Chad Larson thank you for joining me sir on acquiring minds good to be here really pleased that you said yes to this interview Judd uh it's probably going to be a bit of a roller coaster I'm going to ask you to relive your experience of course buying a business but uh in your case that was a pretty front experience uh but it is a story that is deserving of all of our admiration if it didn't quite turn out the way that you probably hoped that it would when you first set out to buy the business so without much more intro let's just get into it Judd why don't you start us off with a bit of your background sure yeah so I uh I grew up in north central Pennsylvania that happens to be where I'm sitting at today so my life is kind of kind of come full circle in a number of ways but I grew up here um on a farm first generation college graduate went to Drexel University uh to study engineering down in Philadelphia um during my time there had decided that I didn't want to be an engineer in the traditional sense of the word um after having done a few kind of full-time stints in the co-op program that they offer as as an engineer design cars out in Ohio for a Honda working for the Philadelphia water department Etc so I got a pretty good idea of kind of what Engineers do on a day-to-day basis and I was looking for something kind of a bit more Hands-On and with some more leadership uh opportunities initially ended up uh taking a year off of college doing a gap year before the cool kids were doing it I didn't know that that's what it was at the time but I just needed some time to kind of figure out what I wanted to do next with my life that ended up being joining the military and and serving our country um in the submarine Force so I ended up uh going through the Navy's nuclear power program and serving on board nuclear-powered submarines it was a great experience did it for almost eight years was for deployed and uh spent a lot of time overseas um but it got a really great leadership experience out of that and kind of started to open my eyes to some different uh types of opportunities that I didn't wouldn't have wouldn't have realized existed uh when I was growing up um so it did that for for almost eight years um and then uh my wife and I who I'll mentioned throughout this interview we had not yet decided to start a family and we were looking to kind of settle down a little bit more at um that can be challenging to do in the military when you're gone a lot and you're you're bouncing you're bouncing all over the place at the at the the whim of of someone else um so I decided to get out I'd done it long enough to kind of get the T-shirt as I say but not so long that I was uh closer to getting that 20-year retirement than I was from from doing something different um so ended up uh evaluating different opportunities to use the GI bill to go to graduate school um had always been interested in kind of business from from an early age so I ended up getting an MBA went to Yale um Som and got my degree there and while I was there I found out about acquisition through entrepreneurship which put kind of some uh it put some infrastructure and kind of like uh words and idea behind something I had kind of contemplated myself but kind of running a business like that was the point of going to business school that I wanted to I wanted to own and operate a business I thought that kind of meant raising money or doing a startup um but uh when I found about ETA and and started digging in it really kind of uh really made my aspirations come to life um so I ended up doing that after after business school you and the startup path raising money doing starting from scratch that was what you envisioned entrepreneurship being and it didn't it didn't appeal to you that's why ETA did grab you yeah I think so and I guess there's another point to make there is I don't know like I had done these these kind of hard things to that point like I I left home I joined the military I was deployed overseas and and had all this kind of responsibility and I felt like I wanted to do something that scaled to that to that set of experiences right so the idea of kind of like just returning home and like owning kind of like the small business like didn't make sense to me at the time which is kind of ironic right um and and like at the at the time right in the early 2010s right like it was just like all about venture-backed startups and how big they got like how that was how that was the the way to kind of take your ambition and match it to an opportunity right and I had never really kind of scaled that to a small business where I could be be like the primary owner or like have a really big opportunity there on the smaller side of things which is frankly like where my background experiences and kind of Interest lie I just didn't know that that existed so acquisition entrepreneurship uh what you liked about it was that it actually kind of kind of being in small business did kind of fit you culturally but it just seemed a little under ambitious until ETA showed you that there you could buy a small business and there really could be this ambitious path behind it is that do I have that right yeah yeah exactly I think it kind of the the scaled opportunity was there right even though it wasn't a billion dollar startup right like the opportunity to own to own a piece of or most of a 10 million dollar business was more than I had ever dreamed was possible uh growing up in in Central PA great so you so you learn about it at Yale School of Management and what do they have one class on ETA or are there is there more than that just tell us real quick yeah so when I when I was there I I graduated in 2017 and Midway through my experience um was when I started to really push the ETA button there weren't any classes even though a lot of other peer schools um had a a dedicated program um there weren't any classes there wasn't like an instructor or any mentors Etc when we get further along the story here on how I made my selection some of some of some of the the facts on the ground at Yale that there just wasn't a whole lot of infrastructure there helped inform that choice but anyway there weren't any classes I I had the Good Fortune of meeting um uh a professor who I'd call a mentor and a friend at this point AJ wasserstein is well known in the in the in the ETA circles um who happened to to live close to to New Haven in Connecticut and be a point in his life where he was ready to kind of dig into his next project so um I I introduced him to the to the faculty at Yale and he ended up joining and teaching the first class that I was involved in as a I didn't even get the chance to go through it as a student I just started as the teaching assistant because um there this was the first iteration of that and at this point I mean he he does a ton of writing I collaborated along with him on the case note that we're kind of talking about today but he he releases he releases new stuff kind of on a on a on a monthly basis and he teaches a handful of classes at this point at Yale so there's a there's a there's a ton of ton of a ton of uh academic infrastructure that that's been built there by by him over the past past number of years I I saw AJ Walsh machines speak at uh in Orlando he was at SM bash in January um awesome yeah and it is told a story really Dynamic speaker okay so you're teaching you're the teaching assistant and in your second year at the MBA program your second year at the MBA program right second yeah exactly yeah yeah um alongside AJ and you're basically you've decided this is going to be your path so you graduate then what yeah and and maybe just back up for for a second the the part of the purpose of that kind of second year and teaching the class like it wasn't just all altruistic like let's get a class for sfm because they need one it was like well what can Judd get out of this right and I had the opportunity to to work alone side of AJ as he stood the class up um but also like me to meet a meet a number of people guests that he bought that brought to the class right to kind of try and hit that hit that number of like talking to a couple dozen people to really kind of fully inform the choice right I'd say for for me it was was a little bit harder for than for other people in 20 Circa 2017 that like went to a school where they had like 50 alumni that like have done the thing right like Stanford or Harvard or even even Booth or North uh Northwestern right um but that was that was kind of my between the the first and second year I decided that I wanted to and then the second year I was trying to decide how right like how should I go about doing this um so um I had decided how before I graduated so I used that second year to kind of evaluate the different options right self-funded search was was I don't even know if it was a named thing yet it was just kind of becoming like this nebulous idea of of something that like certainly people did but like starting to call it self-funded search so I evaluated that a little bit my wife and I had uh she had a good job and we had enough resources where we felt like that that on paper it was a viable option right um and as I looked at the other two models uh if if we say that there were kind of like three General paths self-funded accelerator backed and uh traditionally funded I for whatever reason didn't didn't want to do the traditionally funded path right I think it was a combination of nobody at Yale except for like one guy had kind of done it and he searched in the Dominican Republic so he was kind of like off one off on his own Journey um I didn't feel like I despite the fact that I knew AJ and he had invested in a ton of these things like he didn't he didn't necessarily push me in one direction or another um certainly I think I could have raised the funded search but uh I was I was kind of like looking