Andrew Swiler, welcome to Acquiring Minds. Thanks, Will. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Andrew, you were a searcher who bought a SaaS business, which deserves congratulations because a lot of people would love to acquire a SaaS business, but can't get their hands on one. Also, you did it with an SBA loan. The generous terms that an SBA loan affords to Americans buying businesses. So, even better than buying a SaaS business is buying a SaaS business with an SBA loan. And lastly, you did it from Barcelona. So, you are an American, but live in Spain with your wife and kids. So, all of that is pretty impressive, Andrew. Now, I know that there is a lot more hair on this story than that, um but still a great score score scorecard, I would say. And now we are going to get into the hair, the details, how you put all of this together, Andrew. So, please start us off with some background on you. So, first of all, anyone that's watching this on YouTube will see that there's there was hair on the deal, but there's not hair on my head. So, I did I did It was The deal wasn't when I lost my hair. I've I lost my hair about 10 years before that. So, don't worry. Getting an SBA loan and acquiring a business doesn't make you go bald. It's a genetic thing. So, anyone that's out there thinking that it's going to cause hair loss, don't worry. So, uh yeah, I started my journey. So, I mean, I I started in private equity uh 15 years ago in 20 2006 after college. Started in private equity, worked for a company called Hilco Global. Uh we basically did mostly retail acquisitions in um distressed retail acquisitions. So, I mean, my claim to fame was, you know, we did a lot of work with Starbucks when Starbucks was in restructuring mode uh during the Great Financial Crisis. Um also, we acquired like Polaroid uh during their bankruptcy. So, we did uh a lot of a lot of sort of deals in distressed. I did that for about four or five years, and at one point, I just was super burned out. I was living in Chicago. Uh the winter was getting driving me crazy even though I grew up in Minneapolis, but winter was driving me crazy. I was just depressed. I had a buddy of mine that had just moved to Spain. Uh and I was sitting there with him the day before he left, and I was like, "Hmm, like, that's interesting. That's This I'm interested in doing something like this." And the months went by, months went by. I I ended up living in LA for a month. And I just decided like, "I got to make a change. Like, whatever I'm doing right now isn't working for me." And so, I ended up breaking up with my girlfriend at the time and then went into my boss's office and told him I was going to go move to Europe and write. And he was like, "I'm not even going to try and convince you to stay with us because what you just told me means you're out the door. Like, you're gone." And so, I packed up and in May of 2010, I moved out of uh Chicago, ended up traveling uh throughout Europe for about 5 months. And on an island in Croatia, I was doing a kayaking trip. Pulled up on this beach with the kayak and met my wife uh who was sitting next to me in on the beach, ended up striking up a conversation, talking to her on the beach, and then we ended up traveling for about a month together uh through Bosnia and Croatia, staying in like hostels in little houses. This was right when Airbnb started. So, we were like the first people using Airbnb. Uh and after that, I convinced her to move with me to the US to San Francisco. I said like, "I'm not going back into private equity. I'm going to go into startups." I I experienced like Airbnb and like all this tech stuff and new apps and Instagram had come out, and it was like, "All right, let's move to San Francisco for the gold rush." Uh and moved out to San Francisco, and all I did was finance. So, I went out there and just became like what is now called a fractional CFO. At the time, it was just a guy that did spreadsheets and prepared our Series A decks. Uh so, I did that for people and sort of like prepared their books and prepared their numbers and got them ready to go out and pitch. Uh and then I would go with them. Like, I would go to Sequoia. Uh we'd go to like Sand Hill Road and, you know, sit in the room with them and be like their CFO in the meeting. And, you know, I was only like 27. I don't know why they thought I was a professional guy. Uh and 27, you were like the oldest person in the room, Andrew. So, I was pretty close. It was like 24-year-old, 25-year-old, and I was the oldest guy. Uh so, then after about 2 years, my wife just said to me, she was like, "I'm I hate it here. I hate San Francisco. I want to go back to Barcelona." Uh she didn't like the weather. She didn't like the people. She's not in tech. She's an artist. So, like, she's like, "All you guys talk about is tech, and it's stupid." She's like, "I don't I'm not interested in it, and I don't really like the culture here." So, man, so can I interjection? Such a sad commentary on San Francisco because San Francisco historically has been the city that attracts the maybe in the artist including LA and New York. But, you know, uh a hub for artists or at least kind of bohemian types. And so, it's Yeah. Actually hearing an artist be like, "This place is the least artistic place I've ever been." is pretty sad. Yeah, it was it was not. I mean, we had some friends who were artists like some She'd made friends with some people there, but it's not like New York. It's not like LA. I mean, no. Night and day from from any of those places. So, she said to me, "I'm moving back." I said, "Okay." Uh I, you know, kind of weighed my options, didn't know what I was going to do, went himmed and hawed a little bit, and then decided, "Well, we got to get married if we're going to move back to Spain." So, we got married in San Francisco, moved back uh a week later. I didn't know what to do. I didn't really speak the language. And my wife started this company, started an eyewear company at the time. I tried to start some e-commerce companies, they all failed. My wife started an eyewear company, and like 6 months in, she was like, "We need money to make these glasses." And I was like, "Well, I know how to help find money." So, I sat down with her and her partner, and we made like the business plan, and we like I started like a PR movement. We got on uh on the news. And we got the company uh in like all the big newspapers, and all of a sudden like the CEO of this important company in Spain calls us and just said like, "Hey, I'm interested in your product. I'd like to invest." And gave us money to start the product, and we raised I think we raised like 30K, like nothing. And ended up getting the product built. There there it was like a patent that it was glasses that were interchangeable. So, you could go into the store and customize your glasses inside of our stores. We ended up making our own retail stores and then spinning those off into franchises. People would come to Barcelona and come to our stores, and they were interested in the product. They were like, "Can I bring this to Dubai?" And we're like, "Sure." And they're like, "Can I open a store in Dubai?" We'd say, "Sure." So, we made like a master franchise agreement, started franchising our business. It was in Mexico, Italy, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. Uh I forget where else we were in. Uh somewhere in Southeast Asia. And it was it was an interesting experience. Um my wife after a few years, she we had two kids during that period of time, and then she had some health issues, and in 2019, right before the pandemic, we actually sold the company. Uh not for a lot of money, but it was enough uh that, you know, gave me a chance like sit down, think, "What's the next step? What am I going to do?" And I knew about search funds. I'd actually gone to a search fund conference here in 2016 in IESA in Spain. IESA is like the most important place for search funds here in Spain or in Europe. Uh so, went to the the search fund conference in 2016. I was like, "Wow, this is awesome. You can skip all the really crappy parts of entrepreneurship and just jump into the parts that are interesting. Sign me up." Uh and it always kind of been in the back of my mind. But, I knew like in Spain, I wasn't going to acquire like a local Spanish company. Strangely enough, in Spain, the multiples for like service businesses are the same as as in the US. Financing's like 10 times harder. The market's 100 times smaller. And so, you're in a situation like, "Well, why am I going to buy this?" Like, that this you know, I went back and forth. I'm like, "I'm not going to buy this." I even tried to talk my brother into buying a dumpster company in the US in Minneapolis where he was living, and that he would be like the operator, and I would be the finance guy. And he's My brother was a chef, and he was like, "Are you insane? Like, what are you talking about?" Like, I'm "Buying a a dumpster company? How did you do this? Like, what did people How do people buy things?" And so, you do kind of get this feeling where you're like, "Oh, this is a weird small niche uh society." Like, where you know, you look up to like these guys that have bought other things like private equity firms or something else, but like in reality, it's a very small subset of people that are that are in this business. Um so, I I I knew, you know, living in Spain, really the only lucrative thing I could find was e-commerce or software. And I'd already done, you know, CFO sort of work for software. I'd obviously done e-commerce as well. I just was turned off by e-commerce. I think it's a very hard business. Uh I think uh I did see a couple cool businesses. I mentioned to you a Lego minifigure business that that I did like. Um but, in the end, SaaS was really the only thing that that really peaked my interest. The sales, building up enterprise sales, and building up this infrastructure. You said e-commerce and SaaS seemed like the most kind of two lucrative industries but I I also assume they were the only kind of virtual remote type style industries or or um segments that also would allow you the lifestyle or allow you to continue operating them while in Barcelona cuz you weren't going to buy a brick and mortar or traditional business in Spain. And you weren't going to do that in the US, either, cuz your your brother had said, "No, thank you." So, you it it needed to be a kind of a virtual business, and I get but but what about uh you know, cloud bookkeeping business? Or, you know, there are a lot of types of service businesses that you can run remotely. Why not any of those? So, I actually uh a couple about a year and a half ago, I was trying to spin up the fractional CFO business again Uh yeah. in in the US. So, I was talking to some fractional CFOs that were sort of doing it on their own. We were talking about like coming together and and putting together a team, putting together a sales team, and doing that in almost starting from zero. They all had a book of business, but like almost merging a few individuals together. We discussed that. Um I think for me the service business thing is I think it's interesting. I think from an acquisitions perspective, it's really hard to make the numbers work sometimes. I think a lot of times you end up I mean, the great thing about SaaS is that if you do it right, you can have this multiple expansion that with service businesses it's really hard to get. Like you might buy a service business at one or two x revenue, but you're not going to exit it for five x revenue unless you've done something absolutely incredible with it. So, for me that was something that if I was going to dive into it, I didn't want to do it that way. And I also knew I had to put debt on one of these businesses. I knew it had to be very cash flowing, have a strong history behind it in order to just get enough skin in the game for me to make it interesting cuz otherwise, you know, you get into some of these search types of economics and you know, somebody might have 20%, they might have 15%. Uh you know, they they obviously get more, but I wanted to make sure that I was above 50% inside of our deal and I knew the best way to do that was, you know, demonstrate a past of knowledge, but also being able to put debt on on the business. So, it had to be a business that's that's cash flowing and the SBA would would accept. And sure, that's hard to find in software. Sure. Well, so that's a perfect