted that onto business process Outsourcing and I mentioned what they do earlier when I look back on that time um you know my partner and I have discussed this a lot would we do those again and I can say Cinnamon's been okay cables have been okay and the logistics company has been excellent it really that's been a great uh investment but would we do them again versus simply again being patient preserving our capital and waiting for that next big strike that next big acquisition and we both lean to the ladder because while they did while I can look at them as isolated cases and say well it was a decent return or an excellent return on a percentage basis the dollar amount of what they were earning even with growth didn't really move the meter for the entire hold Co and at the end of the day what we need to be focused on is the entire holding company so we would have probably been better served focusing on being patient and waiting for our next big acquisition so we did those in 2017 beginning of 2018 the three of them um and it was right around that time that again we're looking for million dooll Acquisitions we're not we're not finding them in Panama and we start to look to diversify outside of the country and the first place we looked was Costa Rica and Columbia I mean there're are neighboring countries they're much larger than us bigger economies we figured we could find something there we looked at a few opportunities nothing came came to fruition and in one of those trips we were talking saying you know we're having to get on a plane and fly to Columbia fly to Costa Rica we could just as easily get on a plane and fly to Miami and if we're going to invest why take the currency risk of these two other countries why not invest in dollars why not invest in the US much more Dynamic economy let's just go there and that was 2018 is we decided to said we're going to diversify to the United States so initially it was Southeast us it was Florida um you know maybe Georgia that general area and boy it was hard uh this was pre- pandemic so zoom and these video calls weren't popular so it was like where are you from Panama no don't worry about it and they would just kind of hang up on us no one wanted to give us deal information uh they wanted us to fly up there first uh before they would share anything so it was slow going but we spent a couple years just grinding just looking for opportunities in the US we were still looking for stuff in Panama but we really made this commitment to this is the future and it was just before the pandemic you know late 2019 early 2020 deal flow had begun to finally arrive we were starting to see things we wanted to buy we brought in that CEO for the Restaurant Group another part of that was not only the growth but it was beginning to professionalize a bit more our CEO group in Panama we actually that 12-month period changed all three of our CEOs from those operations people we'd internally promoted to professional CEOs with experience running companies because we said we're going to buy something soon in the US it's going to take our attention away we're not going to be able to be so Focus here we need to have improved management even if it's going to cost us a bit more it'll be worthwhile to free up that bandwidth space to focus on the US um and we found something in the US to buy and that was where we had another you know one of those talks and it was a big decision to make and it was are we going to do what we've done up until now which you know I haven't mentioned outside Capital because there wasn't outside Capital up until now my partner and I own Panama 50/50 we had just taken financing up to this point and it was are we just going to Simply buy a company making a million dollars in Florida with the money we've had reserved and a bit of financing and continue the same path or are we going to raise capital and do something bigger um again I give him the credit on this he he was the push of let's go bigger we need to we need to get out of our comfort zone um we met with an investment Bank down here came up with an offering which is a convertible debt offering and um and we structure our us hold Co so before before you even had an acquisition you built a hold Co shell we did not have an acquisition yet we built the shell I mean at this point at this point we had a website it actually had the address of my dad's office in Santa Cruz so that if anyone went to like Google Street View they would kind of see like a strip Hall office complex because we had to build these website things because it was the only way to get Sims because we had you know I had a I still have a Skype number in the US so they could call me on it because it was the only way to kind of act like we're in the US so we could get information from them um we had enough we didn't have Loi sign but we had stuff that was hot and it was it was going to close and it was again are we going to buy one of these or are we actually going to do something bigger um and we get with this Investment Group we put together an offering and we set up a C Corp in the US so it's a completely separate hold Co structure and the concept that we pitched the investors was we are going to do exactly what we've done in Panama at this point we have you know 10 years doing it this is what we've built this is what we've invested this is what it earns today you all know the companies we own here you you eat at our restaurants you you buy from our Industrial Sales company we're going to replicate this exact same thesis in the US we're going to buy boring businesses with long track records and management teams that we want to work with and we're going to pay 4 to 5x for him and we raised that money again via a convertible debt offering so the way that that worked was you loan me money I pay you 8% from day one you get to see what I'm buying so as I go buying these businesses I'm sharing the information of what I'm buying with you and once I've deployed the capital you have a decision where you have a warrant that you can convert up to 20% of your debt into common stock in the holding company and you get to convert at the price paid so there