George goats welcome to acquiring minds hi Will how are you I'm great George you acquired a shuttle and bus business about eight years ago you've grown it a lot you have locations in multiple geographies and today we're going to hear how you've done that and learn something about the transportation business in the process please start us off George with some background on you sure um born and raised in Utah I went to the University of Utah for undergraduate got a an undergrad in finance and really didn't know what I wanted to do just seemed like a good idea in college so coming out of college we got good grades and coming out of school I it didn't get the job I wanted so I just went back for a masters of Finance really to get a second chance at recruiters and kind of spent more time figuring out what I wanted to do you know I just assume you get grades and no crew just come running but turns out that's not the case at least at the University of Utah it's not so uh you know while I was studying for my master's degree in finance I also spent time kind of trying to get recruited which turns out is useful so I ended up getting a job with bear Stearns in their Investment Banking Group which was if you're in finance that's kind of what you want to do um it's spent so I started bear Stearns in 07 uh everyone knows what happened in 08 so I was there through the crash at Bear Stearns uh bounced around a little bit and ended up at a group called Leucadia in Salt Lake City it's a private Equity Group I had spoken to him before is you know kind of my uh postgraduate process of looking for a job and so when when things went South of there it reached out to them again it worked out and so I worked there for a number of years and really kind of leucade is a little different from a typical private Equity shop and that we're not raising funds it's it's a publicly traded company so I guess it's not technically private Equity but we're buying companies buying private companies and holding them and then selling them when we get you know Unholy valuations so so that it's it's kind of a stubborn philosophy but it works well you never lose money if if you don't sell if you never sell that's that was their philosophy and it worked well with really smart guys um and so I I learned from I think some of the best and at some point you know I I realized I want to do it myself and it took a while and and let me pause you there George so you realize you wanted to do it yourself elaborate on that so you're you see people buying private equities all about buying private businesses and so you said to yourself huh I could do this as a loan guy a with an SBA loan like connect those dots yeah yeah or investors I didn't really have a preference on how to do it but I you know we were buying these companies from these people who you know started whatever company you know a guy who's out in the oil field and buys a few Rigs and you know sells this company for 100 million dollars and I think well I really like that competitive set you know relative to the guys I was working with mbas from Harvard you know and so um it made sense to me and there you know this guy from Oklahoma is making more than anyone in my office and so so yeah so that was kind of the ideas I think I can do this I think I always kind of had that inkling but um you know as I did it and felt more comfortable okay I can do this right I've done it multiple times I've seen how it works um yeah I decided you know you're you're not the for the first of my former private Equity guests to have had us that kind of that kind of experience where working in private Equity they see they see yeah people make money in private equity and it's a really competitive and kind of enriching environment a lot of smart people um but then kind of seeing the operators who come from yeah you know not as pedigreed backgrounds really Scrappy types often building you know having built giant blue-collar businesses and saying to themselves huh wanting kind of to be on the on the other side of the table romanticizing maybe uh the other side of the table we'll get into get into that a little bit since you now are on the other side of the table as a small business owner um but very interesting that this is kind of um this is kind of a realization that people have in private Equity okay Carry On so you're at this this PE firm and then what so I'm at the PE firm I I mean I kind of got fired I kind of got pushed out so I was there it's not a career um there's really one guy above me right and so you're there for a number of years and then you go somewhere else when you find something better when you're worth more somewhere else um so I went to HP for a couple years and in in Palo Alto and just hated it right I mean it just wasn't for me it wasn't my thing um I got connected with a guy who was starting a subprime auto finance company so left HP jumped all in we're about six months into this thing we had an ambassador and the founder who who was in the subprime space decided you know he was going to leave his company and and join us and bring you know his customers and expertise and stuff he backed out so so we tried to find another guy I couldn't find another guy um and I'm you know six months into no income and now I'm really serious about buying a business so I'm just not looking and you know I've been looking this whole time even when I was at located I was always looking um but it I I kind of didn't have a choice and so I found uh this company called rtw Management on Biz buy style and so these these three guys Ryan Trent Walter um started this busing business in Salt Lake City during the Olympics it's actually got kind of a cool story um they were driving for this guy he he profit promised his employees you know these bonuses after the Olympics he never paid them and so Ryan and Trent were friends who worked for this company they went to Ryan's dad Walter and said hey if you start a company all the employees will come over so they did so that was the The Genesis particularly management and um you know that was that was 2000 I bought in 2016. so 16 years later you know they they the three of them had kind of built a good reputation for themselves and uh you know Walt was in his 80s the other two is kind of a last style business for him and and they were ready to transition so these had been drivers the two guys who had the idea they had been drivers gotcha um really neat and when you said you'd been kind of looking uh kind of passively or or flirting with with search and then I hear you say you found this business on Biz by cell does does quote unquote looking searching mean that you're just kind of glancing Abyss Buy sell every now and then sort of thing or were you doing any were you actually engaging Brokers or anything kind of more uh more involved I mean I thought I was looking actively right I mean all those time and I was I was talking to counts I was talking to lawyers talking to anyone that that knew anyone with the business but I think I just you know didn't have the same motivation so you know I looked at a lot of things were probably pretty decent businesses but I'd passed on I'm just I think getting cold feet you know and so it was having to do it that I think made me look more in Earnest because I don't know rtw management was any better than some of these other ones I've seen in the past it was good I liked it it was definitely met the the criteria I had well we're going to get into why you liked it here in a second but um another question so I hear you um I hear your story about what did you send six months with the almost startup where your partner backed out so so a lot of my guests actually don't they they kind of feel like they have the entrepreneurial itch but they don't necessarily ever say that see themselves as zero to one type so you hear that a lot like I'm not a zero to one type that's why I'm buying a business I'm a one to two one to ten type um but you have actually while it didn't go well it sounds like it actually didn't get off the ground but you were willing to go all in on a zero to one brand new business idea so how did how did how at this point in your life or now how do you think about starting from absolute Scratch versus buying a business yeah I think it's a bad idea I mean like you said to go from zero to one is harder than from going to you know one to ten right so I mean to do what the founders of my company did it took 16 years I mean they could have pushed it a little harder but it just takes a number of years to to get a reputation and to get into the industry and it's just not worth it right paying a little bit of money you can I mean we've tripled more and tripled the size of the company I mean maybe we've got quadruple this year right I mean that you know it's definitely worth we basically paid 1X revenue or kind of four times earnings for the company it was good good value in my in my opinion well well so let's get into that some so you see it on Biz by cell um tell us what you saw what you liked about it you've already told us a 16 year old years old at the time it was 16 years old what other numbers can you share just give us a profile here sure it was due in about two and a half million in revenue and we paid about two and a half million dollars for it um or I paid about two and a half million dollars for it so that's just kind of high high level numbers they had long-term contracts which I liked with VA hospitals so they just ran shuttles you know to remote parking lots or um other clinics and stuff like that and you know the market was small but um they had a good reputation they you know had a system there's Department transportation rules that you know take some time to get set up there uh first if you have a company hire CDL Drivers there's a lot of rules around that and you had I heard you say a second ago that you paid 4X so so roughly okay um and how profitable is a business like this would a margins look like kind of typical small business e margins 10 to 25 yeah a little tighter than that that's a pretty broad range yeah they're in that range okay it's a good margin for what you do really because it's I mean fixed route you you can predict your margins pretty well right I