segue, but before I ask you about that, I want to hear more about why you don't like e-commerce because we saw an explosion of interest in e-commerce during the pandemic because everyone started working from home and became entrepreneurs and didn't want to, you know, rethought their lives. But also e-commerce was also booming. So, there was this great this great pull of for this great appetite for e-commerce businesses. Now, that's come back kind of down to earth, but they're still on paper at least a lot to like about e-commerce, namely that you can have a business doing millions of dollars a year that you're running from your laptop. Disabuse people of that of that vision. I think I mean, there there are FBA businesses that I think you can sort of run that way. I have I have a couple good friends that are running that they have, you know, the typical setup. Bunch of people people in the Philippines running their whole business and they're playing golf all day. It's fantastic. They're I'm super happy for them. I I wish I'd gotten into that business in 2015 or 2014 cuz that was the moment to do it. I think right now it's very hard. It's very saturated. It's super cutthroat. You're fighting with Chinese people all the time and the moment to sell was sort of when I was looking, too, because there was all these FBA aggregators that are out there looking and a lot of guys I knew ended up selling out at that moment, but also the multiples were going through the roof. So, it was like, you know, what do we and you knew that it felt like a bubble of, you know, these a bunch of capitals pulling in. Same thing with non-FBA businesses, but I had run uh an e-commerce company for and and just a physical goods company for five years, six years. I had seen from 2014 where we were where it's just sort of wild west like throw some Facebook ads out there, make some Instagram posts, and some of them might hit or or you get, you know, a famous person to talk about you and it and you get it out there. The industry professionalized and optimized super quickly. So, like by 2020, 2022, it was whoever is the best operator, whoever had the best chops, and whoever had the best team. And I saw that. Like I saw my evolution in e-commerce and I knew like I'd been out of the game for a year and I was like, I don't want to get back into it because I know where this is going. It's just whoever has the best operations or whoever has the contacts with, you know, a creator or a famous person or something like that or you just got into a really really strong niche early on and you've gotten positioning from SEO. It's super hard to take a business that you acquire that's an e-commerce business at right now and in today's environment and grow it into something bigger unless you have some sort of special sauce that you know like, "Hey, I'm going to buy this because I know Kim Kardashian or I know X, Y, and Z person and they're going to help me get it off the ground." And I know people that have done that did really well during the pandemic and right now they've cut a lot of their businesses just gotten knee-capped. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. E-commerce. E-commerce. Okay. Well, that was that was exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you for for that explanation. No, it sounds, you know, I I still find my own kind of personal attraction to e-commerce surface every now and then and and think, "Hmm, let me buy an e-commerce business." And then I hear from an e-commerce operator like you or somebody who knows a lot of e-commerce operators and I'm reminded why why I should not. Of course, there are people who will buy e-commerce businesses and it will go well. So, this is a let's let's not generalize too broadly, but um buy everywhere. Um all right. So, the question that I wanted to going back to SaaS now, the question I wanted to ask you about SaaS is so, there's lots to love. Why don't you actually enumerate for us the reasons to love SaaS? We we kind of glanced off it. Address that directly and then I'll ask my question. So, I mean, one of the best things about SaaS is if you can grow it and you can show growth and that growth isn't petering out, your enterprise value goes up enormously very quickly. So, today one of our investors, Einar, is is the the guys from Tiny Seed. He tweeted out a graph that shows MRR growth and enterprise value. I can share it with you afterwards, the link. Yeah. And it shows like as the graph goes like this, the enterprise value is actually above above the graph. And as the graph for MRR goes like this, the enterprise value collapses like this. So, what is there to love? It's if you're to growing, if you can figure out how to grow it, there's huge opportunity on the exit of of, you know, selling one of these businesses. So, if you can come into one of these businesses and it's flat and you buy it when the enterprise value is down and you can get it to go like this and the enterprise value jumps very quickly because growth in SaaS is something that, you know, people value a lot because they see that as every every piece of growth has not a lot of marginal cost. So, the value immediately goes up because product is already made. It's not like a physical good. Um in the case of most SaaS businesses. I mean, there are SaaS businesses that require a lot of service to actually deliver the product. So, that's number one of what there is to love. Number two from my perspective is like you mentioned, the remote workforce. I love not just the fact that I can live wherever I want. I love the fact that I can hire people from wherever and you can find fantastic people you can leverage. And there it's not it's just that they're cheap. I mean, they we have guys in Ukraine that make as much as a US software developer. Um so, that you know, there's a misnomer that that this is cheap labor and it really isn't. You're getting, you know, there's only x amount of engineers in the world and you're going to pay good money for the good ones. But you're able to, you know, you're able I go on LinkedIn and I post jobs. Like I'll I'll do this thing where I post if we need a position, I'll post every day in a different country or in a different city around the world and just collect resumes for free because LinkedIn lets you post one job post for free at any given time. So, if you post every day, usually you'll hit the the max 50 54 if it's like an interesting job post. So, I'll get 50 candidates a day in different cities. You can weed out of those 50 you might find five that most people just apply to things and don't even look at what the job is. But you'll find five like really good people. And you'll find them in India, Ukraine, Germany, Portugal, Mexico. And all of a sudden you have this huge pool of talent that you can look to rather than saying like, "Hey, I'm in Denver and I got to hire, you know, the best guy in Denver." And you get 50 guys in Denver, but you know, you're not getting to choose from this enormous pool of talent that have experience. And a lot of these people now have worked for international companies and they've worked for, you know, startups or large corporations. And frankly, I mean, today I was meeting with a guy that's here in Spain that's from Brazil. He's a product manager and he's amazing. Like he's amazing and he's probably I'd venture to guess we haven't agreed to anything yet, but I'd venture to guess he's 30% of what somebody in San Francisco would be paid, maybe less than that. And English is perfect. His experience is with a super fast growing startup from from Berlin. And it's hard to find that if you're just stuck geographically. So, for me, those are like the two key things that I love about SaaS. The other thing is, you know, it's it's grown it's matured a lot with like like with e-commerce, which brings its good and bad, but there's there are playbooks that you can run. But those playbooks are they're always evolving. And for me, what's interesting is always trying to like get ahead, like see what people are doing in outbound marketing, what people are doing in inbound marketing. What can we do better? What can we tweak? Because you're not selling like what drove me crazy selling glasses was like you're selling like just to consumers like they're they just see a cool picture and they're like, "Oh, I want to buy that." Like buy buy buy. Where with B2B you have to be telling a story. You have to be explaining to people. You have to be educating the consumer. You have to be showing your knowledge about like in our example, HR. So, we're always building knowledge about HR and explaining it to people and telling people like what we know just to build a relationship with them. And that relationship is long term. And it just I don't know. It's that long term like B2B enterprise like you're actually trying to do something together rather than just transactional like, "Hey, give me the money. Buy some glasses. Move on." Interesting. That's kind of the consultative you what you call consultative sales when it specifically when it's applied to sales. Now, I know you're also talking about content marketing and kind of I don't know if consultative marketing is a thing, but same kind of same idea where you're you're trying to really be um to educate your customer and in educating them kind of hoping and expecting that they'll then turn to you when they need the thing or when they're ready to ready to buy. Yeah. And that's interesting that you actually like that, Andrew. Um I mean, I guess I it certainly I can see the appeal of that, but I think probably more people would just prefer, you know, transactional, quicker sale, and doing it more often. And also And also a lot of people just prefer consumer marketing. Now, again, I I don't I don't actually think that's me. But, you know, your glasses company, you could talk to people you know, at a cocktail party. Like there's a there's a universal appeal to it. So, it's kind of quote I put this in quotes more interesting Yeah. to people because it you know, it's more accessible to them. Whereas, this is super niche, super B2B, super only going to be interesting to people who care or know about HR software than HR, which is, you know, 1/1,000,000th of the people who wear glasses. Uh but, I guess it's um that that's just interesting. I've never thought about SAS that way or B2B SAS specifically. Yeah. Yeah, it's it it it definitely takes sort of a specific, you know, way of thinking about things or or enjoyment to do that. But, I mean, I I hung out with like famous soccer players. We had like models. We had all this stuff. We were Our glasses were movies. But, I never felt like comfortable in those situations. Now, I like talk to HR people and yeah, I like them. They're They're interesting people. Like I'm learning as much as as they're teaching me because I didn't know anything about HR. So, I've never worked in a big company. I've never done anything with HR. And, you know, I just talked to our clients and just found out like why do they use this? What is important about this? What do they do all day? And it's interesting. That's great. That's great that you you had that you were willing to reach out to customers and kind of ask that. I guess you got your clients on the phone after you bought the business. But, we're we're jumping ahead. So, let's return to that. One other thing I want to ask about SAS is were you not scared off by something I kind of said at the top or implied at the top, which is they're very expensive from a multiples multiple perspective. So, a lot of people want SAS, but can't get it because, you know, you need dry powder or you need some kind of financing where you can really pay a premium for a business. The idea of paying 3x on SDE like we're used to with, you know, a traditional business with an SBA loan we're told doesn't happen in SAS. Now, you did make it happen and we're going to get into that. But, even before you kind of went after SAS, did that not just scare you off before you started? Yes and no. I I So, I looked at I mean, I would say between SAS, e-commerce, and everything else, I probably looked at I don't know, over 2,000 deals uh in in just looking at SIMs, talking to brokers, looking at a lot of things. And that made it so when I did find Lanteria, I knew it was an outlier like from pricing perspective, from evaluation perspective, from an opportunity perspective. So, all those sort of at bats of taking those swings and seeing