is no revaluation okay so you get to in essence it's a blind pool like a private Equity would be but only on the financing side you to convert to equity we actually see what we already own at that point and along with that we raised 70% of the money via this product and 30% of the money we put up ourselves as capital so that went in so it was it was a 3070 Equity to debt ratio but the debt came via these investors so let's put some fake numbers around there and and do some easy math so say I'm one of your investors and I stroke you a check for a million doll you are paying you are $80,000 a year from from your first year you're earning I'm earning 8% on the million dollars until you pay me back and when you pay me back I have the option to take not when I pay you back sorry when mhm you give me a million dollar I have to invest that million dollar oh right once I'm fully invested I've been paying you your 8% every year as I'm investing once I'm fully invested you get a choice and you say it's called the conversion window so you have a three-month period where you can decide if you want to convert to equity or not you can convert a maximum of $200,000 of the debt into equity and the holding company at par value same valuation my partner and I entered into you're either going to still have $800,000 remaining of debt or a million if you chose not to convert I continue paying you 8% on your outstanding balance and I amortise that debt from then going forward I pay you back okay and when does the conversion window happen sorry when you deploy all the money it was a total Capital amount of $40 million that's what we have to invest in total so it's either when the 40 million has been invested or 5 Years From the first acquisition whichever happens first so if we make it 5 years in and we haven't finished the 40 million there's a cap there for them so they know that this won't go on indefinitely as far as when they can convert um and then starting from that point that conversion date we start to pay back the capital so as an investor what did you get you got 8% on your money remember this is back in 2020 when 8% was a lot nowadays not so much but back then it was a lot you're getting 8% you've got this upside warrant to convert into a hold Co that we showing you the economics of what will look like so that's your upside so in essence when you do the Blended return on that over a 10-year period you're getting a 3X moic it's private Equity like returns but you're not in a blind pool you're getting money up front you're not fully committing all of your Capital what did we get one we don't charge a performance fee we do charge the same salaries we charge any of our companies we buy we're very transparent on that but what did we get we got very well- negated debt okay so that debt if I pay you interest as long as I have ebbit do to cover that interest payment if I don't it accumulates to the next period but it's not a default so I remove that default mechanism once the debt payback occurs after the conversion I pay I have to minimum every year pay back at least 20% of my earnings before taxes has to be designated to pay back debt but it's not a set amount every year again that removes the default so I was able to acquire about $28 million in debt under terms where I have in essence not removed completely but minimized the likelihood of a default um and that was why we did it we were looking for well- negated leverage we're going to make our money on our Equity investment that we get to put in we're putting in $12 million of equity and we have enough confidence that that'll be worth enough when this is done and Rafael a couple follow-ups so you said removing the threat of default is because these aren't because these aren't term loans there's because the interest is paid there's a clause that in essence says I owe you 8% as long as I have ebbit dot to cover the interest if I don't your 8% accumulates to the next period and then I owe it to you in the next period it doesn't say and if if I don't I default yeah yep that's critical and then it says starting in year six you will begin getting advertised but it doesn't say I have to pay you back $2 million every year it says I have to pay you back at least 20% of my earnings before taxes every year it's basically based on the performance so you're cover if poor performance of the Investments you're you're prot correct and from the investor side you go why would they take those terms well because they're getting the upside of the equity and because we're showing them what we're buying in the sense of our thesis I'm buying companies that have been around for 20 30 60 years cash flow positive I cannot pay a dividend during that time until post conversion so all the cash has to stay within the company um and I have a track record of doing this in Panama that that made sense to them all that being said when we structure this my business partner and I assumed we would be batting you know beating people away because they just wanted to hand us their money I remember having a talk saying we're just going to have to go to like five big family offices and we'll raise this money no problem it was a it was Nails cling to get this money I mean you know people we assumed we were offering The Best of Both Worlds you're getting your fixed income and your Equity return what ended up happening is the fixed income guys said I don't want the equity just pay me 10 or 12% and the equity guys said I don't want the 8% I want more equity and eventually we found our niche of investor that this is is what they wanted they go yeah I've got a deposit at a bank making 2% right now I'll take that eight and hey I've got the upside I don't want to have all my money in in equity in this hold C but I can give you a million dollars and I'll have $200,000 of of equity that sounds reasonable and and that's how it it worked out but it wasn't easy and I never want to have to do it again so that's why I will not be a private Equity guy that the as much as I enjoy looking at the numbers and looking at deals I really do not enjoy raising capital and one other Dynamic here for that I need to understand