know exactly what I'm going to make next year excluding new contracts um down to a very narrow band So for for what it is and the margins are strong so I'll see on on Biz by cell from time to time nemt businesses non-emergency medical transport is that what that is so nemt is mostly associated with Medicare Medicaid um a lot of that's just brokering out trips um this was they were CDL buses so they're bigger buses that just ran shuttles happen to be to the VA Hospital it was really more probably employees than patients moving employees around okay and so was there something about VA hospitals in particular I mean a lot of people work at hospitals so is that was there that or I mean could every corporate campus or big you know concentration of employees be in your target market sure so at the time they had what's called GSA so like a it's a general service I don't know what the a stands for but uh these via contracts were set aside in this uh for companies who who qualify for this GSA so you've got a um you gotta do a bunch of paperwork take some time so there was some barriers to entry there and that's why they stuck with VA but yeah the the market was definitely addressable in my opinion um for you know big companies corporate shuttle stuff like that it's you know similar function um these shuttles run you know 12 or 18 hours a day whereas corporate shuttles are kind of morning and afternoon um you know commute times and they're also bigger they're like the motor coaches you see you know which are they're a lot more expensive than the Cutaway shuttle buses we're running in or they ran at the time and so it's a little bit different business model but still something that I'd considered when I bought the code okay that's that's a potential addressable market so give us a little bit more so you uh the business is doing two and a half million dollars uh a year in Revenue it's 16 years old you've got these long-term contracts with VA hospitals GSA kind of set aside set-asides um that's kind of the the niche that you're operating in but you see other opportunities for growth of this business into different sub-segments of of the shuttling and bussing World correct including what we just said corporate shuttling and what else corporate selling and just normal Municipal Transit right so two things happened they the GSA thing kind of dried up the VA decided they passed some law and I don't know if it happened before or after uh the guys sold to me I think it probably happened before and they knew about it um so they're they're setting aside these shuttle contracts now for service service disabled veteran-owned companies right I'm not a veteran so I'm ineligible for these contracts and we lost two contracts we had three when I bought it so we lost two of them to this you know this service disabled veteran set aside so I I I'm kind of forced to go elsewhere and the I thought that the the closest thing to what I was doing is just Municipal Transit City busing and so our first contract you know outside of the VA was with the city of Scottsdale and so they you know we ran their Municipal Transit we won a contract with them you know just a shot in the dark right we put out a bid I don't know how we got it our proposal is terrible but I I guess the reason we got is because the incumbent sued the city of Scottsdale and we're the only other bidder and so we were at right so so we got in we got the city of Scottsdale in our name you know it's not a huge it's 20 buses uh it's a good sized contract but everyone knows where Scottsdale is and so going forward we put that on our proposal and now we're a Transit company so first you lose these you have the three contracts so one thing not to like about the business is that there was incredibly High customer concentration yes a third a third a third roughly let's call it and and so sure enough you get into the business and you lose two of the three yes and in what in year one no this was yes probably in the first yeah I mean it probably ran out let's see let's see the first no we probably had it for over five years so okay or up to five years because the contracts are five year terms and the following terms they they were set aside so yeah we had a number of years with them okay and so for those number of years were you just up just servicing those three uh those three customers yes so we got into Scottsdale before we lost the other two because we saw everything going forward was getting set aside service disabled so before we lost those two we saw we saw it coming so we we got into gotcha Municipal transaction gotcha and um and the year you acquired the business was 2016. 2016. okay great okay and so it would just seem to me that just kind of intuitively shuttling employees um with you know it just seems on shut on smaller shuttles would be a lot lighter a lift than running the municipal busing system for even a smaller City like Scottsdale maybe I'm overestimating what what is involved in running a municipal uh the municipal bus system but that seems like a big leap um yet you took it elaborate what was it kind of a big and you actually you yourself acknowledge that like you were kind of underqualified to be doing this and you only got in Scottsdale because there was there were some other bitter so is it as big a leap as it seems or not so much you know it's not there the operation is doing the same thing the bus is a little bigger but you're stopping at certain points and a lot of our drivers at the VA were Transit drivers you know maybe like part-time Transit drivers or full-time Transit and drove part-time with us so we were kind of in the industry and CDL Drivers kind of hop around from school bus to you know transit to maybe even like driving long-haul trucks and so yeah and even in the the city's mind it may have been a big leap but it wasn't huge right if we couldn't start from nothing and go into municipal Transit but we had the operations that we were able to kind of Leverage to you know to make us look qualified we really were it wasn't we we came in and just clean house right we did a way better job with safety customer service um you know complaints on time percentage so everything approved the the company that had been there just had been there like 25 years and it just got worse and worse and worse they knew the you know the founder knew everyone in the city she's kind of she was a bus driver at one point she's kind of like a you know a thing she had all these magazine articles up in her office about herself um so she just got complacent after so many years and so it's really easy to come in and just out outperform what what they had done in their their recent history yeah and and was that well sounds like because she was doing a bad job but also was it you George saying to your team guys let's really knock this out of the park or was your team just kind of go in and did what they were already doing and they're in their in their shuttling and you guys were just already performing at a higher level and therefore did a better job or were you was there a moment where you're like all right guys this is Showtime this is our opportunity to prove to the world that we can run Municipal buses let's do this just crush it yeah I think we had to right this is our it's our only reference so it's got to be good you know we we do have to crush it um and we do have better processes now I see you know when we compete against our peers we we are better than our pair especially the big guys that just you know how they just have to hire everybody and they don't it's a service business and they're just not doing a great job so I think it's a little bit of both we were fortunate in that when we took this operation over they had a like they call them a road supervisor so it's like your lowest level manager like if someone pukes on a bus he's the guy who grows and Cleaves up the puke right um this guy was an absolute stud and they just kept not really noticed right this guy named Earl Hawkins and we like I'm interviewing everyone as we're taking over the operation we're interviewing our employees to see who we want to keep and who we don't and every question was the answer was Earl you know who does this Earl who does that Earl you know and I'm like well gosh why isn't Earl running this place you know what are these other people doing and so we ended up promoting Earl to to general manager and he you know he did a phenomenal job and he was just this under um undervalued employee that this gem that we found there so that that helped a lot too cool props to you earl now uh George also so help us understand so I'm hearing you say they lose the contract you win the contract but then you're able to get their employ higher on their employees yes so how does that all work that's why it sounds too good to be too right you just come here please keep going it's good when it works for you it's bad when it works against you um but the lady didn't have any other operations it was just um that was her one thing and so she didn't have anywhere else to take these employees and actually she was unbelievably gracious she she brought brought me to her office we interviewed everybody um she she couldn't have been Kinder about it so it was actually a pretty cool process and she really taught me how to do it you know we've lost contracts since and I decided at that point if we lose the contract you know we're going to do the same thing we're going to be gracious we're going to facilitate us some transition and um that's it it was really cool to kind of see that as our first into public transit yeah even though this was her sole contract so she was effectively out of business by losing this contract well she did do charter buses So like um you know buses to events and those the big ones they were talking about she did do that but it yeah it was the majority of her business so when you win a contract like this so you kept some some of the employees you hired some of the employees that were already working there so pretty seamless and then what about the buses the fleet how does that who owns that who man like what does that look like so it's contract by contract in this instance the city of Scottsdale owned the fleet they get they get