for hacks at that point I was like how can I stack the deck in my favor to increase the chance of success and I was defining success at that point as the opportunity to run a business right and I felt uh even though acceleries are fairly new um at the time that that cohorst cohort based learning environment and and the resources that the that they were communicating that they would bring the bear would give me the best chance of of successfully acquiring a business right um and not making kind of uh not making a mistake with with all my own money which is what it would have boiled down to as a supplemented search of it because I had some leadership experience I felt pretty confident that I would that I would understand how to operate inside of a small business having kind of come from that environment culturally growing up plus serving in small kind of specialized units on a on a submarine um but I didn't have Finance experience I didn't have deal making experience I had never done diligence on a deal all those things were were fairly nebulous foreign topics that these days I tell I tell aspiring self-funded Searchers like you can figure out it's fine it's not rocket science but at the time like I felt like it was a an inner surmountable kind of uh wall that I didn't want to take the risk of kind of climbing by myself so you so self-funded you just felt like you'd be kind of flapping in the wind so you liked the infrastructure around the self-funded excuse me the an accelerator model and in terms of but in but you had said on the economics piece in fact you could have gone self-funded retaining much more Equity um but you wanted the infrastructure around you which you thought an accelerator would provide and and these accelerators generally the economics are the same as with a traditional right so yeah I mean Max 25 ownership exactly they're they're very similar they have kind of similar investing schedules similar similar overall economics each one has their own unique kind of twist on things whether it's a preferred return or a shared Equity pool with your cohort or or a piece of the overall GP all of them have a different different way to skin the cat but at the end of the day they're they're all very similar to the traditional the the traditional traditionally Blended economics of 25 a third a third a third and and so even though you could have afforded a self-funded search um it didn't bother you that you were going to be giving away a large chunk of the economics to do to do a the accelerator route no I again I'll go back to like I really wanted to I wanted a chance to operate a business that was that was where my primary motivation was and I didn't I didn't think about the economics maybe as much as I do these days right and maybe I was I was certainly less experienced I was maybe a little bit naive on how I looked about these those things and kind of evaluated the the differences um I wasn't like sitting around with with a spreadsheet trying to model out like the overall upside and the opportunity cost to it all it was more of a qualitative decision-making process so you and so you proceed with with one of the accelerators and and um with the you know kind of the promise of of a hand-holding for lack of a better word infrastructure support um you know not you know guard rails maybe is a better way to put it so that you don't make a terrible mistake and so how does that how does that go yeah no I uh when I look back at it would I remember the most is the opportunity to work in a cohort based environment um which I didn't that's that's not wasn't the primary uh the primary driver for kind of selecting the accelerator but it was ended up being the value that that I got out of it right and for whatever reason I don't know that this kind of cohort has been recreated since but it was four guys right I mean there happens to be a lot of men in this space right so it's four guys right looking for looking for a business to buy and we all happen to have some sort of connection to the state of Pennsylvania or Philadelphia uh more particularly right so we just kind of like rallied behind that commonality and and really kind of joined together you would you would think that like hey these are all type by people that are trying to buy their own business so like throwing them together in one environment like is that going to create some like uncomfortable competitive Dynamics but I think we all like signing up for for an accelerator like you're kind of agreeing to check your ego at the door a little bit and you're signing up for some of the camaraderie to to help uh rally yourself when you're at the lows and celebrate the highs together when you're at the highs um but uh we all we all just quickly gelled right and and we ended up adding a lot of value to each other's searches and we continue to this day to stay in in close touch and uh and and and add value to each other as we as we uh operate businesses for the for the other three we all ended up acquiring right so like if you look at the Stanford study and say well 25 of people don't find a business we beat that right as a as a group um I think that had a lot to do with it right so 100 of us acquired a business um the other three are still operating I've since taken a step back that we'll talk about here in a bit right but uh I got a lot of value out of that you need to get value out of it um that's a public service announcement or disclaimer right like you're not guaranteed to have that experience if you go to an accelerator but there's a chance that you will and that's that's going to be invaluable yeah yeah well it reminds me what people say about a lot of different educational institutions it's like the the people you meet there your your comrades um while you're there Yes actually it's actually the most valuable thing yeah yeah okay yeah however it is search accelerator the sample size is so small right like when you're when you're at a college right or a business school right like you've got a couple hundred feet people and you can sort through them to find your tribe right but uh yeah everybody is self-subscribed to like looking for a business but the the way in which we got along and it interacted with interacted then and continued to interact I think is is particularly special and I'm yeah thankful that I that I had that yeah yeah how fortunate so you embar you go through the accelerator you embark on your search actually let me just um pause to say you you mentioned a few minutes ago the note that you co-wrote with AJ wasserstein so that's how we met um there'll of course be a link in the show notes to this but this whole your whole story you've put pen to paper and alongside AJ you know published this great case study about it um so a lot of so that's how I found you and your story and and a lot of this conversation is going to be based on um what I read there um so just that that's some context for people that I failed to mention at the outset one of the things that you mentioned in there is is you were really rigorous in your in your search uh um the number of kind of industries that you that you researched and and and really kind of um kind of stress tested and then within those Industries the cold Outreach that you were doing so talk us through what that looked like I was I was impressed by some of that process sure uh I mean I think my approach was you hear different people talking about maybe the rifle versus the shotgun approach mine certainly was more of the shotgun approach right yeah I didn't have any particular professional expertise in any particular industry right so I went I went into search knowing that and just kind of embracing it and trying to apply apply where I thought my skill set and interests would would serve me best in in the most the most types of situations or Industries right so I picked a handful to start right and then from there kind of using what I'll call the aisle over approach right you'd learn about something interesting in fire protection you'd look at one of those businesses you'd look at their p l and see where they spent money uh what they spent money on and that would inspire you to kind of look at something a little bit different right so I had a an industry based approach to kind of to to the shotgun and shoot it as many times as many different directions with his widest spread pattern as possible um and some of the infrastructure that the accelerator built really facilitated that a lot of traditionally funded Searchers kind of built this for themselves and even self-funded Searchers at this point this this wide this wide funnel where you're where you're you're essentially finding the emails of this many business owners and it's as you can and and and pushing that forward one other thing that I I don't know if I talked about in the note or not that uh helped Inspire some ideas was running very narrow searches on what I'd call kind of third tier geographies where I had a connection to um where you could go and pull a list of all the businesses that met your kind of overall size criteria in that in that geography and just emailing them all right to see if they'd be interested in in a sale and through that like you ended up having a lot of like conversations because you'd say hey I grew up here or hey I've lived here or I know somebody that lives here right like you could create a really authentic story for yourself to kind of break down the the barriers that business owners often put up for for some of this cold Outreach right and that also not only did I get to see some interesting businesses but it inspired some some ideas for some other industries that uh I wouldn't have initially considered right because you're kind of when you're when you're running a high volume search or a shotgun based approach right you're always you're always trying to fuel the engine with new ideas