it, it could have scared me off like I I looked at some There were some great companies we looked at that, you know, they wanted I don't even know what they ended up selling for cuz they were just they weren't priced. But, I assume they were they sold for 10x ARR in in that time period. Maybe they would sell for 7 or 6 now. But, yeah, it it was definitely daunting. And were you also expecting to be able to or to have to get an SBA loan to buy whatever business you set your heart on? That was my original thesis. I knew that if I was going to have like I said at the beginning, if I was going to have enough skin in the game and enough equity in this business, it had to be something that we could put debt on. I I knew that from the from the top. Yeah. And so, cuz again, part of the reason that people can't get their hands on a SAS businesses is just cuz they're so expensive. But, even even So, you just don't want to pay a huge premium for a business. But, even if you're kind of willing to, often it's un unfinanceable. I mean, the bank is going to say this you know, this thing doesn't underwrite. So, it's kind of like even if you're willing to to go after that SAS business, your you know, your lending partners are not. That also was not something that scared you off. Uh it I think I was just too dumb or naive to actually think through that part. I didn't really talk to that many lenders before we actually found the deal. So, my thesis was and and I I have another uh another friend of mine that that acquired a SAS company. His thesis was he went to the market to to investors and started talking to them like years before. So, he was he was doing the deal on his own. Uh he started talking to investors years years before and started sending them emails, updates to lenders, to investors. And he sent them every month like his update about his his funnel that he was doing for for his search. And I was like I was like, why are you doing that? I'm like, just find a really good business and the whole thing will kind of fall into place, which I I've tweeted about before was a big mistake on my part. I I got lucky then that that I just was super aggressive afterwards and had a good deal and moved as fast as I could. But, it does make a lot of sense to keep people in the loop and build up that investor network while you're doing this. But, from a lender perspective, I didn't even I talked to a few lenders. I talked to like uh the people from Live Oak Bank and they were like, we don't really do SAS businesses. Right. Uh and once I found the business, um actually it was Xavier Helgesen who uh he he Enduring Ventures? Yeah, yeah. I I He reached out to me. I tweeted about something and he like sent me a DM. We ended up talking on the phone for a while. He put me in contact with a few different lenders that he knew. One of these guys uh just was crazy enough. He was like, you know, send us the send us the information. And fortunately for us, um what the previous owners had done was basically optimized 100% for their own profitability for years. So, they underpaid their employees, they underpaid for marketing. They They basically didn't try and grow the business. But, at the same time, they were building up a cushion of cash underneath them every single year. And so, the bank looked at this and was like, wow, look at this business. These guys are taking home like 750k a year uh on this business that's doing like less than 2 million top line. They're like, this is crazy. So, we were able to sort of show them these numbers and they were like, oh, you guys have tons of room to maneuver, which we did. I mean, the the profitability was there and it did give us a lot of cushion afterwards to make, you know, all the mistakes that we've sort of made over the first year because there was a solid base uh inside the business. Fascinating. Okay. Well, uh we're going to hear all about Lanteria and what it is and why these guys were running it the way they were. But, before we do that, let's just hear a little bit more about your search. 2,000 SIMs or listings that you looked at, all SAS businesses or some version of online businesses, digital businesses? No, no, it was all over the place. Like I said, I was looking at dumpster businesses in in Minneapolis. I was looking at at SAS businesses. I would say, I mean, I was focused more on digital businesses. Sometimes if like a traditional business kind of came across my desk, I would take a look. But, very few of those. It was mostly digital businesses. I mean, if you look on the, you know, acquire.com, Flippa, all those, those I don't really consider those as SIMs that I reviewed. Those were just a lot of crappy businesses that just put their P&Ls up there and, you know, you kind of figure out what's who are scammers and who's not. Mhm. Um I looked a lot on Axial. Uh Axial had some pretty good deal flow during the during the pandemic with SAS companies. Mhm. And what I would do is just I I would look at the SIM, but then I would get on the phone with the broker. I mean, I was one of those typical jerks that would that would uh you know, take up the brokers' time that they would complain about like these searchers that waste their time. But, tire kickers. You have, Andrew. Yeah, the tire kickers. Yeah, the tire kickers. I was kicking the tires, but I knew like, you know, I was kicking the tires of business I knew I wasn't going to buy just to kind of understand like what was the level of What was the level you could push back on these companies? Cuz sometimes people are listing things at 8x revenue or they weren't listing it for anything. You just kind of feel out like what is the pricing here? What is their motivation? And just test out like the the questions that you could ask in the discovery that you could do. Mhm. So, when it actually came time to like find like Because the key to most of this is there's a bunch of deals that are on the market that'll be there in 12 months because they're not really looking to sell unless somebody hits their number. But, what you want to find is the businesses that are ready to sell, that are priced to sell, and that want to move fast. And that's when you're going to need to be able to like have mentally say, hey, wait a second. This is outside of what's usually there. And I need to know exactly what I need to ask cuz I'm going to have to move really fast in this business cuz otherwise somebody else is going to call and they're going to rip this out from under me. Somebody else is probably more well-funded than me. So, when you don't have the funding, you kind of have to be smarter and faster in some way. And so, you got to kick the tires and and just figure out what's the motivations. Yeah. It was all about reps. And Andrew, do you remember from those conversations or that kind of self-learning tire kicking phase any learnings? I mean, I I understand you're just kind of like building a framework, kind of a loose framework in your mind and understanding where the kind of like the push and pull is. But, were were there any hard takeaways that you recall that you could share? I'm going to try and think about this for a second cuz I I actually was thinking about this today. Like I One of the things I was thinking about is how funny it is that you spend almost 2 years building up like a muscle for something that once you're done with that uh activity of searching or acquiring, then you don't use that muscle again for a long time. So, like today I was trying to think of things and I was like, I don't even remember like it's like you block it out of your memory cuz of a sudden like a whole wave of new information comes in about how to run a business, about how to manage a business, how to grow a business that you weren't thinking about at the time. And I hadn't even done it before and I almost blocked it out for those 2 years, too. I was like, "No, I'm going to buy a business." And you forget about all the things that come with it because you're thinking about also this like grass is greener on the other side. Like, "Oh, this new business is going to be fantastic. It's not going to have all the other crap that I was dealing with in my other business." And of course it will and probably twice as worse. But I mean the for me the biggest takeaway in in entrepreneurship in general, too, is just curiosity. Like you have to be the the one number one thing like in being an entrepreneur, searching, acquiring, or operating business is you have to constantly be curious because otherwise you're going to run out of passion or excitement for something. Unless you find like the passion of now like I just like talking to HR people and kind of hearing the random things they do all day or like sitting in Facebook groups and be like, "What are these people talking about all day?" And because if you don't have this curiosity, it's like you're going to run out you're going to like, "Well, okay, I acquired a SaaS business and now okay, we're making money, you know, we're doing like the levers of sales and things." But like if you're not curious about like, "Why are people using this? Why do people do that? Why do people do this?" You'll kind of lose that. So for the interesting thing about acquiring a business is you get to look at hundreds of business models and companies and industries. And if you're not doing it out of like the curiosity but you're just doing it looking at the numbers like, "What's the bottom line? What's the EBITDA? What's the multiple here? You know, what's the motivation seller?" You're not going to you're not going to keep yourself motivated through that whole process. Like you just have to be interested like, "Wow, look at this dumpster business. Like how does this work? Where do they park the dumpster? Where you know, what does the real estate look like?" It it's all about interest in industries and in business models. Otherwise, you kind of run out of room to to push through some of the difficult moments if you're not curious. That's so well put, Andrew. And I I think it helped just crystallize for me why I like doing this podcast so much cuz I get to peer into all of these different little random businesses and industries. And I I just I love business and so this is just kind of a way for me to just be ever curious. And and you'll hear podcasters say that. It's like one of the great things about podcasting is you can just be as a host is just like you can just be curious and ask questions all day. Um but if you really like business, you know, hosting Acquiring Minds is is a is is hard to beat. For sure. My my our marketing manager like she kind of cuz we do a little podcast where we invite like part of our lead generation right now is we're inviting HR people that are potential leads but instead of trying to get them on a demo, I'm just having them come talk to me for 15 minutes and I ask them questions about their life, about HR. She's like, "These are really boring. Like I don't think we should be posting these." And I'm like, "Really?" I was like, "I thought that was really interesting. I really like talking to her." She's like she's like, "No, it was really boring." She's like, "You just had that lady talk about her life." And I was like, "Oh, I thought it was interesting." She was like like last week I talked to this woman that was a 911 operator and then she went into HR. And I was like, "Wow." And I was like, "Tell me the stories about the 911 operator. Like what why'd you And our marketing manager is like, "Why you really want me to post this?" I'm like, "Why not? It was interest." But that's great. And by the way, does podcasting as lead gen work? This is a technique that I've heard about a lot. So in B2B SaaS actually specifically. I don't know if it works as a sales closing tactic. It works like crazy for actually getting people to answer emails. Like we had to stop the we we only ran the campaign for a week and I had to stop our SDR because I don't I said I don't have enough time to do all these interviews in the next 2 months. So I said, "You got to stop." So we've limited this now. So what we're doing is we'll reach out to people but we only reach out to people that are active on LinkedIn. So we'll narrow this down to just our our leads like the people that are specifically in our lead in in our lead funnel. And you know, maybe they didn't answer our book a demo type of thing but we'll look and see are they active on LinkedIn? What do they talk about? What do they like? And then