and I I probably am still not understanding the the full uh the full structure here but by the way thank you for that transparency this is something that people in the audience can study and think about when they're in a position to build a hold Co um the Val the valuation the $200,000 that they can convert if in our million dollar example that they can can convert into Equity how did you decide on the initial valuation that they'd be buying at oh it's the valuation we paid for the companies okay okay so in the sense that so in the sense that how much so if we use the numbers again 28 and 12 correct so 12 is going in as Equity from day one so there's only imagine that goes in at $1,000 a share so we've been issued you know uh 12,000 shares right and they're going to convert 20% of their piece it's going to go in at the same,000 a share it's a par value there is no in essence there's no valuation or anything like that it's just what we valued the shares at from day one when we had nothing that's what they're going in at then going forward if we ever had to raise Capital again or if we were ever going to list the company Etc then there would obviously be another mechanism to revalue those shares based on what the company is actually worth they're going in just at pure Book value of the hold Co part value and so yet to make a purchase with the hold Co yet to make an acquisition no oh no no no no so our first acquisition was 2021 we bought a Furniture retailer in Hickory North Carolina um again this was very popular when we when we went to present what we were going to buy you know pandemic brick-and mortar Furniture retailer I mean half the people looked at us like we were completely insane you know Wayfair is going to kill you Amazon's going to kill you what are you doing retail is one of the most difficult businesses why would you get involved in that right go back to business economics uh I don't know how familiar you are with the furniture industry in North Carolina but North Carolina has historically been the furniture center of the United States initially manufacturing a lot of that manufacturing unfortunately has gone offshore but it has converted itself into a commercial destination for furniture shopping so you have two towns High Point and Hickory both of them have malls that are dedicated 100% to buying furniture and we bought one of the anchors in the mall in Hickory we have about 100,000 square ft of showroom um company's been around you know over 30 years and what makes the economics of that furniture retailer so good is one customer diversification 45% of its sales are out of state people drive to Hickory to buy their furniture for their entire home so we're not relyant on just that local economy number two manufacturer diversification we rep 50 to 80 brands of furniture at the store the proximity to either the manufacturer or if they've gone offshore to their warehouse distribution centers which they mainly did keep near North Carolina allows us to have a lower lead time when we're ordering inventory which allows us to rotate our inventory much faster than say a retailer here and Panama which has to buy all their stuff and hold it for months and months to see when they sell it um the price point of our furniture 3 to $110,000 you know it's not competing with Ikea and Wayfair it's also not competing with that high-end luxury Italian brand it's a price point we believe is continuing that middle class continues to grow and will be the growth going forward um and also because of that price point in general those furnit that furniture is is customized so you go in you want the sofa but you want a different fabric and you want it to be a three-seater instead of a two-seater so the way that works is you give us a 30% deposit we order your furniture we get it on credit and we get cash on delivery when we deliver it to you so it's one of the few retailers you'll find that has no debt and is actually sitting on a decent float of cash from the customer deposits that's what made again I don't know if we'll ever buy another Furniture retailer but that furniture retailer had very good business economics about it the owner operator said to the broker that brought it to us he said he'll only sell if you guarantee him a 5-year labor contract because he's looking to ensure his retirement get his nest EG prepared but he does not want to stop working and for guys like us yeah like I'll guarantee you a 10e contract it means you'll stay so we are three years into that labor agreement at this point and while we haven't signed a second contract everything says he's going to stay on for at least another 3 to 5 years once this contract expires um you know it's he gets to keep doing what he's done for the last 30 years he goes in and he's still the boss we're not there we're not micromanaging him he goes in and it's his store in that sense the only difference is the profits are sent to a different bank account um he gets a very attractive base salary and he gets an incentive plan based on distributions to the holding company so so that has worked out well for us what's the name of the store Hickory Park great cool yeah located in the Hickory Furniture Mart so well also very Buffet esque doesn't he have a famous Furniture retailer the the Russian the Russian immigrant yes yes yes so I mean that that definitely helped it helped convince us that maybe there was something here when we saw it um and then a year later in 2022 we bought our second business which is water heating distribution so similar business model to what we do in Panama in the sense that we buy from manufacturers and then we distribute a lot of B2B we also have wholesale but it's selling water heaters so water heaters boilers pumps uh Etc and we rep about uh 40 to 50 different manufacturers and we cover Washington State Oregon and Alaska with that company so that was our second acquisition and your customer your end customer is like an HVAC company so it's going to depend it can be a GC so it can be a general contractor hrat company doing the installation and then it's just going to depend on the size of the project so for example in Seattle