of different things to look at and that's one way I found uh found valuable to to find let's find examples of businesses you would have never heard of and you did that in central Pennsylvania I assume where you're yeah did you do it in other geographies yeah I picked a number of geographies um where my wife and I uh we would like to live or had a deep and and had a deep personal connection to right um I mean when you look at the scaled approach yes I had different Geographic hooks for like every all 50 states but like these campaigns were a little bit different right like they were like I went to Williamsport High School right like I lived in Goose Creek South Carolina for a year when I was in the military right so like being able to have a a a a more specific hook helped increase some response rates sure and prompted more conversations sure in the note you talk about I mean it sounds like you really did a good job at this Outreach because um there were days where you just had back-to-back calls like you were really you were really quite successful at filling your funnel correct yeah no and you I think you use the words kind of successful and and uh rigorous I'd I'd use the words blowing a china shop right like I wanted to buy a business right like I'm kind of an introvert I'm not a natural sales guy so I was just like trying to find ways to push forward and and to use kind of like simple disciplines to keep the volume high with the expectation that if I did that right like it's it's a numbers game at the end of the day and if I did that and I was able to to build appropriate screens I'd be able to sift through the volume and shake the one out at the bottom within the in the time frame with search and I think that's generally speaking at the time I was doing search that's how most other people were kind of approaching it I know there have been some different different philosophies that have emerged since but that's the way I went about it and uh I just kept kept pushing forward kept charging right like every day every week um and yeah some days I mean I would be talking talking on the phone for like 10 hours a day right at the end of the day like I was even though I sat in chair all day I was completely exhausted because I'm not I'm not naturally inclined to do that let's define the devices um but I knew that's what needed to be done to accomplish the the goal that I'd set out to do so I did it the um and you actually some of these conversations really beared fruit I mean you you submitted offers so talk us through some of these These Broken deals and weave in you know the the conversations when you when you have you know something that looks like you're going to make an offer on or maybe even have made an offer on um how you interface with your investors on on that front and the investors of course are the folks at the accelerator sure yeah yeah no I use the the example from the note where I had this I mean the accelerator is working Wednesday based in Boston right my wife was living in Hartford um I I ran kind of a geographic campaign in the great for Hartford area because staying put had high value to us especially since like I've been in the military we've bumped around all over the place and like we were looking to start a family and like develop roots in the community so anyway uh long story short I developed a relationship with a with a small growing uh it MSP in the Greater Hartford area and had gotten to the point where I requested a bunch of information it was a proprietary deal off Market this was probably the first time or the second time the owner had thought about selling his business but I was I was on paper the son he never had right like I went for a business took me for a ride in this Tesla right like it was it was it was Kumbaya around the campfire right so anyway I ended up uh having conversations with with my investors about that business right reservations about maybe the geography it was in the if this was the best opportunity that I was I was gonna see because it was fairly early on in my search within the first six months or so um we talked through those um it had high I I was kind of anchored to it from a personal standpoint because again like my wife and I we went out to dinner with the seller and his wife um right before I kind of submitted the the formal offer to buy the business I'd use the uh uh a two-tier kind of offer system where I submit an indication of Interest or an ioi to kind of make sure that that there were some formal agreement on price expectations and then request some additional uh accounting and and other data to to formulate a form or letter of intent to get signed so in between that that initial offer that was accepted before I kind of submitted the LOI I I'd met with this guy four or five times right I had met with his control his retiring controller to go over some of the financial information my wife and I had gone out to eat with him and his wife and at a West Hartford restaurant right and like it was it was like all good right I mean you've heard these stores before but until they've happened to you you don't like know how the how it's going to end right so I ended up submitting the LOI my wife and I became very anchored to it right like it was a reasonable opportunity but like it was really really good for us and what we wanted to do right yeah yeah on the investor side it was like well is this really the best one is it is it big enough is it growing fast enough there are 7 000 ISP or msps in the US is this does this rise to the top right is it the is it the cream that rises to the top that makes sense on making an investment I don't know that's that's that's kind of tough to say but anyway I submit an offer and it's all through so those those conversations both with my wife on like us getting super excited about an opportunity and kind of being on an emotional High to going in the complete opposite direction and and some of the friction with with with the the capital providers and whether or not this was going to be the best look I was going to get um they kind of subsided until it was on to the next one okay and is there any takeaway for for people who have investors or are going to do a traditional search or an accelerator on working with investors I mean did were your let me ask this a more simple simply were your investors correct like in retrospect do you think that they were right to interrogate your your interest in the business um or or is there something something else to be learned from your disagreement um with them on your interest in this business in this MSP in Hartford yeah no I think that's the role that they serve right is to be to play the devil's Advocates right um especially for for I think Young aspiring entrepreneurs right um that have a bias towards action right like that's the reason why we're going to be successful ultimately the things that we choose to do so I don't think it was incorrect for them to really kind of pressure test the opportunity and how I was thinking about it Etc it's tough to tell if it was the right decision at the end of the day or not right we'll go through the rest of the the rest of my story here and the outcome wasn't as as I would have hoped it would be right and I oftentimes think about what my life would have been like had I had that offer accepted and was able to to get the support to buy the business um how things would have turned out right um we had the pandemic we had all these other things that I think all else equal have been Tailwinds for a business like that right was it geographically constrained sure could have a smart guy like me figured out some some some ways to to expand it and grow it probably right yeah um yeah an interesting anecdote here is AJ's most recently released paper is about a competitor to this business in that market right really they've done quite well doing some consolidation Etc so um a competitor a competitor to that business that a search funder acquired no it was run by uh a local CEO right I happen to meet the guy so I know him I tried to buy his business too but he wasn't he was just curious about why this why this guy from Yale like was sending out all these emails right so I had the opportunity to meet with him right like maybe he's bought the business I don't know he's he's run a consolidation play yeah um he's partnered with uh with some other folks to run a consolidation play to roll up some msps um in the Connecticut region and Beyond so okay okay well Judd we still haven't even gotten to uh your actual acquisition so um take us there unless I'm missing anything between this point in your search and finding the business that you do by so I uh I ended up finding the business that I was looking for um through a through a pretty interesting interesting way that I'll I'll tell you about so I ended up searching for um a list of just businesses that didn't fit into other makes codes right so just a miscellaneous uh miscellaneous industry list um and I can distinctly remember one of my interns pulling up the website of the business that I ended up acquiring and uh asking me like over his shoulder or like hey Judd does this look interesting I was like yeah like it's related to real estate it looks to kind of be of the right size like let's find the let's find the owner's information and reach out to them um and then uh I would oftentimes do kind of a quality control check of the information that my interns were putting together on a weekly basis and I can remember having an email sequence for this miscellaneous industry search and um usually we'd send out like maybe 10 or 12 emails over a couple of months and uh the but I continuously do this Quality Control process and I can remember misspelling the owner's name for the first couple of the emails that was sent to them right so that the owners one of the owners names um had a