Federal funding so their their buses are subsidized about 80 percent and so it makes sense for them for them to own the fleet and there was a little like you know deferred maintenance stuff like that they argue about that happens with every contract sometimes it's worse than others and what's to argue about because because you're going to charge them for maintenance because you're going to maintain and you're going to absorb the cost of Maintenance and then you're going to need to be reimbursed for that if like if you don't own the fleet what am I well when you take over the previous operator may not have maintained the vehicles right because they know they're losing the contract before it's over right and so they've got a number of months and they're like oh I'm not going to fix this if it's not broken or I don't have to because um I'm I'm not going to be using it in two months from now so when you get the buses oftentimes they're they've been under maintained okay so what it really looks like is you are when you get a contract like a Scottsdale Scottsdale contract where the fleet is owned by the city because the federal government subsidizes 80 of the cost of the buses uh you are basically managing the drivers and then the managers of the drivers and that's essentially the the purview right there's there more there's a little bit about you know scheduling and routing and stuff like that do we add out here do we do we optimize we move stuff around so there's a little bit of that but generally it's it's the service that we do yeah let's let's also just talk about so you know your realization that the municipal bus Market was a good one to go after and then you get this contract happily um to get a kind of Toe Hold there what does that assuming that you are successful in Scottdale what did that look like to you how many Scottsdale size and above cities are there in the country 500 I'm that's a total wild ass case I have no idea I'd say that probably cities like Scottsdale maybe between 100 and 200. uh-huh okay so then probably Scottsdale and above probably only 300 350. yeah yeah okay and so that still that that's that's a lot I mean if you if you have one and you can just get you know another nine more that's still a tiny sliver of the market but now you've you know 10x your business um is that that easy so our challenge is it's political right it's not it's it's not operational success it's not good pricing I mean those are factors but the biggest factor is do they like you do they know you you don't or it probably even more do they know you so the big guys are doing a terrible job and that's that's what I liked about us like these big guys are they're horrible operators right they've got you know layers of middle management they've got all these rules nobody likes being there it's it's you know they they really do a terrible job I mean for huge contracts maybe they're necessary but we compete really well against those guys in you know your Scottsdale maybe a little bit bigger than Scottsdale and definitely below um but they'll they'll come in and say hey you don't want to go with rtw management because they're small you don't know who they are you're taking a risk you're not going to get fired for hiring trans staff right they're they're a publicly traded company they're huge they're going to do you know a poured a mediocre job but that's they're the market they're perceived as no risk exactly the perceived as no risk or little risk and yeah No One's Gonna fire you because it's like oh Trans step everyone hires them you know like they're good enough a recent guest bought um James um James Bloom bought a small mechanical HVAC business very small and provided a phenomenal service and got a like a larger contract and that larger contract really accelerated getting larger and larger contracts because they just delivered great quality service and they were actually bidding for projects against some of the really big players and the customer was getting sick of how the really big players just didn't provide great service because the really big players are huge and each individual contract isn't so important to them and you know as as service companies get bigger quality tends to go down and so just by providing better quality service Word of Mouth travel very quickly and he was he just gobbled up new contracts new business not so here maybe because those relation those aforementioned relationships sort of thing yeah there's two or their two relationships there's one with the the company which matters a lot less than the one with the general manager you're I mean your your operation lives and dies by the general manager and Earl yeah Earl and it's lived with us you know it's some instances some of these big guys have great general managers or they have general managers who are local and know everybody you know and so we've got to come in and say okay we gotta if we're bidding a new city for example we got to come in and convince this guy to either come over to us or we got to find someone and convince the city that they're the person we've found is as good as this guy that they know and you know their kids play baseball together and that kind of thing so that's our challenge it's probably the people more than even more than the company itself going back to my question about if you get you know you got Scott's Scottsdale you did it really well did that lead to a domino effect the answer is no there's just every city or municipality is kind of has its own friction its own kind of moat in the sense of these relationships well I think it did so we after Scottsdale we accelerated we got a bunch of cities we got um a handful and then covet hit so yeah I think that was our challenge that the momentum really is real in our industry so if you're if you're doing well you can you can refer to your your current customers that goes a long way people see you growing they're like oh you're growing for a reason that that's kind of a counter to the the big guy's narrative but when we hit Kobe and everything stopped for a couple years that you know our momentum kind of stalled and now we're just getting that momentum back um which you know it takes a few new contracts to get that we've landed a couple new ones and so now we're I think we're we've got the story to tell again yeah though I would imagine that you know covid stopped the entire industry in its tracks and so I would imagine like with many Industries there would be kind of a a resetting going on in some of those entrenched relationships might not be quite as strong now post covet yes I think that's true a lot of the municipalities and even on the federal side they've they've taken the opportunity to extend the contracts they had prior right so if they the worst thing you can tell procurement person is you've got to rebate right nobody wants to rebate it's a lot of work you know they have the opportunity for protests or whatever and it's just a nightmare I mean there's a real cost to it right cost to people and resources so they they want to extend contracts as much as possible so generally these contracts are like maybe a two or three year tournament with two or three one-year extensions but with Kobe they've said oh well let's just extend it beyond the you know the second or third year extension and it you know it's questionable whether that's legal or not but it gave them justification to do that they don't have to bring bed so we're just now seeing a lot of contracts that should have come out in you know 2022 um or even earlier this year they're saying we're calling them and saying hey you know we've got on our list that you're supposed to your contact ended last year what's going on like oh we're in the process rebetting so that's we're just seeing that now so the the stuff really died during covid um and I think that's mostly the reasons because they they push stuff out and now we're seeing probably 50 percent more at least 50 more than we'd seen in the past um and there is a bit of a reset but we lost some contracts during covid um and and so that that kind of hurt our momentum yeah yeah yeah so you're you're kind of trying to get back to where you were yeah I think we are we then supersede that oh you're you're back yeah and we're just seeing that um I think that acceleration right now and aided by the the Tailwind of all these the just a normal amount of contracts plus the late contracts from the last couple years added to it exciting and so George where are you now you you you're in Scottsdale where else so funny thing we lost Scottsdale the lady who so we ran it from for four years um that we had an option for a fifth year that we couldn't come to terms on pricing and so I think we pissed them off so we made him we said no we're not you know we're not against your pricing you got to go out and rebid and we felt pretty confident maybe overconfident um and the lady who had before she that she'd been working behind the scenes and you know she's she's in all the The women-oh Business Clubs and she knows everybody and she she told me she'd been the whole time she'd been kind of working the the political scene and uh she got it back maybe maybe a little less gracious than you thought yeah but hey it's it's a you know it's a competitive market good for her she yeah she's uh she's sharp lady so yeah so we ended up and that was one of the ones we lost during covid um I think you know we we probably got a little overconfident in uh you know we kind of figured hey we're we're doing better in every measurable aspect like our price is good too like there's no way it would lose this contract so I think we probably got we're probably victims of our own success you know in addition to the the um covid problem can you give us some some of the other names where you are some of the other municipalities can you show this yeah we're in Baltimore we're in um this town called Radford Virginia um we're operating we were operating Summit County up until the 30th of last month Summit County is Utah yes and then Morgan State University that's it for now the city of Baltimore um it's actually the VA for the state of Baltimore gotcha so that's one that we've retained that's the one of the three that we retained