the Seattle Kraken the the hockey team so they play where the SuperSonics used to play the basketball team and they had to read do that entire boiler system because now not only are you producing the hot water but it has to be done in a way that maintains the ice at its temperature so for example we did that whole project so they would be working with the engineers and the designers and and and the HVAC people everyone to to to understand the specs of what that type of project needs when selling those boilers um but it's a it's a nice business again I believe that going forward people will still need hot water in Alaska and Washington and Oregon and and while the technology may change of how that water is is heated or the manufacturers may change somebody will need to sell that and get that to the end user and this company's been around 65 years doing that and we maintain the entire management team and um and so far so good again it's been a little over a year with them but the results have delivered to what we were expecting and and um it's a lot of fun you know for us it's an interesting company to watch how much have you deployed of the 40 million then Rafael right so we have actually just closed our third acquisition as well in the US um and with that third acquisition we are now just about 70% deployed so I would say we have one more to do it's going to depend on the size but considering we probably want to go bigger next time we're going to probably have one more acquisition to do and then that would finish our deployment the third acquisition the bullet points this was I I I love this story of how it got to us um it was at a conference for water heaters for all the manufacturers my business partner was with our CEO and they're speaking with another distributor and he's telling them a story of you know I've got a business partner looking to exit the business and retire and I have to make the decision of do I buy him out do we sell the company I want to keep working how do I do this you know and and our CEO says we were just facing that and we sold to this group and they let us the ones who wanted to stay continued running the business with no interference and it was a really easy transaction and uh my business partner actually met the the seller of this third acquisition and um so it is also water heating distribution very similar manufacturers of the ones that we do on the west coast except now we cover Minnesota Wisconsin North Dakota and South Dakota so at this point we do water heating distribution in seven states you know it sounds like you're an appealing buyer because you don't have new expectations of your companies or of your leaders whereas a private Equity Fund is going to be very growth oriented like clock starts ticking from the moment you know the ink dries in your case it's like we want seamlessness we don't want change right I mean this is kind of this is the directive it's definitely yeah and it it again like everything it speaks to some Sellers and not to others right the seller who wants to stay on running their company which is the seller we're looking for I think this speaks to them the seller who's simply looking to exit their business and wants top dollar the reality is they're probably going to get a bit more from the private Equity um in the case where it's a private Equity Fund that doesn't expect them to roll a lot of equity and stay to stay right but a lot cor correct correct but still they're going to get top dollar from it so if what you're looking for is to Max that dollar amount and you're willing to trust that process with a private Equity then go for it but when you start paying seven 8 nine 10 time multiples or higher for a business you better be building growth into that thesis to get a good Roi especially with what debt costs now maybe back five years ago when debt was so cheap you didn't need it but now with what debt costs plus that type of multiple you have to have growth the reason we're able to allow the company to Simply continue operate the way it does is because of the debt that we negotiated previously and having that you know four to 5 a2x multiple we're already getting a sufficient return on our money based on past performance I just need to ensure that their past performance converts into cash flow and actually gets distributed out to the holding company that's what we most focus on post transaction and so take this home for us Rafael I'm looking at the time we only have a few more minutes yeah so for example with your holdco you you do another acquisition let's say you find your fourth comp let's say I'm sure you will you find your fourth business you acquire it you've now deployed $40 million 12 of that 40 million was your own Equity uh but you're permanent holders so so what how does that so basically well so the so just to let's let's dip our toes in the water the math again a little bit so that 12 million basically what you're doing is getting a phenomenal return on the 12 million year after year after year after year and that's also so so that money is just compounding from an irr perspective um there may correct maybe at some point in the future there will be an exit but you're not exit oriented you're the you're just cash flow oriented and seeing this annual return on your Equity that's correct Okay so our Panama hold Co which is the majority owner of the US holdco the plan for Panama is to remain a private company my partner and I own it it stays private um we have no plans to raise capital for it bring on outside investors take it public or anything it's just we see it more like a family business in that sense the US holding company we have outside investors obviously the ones who are going to convert have asked the question okay and I convert for what you say you don't want to pay a dividend I don't get a salary what's the point of all this and what we've told them is so let's imagine it takes us exactly five years to deploy the 40 I mean at the pace we're going it'll probably happen a little sooner but you never know we've said by year 10 so conversion plus 5 we will either direct list to a public market in the US providing