had a misspelling in it and I ended up correcting that and that was the first email that the owner ended up opening because you can see with the email program like what you're sending what's opened what's not so like maybe it went to a Spam the first couple or it just gets a lot of emails and you never opened them um but for whatever reason the first one was the oh he opened was the one that I had made that the change to like spell his name correctly um so uh the the business owner responded we started the dialogue uh the business was located in Florida and and I was in Boston um so I ended up trying to do a lot of kind of preliminary preliminary diligence and data requests um over email and over the phone uh did that over over a kind of a month-long period came to to general terms on on price and was getting to the point where I was getting ready to to submit a letter of intent um flew back and forth to Florida a handful of times to to meet with the owners always met on site at the business which in retrospect I think was an interesting choice for them because we would kind of be alone in the conference room all day and I can only imagine that their employees were having kind of the questions arise and who this guy was why he was there they used the the premise of I was a consultant there to kind of help evaluate the business sometimes people talk about whether or not it's a good idea to do that uh I think I think he's changed a little bit I I I submitted to it at the time because again this is my first rodeo and I was like just trying to get this thing done right but in retrospect I think I lost a little bit of credibility with the team when my the pretense is under which I met with the owners and then ultimately them before I closed was not entirely accurate right yeah so I don't know maybe I have more confidence or just the ability to to kind of uh be okay missing out on opportunities but being kind of more more straightforward and forthright in my interactions that when I do it again if I do it again um it when I coach and advise others I encourage them to to kind of bring the fullest version of the treaty to the table um right from the get-go uh because you never know if you're going to be ultimately come leader that organization or those people's loss right and when they say well wait a minute you told me you were an advisor and now you're telling me that you're my boss and the owner like why should I believe you right like um anyway so ended up committing that yeah it's a great point the letter of intent and uh the sellers accepted what I should also mention is a intermixed in this in this professional version of my life in the background my wife and I were getting ready to have our first child um I was training for uh an ultra marathon Race that I was going to run that summer so like I often tell people that uh I signed the LOI to buy the business that I bought in in May of 2018 and my life has kind of been in disarray ever since um because after that before we close like I was training for this race we had my son and I was trying to like put together a a a a multi-million dollar buyout deal to buy a small business right and ultimately move across country with my young family and try and wrap my arms around a business in a place that I had no connection to in an industry that I had no experience in well before we get into all of that tell us just a little bit about what you liked about this business and what it and what it did in any size employees numbers that you can share around 20 employees uh 5 million in sales a couple million dollars in profit um when I identified it and the business model was uh it was a third-party debt collector that collected past due assessments for HOAs condos uh poas Etc in Florida and then had just started its initial expansion into to Georgia and the Carolinas the interesting thing about this business is the fact that I didn't really look extensively at debt collectors but when I found this one and uh I understood the business model uh I I really got excited about it because it had operational leverage right so the business could uh operate from it's Operation Center in South Florida and serve multiple geographies from the same place right um and this was even kind of pre-pandemic pre-remote work the business is remote at this point it didn't start that way but it has it's a laptop and cell phone business right so you kind of do it from do it from anywhere at least the operation side the sales side um again had that those aspects of operational leverage where you can hire a salesperson to cover a particular geography and territory and they can go out and and and Conquer that territory and bring back bring back business right um and there's no reason that the business can operate kind of in all 50 states with the current model that has so that that was part of the reason that I say the other part was the underlying uh debt or assessment that was being collected was backed by real estate so dissimilar to other forms of Consumer Debt like student loans I guess student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy but all over all other student debt could be the start Stars discharge the bankruptcy and it's not backed by an asset right but assessments um they're backed by the the asset the house right and you have the ability um each state is a little bit differently but you have the ability to file a lien on that property if the folks are behind on their on their on their HOA dues um and ultimately foreclose upon that lien right and you're kind of third in line behind the bank and the tax man right so you have these these high priority liens that you can pre place on real property and you can give people a lot of incentives to to make good on that debt right so it was a very particular unique Niche business model again one of those search businesses that you would never know existed until you started bumping around and it also had the on paper had the ability to to kind of uh scale yeah well it's sure a big Market I mean every HOA in the country theoretically is your you know your team um yep and it started in Florida in the coming out of the last recession so like that's how a business like this was was born um and Florida has the most HOAs in the US right California is number two Florida's number one right so it's a really good place uh to start yeah for a business like this yeah um and to your point right like there are there are 350 000 of these things across the us so you have the potential to have 350 000 clients is served like only like a thousand of those in its whole lifetime right at any given time it has like a couple hundred active clients right and it's served maybe let's call it a thousand but the the Tam is 350k that sounds huge huge and how competitive was the space I mean is this is this a space where it's it's a it's a young industry it's but I mean obviously debt collection isn't but debt collection targeted at HOAs and um yeah and assessment fees yeah I think the the innovation of this business model or it wasn't a a regional or small Law Firm doing the work um there wasn't a ton of competition there there were a few other kind of like size or smaller uh collection agencies that operate in the State of Florida and then your your main competition was small single person law firms that have a relationship with the board president and you're trying to displace that person because you think you can do a more effective job yeah um so the primary there it was competitive in the sense that you're competing against kind of every lawyer and their brother right but it wasn't competitive in the sense that that there were other kind of scaled sophisticated operators out there trying to do something right that's great it sounds great at least we're about to find out how great it actually was and Judd I I gotta ask this you know debt collection as uh as a service debt collection as a thing you know obviously it's not the most Pleasant place to live you know the people you know you know um debt collectors uh are it's not some it's not the call anybody ever wants to get it's not you know you're basically dealing with distressed situations all day long consumers in distress or maybe not always totally in distress maybe they're just somewhat negligent but I mean you see where I'm going with this did that did that give you pause to be to be in a space where there's just you know it's kind of dripping with anxiety and Desperation I don't think it did I I mean I come from a become I guess maybe I come from a background and I have a personality of of just like being firm and fair right so I brought that to the business right that we're just going to be firm and fair about this stuff yeah um so like going in I think that's the approach that I took like I didn't have a problem with the services that the business provided um somebody has to do it so it might as well be us and we can do it if we can do it in an efficient and a fair way that creates value for all stakeholders and I'm really proud of a business that has become and the business that it continues to be at this day I think the the question that you didn't ask but is worth answering is kind of how do I feel about it today right so I sometimes I tell people today like there are easier like other other Searchers people that are looking to buy businesses like you hear people say they're like easier ways to make money and I think debt collection is one of those industries that would fall in the bucket of like a hard way to make money right like it's fraught with some of the things that you suggested right it's very emotional right like It's a Grind you're you're you're kind of intertwined with the legal system at any given time where you're you're getting assumed by consumer protection attorney or you're having kind of other kind of challenges with Regulators Etc and that's