we'll reach out and say this post they talked about, we'd like to expand on this post and have you come on the podcast. And the response rate is like at least from this small campaign the response rate was like 4 30% I want to say positive response rate which is like absolutely insane and in a cold email right now is dead. It's like almost impossible to get cold email leads. And this is has blown up. So yeah, we're in a And the and the lifetime value of a new customer justifies the this customer acquisition cost of your time to do a podcast, produce a podcast, etc. That I haven't dove deep enough into the Yeah, that's TBD. I mean, we're just looking for anything to sort of generate get the lead gen going and and getting it to work. So for me, I view this as twofold. One, we talk to people that we know are our target market. Like we 100% know this person could buy our software. Then we get them on the podcast. Then they share it to their LinkedIn audience which is usually other HR people that they know. So at some point I think indirectly this should work in some way where I'm taking 15, 20 minutes of my time two or three times a week and talking to these people that I think if we do it well and we find the right people that share a lot on LinkedIn, we we should get some ROI here. Well, if you can if you can do a if you can truly do an episode in 20 minutes, man, I I I need to take notes cuz my my mine are multiples of that. No, I do 20 we do 20 minutes and I've I've been on other people's that do I was on a guy that was it was 15 minutes. He like entered the room. He was actually an HR guy, too. At 15 minutes, we were in and out and and done. Like he he's like, "We're going to talk about this. I'm going to ask you three questions. You're going to answer them and that's the show." And he just he his focus is just like giving people like really quick hit HR tips and that's it. So you know, there's different types of podcasts for everyone. Cool. Well, Andrew, let's get back to the search. So you've looked you looked at hundreds and hundreds. You were kind of educating yourself on how to strike quickly when that right deal did come along. Finally it did. How did you find Linteria? So Linteria actually came about the guy the seller posted it on SearchFunder at one point. It was one of those things on SearchFunder that nobody so that you know like the founders of SearchFunder always like at people or they mention people to get their you know, get the post up. This one just slipped through the cracks and they didn't notice it and it didn't get posted as a deal, didn't get up voted or anything and just was there. And I was like, "This is interesting." And I looked at the the the EBITDA, I looked at everything. I was like, "Wow, this is an interesting business." Reached out to the guy, talked to him. At first he wanted like I want to say 3X revenue probably. I didn't even get into the numbers. I just was kind of poking around asking him. And he alluded to like kind of around 3X they were looking at. I was like, "No, no thanks. But you know, let me know if you guys can't find anyone." Hung around the hoop, kind of kept following up with them from time to time. And about 6 months passed. This was in 20 the end of 2021, 6 months passed. It was 2022 mid-2022. They were starting to get closer to actually wanting to sell. They didn't really have that many people interested. And I said, "Okay, well, you know, we'll take a look." You know, the numbers have been flat and I said, "No, we're you know, still not interested." End of 2022 rolls around. The the Ukrainian war is becoming a thing. They're starting to have questions from clients asking, you know, what's going to happen? What's your you know, what's your plan? Your your your you know, emergency plan. Employees are starting to worry. Everyone's starting to get a little bit concerned. Now they're motivated. Now they're really motivated. And they knew we were I mean, I'm sure they were talking to a few other people but we were one of the few that had been you know, actively checking in on them and seeing what was going on. And Ukrainian war starts or or was sort of on the horizon. I said to him, "We will buy this for 1X revenue right now. Like we'll I'll get the deal that I had no money and to actually close the deal." And he said, "Okay." Signed an LOI. Went I I told him we'd close in 60 days. I went out and started I I live in front of this big park and I would walk up and down the park every day like 10 km talking to talking to investors, dialing for dollars, getting people on the phone. And the investors that finally invested, we talked to them for like 15 minutes each. Like they understood the economics, they understood the market, and they said, "Go ahead. Send me the send me the due diligence you've got and we're we're in principle." So we closed most of the capital closed about like 700K pretty quickly. We still needed a little bit more and then the SBA was the next phase cuz the SBA wouldn't even talk to us until we had the equity capital. So then we went up to the SBA. Z one group just kind of let us along for a few weeks, didn't work out. Xavier connected me with these two guys Ben and John who at the time were at Dogwood State Bank. Now they work in another bank. They got the deal through in like 3 weeks from first meeting to closing to like starting closing in 3 weeks. I don't know how they did it because I was in Barcelona, the sellers were in Ukraine, the company was a US-based LLC. I have no assets in the United States, zero other than other than a an IRA. And they just basically just said, "We see this as an airball. We're not going to get anything back on this if you screw this up. But we believe in you and we think the business has a lot of room to screw up. So, you can screw up a lot, and we probably won't lose our money. And the investors said the same thing. They were like, "This doesn't have the upside of the deals we typically invest in, but it also doesn't have the downside. Like, if you screw this up, you, you know, you you really made some big mistakes." So, Andrew, were they saying that that they think that the downside was so protected because of the healthy balance sheet of that was you referred to earlier, or just because they thought the fundamentals of the business was were so strong? The business had a long history of profitability, going back for, I mean, 6 7 years, basically, of being highly profitable, having decent top-line revenue, having good recurring revenue that didn't churn. So, they saw that as, you know, churn was very low and continues to be very low, and they saw that as an opportunity. I mean, our the biggest pushbacks were the product basically needed to be rebuilt at some point in the future. This was a product that it's a legacy SaaS product, needed a lot of work. So, that was really the biggest pushback, and then a lot of people pushed back on the fact that we haven't gotten into this, but it's a it's Microsoft focused. So, this is for Microsoft users, and a lot of people didn't get that. They were like, "Microsoft? Like, who wants to be in the Microsoft ecosystem?" But turns out, in due diligence, I talked to several people. Steve Ressler actually put me in touch with a guy that had acquired a business in the Microsoft space, and he was like, "It's crazy." He's like, "Microsoft will help you, they will push for you. If they know you exist, they will bring you deals." Like, he had doubled his revenue just from Microsoft's business developers bringing him deals. So, I found out that it was a crazy it had doubled. Microsoft's user base had doubled in 2020 alone. So, it was like, "Whoa, hang on, this there's a big opportunity here." And we kept talking to people like, "Microsoft? Like, ugh, we don't want to deal with that." And it became pretty clear to us like, this was a really interesting deal at a really interesting multiple, and you know, especially at the time. I mean, you know, now you could probably negotiate some of these SaaS businesses down, but at the time, I mean, everything was going for at least 3x revenue. So, it was it was a huge outlier, like I said. And when you say it is for the Microsoft ecosystem, what does that mean? So, I mean, two-part. We we do have on-premise customers. So, almost half of our customers are still using on-premise servers. We do move them into private cloud pretty regularly. So, we're on we use all Microsoft infrastructure. So, Azure is like everything's in Azure databases, Azure servers. So, if you're a Microsoft user and you're using Teams, OneDrive, Viva, all these different products, our product integrates very well with those and is like built to sort of integrate with them, especially with SharePoint, where it's built on. So, you know, if you're inputting all your employee data into our system, it's easily going into all the other Microsoft tools that you're using, and easily sort of sharing that. So, you only need one source of truth like inside of our product, and it'll share to all the other Microsoft places where you're using. So, all the documentation, all the contracts, all the employee pay stubs, all the employee information, predictive index, all that stuff lives inside of ours and can easily be found in other parts of Microsoft. And also, ours, you know, sucks things out of Microsoft, too. We have Microsoft Viva that sits inside of our dashboard. So, it's a great sort of hub for HR, and you don't need to leave SharePoint. So, like, you're kind of used to being inside of SharePoint, and our product sits inside of sort of that ecosystem. So, it's it's a unique weird niche. And why did everybody turn their nose up at Microsoft if in fact Microsoft is this really healthy growing ecosystem? Is it just because it's seen as it has been, and and people are kind of ignorant to the actual growth that still exists in the Microsoft ecosystem? Yeah, it's viewed as boring. I mean, there is always platform risk in anything. I mean, they looked at it as like, "Well, what if Microsoft raises prices? What if they do this? What if they do that?" I mean, there are certain things around that when you're sort of focused on one specific niche, and we will take a hit like in our in in any exit. Like, people will say like, "If this was just a cloud-based solution, it could go anywhere." Which we're that's sort of where we're going is focusing on Microsoft users, but being a cloud-based solution that anyone can use. But, you know, if we sort of stuck with this, it would take a hit in the multiple, but I I think the infrastructure in the ecosystem is healthy enough and worth it to sort of make that investment and to focus on Microsoft. Fascinating. And going back to how you kind of waited around and and and kind of kept them warm or kept raising your hand to let them know you were out there. Sorry, you said it was a 3x multiple initially on Searchfunder, and then it eventually came down to 1x is what you acquired it as at? Yeah, I they they had a we never got into specific numbers in the first calls, but they alluded to something around three like, you know, minimum that they would look at would be oh, you know, around 3x. And as we waited around, it got down to 1x, and then we went even further. When the war started, you know, we were still negotiating things around deferred revenue. So, at Lanteria, all the contracts are annual. So, when we bought the company, there was all this deferred revenue like, you know, whatever if somebody's contract renewed on March 1st, you know, we would have to wait a whole year to collect that money. And so, we had to educate the the owners on this cuz they were just booked everything as revenue. It's like, "Well, this money's in my bank account, it's revenue." We had to, you know, educate them on what deferred revenue was, and how to actually account for that. And then we ended up reducing the price even more because we said, "All this deferred revenue, we're not like, we're not paying for it. We're discounting it off the deal due to the risk of the Ukrainian war and that, you know, some of this revenue might not exist next year." And they ended up accepting that and deferring some of it through payments later. Like, we we said, "Okay, you know, we came to an agreement where some of the deferred revenue was taken off the deal, and some of it was just moved into year two, where we would pay them through the company like as a consulting fee cuz the SBA doesn't allow um doesn't allow So, there