gotcha ah from the original going all the way back the original contract yeah I mean we re-bid it it went out to bid again we we won but yeah yeah gotcha and then Radford yeah that's a so I'm in Arlington Virginia radford's a quite a small town so I guess I shouldn't have thought about things in terms of Scottsdale and above because there's all this Municipal busing at cities much smaller than Scottsdale and so of those are hundreds and maybe a thousand or more right um I mean fewer than that you'd be surprised we see these small cities you kind of get to know the cities and counties or Transit districts that comprise maybe multiple cities um yeah I mean I I'd say our addressable Market is probably 500 so that's your you know seems a little smaller in Scottsdale so we're looking at like 10 buses to um 50 buses I mean we'd go 50 to 100 but I think right now we're kind of perceived as the you know 10 to 50 bus type company and and 50 would be a city of what size like uh Salt Lake City yeah Salt Lake's probably a couple hundred um so 50 is going to be maybe your San Diego or something like that maybe a an El Paso Texas one thing that I hear coming up a lot in our conversation here George is the power of relationships um now obviously relationships are powerful in all business but in sounds like maybe more so when it comes to city government and certainly you know when it comes to politics and relationships I mean and you know the c word corruption we all kind of there's a stereotype there um is this are these relationships that are so valuable do they ever flirt with what what an outsider might consider is like unethical uh or is or is it or not like yeah kind of for those people in the audience who are wondering if dealing with city government city government contracts entails like making contact with corruption does it in Florida yes they're getting paid right so but outside of Florida maybe New York New Jersey Chicago Florida's South Florida is the worst by far right like oh okay that's that's the most corrupt the former owners wouldn't even do business there because it's so corrupt um but I'd say 99 of the contracts are somewhere on on a scale right so so if if you do business with a company that you like they're doing a good job their price is reasonable you don't want to change because they're real transition costs you know that that's probably not corruption right that's probably if if you would do the same thing if it were your own business you know when you're representing this a city or um County or whatever then I don't think that's corruption but when it there's a real fine line and a kind of gradation into corruption which is like well I know this guy like we've got a houseboat together you know like those kinds of things um that kind of is where you see it because we do smaller uh we call it small Urban or um like these these cities where the population is not huge and everyone has some kind of connection we see some of it there we're like I don't think any money's changing hands but they know each other and they're probably like some some unspoken favors changing hands and things like that I would say probably the worst kind of corruption most destructive and like kind of like demoralizing is the kingdom building that you see where someone just wants to build this huge Empire just so they can justify a bigger paycheck or have a better resume or you know go on to their next job that stuff's just as far as like cost to the government is is unbelievably destructive and that's so elaborate on this for us George so that this will be a bureaucrat for lack of a better word somebody working in in the in the city government who is trying to just accrue power and a thief a kingdom yeah to to just because that's how you go up the ladder in city government sort of thing yeah yeah it's how you go up the ladder it's how you you get a bigger paycheck you're more important you're you know and that that stuff happens and it's if you think about the dollars like we have a situation one of our contracts that we operated where you know this lady wants a big entity right and so she's she's spending more than she needs to hire more people as she needs to because she gets a title there's there's actually official titles based on the size of your organization in transit so you're a a general manager if your organization's so big if it's if you're bigger than that you're uh what they call it direct executive director exactly so you know if they want to be an executive director so bad they'll just hire someone that has no purpose and their org charts just completely bloated just to hit that title and there's probably a pay increase associated with that and so that kind of corruption you know you might spend an extra three million dollars a year to get a thirty thousand dollar raise right and those people think that's fine that's a you know that makes sense that's how you do it but you know the there's a lot of money that's wasting a lot of people suffer because of you know a a timely raise one person salary yeah that's really disheartening George yeah does this has this has been in this business at all disillusioned your faith in government if you had any to begin with yes it has I mean I I don't know that I have a strong opinion coming into it but yeah just the the money that and sometimes it benefits us right sometimes if money's allotted they're just like oh take it all you know you know we if it's been budgeted like we don't care how you can spend the whole budget you know there's there's not a lot of scrutiny um if you go over budget sometimes they just say we're not going to give it to you even if we owe it because it's our budget right so there's some of that idiosyncrasy in government um and it's again it's it's not their money um and I think a lot of times if if a government employee looks at somebody says well wow that's a lot of work for me um it'll save the I might save us millions of dollars but but it looks like a lot of work I'll just just do the easy thing and so I I mean you just feel like if they would pay more to some of these people who are putting out proposals who are overworked or have less capacity for whatever reason the government would save a lot of money I have to add more yeah you know because he's you know someone's making 70 grand a year and they're they're bidding out millions and tens of millions of dollars worth of goods and services you know and so yeah yeah I there are reasons for it but it's not efficient and yeah it is it is kind of disheartening in some instance like where you see stuff that kind of is corruption you see you know a whole board that's kind of in on something that's that is it is pretty demoralizing growth so do you see basically bidding on bidding on contracts the ones that you've talked about that just are on schedule to be bid and then the kind of ones that were were extended because of covet all that all that organic growth possibility coming what about inorganic growth in in buying buying other busing companies from retiring owners is that is that a play here yes yeah absolutely I mean generally it's easier to outbid them than to buy them and if you're going to buy someone you're probably going to buy a regional player so there's some advantages we're unique in that we're small and we're National you get a lot of small guys who are Regional you know so they might do a couple adjacent towns or whatever but those would be the folks that we would acquire we looked at one that was really underperforming we made an offer gosh this was maybe a year and a half ago I mean the offer is basically zero they were losing 25 Grand a month and we said we'll take over your you know all your obligations your contracts they they they they were entertaining it they renegotiated one of their contracts you know I don't know they didn't renegotiate it before they engaged with us but they did they need to go see some other contracts and said hey we're doing better you know we're not interested in selling um but they're still from what I understand they're still losing money so we might re-engage those guys that's so we looked at them we didn't buy them there's another one um in Montana that we looked at we they did they were kind of like the the company that we beat out in Scottsdale where they did part part of their business was you know all those over the road kind of tour buses and the other part was doing fixed route Transit so we didn't buy them for that reason they were kind of more skewed towards the over the road stuff which we don't our business is built around being efficient and focused and specialized so um we couldn't figure out how to parse that out so we didn't buy those guys either but yeah inorganic growth is is definitely an option in in certain circumstances you just said that you guys are a little unusual in that you're small but National yeah and when I'm thinking Salt Lake City to Radford Virginia I don't even know what airport you'd fly I don't actually know exactly where Radford is I suspect you'd fly into Richmond and drive from Richmond you could do that I'm flying to Roanoke actually it's quickest way to do I was gonna I I thought Roanoke but Roanoke is a tiny a tiniest one I mean there's six or nine flights coming out going out of it a day and it's a small very small City yeah that's so so getting so so talk to us a little bit about having this kind of very far-flung these very far-flung operations you've already mentioned that the GM on the ground it like all comes down to that so just give give us a picture it really does we've been fortunate to have unbelievable general managers and that's part of what I like about the business because well you know like finding guys like Earl right who who are underappreciated underutilized and you know giving them some trading some some experience and some opportunities to improve and those guys like Earl loves it right he loves his job he loves working for us like you know he's making two or three times what he did when he started with us and he's and he's doing a great job the city loves him everyone loves him so those kind of success stories are cool and like the the other employees see that right so it creates this this good environment