just part of a that's part of the game and for me even though I'm kind of firm and fair I take everything like very personally and very seriously right so that aspect of the business kind of ground me down a little bit um and I don't think I would do it again on purpose right like even though I've gotten this great experience in the debt collection space like anything beyond kind of like an advisor or a consultant like I'm not necessarily like itching to go and get back in the trenches of one of of a debt collection business if that makes sense yeah well so that aside um certainly yeah it does just kind of on paper look like a great business you said five million dollars in Revenue a couple million dollars in profit so that's not you know 40 margins or you know give or take phenomenal margins recurring Revenue I mean you've got these relationships with HOAs who need collection service done month in month out um so uh you know and two million dollars in profit uh that's a you know that's that's a lot bigger than most Searchers get their hands on course you were following a traditional model so you were looking a little bit bigger but um it's got all those appealing characteristics so um no wonder you you ran at it okay so and oh and by the way how did your investors feel about this one we were all we were all excited right um I had one of my investors come down from one of the site visits that we did we met with the we met with the owners and we're really kind of evaluating the we were really trying to stress test the the scalability of the business model right and again on paper before we got in under the hood everything kind of checked out right like the the business model has the ability to scale okay so yeah we were all we were all we were all excited about it great okay so um you buy it unless there's anything in the transaction itself you want to talk about I suggest we just skip into you being in the seat um great so what do you find what do you find because things kind of get real interesting and nasty real quick as I understood from the case note yeah no it was a challenging situation the business had the business was an innovative business model right so like it wasn't something that we could necessarily Benchmark or hire uh hire a consultant that has experience doing this exact thing and tell us kind of like what to look for and how to look for a diligence right like we did we did everything that we could do but ultimately that effort fell a little bit short and I identified a few things came to the surface through some some folks that worked for the business kind of pretty quickly after me buying it that people were had questions about or were uncomfortable with and they I came in kind of very directly being the the firm and fair person that I am and the High ethical standard that I think that I hold myself to and I came in letting people know that like I was excited about being there and I wanted to kind of grow the business in the right way and I was quickly it was there were some things that were quickly brought to my attention that I made the determination that I didn't want to keep doing things that way right and that put me at odds with the sellers of the business um and required me and my investors to kind of uh really buckle down and address a lot of things very quickly right we had to make some changes to the business model we had to layer on some additional costs that we didn't anticipate um in an attempt to to stabilize the business and and solidify the business model and short up from um from illegal and a regulatory standpoint and because that put me at odds with the seller's take on this and again it's kind of there's everybody is entitled to their own opinion right they had theirs um but mine was different and I was now the owner of the business so I wasn't able to rely on them to kind of help ease my transition you hear these stories about like don't change anything in the first 90 days right like spend the first six months like learning the business I didn't have that luxury right and uh not only did it because you you or you felt that it was urgent I felt yeah I felt like strongly for like I needed to make some changes quickly both from uh illegal in a regulatory standpoint but also from a cultural standpoint right that like if I was going to put my mark on this business and we were going to proceed forward in the in the direction and then the vision that I had for the company we couldn't just kind of like wait and see right we had to we had to take some of those actions pretty pretty immediately um and because of that right not only did I not only did I have to like make some changes I didn't have that soft Landing that that people talk about um where they had a great relationship with their seller and they were there alongside of them and kind of helped them with all these problems right like I had some I had some kind of uh business model and strategy issues and then I also had these cultural issues and the sellers were were antithetical to what I was trying to accomplish so this is this is quickly at odds yeah just remarkable so you get in there you you say that you're uh what is your what is your phrase fair and fair and firm and fair Furman firm and fair um you communicate they're consistent and consistent that that's going to be the culture under your leadership and I guess a couple people in the organization kind of quietly raised their hands or take you aside and say you know we're doing the way we do business over here is like maybe a little bit um you know might not be it might not be the standards of uh firm and fair um and and so you you realize that the kind of the entire business model while quote unquote Innovative is actually maybe taking advantage of whatever it's not it's not uh Regulators wouldn't like it uh it could be scale right yeah and or and it couldn't be skilled okay I mean you can look at the you can look at it from a lot of different you can look at it from a right wrong lens you can look at it from a scalability rent lens you can look at it from a a risk reward lens But ultimately like I was the guy in the seat and and I I took the action and told my investors why I took the action and we just moved forward right but it will ultimately at the end of the day it was just it was going to have was going to have impacts that we couldn't even measure or understand but it was that important to just make the change right and we started to layer on um some compliance infrastructure that we knew we needed before I bought the business but we started to press on that kind of like a little quicker and a little faster right okay and we knew we needed to to implement some some operations infrastructure that was kind of like independent of all the other stuff that was going on right so like that was going to be like those were going to be our big things right but then there was it was it was it was within this this kind of uh this this environment that we didn't anticipate right it was just kind of super challenging it was It was kind of rolling with the punches and to add kind of insult to injury right like I was at odds with the sellers I was trying to transform the business on the ground level and then we were getting demand letters and lawsuits on almost it felt like a daily basis it was more like maybe a monthly basis right but they were for some of the issues that the that we were trying to fix right so it was like I like I took all that really personally right it kind of ground me down it was like this wasn't me right like I'm I'm trying to change things here I'm trying to do things a little bit differently but I still got the same name out front right so even though we did an asset sale we did musical chairs with the LLC names and my LLC ended up being the same even though I had a different Ein it was the same LLC name as the prior the prior owners right so like when you try and show that to even like we were in a particularly complex legal case where we're in front of a judge like trying to explain to them like how these leverage buyouts work and you're just like I just don't get it I don't understand like this is really complicated right like this is a judge like trying to make decisions on where the liability lies right um so just imagine trying to explain that to an HOA president or a homeowner that way back when five years ago resurfaces and discovers something that they don't think is fair they don't think it's right and they want to have they want to have a conversation about it right like you had to we had to clean a lot of that stuff up just because we had reputational risk on the line but there was the liability and then fall with us and we were trying to put it on the the parties in the instances that you did and that was that was like a full-time job in and of itself when when I had this full-time job executing on the thesis that I knew that I wanted to execute on before I bought the business right layered on top of having uh some cultural issues that I wanted to address Etc so it was I don't know it was it was it was hard John the the hostility that you have now with the sellers that you're experiencing with the sellers um what about with the employees are there employees who are loyal to the sellers or loyal to the way things were and I mean how is this yeah what's that look like between you and your and your new employees yeah no I'll uh I won't answer that question directly but I will say that we as we started to execute on our thesis and our strategy We Grew From let's say 20 people at the start it was just a few over a handful over 20 to to almost 45 um over the next two and a half three years we had we quickly had more new people than we had old people right so like when we were Midway let's call it Midway through that transition at 30 people right like 15 of those people were new and less than 15 were the