liquidity for our investors or we will create a share repurchase program annually and that will have a set multiple based on trailing 12 months earning before taxes had a multiple we've already discussed with them and we would begin so who wants liquidity can have liquidity um but our plan a is to list um and and that's what we're going to do so again when we list the plan is not for us to sell our Equity it's we just want to keep growing the company but it would provide liquidity for those that do it would also open up a lot more ways of financing growth going forward being a public listed company mhm and so the model will be rinse and repeat by profile of company that we've already talked about a lot um and and maybe larger and larger and larger but really a public company whose service that it provides is buying private companies and distributing those cash flows that's what it seems like for now and I mean as as I mentioned before you know we continue to do this because we love doing it and if in 10 years we decide now the way to continue growing forward is to buy public stocks we would also have that flexibility to do it at the end of the day we're investors um and this is a vehicle that right now makes a lot of sense on a return perspective to continue investing this way I don't know what that would look like in five more years or in 10 or 15 more years but I do know that we would continue continue applying the same criteria and discipline and thoughtfulness to the Investments that we make regardless of in What markets they appear in um I think once you're public you also give a lot of freedom to the shareholder to decide if they're still Vision aligned with you because if they're not they can simply sell their stock and say you're not doing what I want you to do it's one I mean Buffett's Keys has been he's stayed consistent for 60 years building this that being said he's also changed along the way he he started buying tech stocks right he buys Apple and it that was something he said he was never going to do and then he does it so there have been slight changes they've had obviously always phenomenal results for him yeah it's it's hard to know exactly how the future will be but yes we will be a holding company focused on investing and compounding our Capital at high rates of return going forward Rafael I want to close us out with yeah some themes that emerged from our previous two conversations from this conversation that you and I emailed about a little bit and they've already come up many of them so I'm going to Rattle through them and give you the opportunity to say more if you feel like you haven't said enough already and you you may have first um name of the game is not blowing up protecting downside anything more you need to say on that are we good if you are investing for the long run what you're looking to do is compound and compounding takes place over many years you don't see the benefits of compounding in the first 5 or 10 or 15 years but at year 20 and 25 and 30 it gets really amazing the only way that works is if you can stay in the game so you the first thing you have to do is ensure that you're not going to blow up how do you do that in my opinion there's three ways one don't overpay for an asset don't chase two hold on to cash you can never have too much cash you know buff it likes to say cash to a company Is Like Oxygen when you have it you don't even think about it but when it's not there and you need it it's the only thing you're thinking about right and the third one is don't over leverage yourself if you're going to take on debt make sure you take on a reasonable amount and then also focus on how you negotiate it that was what we learned we didn't blow up in Panama but we had some there were some nervous moments and especially when we saw the pandemic hit and we thought imagine if we had been sitting on a bunch of bullet payments coming due right now we could have lost everything and that was when we really made that focus of we're going to raise this convertible debt and that's how we're going to get our benefit from it instead of being a performance fee we're going to get our benefit by negotiating debt in a way that we can't have that blowup occur to us um so that's how I think you can ensure that you stay in the game spend time thinking where you want to end up this is when you guys sat down and you looked at your three three directions I guess yeah and I think not only then but also when we decided to enter the US you know we've had we've had two or three moments in time when we very much you know sat down put a break on everything that was going on and just spent time discussing where do we want to be in 5 to 10 years we've always been very honest with each other as business partners in that sense when we went into the US I said I don't want to be the one who travels I'll be happy to go look at a new opportunity or close a deal but I don't want to be the guy that all the CEOs are reporting to traveling a lot I already lived in the US I moved to Panama for a reason and I'd rather not have to do that and my business partner was okay with that he wanted to be that engine overseeing the us so we both aside from analyzing businesses and Investments Etc we are managing Partners I run Panama he runs the US in that sense as a managing partner where the CEOs report to um that takes thought you know don't just get caught up in acting it's worth it to take some time especially in the beginning you're sitting here going I want to start a hold Co I want to buy a business because I read a book or I saw somebody on Twitter who's doing it that's great it's a great way to make a living but spend some time really thinking about where you want to end up because two things once you take on outside money and once you take on debt those things are very hard to undo you got to see it through so you better be sure before you do it that you want to see it through because there's no you don't get to call timeout in the middle of that and just and walk away you know when we decided to take outside capital for the us we in essence were signing over 10 years of our life to taking this to