there there's the seller notes that people always talk about, but the sellers are way down on the capital stack, and they can't get paid out until until the SBA's paid out, which a lot of owners don't like. But what our lender let us do is do a consulting contract with them posterior. Like, so we could do a consulting contract with them a year later or 2 years later, and pay them out via consulting contract, which, you know, obviously isn't as interesting for them from a tax perspective, but since they were living in Ukraine and the Ukrainian tax is like 5%, they didn't really care getting paid out uh that way. And just to educate people on deferred revenue to make sure we're clear, imagine, you know, one of your customers pays you $1,000 for an annual contract, they pay you on December 1st. So, it goes all the way through to the next December 1st, that $1,000. But really and and they sell to you on January 1st. So, really they have serviced that $1,000 for only 1 month, and you're going to have to service the remaining 11 months of that contract before you see another more income from them, a $1,000 renewal for the next year. And so, the sellers shouldn't be able to keep that 11 months' worth of the $1,000 payment. That should go to you. It's I mean, it's tech it's a liability on a on a balance sheet. So, the way I explain it to other people that, you know, talk about referred deferred revenue, I think the easiest way to explain it is imagine you go to a bank and they give you a loan for $1,000 on January 1st, and you got to pay that loan back on December 31st. That loan sits on your balance sheet as a as, you know, whatever hasn't been paid back on that loan sits on your balance sheet as a liability cuz the bank gave you that money that you have to give to the bank. In this case, it's the client that's giving you the money up front, and you have to pay them back via services throughout the year, and those services, you know, dwindle down that amount of money that sort of that you owe to them over that period of time. So, I just say just instead of thinking of the bank, think of the customer as your lender for that whole year. And yes, you don't have to pay them back via cash, but you have to pay them back via services. And once you explain this to the sellers, they got it. They didn't get it until the war started, and then we told them, "This you got to take this one or leave it. Like, we're we're not going to dance around this one anymore." Cuz they they were kind of dancing around this for a while, and we said, "What's the worst?" They were like, "No, deferred revenue's off the deal." Um and this the role of of the this tragedy, the war, it sounds like they they weren't necessarily, hopefully, affected like their families personally, but it was more it just created a lot of uncertainty in their business, and as you said, their own employees and customers were kind of getting concerned about what this could mean for the business. So, it just kind of was a natural point for them to want to get out of it. But this wasn't like a vulture situation where, you know, there was some tragedy that everybody was able to kind of like take advantage of. No, I mean, we we had been talking to them for a while. The war, like I said, really the war just spurred them to be more motivated. They did have clients that were that were concerned. And then for us, when the war actually started, you know, we had been negotiating this deferred revenue for a while, and we just said like, you know, "Guys, we've been dancing around this issue for a while. We're taking on a lot of risk now. You know, your whole team." Because what Remember like, when the war started, like these guys left the country. So, they got out, and their families got out. They live in Canada now. But a lot of the employees at the time, we didn't know, are the employees still there? Are they not still there? Are they leaving? Some of them were going to leave, then they didn't leave. So, you know, the risk was varying from day to day of, you know, who was leaving and who wasn't because there are some employees that did leave. If all the employees had left, the risk would would been totally off the table, and we wouldn't have been able to negotiate this. But a lot of the key employees were still in Ukraine. So, we said to them like the risk just went up, and so the price has to be impacted by that. And what we've been debating this deferred revenue for a while this is what's coming off the table. Like this is for us sort of a red line inside the negotiation. But they got out um and they're doing fine and and frankly all of our employees are are pretty good, too. Mhm. Great. Well, that's great to hear. And your lender and your investors, did they also uh I mean they talked about how this didn't seem like it was there was little downside here or um pretty good downside protection uh because the business had been historically enduringly profitable. Uh really healthy balance sheet. But to lend money into a business that's now in a a war-torn country uh might change the cal their calculus a little bit. Did it? Uh the bank the the the investors I had we had one investor that wanted to get on the phone and find out more. So, one of uh my partners uh they're in India. They have an outsourced um product development agency. So, we were able to tell the bank and tell the investor like, "Hey, we've got team teams in India. We have the ability to hire uh what you know, that was half true. We we did have teams there. The other half that wasn't true is we did not have teams that were built specifically for the technology stack that that Lanteria was built on. But we were pretty confident that you know, worst-case scenario in this was if you know, this would just set us back you know, 3 to 6 months in development time. Uh from anything else. It would just be a we just got to get new people up to speed and hire them quickly. So, we alleviated their concerns with some of that. But frankly in retrospect, there was more risk than we probably uh than we probably let on and that we probably understood. Although on the flip side, there's also that that factor that you called out at the beginning. What you like about SaaS is that you know, kind of the world is your your labor pool. So, you are likely at some point even if it takes some months and the business gets a little bruised or you kind of get into a pinch, you're going to be able to find people to do this uh somewhere in some country at some point. Yeah, it just would have taken time to get them up to speed. I mean there's a lot of tribal knowledge, a lot of we have people that have worked for the company for 8 to 10 years. So, you know, you've worked somewhere that long and it wasn't a super well-documented product. So, we went about almost a year without having like a real CTO. Now we have a CTO in Indianapolis that joined the team. If he had joined the team at the beginning, we would have really mitigated this risk and you know, he really understands the product. Now within a few months, he was up to speed and said like, "Hey, if anyone leaves, I can get new employees up to speed quickly." But we definitely went uh for almost a year where we didn't have anyone that could actually step in and really document the product and really train new people if you know, the the three developers we had in Ukraine just disappeared. Yeah. Uh we would have had difficulty for about 6 months getting anyone up to speed, I think. And what about this factor, Andrew? The fact that you're not technical. I mean you are comfortable in digital businesses and digital business models, but not understanding not being a coder yourself or at all technical how do you feel about that and what would you tell other people out there who might be intimidated uh by buying a SaaS company cuz they're not technical? You have to find somebody. You got to find your other half that is technical. Uh I think you can get far enough. So, we did So, like I said, I I had the guys in India that that worked with me. They did the technical due diligence. So, they brought in uh a consultant in India that went through the whole technical product, worked with the team, understood the product before we bought it. So, we were comfortable with sort of how the tech stack was built and documented. So, I would say you can get external services that you know, give you a report and can make you comfortable with the acquisition part. But I I think personally one of the biggest mistakes we made was not um bringing on from day one a really strong CTO. Uh and it wasn't necessarily a mistake. It was just a lack of funding, a lack of having the right people. We actually did have a guy that started with us uh and he ended up sort of quitting like three different times. He just kept flaking out and finally we were like, "Okay, you got to go." Uh but I think you got to find like a really solid person. Now now we have him. Like Chris is a fantastic guy, super committed. Uh we've given him equity in the in the project. But if we had had him from day one, it would have made a huge difference and I would not recommend anyone to do this without having at least someone next to you that is technical uh if you're getting into sort of a bigger product that that's like Lanteria. I mean there there are simpler SaaS products that you can step into. Uh maybe they're you know, doing 20K MRR and it really just needs you know, marketing and sales muscle to to get it to the next level. The product is good enough. But there's a lot of landmines that could explode in your face if if you go in that direction without having sort of a really technical person next to you. And what would you say to just having that technical person next to you just be somebody who's already employed by the business? Does that check the box? Are you are you suggesting that you know, you need to partner with somebody who's your fellow acquirer and your partner in this project kind of as an outsider? It doesn't have to be a fellow acquirer. It could it could be somebody that's employed or somebody that you hire to to join. I would say if it's an employee that's with the business, that's ideal. But you got to make sure that they are you know going to stick around. Ready to step into that type of role. Like we we actually we we approached uh when we acquired the company, forgot about this. We approached uh the CTO the the CTO that was outgoing said, "You should have this guy become the CTO. He's our best developer." So, we approached him the first week and we said you know, "Sergei says that you're the best guy here. You're a fantastic developer that you should step up and be CTO." And he said mm no. I don't like managing people. But uh I will step up in the mid-term for you. But I want double the salary for from what I'm getting paid And it was like the literally the first week that we were there. And I was like, "Oh my god. Like what what did we just step into opening this door?" Cuz if we had never said anything to him, he probably would have asked for a raise, but never at this level. Uh and it kind of opened up Pandora's Box and put us in a very adversarial relationship with him for a long time. Uh he's still with us, but it took until we kind of hired a a technical person to actually build up a better relationship with him. Mhm. But yeah, I think you got to make sure that the person has the right mentality and is sort of thinking about things right here cuz otherwise you could it could bite you. That you kind of have someone that's like, "Oh, this guy really needs me. I'm going to put the screws to him right now." I want to hear a little bit more about the terms of the deal, the structure of the deal. So, just going back again, you see it on SearchFunder 3X. Just for the uninitiated, remind us how SaaS businesses are sold. It's it's a it's a multiple of ARR, annual recurring revenue. It's not a multiple of FTE. Um and 3X 3X you considered too high cuz I I recall now this is a few years ago SaaS businesses being sold for even more eye-watering multiples of revenue, not a profit. So, 3X doesn't strike me as a lot for SaaS for SaaS. But it was, I guess, you're saying. It was because it wasn't growing. I mean it was a business that first of all, Lanteria has a heavy part of service uh revenue. So, we probably have 30% of our revenues through services, implementation, customization, things like that. Um which is always a little bit scary for a SaaS buyer. So, I think that scared