the 15 of the original 22 right so there were there was a fair bit of term that uh that that we went through as we tried to scale up to meet the opportunity and to um if you can't change the people change the people right um so we ended up changing a number a number of folks out um but we were still able to retain um some some of the Legacy employees and they've grown in their careers and and and grown as managers and leaders in the in the company to today that I'm again I'm super proud of that fact that uh they uh they were they were on team Judd pretty fast I mean their their livelihoods depended on it to a certain extent but they they they just kind of left their egos and and the old ways at the door and picked up the new ways kind of almost overnight right and it was it was pretty amazing to see that not everybody did that and there were some challenges both immediately and then kind of along that along that timeline Spectrum to the point where we got um I don't even know how many out of the original 22 that are still there it's got to be less than uh it's got to be single digits wow so in addition to hostility with your seller and and um monthly lawsuits and going in front of judges and changing the business model and layering in new operations and and Valerian Tech and uh you're also dealing with churn and people leaving I mean you're trying to completely change the culture unbelievable and and so Judd then the other kind of obvious question is um you know to just to put it very bluntly why wasn't this all of this stuff caught in diligence I mean I asked myself that question or I have asked myself that question a lot um since I since I closed some of it like you just couldn't catch unless you knew like what question to ask and you never would have known what question to ask until you like have operated a business in the space for a period of time right and because I alluded to this before like we even hired attorneys to help diligence the business right and and offer an opinion on the business model and they did in the typical way typical non-committal way that attorneys do like yeah like this is on the Spectrum like these are this is this is primitive this is not permitted Etc um but the way in which these guys were going about going about what they were going about it was I don't know like could have I caught it I I don't think so right yeah um but as I as I look forward to to kind of continuing my career I learned a lot from it right and I think I've got I think I've got ways to to to to ask different types of questions or maybe a different way to answer your questions like could have you caught it or not it's not the right question is the right question is were there other signals right that that could have alluded to the fact that something wasn't quite right the answer to that was yes right um in every single business I mean I invest in I invest in in small businesses myself right and I saddle up alongside all entrepreneurs and try and help them understand the opportunities they're looking at and what do people say like every deal has hair on it right so like right there is no perfect acquisition opportunity but hindsight being 2020 and when you look back at the the the opportunity that I had there were some other there were some other indicators where there was smoke right and we we Justified those we dismissed those we found ways to we felt to address those but when you look at the picture more broadly um at a later date you realize that those were just symptoms of a broader underlying problem that we we hadn't discovered yeah um so so difficult um and we haven't even touched on the fact let's let's do that now what's going on in your personal life so you also you were you're doing you're conducting your search from Boston yeah this business was in Florida and you moved your family in Florida sure well my wife was living in Hartford I was searching from Barbara we were switching weekends we had an apartment both places so we were switching weekends back and forth um at I alluded to this before like we had we had my son in June of 2018 I had signed the LOI in May right and then we closed in November so we were new parents and my wife at that point like she was on maternity leave and she had she had moved into my 300 square foot studio apartment that I had my bachelor pad in Boston right that I was walking to the accelerator offices out of right so we had our son we had 300 square feet right like whoa I was working 80 hours a week trying to trying to like close this deal and she was trying to like figure out how to be a new mother right like all at the same time right and it was kind of like we were getting to the point where like if this doesn't work out like what are we gonna do or are you gonna like quit the accelerator and come to Hartford because like I still have a job there and we're just trying to like stiff arm a bunch of those conversations and assume that the business was going to close and we were going to ride away into the sunset and move South to sunny Florida right in time for the winter right which ended up being what happened but there were a lot of kind of underlying conversations that were that were happening and a lot of change that happened in our life right and when I reflect on the experience I think a lot about like I I was I was becoming a different person right like and I couldn't anticipate some of those things when I was contemplated certain when I was contemplating search when I started search right before I bought the business and then as I started to operate the business like and I think this happens to everybody naturally but I don't think a lot of people necessarily try and anticipate some of those changes or as thoughtful as they they might be able to be with with the benefit of kind of hearing someone like to me tell my story and be like oh yeah you're right like this is a this is a 10-year commitment my life's gonna look a lot different 10 years from now right so like as you start to project and think about those things in the future um you can hopefully maybe learn from my experience when I articulate that like I started out we were married and like a dual income couple right and like we went along the Spectrum where we had children and we moved and Judd got punched in the face at his business right all these things were kind of happening back when you say you were a different person or becoming a different person you know all these external things are happening but can you can you put some color to that like how you're at I mean I assume you mean your actual perspective and personality was was shifting yeah no I think priorities is a good way to think about it right so like you can't you can't know how your priorities are going to change like before your parent after your parents right like I mean we didn't we didn't like meet each other and get married we've been married for quite a while so like my wife and I we had a nice life we really enjoyed our relationship and then and then my son Logan came in and blew all that up for us right we had another human being to care for and we had to we had to figure out what that meant and uh I think like some of my ambition and aspiration like at the beginning of search was like more self-centered that I wanted to do this for myself and I wanted to scale the opportunity that I was pursuing to like the capabilities that I felt that I had and then as as as my son came into the picture it was more about like how do I support my wife and my family and that was quickly came at odds that like what was required of me as a fiduciary right and as the CEO of this business where where not only did I had these new priorities in my personal life but like I had 20 plus people that scaled to 40 plus people that depended on me on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to like make sure they got a paycheck right and then I had investors and limited partners that expected a return on their investment right and I had the same like I I was I was invested right both my personal money as a as a I mean I invested personal money in the deal alongside of my investors plus I had carried interest on the line right so all those things kind of I don't know they came they they started to come to a head right because it's just a lot right to have on your plate all at once um as you're as you're evolving as as your personal as your personal life is evolving well it would it would be a ton to have on your plate even if acquiring the business went well yeah sure I mean it would be a huge amount to have on your plate even if that position was going well but your yours was a calamity so that's I'm just I'm over I'm getting anxiety over here just like thinking about it and putting myself in your shoes um uh okay so so you start but you do start slowly painfully making the needed corrections to the business um so so kind of fast forward a little bit and I what what did the notes say about 18 months later you were starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of getting getting the business on sound footing and and being able to be positioned then to go attack the the opportunity properly you know what like a year and a half from November 2018 you know when that is right March March 2020 March 2020 right so felt like things were settling down a little bit right had settled the indemnity to claim had kind of had kind of uh addressed a lot of the legal matters said we're well on our way to implementing your new technology stack and had grown the head count and brought in some new people some news new leaders managers um Etc and my birthday is in March and I can remember being out for lunch with my wife in Florida right uh right before the world came to a screeching halt um feeling like more optimistic than I had in a while right um and then and then covet hit which kind of put me back into that