this is free decor and right now Earl's at the point where he could move up again he's just got to find someone to replace himself and so that's his Challenge and he's he's still working on he hasn't been able to find anyone I mean I think he's kind of has a high standard but if he can find someone to take his job we've got another position for him and so that that it kind of flips the you know the HP Corporate mentality where you don't want you know someone who works for you to outshine you he's kind of the opposite right like all you want is for this person to move up right and so you're helping them you're looking you're you're doing everything you can searching for a way to get or searching for that person who can who has the ability to be promoted and so it's that's kind of what we want to be is the opposite of corporate America is I think for the foreseeable future we can be that um as long as we keep growing we have opportunities for these guys to move up and you get a bus driver who you show up on time you're a good person you work hard we'll notice and we'll get you opportunities to to do other things and we'll promote you and that's and all the bus drivers like that they see that they feel like their job matters and um that that's 99 of our success right you've got policies and procedures and manuals but really if your drivers aren't happy it doesn't matter what kind of you know manual or HR processes you've got it doesn't help right the the drivers who like you they don't they don't file each they don't file work on claims right they they take care of their customers so I'd say in our industry that's that's really the the key so on the ground let's say in Radford you your general manager there so or in any of your locations so the general manager is really kind of running this as a pretty autonomous business in all the back office is Flowing up to you guys uh at headquarters um but in terms of literally keeping the buses running on time that's you know that that's always the cliche we use keep the keep the trains running on time for a good operator but in your case it's literal keeping the buses running on time that's essentially what they're doing and keeping the buses maintained and you maybe day to day don't have a lot of visibility into that they're running to use the word again their own little thief sort of yeah yet they are and the people who succeed in our company love it right they love that I'm not in their business right they they report to me and and pretty and frequently I mean I've got a guy out in um like the eastern shore of Maryland I mean I talked to him a couple times a year right he just takes care of it he does a good job and that's it right he doesn't you know I like him and but we don't need to talk and and he likes it I trust him and I like that I can't trust him and so I think yeah that's that's part of the characteristic a general manager has to have is they have to want to have that kind of autonomy and and they do more right if I'm not telling them what to do they're like oh they do more than probably I would even ask them to do and what about again going to an like a transportation business where timeliness is really is the kpi is the the value that you're delivering to the customer are are there metrics being tracked uh like what percentage is uh what percentage of your buses arrived at their stops late you know every week and stuff like that I mean how high tech is it and how how how much are those numbers being scrutinized it's getting better and it's cool some of the technology that's coming out you know in 2017 it was pretty bad right the numbers were unreliable you know because they're they're testing certain stops and you've got a like a a GPS locator that you've kind of programmed at each stop and they were unreliable for a while there's a lot of technology that again the government overpaid for um but now you've got you've got uh you know tablets that are kind of pre-programmed that you know the stuff used to take a year to program now you download on your tablet and it's almost 100 accurate so that's they'll measure on Time Performance really in our industry you know the hitting your first stop is the most important right you've you're kind of on time at that point but a driver's gonna drive at the speed of the flow of traffic so really if if you get behind more often uh it's the it's a bad schedule it's traffic it's weather than the natural driver error um a driver driving slow um if the schedule is not good right the the time points are somehow don't match up with the flow of traffic or if you don't get enough you have recovery points you know so you'll you'll drive around every once in a while you'll build an extra five minutes so if you're behind you again get caught up that way because you definitely can't drive faster to get caught up right that's a No-No so so yeah so they're they're multiple aspects to it I think they put a little more emphasis on on Time Performance there there is a metric that gets in every contract that gets tracked um but we kind of say look if we get to our first stop on time our drivers are doing what drivers do you know and so the on top but that said our entire performance is still better than our peers so I don't know what they're doing I mean every once in a while you get a driver they'll take the bus to McDonald's or something like that but in general that's that's not like it used to be with you know you get a ding or a text message if they go off Route now so it's it's a little you know a little tighter than it used to be and going back to your your GMS your operators now for a sec so um it the reason I'm I'm um lingering on this is because this is kind of will be Universal universally applicable to anybody who has a small business where there's remote GMS what do you do if one of those folks quits I mean it sounds like you you have great relationships with them so they'll probably likely to give you you hope lots of notice yeah enough cushion so that you basically just hire a replacement but but walk us through that because that does seem like the nightmare because it's a pretty specific I would imagine it's a pretty specialized role no yeah that's true okay um knock on wood we've never had anyone quit up to this point and I think that's your first line of defense is treating them well and giving them opportunities to advance and if they know they've got other things coming then they won't quit and and our peers do a horrible job so so there's not a lot of good places for them to go um I guess if someone were to quit our two backup plans are to send corporate folks we've got kind of a CO if you will so she'll go out and start new contracts um she can fill in she can do that kind of thing or even I guess better than that would be our assistant general manager so the idea is we're always training we're always trying to find someone our biggest need isn't bus drivers right it's it's management and so we you know the the ideal scenario be our assistant general manager can step right into that position and that's what we tell our general managers you should have someone trained well enough that if you get hit by a bus then the assistant general manager can take your place more uh more bus cliches that happen to be literal in your in your business and when you'd say the opportunity for advancement so give us a picture of the of the hierarchy of your organization you got the drivers the Gen the general managers that assistant general managers um who represent kind of a one-person or two-person thin layer of management and then if say say your GM in the Eastern Shore says I'm ready to advance now and I've got a great replacement for me where does where can he or she go so generally it's it's relocation you're you're running a bigger operation ah so there's and there's between driver and general manager there's a handful of management positions um you know so I mean you might see in a bigger contract four or five management folks supervisors and so how big is your organization Today George um give us a picture of of uh Revenue if you if you can and employees number a number of employees sure so last year we did about eight and a half million I think we'll do 10 this year um let's see we've got probably 130 employees and of those 130 employees how many of those are like drivers versus management or some some sort of back office or management by 115. wow yeah so it takes it takes 15 people of overhead to run 115 other drivers very interesting okay so well that's so so eight and a half million this year and hopefully uh last year and hopefully 10 by the end of 2023 and you started at two and a half million what seven years ago or I guess eight yeah seven eight years ago eight years ago as I said at the top and so not bad for exit in eight years is this the success that you you want it or do you feel like you've done things wrong it could have grown faster or what how do you feel yeah I mean it's success um covid played a role right that that yeah we had a good trajectory we were on that trajectory I think covet had something to do with it I made some dumb mistakes um you know I I one thing I didn't mention that I guess is is relevant is is pissing people off right so if that's that's really where we make and lose our money so the contracts that we've won are really because the incumbent made somebody mad you know that's that's a hundred percent of it if they not made someone mad they could probably get away with a little higher price a little lower quality but you make someone mad and like that's it so I there were a couple instances I could make someone mad in Scottsdale I made someone mad we had a city called Aventura where you know they they reduced our service and we had to renegotiate price and I was a little too aggressive made him mad you know who they went with someone else so um I learned quite a bit there about you know about uh people being sensitive and customer service and that kind of thing so I think that was probably you know I'd say overall yes it was successful we could have been more successful um we had another operation where I had a partner um it was a service disabled veteran so instead of us having the contract we partnered