fruition because I'm not going to go and look at those investors in the face and say ah you know I just I got kind of bored at this I want to I want to go do something else now that's not okay they Trust us so if you're going to make those decisions make sure you put a lot of thought into it before you do um and even buying a company I mean buying a company it's not just you're not just buying a piece of paper it's people's lives it's people's jobs I know a lot of people say that and but it's real uh when you own the business and you have to make payroll and and and you have to fire people and you hire people and and you this affects people's lives I mean make that decision with at least some thought put into it not just just because it's it's the thing that people are doing right now you must put in the Reps yeah I think we covered that we covered that yeah I mean I would if you're starting out in this or even if you're not I would be looking at I still review every teaser that is sent to me by every broker or every other source that we have for off-market deals I look at all of them I reply to most of them if it's a personal email sent to me that wasn't just a mass emailing let's say even if I'm not interested I reply to every single one and the reason I do that is because you never know when that broker is going to find the one that is the one I want to buy and I want to be the guy that always says not interested and I usually give them even one or two senses of why because I see this or this because that can also help them direct maybe an improvement of how they pitch it to somebody else or also improve their filter of what they send to me um and that is just putting in those reps you know it's just it's just doing it daily in consistently I'm going to take the liberty of adding to you must put in the repetitions and it it helps if you love whatever the repetitive task is it definitely does it definitely does if you don't then I would look to do something else for sure you know be careful of taking on debt and it's corollary you can never have too much cash think we covered that I think we covered that and then last but not least we've probably also covered be patient that and I think you meant that specifically in Mak moves buying businesses but also I think that obviously plays a role in the compounding effect and how long for the real wealth to come this project takes yeah I think being patient is an overarching theme for all the ones we just talked about you know you've got to be patient to put in the Reps you've got to be patient by hoarding your cash and not taking on too much leverage and not just chasing the next shiny object that's out there you know just being disciplined waiting for that pitch like you mentioned that waiting for your fat pitch to come across and knocking it out of the park um it even comes down to and this is one I'm still learning today to be more patient I used to love to look at weekly sales numbers then I started focusing on monthly uh financial statements I'm trying it's really hard for me because I love looking at my financials I'm trying to wait for quarterly now you know just being patient businesses Zig and zag you're not going to be able to course W every 4 weeks let 3 months go by compare it to the budget sit down with your CEOs be patient the further out you can get yourself from the weeds the better decisions you're going to make and if you're not an operator which I'm not am I partner is not we're investors we get paid for making correct decisions we don't get paid for making lots of decisions we're not here to be doing being active we're here to do something right once a year once every 2 years honestly but there's a lot that goes into that to Preparing yourself for that decision and some of it is just giving yourself the space to really see the field and understand what's going on um and I love it I mean it's it's again I always say I've got the best job in the world I I absolutely enjoy being here enjoy who I work with uh enjoy what we're building and and we both say this we'll keep doing it as long as that's how we feel the day that this really becomes work and a grind we'll have to start having another conversation like we've had in the past of well what are we going to do next where are we going to take this thing um but until then I plan on just you know keep reading my Sims and collecting my financials like I did as a kid with my baseball cards well that reminds me of of probably my favorite buffe ISM which doesn't even have to do with finance and it's about finding the thing that you love doing every day his expression tap dancing to work every morning yeah there's there's a video of him going into work and he you know he goes to McDonald's drive-thru every morning for breakfast on his way to work and he checks the stock market before he leaves his house and if the stock market is up he gets uh sausage McMuffin and if the stock market's down he only gets the Egg McMuffin so I mean I hope to be you know 90 years old and still enjoying it this much like I do now and living like that that'd be great what a what a uh a tour uh of of a exciting and unusual Journey uh rafhael thank you for sharing it with us if people want to reach out I can I could see people wanting to reach out to you for any number of reasons how is the best way you prefer they get in touch yeah I mean Twitter is Rafa Quinn um and alternative holdings.com is our website so that's the easiest way to and twitters you you like as oppos to DM and Twitter and also you know read along I try and and post every day um and they're usually medium length to long length posts about the process that we're going through lessons that we've learned so I hope that they add value for people and yeah DM me on Twitter or uh or go to the website there's a way to contact me on there Rafael Quinn thanks so much sir congratulations on your your financial and professional success but more importantly you're having found a way to just love what you do that is uh that is should be the goal for all of us Amen to that ma'am thanks will I appreciate it 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