off a lot of people. I actually personally think it's it's I think it's actually a sign of you're going to lock in customers very well because they need something customized or need something you know, specifically implemented. And you're going to get them locked in, which you've seen from like Salesforce. Salesforce needs certain customization, they lock people in forever. Yeah. Uh so, I actually viewed it as a positive um where other buyers probably looked at this like, "Oh man, but look at all this non-recurring revenue." Um the other part of this was like I said, it was basically flat for three or four years. Um profitability continued to go up. They continued to grow a little bit, but you know, 3 to 5% a year. Where you know, most of these SaaS businesses you're seeing are growing 30 to 50% a year uh at that level cuz they're going you know, 200K, 400K, 600K uh 1.2 million. Uh a lot of these SaaS businesses that are even bootstrapped are growing very fast because they can expand you know, globally super fast. Mhm. Uh I'm not saying everyone cuz it's not easy to grow at that clip. But usually the ones that are out there for sale are growing at that speed and you know, they're looking for 7 to 10X ARR uh in those cases. And frankly, you know, they're basically what you're buying is that projection that that's going to continue. That there's an unlimited or or long-term growth plan here where you're going to go 1.2 million, 2.4, you know, 6 million. All of a sudden you're going to make these big jumps. I and you're going to grow into that that multiple. Um I would be interested to see how often that actually plays out uh in in certain SaaS acquisitions. I I mean I know there's you know, the big companies and the big acquisitions and the big PE firms that do fantastic. I'm saying in this lower market there's a lot of companies that find really good product market fit for a specific subsector or a specific niche and they can't hit those next levels outside of that niche. Or they had a really great offer. Uh you know, I've I I looked at deals where you'd be looking at the revenue you'd say, "Wow, this is amazing this growth." And what you noticed was that their sales team was actually just running these crazy promotions to lock people in. And then they were churning the next year and they would run the same promotion again and churn again the next year and then run the same promotion. But they would continue to grow because they would lock in new revenue but always at a very low very low margin. And you'll see that a lot in SaaS businesses because it's all about just the growth. Because that's where the enterprise value is. So you see a lot of weird things that that pop up in these like smaller lower market deals where companies like Lanteria that have been around for a long time has a long history. You saw sort of what they were doing. You saw the profitability. You saw the company people were locked in for a long time. And it you know it it it takes a hit on the multiple for the seller. Um and and we saw it like we just knew like somebody that doesn't see growth people are going to automatically discount it. They're not going to buy this because it's not growing. And so we knew there was a smaller pool of buyers than a typical SaaS business. You know, it's interesting Andrew because actually the quality of your revenue was higher than the than these growthier SaaS businesses where where they're basically sort of buying revenue revenue that's not going to stick around. Very very interesting. And and so map for us when you when it was you got it down to 1X revenue what that actually was in multiples that we understand of SDE. So what what because I assume you had to do that for your SBA for your lenders anyway. So so what what did that look like so we can all speak the same language? I think the SDE that they calculated keep in mind the SDE was I mean there was the EBITDA there was what the owners were kind of paying themselves which wasn't super clear because they were paying themselves like overseas through like another LLC. So the the bank had to do some strange math to figure this out but I believe they calculated that the year before we bought it. So I think it was the audited financials that we had for the business were from 2020 when we bought it. The 2021 ones were not audited but they calculated more or less like 550k. So it was about it was under 3X SDE that we bought the company for. This keeps getting better Andrew. That's remarkable. Yeah. And also I I we've vaporized that SDE by reinvesting into the company but that's that's another operational question. Yeah, we're we're going to get to that too. But Andrew you know was it just really kind of foresight and savvy on their part that they that they had an that a US-based entity? Cuz I feel like a lot of non-US based software businesses e-commerce businesses website businesses don't bother setting up you know, don't have a US entity. They have an entity wherever. And then so and that immediately disqualifies it from an SBA loan. Happily for you they had this US entity. So most of the business most of the clients are US-based. So early on this company started as like a consulting firm like a Microsoft SharePoint consulting firm. So they were doing like offshore consulting work for US-based companies. So they set up an LLC from day one in the US and were were selling into the US. So for them it was sort of table stakes to be a US-based company. Like people weren't going to pay a Ukrainian company. Uh so they you know, fortunately the US is a very easy country to set up an LLC run it especially online now. And they had an LLC since 2012. I think it's when they set up their US-based LLC. So it had a long history in the US. Great. And the Lanteria product as such when was its inception? How old was it? It started in 2012. Product as it is now is sort of like 2018 is like when the new the current product sort of came into into being. Before that it was a they they were selling it as a very traditional perpetual SaaS license business for perpetual software license business. So they had a pretty bare-bones product pretty cheap. Uh in fact a lot of the customer interviews I did at the beginning when we took over it was like so what do you like about Lanteria? And they're like it was really cheap when we bought it in 2014. And now we pay you almost nothing and so we're fantastically happy with this amazing product that continues to update. So which is great news when you're the new owner like there's no revenue coming from this customer but they had a lot of perpetual licenses. They did a good job at the time of like having just a bare-bones product. It was cheap. It was easy to get new clients because they were selling this just like really cheap product. Uh and then 2018 they saw like they started moving to SaaS. They they upped their game. The the product came more robust. They expanded into like LMS. Expanded into more more modules and and raised the price significantly at that point. Um they obviously took a hit on amount of customers coming in because they were going from these crazy perpetual license deals into recurring SaaS deals. But in 2018 that's sort of where they came in and so that's where you know, we were able to see you know, four years of of history in the SaaS business. And they they took a big hit at the beginning of the pandemic. Uh but 2020 for them actually worked out pretty well because they they brought on a pretty big customer. We we still have this a very large bank that works with us. And the bank does a lot of customization work. So they're constantly customizing our product adapting it to their needs. So they brought in a lot of revenue that was sort of one-off revenue in 2020 from that. But we've been able to continue that relationship with the bank and continue to bring in that revenue and even more. Like this year we've brought in more revenue than they did in 2020. Uh just from this one client which has basically helped us bootstrap the business and continue to be able to reinvest because um I mean we can get into this later but I I'd say the biggest mistake that we made the number one mistake that I made in this business was we raised enough capital to close the deal. We didn't have a lot of time. So you know, we did what we could do. Um but my mistake was okay, we closed the business. We're fine. We've got enough capital. Let's build a plan. Let's build up some bonafides. Go out and then we'll go out to the market at the end of 2022 and raise sort of the rest of the money we need. Sort of like a growth round so to speak. And obviously the market totally tanked collapsed and rates went through the roof. So I mean our our SBA loan went from 12k a month at the beginning to now it's 16k a month. Uh which you know it's it's a hit. You know, it's probably a developer that we can't hire because we're we're paying the bank those interest rates. Yep. But the bigger hit was just on the fact that we couldn't go out and raise you know, the half million to a million dollars that we really need now to do that. And so what we've had to do is just find ways to claw cap cash out of out of customers through doing more work for them doing customizations doing things that don't scale. Uh but at least you know, fill coffers to be able to invest into you know, new people and and sales. Well, in some ways there there's there's a pattern where an agency a tech agency will eventually create a product from from kind of something that their customers are asking for over and over and over and they're doing custom work over and over and over and then they say to themselves oh there's a there's a product here. There's a SaaS product here. Let's build it once and then and then we have a product. case. Yeah it sounds like that's this case. But but now you're kind of having to take a little bit of a go back to the custom work thing kind of kind of the reverse of this where you have the SaaS product but you need the capital to to reinvest into it to I guess redo rebuild it. And so now you're going kind of back to agency custom consulting work whatever you want to call it project work to to to kind of fund the project anew. Kind of an interesting And we've we I mean even beyond that. So one of the things from a cultural perspective is because this company was built with that fundamentals like the the previous owners did everything thinking of how much money can we make off of this? How much are we billing the customer? You know, everything was billable hours. So we came in here and we were thinking like we're going to step into a SaaS business and like Chris even when he stepped in almost a year later he was like what's with these what's with the billable hours this guy? Why is everyone talking about billable hours here? And I'm like listen I I'd explain to him sort of the structure of what we were doing from a revenue perspective. I said this business was started as a consulting company and it kind of stayed that way even as it moved into product. They still thought about how do we bill the customer? How much is the customer going to pay for this? So like implementation hours it was like oh we went over on implementation hours. Doesn't matter. Bill the customer. Instead of saying like hey, how do we cut down the the implementation hours on this so we can get more customers? So there's all these like weird dynamics that you would never see in a regular SaaS business that we've sort of had to pull out and we're still pulling out the the wires there. Uh that that are difficult and I would say people that do spin up SaaS products from from agencies have to be careful that they don't embed that into their culture that that thought process. On the other hand it in in some ways in this kind of growth equity raise pinch that you're in it's serving you well because it's a natural now it's natural to go back to doing kind of consulting work to to to quickly generate revenue. Yeah, it it definitely derails some of the things that we want to do because you know, you'd love to have your developers just working on you know, the next version of the product improving the things. So it definitely derails us. It derails my sleep more than probably anything. But that's you know, that's that's the next phase. I mean that that's what I'm focused on mostly right now is is figuring out dialing for dollars again. Getting Well well, I want to I want to close with that in just a second Andrew to kind of hear what