with this guy and and we do all the work he gets half the money you know like that kind of thing um but he got he kept all the money and he wasn't paying us so I I I just pulled all equipment shut him down and um probably a little bit rash he ended up going bankrupt and they didn't give us the contract again it was a whole mess and so you know had I been a little yeah gentler there I think that was a very profitable contract we would retain so you know it made some big mistakes that have hurt us but despite those I think we're still achieving success and and now I think the future is a lot brighter because you know we've learned a lot um from those mistakes and you know we're getting more uh politically active which is helpful it's extremely helpful and you're not even just politically active we're we're reaching out proactively to cities that whose bids are coming up within the next year and we're introducing ourselves asking them what their pain points are what they're looking for and you know that that's really made a world of difference and I think we'll see that in the next the benefit of that in the next 24 months very exciting and and so do I hear right that you have about four primary contracts now for primary customers or contracts so so actually you only have one more than the three that when you bought the business but they're all just a lot bigger yeah yep okay and by the way what happened to the to the the non-municipal uh the non-municipal contracts you had are you still doing any of that stuff or did you let all those contracts when they when they expired you let them let that business go like the federal stuff well like the VA hospitals that you started with yeah so we have the 1B Hospital still in Baltimore I guess um we the otherwise it's it's almost all set aside for service disabled veterans so we have a partner now not the guy that we took the bit you know that we we took our ball went home with um but we've got a new partner that's that's trustworthy and uh that's slowed down too that's probably been the biggest that they've been the most affected by covet or taken the most advantage of of covet to extend their contracts so there's been a dearth the last couple years on the federal side because they they don't want to bid I mean bidding's harder on the federal side yeah they have more latitude to not put stuff out to bids so um yeah so that I think we'll see a lot of opportunity in the in the near future but that's that's kind of been dead the last couple years do you envision running this and definitely growing it and definitely for the duration of your career or might you sell to a larger player if there was a knock at the door or do you have a plan or is it just like you know optionality yeah the optionality I mean the the our peers the big guys are acquisitive I mean they're they're gobbling up the little guys all over the place but you know going through the acquisition process I feel like it's probably easier to I can create more value growing this than I can you know selling this and and trying to acquire another business you know just the the process of Acquisitions so hard um so I think I'll grow this I feel like it's doing until I see some resistance right right now I just see green fields for a long time you know I think yeah we can get to 50 million revenue and not be big not be bloated not have that you know crappy layer middle management um but I think once we hit whatever that you know that size is where we have to change our business model I think that's where I have to make a decision right do we just optimize and become profitable and stay a certain size where we have a good span of control that we grow and you know get big and hopefully do something different from our larger peers right now or do we just sell and walk away and not have to worry about getting sued by people who fall on the bus do tell so is getting is getting sued also another uh Hazard of this business such a pain point we just settled for 200 000 for some guy who like slid off of his seat land on his butt and said he broke his neck like it's oh you're kidding no it's I mean like if you fall on your butt how do you break your neck and whatever the problem is you had a pacemaker and you're not able to do an MRI if you have a pacemaker so there's just a lot of circumstances that led to this like outsized um settlement that just hurt and but do you have insurance for that yeah we have insurance we we have um we're part of a captive insurance company so the way it works is you put in your premiums you you pay a fee to manage the insurance process and then and then you have reinsurance you know above whatever the levels like 300 000 but if if you don't have claims you get to keep whatever is below so say I think we pay like let's say 300 Grand a year in in Insurance um you know 100 Grand of that goes to goes to management so we have 200 grand every year in a pool and if we don't have any claims we get to keep that money so it's kind of our money this year or that year I think it was 2020. it happened in 2020 we just settled this just said last week um so obviously we're not getting any money for that for that year so it's still our money in a sense you know yeah yeah it doesn't feel spent it's not spent until it's spent exactly so so this guy made out 200 grand for you know faking an injury and that that's pretty I mean it happens happens all the time usually this was a unique combination of circumstances usually if they're Faking It you give them five thousand dollars and they know they know where the threshold is that like they know what their case is worth like it's almost like there's a calculation for what their case is worth and they know what that is and they'll you know they'll settle for that amount and just kind of put up with it and is this more common in your industry than others because people like this kind of Target government or because they target Transportation or what about this industry is so vulnerable to that sort of behavior and abuse I think just because you're it's you're moving people right I mean and it's you know everyone I don't think we've ever had an injury that was like substantiated right it's always like oh my back hurts my you know like there's no like we've never had like a broken leg or anything like actually shows up on a an x-ray right it's always like soft tissue stuff and it's hard to say you know then I think that's why because they say oh I got whiplash or you know something that's hard to Define and it's you know we don't have a lot of solid defense in those instances and we have cameras everywhere now and we do what we can but you know if most of our claims are like our bus hits the brakes and someone like slides forward and falls and they they make a claim we have very few accidents but um yeah I think it's just just vehicles and like anytime there's any kind of physical damage to a vehicle there's a claim someone says they were hurt you know it's almost like depending on where you are in the country um some states are worse than others it's almost a given that Maryland's The Worst by far right everyone everyone's got an attorney in Maryland I mean we we have claims where like someone will get hit and like on camera you know because we have cameras and buses they're on the phone with their attorney and I'm like how do you guys have an attorney like I don't I don't have to turn on I'd call if I was in an accident but all these people know and you know they fall just below the workers comp claim levels and anyway it's it's a whole industry out there um but it's it's it's almost given if there's a collision or incident someone's gonna say they're hurt yeah the car that more more disheartening view of human nature here but but the point about yet moving people around and you have so I mean it's disheartening to hear how much abuse there is but given the volume of human bodies that you're moving on a daily basis and on a monthly basis and you know along roads like does that ever keep you up at night I actually this reminds me of I actually talked to a a busing business not Municipal busing uh and and the owner was somebody who had been a business broker so he knew to how to kind of talk to a prospective buyer and he said look I I like to disqualify people so that I don't waste everybody's time if you go on if you want this business you got to be really comfortable with liability because some people just can't sleep at night knowing that their business and maybe ultimately them is responsible for 150 human bodies you know cruising down the road at 60 miles an hour is there something there in you that he that he was talking about yeah I think there's there's the moral obligation and there's like the the physic just the the fiscal concern um as far as the moral obligation I feel like we can do that better than anyone else and so these people are going to be moved in a bus I think I'd like our company to do it I'm okay with that the fiscal the fiscal part of it just the concern that something happens beyond our controller you know even if it's our operator's fault you know we I think we minimize that more than anyone else but if something happens yeah like the the concern of having 50 people roll over in a bus like that's that's catastrophic and it if I were to sell the company that would be why I mean I love operating I love our employees I love I love being a business owner that that's the one thing about the business that I hate is I mean I have to be in mind that the corporate and the politics and stuff like that like I can deal with that but the the part about where people will just lie to your face and say they were hurt and that kind of stuff like that's that's the hardest part of the business well that's actually that's really clarifying and it's a perfect segue I wanted to ask you for people listening who might be considering this industry or or like the sound of it what would you tell them is it is it now that you're in the on the inside and you've been on the inside now for seven or eight years is it is it a good industry for Searchers sounds like you like it other than people lying to your face what would you say I I don't know we're all recognized that you don't want we're you