cycle at the business of a ton of stress right for very different reasons right it was more like well how do we are we an essential business are we not an essential business how do we operate remotely right like what impact is this going to have what what macroeconomic impact is this going to have on the business right and initially it was like well the stock market crashed right like it looked like we were we were headed for a recession very quickly and that was going to have uh lagging Tailwind benefit to my business because we're a debt collector right and then and then what happened right the government printed trillions of dollars and injected it straight into the real economy and that's where my my debtors right or future debtors lie right they were all sitting at home watching Netflix on their couch not forgetting to pay their HOA dues anymore because like that's their Sanctuary that's the only place they gotta go right um so our our sales funnel it didn't take like a nosedive but it kind of like flatlined right like all the growth and the infrastructure the growth infrastructure that we invested in was like just wasn't bearing fruit for for kind of like 12 months or so um because the the environment was just so challenging right so it was like it was entering this after after the initial uh initial phase that we talked about the first year and a half or so right like I was headed into this this next phase which ended up being Justin's challenging and stressful as as the first phase and it wasn't uh I don't know it led to the point where it just wasn't sustainable at least for me personally and so what does that mean what what what were you considering what what did you do yeah so uh let's call that that second phase the the second year and a half um my wife and I were continuing to have these conversations about expanding our family um she ended up getting pregnant again so we're about to have another child and uh we were living isolated in South Florida with no Community right so like during the first year and a half it was so challenging that uh outside a few people that we had met at our church like we just didn't know anybody there right we didn't have any friends or family around and then the world shut down you kind of like just had to keep to yourself and we were just feeling I mean my wife had lost her husband to this business right I was just kind of either thinking about it or there all the time and she was still working part-time and raising my son and then we were about to have another thing right um your first son at this point yes if he was born in uh the middle of 2018 so he would have been going on two years old right um and actually when the epidemic first happened it was like really great for us because we got like a reprieve right like I didn't have to be at the office because there was nobody there right and we didn't have child care because the daycare shut down so like I had to come home and be with my son so that my wife could could work her part-time schedule right so I would come home I would go to work in the morning work out of the empty office just to have the the silence to be able to get some work done and then I'd come home at one or two and and uh and my wife or my son and I I take him in the stroller and we go on like I can remember literally remember this the route of the run that I would take him on the six six mile run like every day for like 21 straight days it was crazy right like it never had that consistent of a workout schedule since I bought the business but like every day that's just kind of what we did and then I would plug back in and keep working um after my wife got done right and and at the same time like we're we're like thinking about expanding our family and we find out like this joyous thing that we're going to have we're going to have a daughter to add to the to add to our to add to our family but it felt like Hollow and empty right like I'm just working all the time right we're not spending a whole lot of time with each other because either one of us is with the kid or the other is with the kid and when we're not with the kid we're working so we decided to I decided like that was the first the first point where I saw like I really need to make a change here and like there's no it's nonsense for me to go work from an empty office when I run a business that that you can run from anywhere with a laptop and a cell phone so I made the decision that that it would be best for my family for us to to return to Central PA North Central PA where um where we grew up in both sets of Grandparents were to get some some support with my son and uh to help uh with my daughter as she was gonna come to the world at the at the end of that year um she ended up uh being born in uh December of 2020. um so that that fall we moved back to Pennsylvania I was commuting back and forth I'd go back to Florida um a week or two each month and then returned to Pennsylvania and when my daughter was born this was in the height of one of the second surges of covid so like we just kind of like stay put for like three months or so yeah December 2020 that was that was Delta time as I recall um and so did this move to central Pennsylvania with the two sets of grandparents uh did it help your family life it did but it was a Band-Aid on something that needed surgery if I'm being honest right um I mean it was it was nice to be around be around our families um unfortunately this isn't really in the case note but it's kind of like an aside like I hadn't lived in this area of the country since I was 18 right and I had kind of changed a lot but everybody here stayed the same and that created some friction um I mean if you recall it was like the election cycle and and covid and vaccine and misinformation and all this stuff so like there were some like some underlying friction that I didn't anticipate I just thought it was be this like pencia like wonderfulness that like I got to be back around my family and what I realized is like I was a bit different and I was like stressed out and working a lot so like it didn't didn't manifest exactly the way that we anticipated but it was it was a benefit to us right and that benefit and it was uh but it was ultimately a Band-Aid on something that needed some more more dramatic action that I ended up taking and what was that dramatic action so uh uh I caught like a year or so into that into that experience of being back here in Pennsylvania for six months or so the following spring after my daughter was born um it got to the point where my wife was diagnosed with uh postpartum anxiety and depression I was having kind of my own mental and physical struggles um with some different stuff and it it wasn't getting kind of like any different or any better at the business right it was just kind of like it continued to be it continued to be a grind um and I can distinctly remember uh going out for for for a run and I often come up with some of my best or wildest ideas when I'm out when I'm out in the mountains running um and I came back and I told my wife I was like I just I gotta find a way to take a step back right and she was in the the deepest darkest days of of her depression so she's kind of like Shrugged her shoulders and was like yeah makes sense right so I kind of like I I felt like I got to the point where like I was living with this person that was my best friend right and and my partner in life and we had gotten to this this point-like indifference right between the two of us and it just became super clear to me that like I needed to to have the courage to take action um to to frankly save my marriage and and and make sure I was living the values that that I thought I espoused right of being of being a good father of being a good husband right well also making sure I fulfilled my responsibilities to to my investors in the business right so man well it sounds like um obviously this whole story is pretty brutal from the moment you acquire um but it sounds like your actual decision to take action um was it was not brutal I mean it was It was kind of it was kind of like an epiphany on this run or do I have that wrong it was it was yeah no it was a flash I mean yeah I mean it was it felt like the right decision it felt like kind of like an easy decision to make because I just that didn't I mean what were the other choices right yeah like just just keep going like take all this risk Etc that being said like executing on that decision is an entirely different story right like it's hard to approach business partners and say like I just can't do this anymore right like it's hard to especially when when when I would say like your life is not on solid footing to like think clearly about the situation and make sure you conduct yourself in the best way I was fortunate to have like to cohort of CEOs that that I grew up with it being able to kind of interact with them and get some advice and having them help level set me right but it was still a really hard experience to to kind of go through and relay the information and start to come up with the game plan and know that it wasn't a light switch right like I wasn't uh I'm not I wasn't then and I'm not now the type of person that's just gonna drop the mic and walk out of the room and say like go figure it out right like I had I had responsibilities there and I felt I felt strongly about making sure that the business um would have the best chance of continuing to to succeed without me right and that meant that it was going to take a while right and when I approached my investors I was like I mean things are I've got to make a change personally right but I recognize that that it's not going to happen overnight right so we've gotta we've got to start working on this together um so ultimately it took it took almost six months to the transition out of the business and I'm still I'm still