your plan is what your vision is, but I my um listeners are not going to be happy if we don't just I want to make sure I we got terms of the deal and kind of the numbers laid out cleanly. So, what did the the ultimate deal look like? What did you pay for the business? What percentage of it was your capital, investor capital, SBA capital? Break it all down to the extent that you can, please. Yeah, so I'll yeah, I'll break it all down. So, we ended up paying 1.6 million for the business. Um it was doing 1.6 million in revenue. Now it's doing about two We'll probably do 2.2 this year. Um the breakdown was about 600k 650k was investor capital. Um I didn't put in very I mean, personally I probably put in 75 into the business. Uh a lot of my I mean, a lot of it is I I pay myself a lot less now on a CEO salary. Um you know, I I basically did all the due diligence. I I didn't charge. We didn't do any fees for, you know, closing. We didn't do any fees for anything. Um the rest was all the SBA. So, what was the SBA? So, the SBA gave us 100k in working capital. Um so, I think the SBA was overall because of the fees the SBA was about 1.2 million that we got a little under 1.2 million if I'm recalling correctly. And then we have a deal with the the owners that next year we'll pay them uh $100,000 in consulting fees over the year. Uh so, so monthly throughout the year. Uh if we hit, you know, certain milestones which I mean, from a revenue perspective it seems like we're going to hit uh because what we've done this year. Um so that I believe was I'm trying to think what else would be an interesting deal point from there. that that that's great, Andrew. So, basically the SBA was kind of the traditional I did some some quick math here about 75%. Yeah. And and the investors and you a small piece you was the remaining 25%. So, this So, this this was also cuz I thought it might we might hear from you like, yes, it was an SBA loan, but only, you know, 50%. But no, this was a this was kind of a traditional searcher first-time searcher acquisition of mostly funded by the SBA. That's great. Yeah. They did push at the beginning they did want us to put more and in the middle of the closing we got them to give us more capital for for because we just said like we're we're going to need more capital to get this deal going. And the banker was like, whatever. He's like, you're He's like, we're not at the limits of the threshold and, you know, nobody's close to more than 15% in the capital stack. So, they felt comfortable with it, you know, there was a good spread of capital out. So, they gave us a little bit more working capital. Mhm. And to be clear, that consulting agreement that you have with them where if you guys hit certain revenue a certain revenue number, then you engage them as consultants for 100 grand for 1 year paid out monthly over the year. Yeah. That is uh you know, what SBA lenders will talk about as kind of the side consulting agreement. It's effectively an earnout. But the SBA doesn't permit earnouts, so they're packaged in these kind of interesting ways. Fair? Yes. It was definitely a side agreement. Like they they wanted it to be in the asset purchase agreement and the SBA was like the the the what somebody told that one of the attorneys was like, you guys can go sign this. It's not enforceable. They're like, if you want to break this deal, go ahead. Uh but they said this is just a gentleman's agreement, basically. Okay. Okay. A gentleman's agreement on paper that had no relationship to the SBA deal, but gentleman's agreement nonetheless. Yeah. But and just to be clear that I'm understanding it correctly cuz it kind of essentially does function as an earnout. In your mind as the buyer, you're like, if we hit certain performance in the business, certain growth, then I'll compensate you more, seller. Yep. After the fact. Yeah, cool. Yep. Uh thank you for that. And it just the before we just move on to your plans here and close out, Andrew. So, to paint the picture for everybody, this SaaS business comes out, it's on Searchfunder, it seems overpriced, it doesn't get much interest. But you circle the hoop. You you engage with them and then you circle the hoop, keep raising your hand, and that price comes down to earth and then, you know, kind of hits your strike price and a deal happens. That's Do Do you think And a little bit more context. So, like a lot that will happen a lot in SaaS businesses where they come out overpriced and like nobody bites and then it kind of like withers or whatever. Do you think that there's a playbook or a technique that people can draw from your experience where you if you're interested in buying a SaaS business and you see the mini listings where the SaaS where the price is way over listed that you should kind of return to the seller, put them in your CRM, you know, reach back out to them in 3 months and 6 months and see if that price comes comes down to earth as it did in your case. Or were you just was the Lanteria story just totally fluky and there's not really there's not really a a playbook that one could write here? I think it's a little bit fluky, but I think every I think everyone that closes one of these deals or gets anything done in general is usually kind of an outlier. It's it's not something that's like, hey, this was right in the middle of the bell curve on acquire.com and I bought it and everything went well. It's Something strange has to happen for any of these deals to get done unless you've already done some of these weird deals and you have a track record and you have capital and you can just move fast. Like that's, you know, that's the pitch that works well on acquire.com or on any of these is is we can move fast. We have committed capital. Uh 30-day due diligence or 45-day due diligence. But if you can't offer that, you got to find some weird stuff and be willing to deal with I mean, I tweeted about this the other day. Like you're either buying a growing business or you're buying a turnaround. And you got to know what you're buying when you buy it because some people are great at like, hey, I'm an account executive or I'm an enterprise account executive at fast-growing startup X and I want to buy a company because I know the playbook of how to grow SaaS startups, but if you buy a company like Lanteria that you basically have to like crank it to get it going again, your moonshot like super fast, I'm going to hire SDRs and build out this this system isn't going to work with this type of company. You got to be willing to get down and get dirty with a turnaround or pay a premium, buy a company like that, run your playbook, and grow it and grow into that that revenue multiple. But you got to be clear what you're going to get into and what you want to get into and what your talent is at the beginning. It's interesting, Andrew, to hear you characterize I assume you're characterizing Lanteria as is is in the turnaround bucket. Yeah. Which which kind of, you know, belies my characterization at the beginning of your story here that, you know, you got this amazing SaaS business with an SBA loan. And And And I acknowledge that it was going to that it's a little bit hairy, but to hear you call it a straight-up turnaround, um you know, that that suggests a lot more risk there and a lot more a lot more hair than I was implying. And also but it also doesn't actually sound like your investors or your lenders thought of it as as a straight turnaround. It seems like it's kind of a sleepy business, but not one that's in freefall. No, not in freefall. I consider in SaaS, I mean, If If you're not growing, you're you're basically a turnaround, basically. Like in SaaS, a turnaround is either like a real turnaround would be like someone that dumped a bunch of VC money into something and the VC money's dried up and we're going to buy this company, you know, instead of it going to bankruptcy we're going to buy it at a huge discount. The VCs basically just want to dump it and write it off. That would be a real turnaround, but in those cases, like you just step in and you say like, hey, all that VC money's gone. So, the 100 people that are working here, we just need 15 of you to actually run this business and that's what we're going to do. I view either that's a turnaround in SaaS or if you're not growing, you're turning it around because something's got to change if you're not growing. It's usually not like a magic dust gets sprinkled on it and you just start growing the next day. Uh you got to do some you got to fire a lot of people, roll heads, make some tough decisions, and and push pretty hard. Uh and if you're going to pay the premium, you're going to get a good business that's growing and and you just got to you know, you got to hit that next crank and hit that next hit that next level and push it up and that's, you know, it's just two types of businesses and it's different strategy, different playbooks, different people to to run those. Well, it sounds like in your case in the quote turnaround that is Lanteria, it's not conserving costs. It's actually investing a lot into the business. So, you've made it clear that basically there's tech debt quite a bit. I mean, the product needs to be rewritten at some point. I think you'll do that gradually, not all in one fell swoop. Uh what So, as kind of a closing topic here, what is what is your game plan? So, there's two game plans. One is Lanteria needs to be sort of rebuilt. What we're doing is module by module we're adding new modules, building them in a more modern tech stack uh and, you know, joining them onto the current product. And then we'll keep rolling out, you know, current modules we have updated versions inside of new tech stack over the next I'd say 24 months. We'll sort of have a a new product that launch that's fully launched in 24 months. Um we have been out there we're looking for capital at the beginning of the year like I said, kind of put that on hold as we focused on like focused on um bootstrapping, so to speak. And we I I I went out and did the rounds. I mean, I've been talking to a lot of HR people. I've gotten the word out there that we acquired this HR company and that we're like this is what I'm doing now. I'm in HR. I'm acquiring HR SaaS companies. And planting that flag has all of a sudden attracted a lot of companies that want to sell that are they they can't raise that series A, they can't raise the series B, they couldn't raise their seed round or you know, for whatever reason the markets just kind of turned on them, but they have good businesses. So, I'm getting a lot of good inbound of interesting deals all of a sudden. And Lanteria on its own raising capital is very difficult. So, what I've kind of pivoted to is let's go bigger, find raise 10 million in capital and go acquire a couple more businesses that could be complementary Lanteria, could be just they run on their own. The way I view this is HR, if you're building HR content, you're building a content flywheel, you're building up a database of VPs of HR, HR managers, that's all shareable across various HR software companies. And then there's obviously, you know, the HR back office, the finance back office that we can build out. So, that's where I've pivoted my vision to because what I saw from talking to investors is they're like, well, this is just too small for us, but if you need a $5 check or a $10 check, come talk to us. And it was like, well, this business is too small right now to do that, but I've got some really interesting businesses that have reached out to me. What if we kind of either The only thing that hasn't crystallized here is is this like a holding company type of thing or is it a fund? But that depends on the LPs. I mean, we're talking to some LPs that don't want to put money into a fund, talking to some LPs that do want to put money into a fund and sort of depends on who we're able to close first. I'm frankly, I don't care if it's a fund or not. I don't want to collect fees. I'm all about building the businesses, growing them, selling them or keeping them, whatever we end up doing. So, for me, it doesn't matter the structure cuz I'm not going to be collecting management fees on any of these. So, that's sort of where we're at right now and part of that funding, you know, I'll I'll put our shares of Lanteria into that fund or into that holding company and part of that funding will go into, you know, growing Lanteria as well as part of that portfolio of two or three