know by saying you like it too much you're inviting competition so with that aside this assessment you know what if I were to be able to acquire a business like magically not to go through the whole process of finding one and talking to owner and just selling it to me um I think they're they're better options uh because of the the liability issue um but that said this it's it's there's a place to grow right there's room if you have if you can buy an operator I'm gonna get started that way there's room to grow there's there's a lot of operators who aren't doing a good job um there's definitely room for improvement in the industry I think that there's another adjacent industry which is Paratransit which is a lot bigger and so that's one that that we're kind of flirting with now so that's your uh you know your short bus if you will right that's that's picking up individuals in wheelchairs they're they're the the market is bigger um it's less Stussy right we have there's two big companies maybe five depending how you consider it that run probably eighty percent of our market right even down to you know small companies so that it's it's highly concentrated in fixed route whereas Paratransit you know you got a lot of local guys who buy some bands you compete um it's a little higher margin but it's a little it's a little more variable if you screw up you can lose money out of contract fix that you're going to make money you're always going to make money but you're not gonna make a ton whereas Paratransit you should make a killing you might you might lose if you bid it incorrectly so that that's part that we're looking at and we may you know we may bifurcate the company we may do something like that and get into the the period Transit side we do a little pair of Transit now sometimes they're combined so they'll say you know run fixed route and Paratransit for um you know bizman North Dakota whatever it is and so we'll do both because we're required to and but as we've done that we're like maybe we maybe we should do some Standalone paragraphs or contrast see how that goes well and that also Paratransit also sounds like it's an easier industry to break into like the the you don't need a fleet you don't maybe need as much experience because it's more fragmented and more Mom and Pop yeah uh but you think that's a bigger opportunity than Municipal yeah Municipal running city buses yeah there's more there the volume is larger because a lot because a lot of cities do their own busing whereas they generally contract out Paratransit um okay so the 500 cities that we keep referring back to they don't necessarily they're never going to actually Outsource their busing about I'd say it's probably half of the city's Outsource their busing um okay so so yeah maybe it is 500 and maybe a little more on that and 250 Outsource there uh their fixed route but I would say the majority of them Outsource their Paratransit and let's just we may have hit it all but let's just get an overview now of the shuttling and bussing business from you George so we so we touched on nemt earlier we've now heard about Paratransit of course Municipal busing VA Hospital busing corporate shuttles get is are there more give us just kind of an overview of the entire shuttling and bussing business in 60 seconds if you care there's one more that you haven't mentioned which is like corporate shuttles so there's a company that's just made their way doing you know they do Google Apple Tesla all those kinds of companies or all those large any company that has um multiple facilities or any company that's big enough that they're going to bring their employees in from you know other close you know other cities in the area so they they don't do Municipal they do almost the exact same thing but they they don't do they just do private companies I mean it's the same thing these are the Google buses that were controversial when they were driving through the narrow Streets of San Francisco to pick up programmers and take them to yeah this company had a whole portfolio they were I don't know what they they got acquired for they're called we drive you uh they built their whole business on just working for private companies busting from fixed route busy for private companies okay and so but what about Charter or one-off or when you're doing I don't even know what you do that for moving conference attendees around or tourism uh so Charter is a good business it's just different so you're you on the buses yourself they're probably half a million to a million dollars a piece um you're going to make more money if you can keep them full but you're going to make less money if you can't so it's kind of a you know it's it's a little more variable as far as your your margins uh and we just decided where they're gonna do all that or none of that um yeah the other people who made a lot of money there's a local company called labas here that's you know made a lot of money doing taking ski buff kids you know skiing and field trips and you know right towards the Grand Canyon or whatever so there's there's a market for that there's a some Capital involved and if you're small if you've got five buses you can keep those five buses busy right you can find the business to keep those busy if you get big and you've got you know there's a covet or something and you've got buses sitting you still got to make those payments yeah yeah and some of these other niches within transportation lack the thing that you so dislike in your own Niche which is they lack the litigiousness of your of your Niche or not necessarily they all kind of have it I yeah I don't think he's here one of our problems is like when you're when you're operating a city bus you know you're kind of a lot of times you're getting just depending where you are you're kind of getting the the bottom of the barrel getting on your bus you know and and in some instances you're getting people who are kind of frail or old or elderly maybe can't drive and so we're kind of driving around cracked eggs or people who are just mentally off you get some weird people on your bus just to be honest and so that and those people somehow you know they they might be homeless but they know how to call a lawyer you know so you get it's you're you're picking up the whole no I wouldn't say the whole Spectrum side you're picking up like people who who really have nothing to lose they're going to sue because they're not they're not going to work they're just riding a bus around and stay warm or you know um that so that's desperate yeah it's people who are desperate and that's that's the challenge is those kind of people are going to sue um you know if you have a bus of people going to Disneyland they're they're going there for a reason you know it's a different demographic and what about I'm just going through my kind of list of where I've seen shuttles in my mind like airport shuttles for example what what would that fall under kind of corporate uh the the corporate business so airport shuttles are are a good one they're they're pretty much dominated by the big guys because it's they drive transit buses but the problem the airport shows is you've got to buy your own transit buses which are you know probably five five hundred thousand dollars a piece and so that becomes a huge barrier just on final two questions first the relevance of your Finance background so I'm circling all the way back to the top you majored in finance and then you gotta and then you got a master's in finance uh and then you worked in private Equity sometimes I'll get um notes from folks who are intimidated because they hear my guests have these real Financial chops before before they go out and buy a business and if they don't come from a financial background they say well is that is it not for me therefore so what how what is the relevance uh of your financial background been to this experience it's actually been enormously helpful so even buying them okay I mean sorry to say but even buying the business right so I the our loan was denied they they said you know it wasn't worth what we what we were paying for it and I told the sellers out and they said okay no deal so I still liked the deal even even though the bank did yeah thought we were paying for it so I wrote my own evaluation right I took it throughout a three-page evaluation submit it and they accepted it right so I um and we the deal got done so that was helpful and even in now in in daily operations you know when we're being able to put together spreadsheet and run numbers um the the devil's really in the details right like there are people who or their instances where we're comparing notes and people will have incorrect spreadsheets and and like cost structures that are messed up and we'll fix those you know our our peers don't do a good job of bidding um jobs so I kind of look at bidding a job as kind of like a mini acquisition right I put together a evaluation for that acquisition and and that's what I submit and I think we do a better job of that than anyone else because because of my finance background uh it helps a ton I mean there if there's a change and we say hey these are our costs and this is why and um it's yeah it's been helpful yeah we'll we'll say yeah we'll I'll do an evaluation of our peers and say here are our peers public financials and here are as compared to theirs and this is why we're better you know on a a margin basis we're better operators so all that stuff has you know has made our proposals look better has made us kind of be able to to eke out some margins where you know someone without that background may not have been able to but I mean I'm just playing my strengths and I think there are other people who have strengths in industries that you know I don't necessarily that you have to have a finance background but it's helped a lot well it's funny George because one of the things you also hear in this world of small business acquisition is operators who who are experienced see MBA types coming in and just running a lot of spreadsheets and and kind of making fun of them being like Hey kid this business is not all about just like you know pushing numbers around on Excel in fact that's a very small or non-existent part of it