involved today just not in a day-to-day operating capacity um and was it a lot better was it a hard sell for lack of a better word to your to your investors that I I assume you've been communicating with them all the while so this might not have been completely out of left field yeah yeah I I don't think it came completely out of left field they'd be the only ones could answer that question but I don't think it was a hard sell in the sense that like I don't know for better for worse maybe I didn't conduct myself the way I should have but I kind of like bared my soul a little bit right and and was open with them as as as open as I was in the case study as open as I'm being with you and your audience right now right like like this was really hard I had a tough thing going on I wasn't going to be so non-humble about it to just try and pretend like there wasn't a problem right so like I I in pretty explicit terms like said there was a problem right also said that I wasn't running away that I was willing to kind of continue to to kind of take the personal risk to to have there be a time period over which we kind of figured this out it wasn't an immediate thing but it was urgent right um and it was something to be needed to be addressed and fortunately we were able to identify a leader inside of the business um that was going to be suited to to take over as as CEO so from a change management perspective um the employees didn't have to deal with uh an external intern um at again what was a critical time for the businesses they're trying to continue to navigate the pandemic and and find ways to to ramp up and scale up the sales process right so we had an internal candidate come in and take over and I had the opportunity to to provide a lot of support and do a worm handoff over a period of months frankly um to make sure that that one is as smoothly as possible that's yeah that's good one one happy occurrence in the story um Judd you know you you're you um are an ambitious person you said earlier how you you know you look to do hard things you look to you know to do things that are you know make an impact um you so typically somebody like that has an ego you know probably all all people who buy businesses and I certainly include myself here um we we have egos in our our professional success is an important part of our identity um was your was your ego how did your ego deal with all this happening yeah I don't know it's a good question um I think that uh I like to think that that I'm able to check my ego at the door but at the same time right like it was it was like bruised and maybe it's still a little bit fragile to this day right like writing the writing the case note was therapeutic in nature right you know it's one of the one of the personal selfish drivers to do it the other was like this stuff's hard like other people need to know about this like I I feel like I can add some value to the to the community by putting this stuff out there but you have to be willing to kind of humble yourself a little bit to do that right and I'd argue right that uh I don't know my my lesson in humility may have been extreme but don't go down this path if you're not prepared to be humbled because it is going to happen right like no matter what your outcome is no matter what type of business you buy is is how much money you make or don't make right like you're going to be humbled many times along the way and if you're not prepared for that or that doesn't sound like fun then like you should like run the other way and not do this because it's definitely going to happen right um so yeah I don't know I think my I think I think I'm a low ego guy to begin with which is why I'm I'm so I'm so open to kind of discussing this stuff and sharing it but I think that uh I think you kind of have to have that mix of confidence and humility right like in those things in life but maybe in this space more than more than most where you have to be you have to be a type a go-getter bias right for Action kind of guy to get anything done because sometimes you just gotta put the weight of the world on your shoulder but if you don't have an equal or greater part of your of your persona that's that's humble and humble and low ego like it's gonna be challenging right um anyway yeah well I and to that point um of of all of the kind of all that happened um you know I guess I guess the question would be this this stuff that's hard you know what what about I guess what about your search is in kind of sorry your story is intrinsic to search I can reflect on both during the search and then during the operations phase complaining about how hard it was to like some of my mentors right like Jim Sharp's a friend and mentor of mine AJ as well where we would stay periodically in touch and I often found myself complaining that it was like hard to get an Loi accepted or it was hard to buy a business and then when I was operating talking about all the hard things and I can remember getting like a little bit of pushback from them like what did you expect right like this stuff is hard and not only that AJ in particular I can remember a conversation with him where he was like well you think it's easy to become a partner at McKenzie right like do you think it's easy to like rise up the ranks at Goldman right like most of the things that the NBA's choose to do ambitious mbas choose to do are hard right um and I think your question about like what is intrinsic the search right I think I think the the thing that I think the thing that's intrinsic the search is maybe how personal it becomes right or how personal it can become when you're when you're undertaking some of these kind of responsibilities right so like I can imagine I mean maybe you get really personally involved on the on the partner track at a consultancy or in High Finance right like at the end of the day I feel like you can probably be like a little bit more dispassionate about your your employer or or whatever right like at this point like you are your own employer like certainly you have stakeholders and or bosses or however you want to think about them but it just becomes so personal so fast right and uh I think like the during the search like and in the operating phase you have like all these ups and downs right but like what makes it so hard is is that it becomes so personal and so fast and if you don't have like a good support group or a network um that that just even magnifies that even further right so like I mean it's still hard to dampen those things with the peer group or YPO or EO or vistage right but those things help and I think people people should do those if they can't if they can't create it themselves um but it's just it just gets so personal so fast last question for you John and before you tell us where how people can reach you um you do see a future for yourself and you said you'll probably be in small business from here on out um despite the fact that you've got you know broken bones to show for your first experience um what what is it that keeps you addicted uh I mean I think it's a a good use of my experience and skills and aspirations right I just I know like I grew up in in an area that like there are only small businesses here right like that's what the economy the entire economy is made out of right like even like the garbage collection there is no Waste Management they don't come here right because it's just like too small of a market right so like the fabric of the society in which I was raised was composed of these right and I've got many family members that are are entrepreneurs right um and that's uh that's something that just like resonates with me um in a huge way like when you go to business school you get caught up in in like working for the big company and having stable job and getting the stock options and and those kinds of things and I certainly got caught up at a little bit of myself but like I quickly pushed it aside I was just like that's just not me right like I'm not going to be happy there right like um anyway so I I imagine that I'll I'll always be involved in in the small business world and I think after a bit of reflection uh I operate at the highest level and the best when I sit in somewhere in between like a purely passive investor and a purely operational day-to-day CEO right um so um trying to to figure out exactly what that looks like moving forward but uh it'll be it'll be trying to operate there is as often as frequently as I can how can people reach out to you Judd yeah sure so uh as mentioned I I have invested in a fair number of search deals so if you're raising money for a deal certainly uh reach out to me um I also do some uh paid coaching and advisory work for for CEOs so if you're interested in in having a periodic touch point with me and you think I can add value um hit me up on LinkedIn or uh just send me an email it's easy Judd uh my first name dot my last name Larson gmail.com great Judd thank you again for coming and sharing this uh this extraordinary and difficult story um I I I I you know it's important that stories like these be told and that they're not all uh happy stories uh which uh you know acquiring minds probably 95 of my stories are are that way so it's important yeah to have ones like yours aired as well so thanks for being transparent um I think this is going to be super valuable to folks and I imagine you'll hear from a lot of them so and congratulations on Surviving as I said at the top I think your your story is worthy of a lot of admiration I mean what an incredibly difficult situation and you survived it and I think with your your your family and your values intact and and that's about you know that was what was at stake yeah you learn the most from the hardest the hardest experiences so yeah thanks for having me well I appreciate it I really enjoyed it and hope this is uh helpful to your listeners