companies. And so, the idea would be let's say whatever the structure is and I'm going to want to return to that in a second. The whatever the structure is, you have three or four or five HR SaaS businesses and unlike a HVAC business roll HVAC roll up where you're going to integrate them. Maybe. I mean, I guess if they're in different parts of the country, you don't integrate them, but you know, in kind of a a services business often times there is an attempt to to integrate if they're if they're basically serving the same the same market, you you integrate them into a larger entity. In this case, they would remain they would remain distinct entities and so, you don't necessarily get you're not building a single under a single brand or a single piece of software, but the economies of scale, of course, in the back kind of back office economies of scale and also your customer list. So, you you know, once you have some kind of touchpoint with a VP of HR, you know, at this company they're using Lanteria, but when they move go to another company, they maybe they'll want they'll, you know, they won't be on the Microsoft stack and they'll use they'll be they'll be a prospect for one of your other pieces of software that still basically fills serves the function sort of thing. Yep. Yeah, serves the function or even serves a complimentary function. I mean, there's there's a lot of things I mean, even if you just think of like a normal software company where you do a lot of channel partnerships across software companies, you know, you have this is a complimentary product to us. They they do like one company we've talked to does AI coaching for, you know, for companies. So, like the managers can run their one-on-ones. It's kind of like Fireflies where like an AI sort of sits in the meetings, takes notes, gives you tips on like how to improve the performance. That's something that, you know, we could resell or they could resell Lanteria if you were just channel partners like working together saying like, hey, you should talk to Lanteria. It's an interesting product. Now, think of it as like you're just owning them both and sort of cross-selling. If you cuz you're taught you're if you're a good account executive, you're talking to these people, find out what they need, what they're doing. You say, ah, we don't have that, but we could, you know, bring in this piece of software that is part of, you know, our family of companies and give you a great deal on it and you could use that to complement, you know, what you need. Mhm. And is there are there funds or holding companies or collections of companies, SaaS companies that are following this playbook? Of course, I don't not the constellations, not these giant software roll ups, but something like what you're talking about where there's kind of light complimentaryness between the various software packages and that are being held. There I I did talk to one other group that's focused on HR software for this. There's a few that are focused on accounting types of softwares. Most of the ones that I've seen though are it's just decentralized. It's, you know, doesn't it's just software. For a lot of people, I mean, software is software. It's they they always say it's like chicken. It's like 80% is the same thing. I personally think that having sort of that knowledge base in one specific industry gives you takes you from 80% to like 95% because you you can cross-sell in that. So, I don't know. I like I said, I'm I'm always just a curious person and and like dove into this HR space and from diving into it, all of a sudden this sort of came back as like a payout was people want to they they see you as a legitimate buyer because you know the space and you can go to people and say, hey, we're building up an ecosystem here with content and you know, I'm in like Facebook HR groups. So, people sort of know who I am now. And you can use that to leverage into, you know, growing customer list. Well, it's funny to see this play out in SaaS because certainly it's a pattern that plays out in buying a blue collar business in a local market where, you know, you buy you buy the the HVAC business and then the other owners who are also nearing retirement hear about you and say, hey, you know, why don't we talk about you buying my business as well sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Andrew, we we're we're really pushing time here, but there a couple of things I got to ask you about just because I think this will be helpful for me and probably for others in the audience. When you talked about you said, I'm open to a fund or a holding company. I'm kind of agnostic about the structure. Can you give us like 120 seconds on what what the pros and cons are there? How you even think about that? Educate us a little bit, please. So, all right, we'll start with holding company. Pros would be it's more tax efficient in theory. You're able to reinvest that money into the business on a much longer term at a much more tax efficient way than with a fund because the fund has to legally has to return money to to the investors. So, that's one of the pros of the hold hold co. The hold co also has uh operational efficiencies inside of the business. So, if you're running the the fund, all those like efficiencies and management type of stuff kind of goes into the management company where if you're running the hold co, that's all something that could live inside the same C-corp or the same LLC and you can share those relatively easily. You know, there there's a whole host of other efficiencies that go with hold hold cos that we won't go into. I can share some links and send it to, you know, whoever wants to read them. On the the biggest con on on hold cos is how do you value them when the investors come in? Like how do you build up these valuations? Like the enduring venture guys, I don't know how difficult it's been for them, but you know, they've done several rounds and you got to value your shares in each one of those rounds and you're raising new capital, fresh powder. It gets complicated where as a fund, you know, each fund is sort of closed. It's its own entity, it's its own thing. The investors invest into fund one, now they're investing in fund two and it's all sort of closed off. It's hard to value the hold co and it's hard to convince people to invest in a hold co cuz the fund structure is way more prominent. So, if you go to a family office and you try to pitch this to them, they're like, we just invest in funds. Like we don't want to do this. So, like I said, I've talked to some investors that actually don't invest in funds because they're like very contrarian in that way. So, if they want to do that, then I'm totally open to it. I I think the hold co for me is much more interesting, gives way more incentive and way more skin in the game for like the the GP, so to speak, in in that structure because they're all owning it together rather than, you know, you just collecting fees and collecting the carry on the back end. On the fund structure, biggest pro is that that it's way more prevalent, way easier to raise capital. You don't need to educate people on on what that is. Valuation is way easier. Structure fee deal structure is way easier. You say, two and 20 or, you know, one one thing I've been pitching to people is if we do hit certain MOIC, certain, you know, return on capital to people, you know, if you get 30% or if you hit 3x, we'll take out 30%. If you hit 4x, we want 40%. If we hit 5x, we want 5 50%. So, you can structure it in a way that's a little bit simpler. Like I said, the most attractive thing for funds is the fee structure for people, you know, if the more assets under management, the more fees you're collecting, which for me is not what I'm looking to do. I'm still obviously a novice in this space and I'm presenting myself in that way of saying, "Hey, I'm it's step one, but this is sort of step two and I don't think I should be paid, you know, a fee for management because I don't think I'm at that level yet. So, those are the pros and cons. Andrew, is it also fair to say that if with a fund, there's going to be the expectation of a life cycle of the fund and a return of that capital at a certain date, whereas with a hold holdco holding company, it's a little bit more open-ended permanent permanent equity-ish. So, so that's that's and that's a pretty pretty key distinction. One is there's a ticking clock, the other is there's probably always a little bit of a ticking clock cuz most investors are eventually going to want to want to get their capital back, but it doesn't tick quite as loudly. Yeah, and it's it is more capital efficient from a tax perspective, the holdco type of thing. I mean, where the SaaS part starts to bump into it is like if you talk like Michael Girdley, like he he has a holding company of SaaS of software companies, but his theory is to hold them forever. Like his thing is like we're going to hold these software companies. I I could see like if you find the right companies, the right businesses, but I think those are really hard to find in software unless you have like a really good funnel and a really good structure and really good capital. I mean, even Constellations like they're doing a very good job of acquiring companies very cheap, but their volume is insane and they're going after very specific types of companies that often times don't have a long life cycle in front of them. They're kind of being phased out, so to speak, but Constellations getting them so cheap, they're able to siphon a ton of cash into their holding company. But where they kind of bump into each other where the fund does make a little bit of sense is that you are kind of working on a shorter time frame. Like you're buying these companies and maybe it's a five-year hold, maybe it's a six-year hold, maybe it's a seven-year hold, but the money a lot of times in these SaaS businesses is made in the buy and in the sell. Like what multiple are you coming in in, what multiple are you going out in? And, you know, what's the timeline that goes in? And a lot of times that timeline is, you know, three to six years. So, the fund could make more sense then. Is specifically for SaaS because SaaS products by by their nature kind of have three to five seven-year kind of lifespans or generations. Yeah. And and you're you're reinventing I mean, in in a SaaS company in six years, you're reinventing yourself. I mean, you're Yeah, exactly. doing something basically new. Where if you're an HVAC company, I mean, you could probably keep offering the same services in six or seven years and be fine. And and that's actually that's a that's a great point that we should highlight because that's one of the ways that SaaS, despite its there being a lot of appeal to it, because it is technology and it moves fast, it's not actually enduringly profitable in kind of the traditional definition because you got to be it's I mean, technology software moves quickly, so it doesn't just what you build doesn't endure. It needs to be reinvented. Um so so it's actually kind of violates the enduring enduringly profitable principle even though it's very attractive in many other ways. It's sand. I mean, it it's the day you're holding it, the sand is dripping through your hands and you're trying to figure out how to put more sand to keep it going, but the sand is very profitable. Has very good margins, so that's makes it attractive. That was an education. Thank you for that, Andrew. That was great. Okay, we are at time, but is there anything that we didn't get to that you wanted to wanted to say, wanted to share, learnings, otherwise? No, I think I like I said, always be curious, raise more capital than you think you need would be sort of like the two takeaways and invest in whatever I end up whatever I end up building. How can people reach you, Andrew? Let's let's plug you here. directly So, on Twitter, I'm SwilerA, LinkedIn, I'm Andrew Swiler and you can find us at lanteria l a n t e r i a.com. Um yeah, that would be sort of the three ways to find me. DM me. I'm always around. That'll all be in the notes. Andrew, thanks for giving me so much of your time. Thanks for the education on how to think about fund funds and holdcos with respect to SaaS SaaS overall. This was a a very rich and educational episode. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Will. It was great to be here. It's awesome talking to you. 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.