yeah um but it sounds like actually George in your case a lot of your business has been um doing spreadsheets it has and it helps you know because they'll you know I mean some of these cost structures get pretty complex and if we can put our thing in it looks better than theirs they'll take ours you know and so it it has made us a lot of money and there are a lot of cases I mean I think knowing people and being personal and being able to work with people is probably the top skill but being able to to put together numbers and convince someone else that your numbers are right that's a that's a skill that's well compensated George one of the things that we talked about in our pre-call was how difficult or not you have found running rtw I mean you hear in in these days in in the popularity of buying a small business that like oh it's too popular because people are under underestimating just how difficult this is and what do you say to that it's difficult in some ways um in others it's not right I mean I love it I enjoy the the freedom that it affords um but it it's really not that hard I I told you we were going to buy a yeah we were going to start the subprime modifyance company and our investor um it's a guy named Aaron super smart guy right so he's actually gone built another company in the meantime sold it for a billion dollars I don't know how much he owned at the time but it made a killing after this this thing fell apart uh so so we're we're trying to stop the subparate model Finance Company our expert the you know the guy kind of started the whole thing backed out so we're trying to find another you know another guy who knows the industry and and can can be our CEO and so Aaron gives him this feel about how it's really not that hard you know he's like I'm an average guy and I've you know I've grown these businesses and he's like your employer is going to tell you it's hard and you can't do it and and it's scary out there and there's so many risks but it's no more risky than your employer letting you go yeah one day because the market changes or he finds someone better you know and and so they're you know people are afraid of the risk they're afraid of the unknown but really the day-to-day is not not that hard I mean you're it may be less hard than some of the roles within a company right you're you're making sure people there and they're doing the right thing and and uh you know if you do a good job of that then it's it isn't hard I mean you do have freedom freedom of schedule freedom of time and it's for me I mean it's it's even if even if I didn't make even if I made the same as I did you know working in Industry I would still choose this lifestyle well it also of course depends on a lot of things but two of the big factors that immediately come to mind are the business itself like how like the nature of the work and the nature of the services being delivered that can be harder or easier Messier or not or whatever and uh first and then second how healthy the business that you acquire is certainly if you acquire a business that you know you miss something in due diligence or there was something that you really couldn't have known until you got in there and you find out that it's bleeding money or whatever that's also hard um so so so if your if your business is making money it's easier than if it's not I guess and I I mean that's the whole trick of buying a small business is I would think any small business I've looked at would be a good value you know what I've really like taking the next step to look at seriously would have been a great acquisition would have made a bunch of really the only problem is is there something I don't know right is there something yeah you know when I was at located we were going to buy this pallet manufacturer in New York and we were pretty far down the road and then we had another portfolio company that manufactured wood and they said oh there's a law that just changed and it's going to create another step in the process of manufacturing pallets you got to dry your wood first before you build these pallets it's gonna it's gonna it would have killed our margin I mean there'd be zero profit in this company and the guy who's selling us knew that we did right and so that's I mean that's what duel deals and says right like every business is good unless there's something coming that you don't know about yeah although in your defense uh you're a testament to your ability that's exactly what happened to you in your own business I mean Hospital business was going away the three contracts that you had you lost two of the three that's true I'm pretty sure those guys knew that too um right yeah so and that's it's hard right you don't that they're that's I think that I said you're gonna say it's it's hard that is the risk in buying a business is do you trust this person are they why are they selling um you know they've they've got to have a good story and even if they do have a good story there might still be you know something that that they know that you don't yeah yeah well one last question on on this topic George you um had mentioned or pre-call that over the years you've gotten a lot of people reach out to you saying that they they want to buy a business like you like 30 people or a couple dozen people and as far as you know none of them have actually proceeded with doing so what do you think that's about the interest but the the unwillingness to actually Forge ahead and actually do it because it's hard simply yeah it's hard to get cold feet I think they're you know maybe their their boss is talking out of it or their spouse talks them out of it or you know whatever um but I think that's it it's the fear of the unknown more than anything yeah yeah interesting I mean I always encourage them like it's kind of been discouraging because no one's actually done it but I always encourage people to do it just because it's been such a great experience for me and I think it's you know it's it's liberating as far as your your time goes and it's kind of creative you can you can do it how you want and I feel like it's for me I'm a lot happier you know I try to give that entrepreneurial kind of opportunity to my employees because it's yeah I think it's just it's it just lets you be more of yourself and have more influence and yeah it's great last question for you George so um let's Circle back to now that you're on the other side of the table from when you were PE analyst and seeing the operators you know cash out of cash out of their blue collar businesses for 100 million dollars or whatever uh what do you now understand that you didn't then or is it is it is it as great as you thought or reflect for me um it is as great as I thought I really like it I I love being you know you know your succeed or fail on your own Marist which I like um and you don't have someone telling you what to do or someone with you know people with ulterior motives and you know people trying to look better that kind of stuff like that's totally counterproductive and I try to stamp that out in our business um the one thing that I do get you know that I used to kind of rag on people for when I was in private Equity is like not knowing your numbers as well as you should right like I I don't know exactly you know what our Mars are right now I've got a I've got a controller who does all that and he's great he's better than I am at it so I don't need to but I always used to think like they don't know what their margin is on this product are like you know how do you not know about it yeah like we're running the business like it doesn't really matter if it doesn't change what you're gonna do it doesn't matter if you know it or not you know so now I get like okay there's they were spending their their time on what was most important and you know we're we're looking at every line I had been saying hey your margin on this there's a variance from last year you know of this and yeah and yeah they really were looking at the the big picture and what's gonna move the needle right like just because you know it it doesn't change what you do there is this is where we do some financial analysis and get some you know learn some stuff and kind of find things that they might not have known but um maybe they should have done a little bit more of it but I get it yeah yeah well and that actually dovetails nicely with what we were talking about the relevance of your Finance background so so PE folks MBA folks who really do look at these businesses very financially yes they they should and probably uh good people good people listening to this think about a business strategically and holistically but the finances is so much a part of it and it's easy to critique the the sellers and the owners for not being financially sophisticated or this and that but it really is when you're an outsider very different than when you're The Insider the guy running the ship the guy or gal running the ship and they probably were responding to the pressures that they needed to which was not knowing precisely what their sde was or precisely what their margin was or some other Financial metric there was probably something a lot less quantitative perhaps yeah and you can have that luxury if you're making money right so I think you got to have the financial you've got to be making money first in order to be able to do that but yeah it's I think that's true George this has been great if people want to reach out to you with any questions what's your preferred mode of communication sure they can just go to the website and just send a message there's a they can leave their email or not they can make comments anonymously they can just you go to rtw management.com and contact us and just the messages come straight to me and they can say they can um if they put their email address in I can reply if they don't then it's just a comment great so if somebody wants to personally reach out to you they should they can do that via the contact us form on on rtw's website yep all right George goats thank you very much for uh your story and for giving us a a great view into the the transportation and busing business fascinating absolutely thanks a lot well 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