Josh Meadow welcome to acquiring minds thanks excited to be here Josh we're going to cover a lot of ground today reviewing our pre-call there were really good takeaways from each stage of your journey so I want to make sure we hit all of those but let's start by telling where you are today telling people where you are today so they understand where this story is headed and how exciting it is and has become so first question Josh tell us where Mercury your business is right now yeah so today we're a Healthcare Logistics company and we're Tech enabled so what we do is we offer every type of shipping that a Healthcare Company might use we kind of break that up into three markets medical devices you can think MRI machines or machines for testing blood we do diagnostic kits different types of kits that test if somebody has cancer we did a lot of covid testing and then we do life science research that's really early stage biotechs who are trying to do research we also do clinical trials and then eventually the pharmaceutical production uh and what we do is we offer that globally we offer every single type of shipping that they might need we offer dedicated teams to give individual attention we call them squads I was in the military previously so we used some military terms and we have software that our customers can log into they can book any type of shipment they can track their shipments and that's kind of where we're at today great and and how about a sense of size uh potential growth because my impression is you kind of find yourself in the middle of what is kind of a high growth startup yeah it's interesting we've definitely changed the company a lot over time too just to give you a bit of background the company was founded in 1984 and originally we were serving law firms so Peter Salisbury who started Mercury I think this is kind of a common story through a lot of small businesses he was running the mail room of one of the big Boston law firms and he had this idea he could make a mail room for all of the law firms that's how Mercury started and what law firms needed was tracking of their packages or their documents that they were shipping most often they would ship these contracts if there was a five o'clock meeting and a bunch of attorneys were meeting to negotiate a contract that had to be there so we started from the beginning 24 7 tracking every single package knowing where it was supposed to be if it wasn't where it was supposed to be we'd reach out to the carrier try and resolve the problem and then let our customer know over time obviously law firms started shipping a lot less that was DocuSign and email and that's when we pivoted because the company's based in Boston and Cambridge right across the rivers where a lot of the biotech world is we switched over over to that Healthcare life science about five to ten years ago and uh now we're really fully just a Healthcare Logistics company uh and as we made that transition the company's really fast growing uh about two years ago we decided to be just Healthcare life science uh We've more than doubled uh there we're up to 40 to 50 million Revenue now and we're really focused on trying to become a much larger company so I've brought in a leadership team I've brought in a lot of people onto onto our team who have really uh stretched goals to grow a business and ultimately our plan is to try and become a public company I did a self-funded search I did it in a way that I could run a company for 10 to 20 years um and so as long as it takes uh we'll do that to get there awesome thank you for that Josh well we're going to return to a lot of those details over the course of this conversation but headline 40 to 50 million dollars in Revenue today um and but with kind of the sense of you're just getting started you have this leadership team and you have going public uh sometime in the future as a goal so like I said uh really fast growing kind of startupish culture understanding that the business was actually founded in 1984. so so really a really an exciting and pretty unusual um story of search we're gonna again keep we're gonna return to this and go deeper but let's now for your own story Josh start at the beginning as we usually do some background on Josh Meadow please uh yeah so I was uh let's see I'm from the Midwest I was born in Wisconsin I lived in Minnesota I grew up in Ohio um I went to West Point for college I was an army officer for just over five years I was an infantry officer in the Army I loved that job I had a lot of fun uh I don't know if I'll ever have a job as fun as being a infantry platoon leader in the Army it's just a great time um why is that so fun Josh uh you get to lead people and uh one of the reasons one of the things I really liked about being an infantry officer in particular in the military is that you don't really have equipment uh everything else in the military you've got tanks or helicopters and you're really focused around that equipment but with infantry it's just people right you just have 40 people and it's all about leadership I was fascinated by seeing how one unit could be so much better than another with the same type of people who went through the same training and it's just the leaders in that organization and so I love doing that Hands-On you know leading a 40 person team when I was 23. it's a great opportunity and I did that for about five years in a couple different roles and then my next role in the military I would have been on a staff um and I really didn't want to do that the military has like leadership roles and staff roles and staff just wasn't for me so I got out of the military went to business school so I moved to Boston with the Harvard Business School when I started there I thought I was going to start a company I really wanted to start a robotics company I was fascinated by robots and I spent my during my first year I did an in-school internship to kind of learn about that um then I kind of my friends and I were gonna try and start a company we were going to start a robotics company we thought about that for a while and decided not to pursue that then I did a summer internship why did you decide against robotics in starting something yeah um you know we just we really didn't know what we were doing uh our idea we were gonna try and create like a swarm of robots so we were trying to think about what are like the use cases for that and we decided uh we came up with lawn mowing and so we were like you know we can make this swarm of robots and then uh it's more efficient you know a crew could just drop off a swarm at one yard and drive up to another and drop off another swarm and they'll do their thing and then come back and grab them but we just had no idea what we were doing we didn't know how to start a company we know how to raise money we didn't know who would do what um none of us but you started thinking about landscaping and that got you interested in search yeah and funny enough my first first Loi was a landscaping company actually there you go there you go yeah uh so then yeah I really didn't know what I wanted to do um so I did a summer internship at Amazon as a product manager I learned that I really love technology but I didn't want to be at a big company I felt like I was in the military again I was in this giant organization um so then yeah my second year business school I kind of learned about search and that's how I got to do it and and just going back to you said you loved Tech you had this idea for robotics you were drawn to robotics was your degree at West Point in something technical uh no I did international relations in Arabic so okay Humanities okay all right but you are kind of would you say engineering minded um I just kind of learn what I need I'm very detail-oriented and I love getting into details of how things work um and I love kind of learning I'm very much a generalist I know like a little bit about everything all right so your second year at HBS and you learn about search from taking the class from how yeah uh taking the class and I had no idea what it was going to be I just knew I knew nothing about Finance I'd never seen before I started business school I never I didn't even know like a public versus a private company was I'd never seen uh any sort of financial statements and so I was like great I'll just take all of the finance classes and I saw this class called financial management of small firms and I thought sure I'll learn more about finance and then I took that class that's the Rick and Roy search class and that's where I learned about search I started talking to people who've done it um and I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do I could jump into running a company I didn't have to come up with an idea like I would get to kind of take something that was existing and grow it which I think I'm really fit what my long-term goals were then I dug into funded versus self-funded search I really explored that really deeply um and decided perfect segue so tell us about the analysis of of traditional versus self-funded yeah a lot of that for me was one of the things I wanted to do was run an organization for a long time so one of the things I disliked in the military was you'd be in charge of an organization for like 12 to 18 months and by the end of that it would be really good you'd be like I've got my team I built my culture and then you have to move on to something else and when I learned about self-funded and I could run a company for 10 or 20 years I was like this is perfect I can just keep doing what I like doing for as long as I want I also just talked to a lot of Searchers and there were a few self-funded Searchers I talked to who were a couple years ahead of me they were running companies already and they were like the smartest people I ever met and I was like whatever these guys did I'm just gonna copy interesting and and the idea that you wanted to run something for 10 or 20 years you know I'm I'm um that might be a little bit uh counterintuitive from the little that I know you from these first just few minutes but you see my like somebody like you said you're a generalist so you you General is kind of by definition don't go deep deep deep into something they you know they they kind of Bounce Around uh and I would consider myself that as well by the way so not I'm certainly not disparaging it um but it sounds like uh and you have these kind of varied experiences I know you said you didn't like being moved around in the military but still a tend to a vision to do something for 10 or 20 years few people uh want to do that let alone in their 20s say I want to do something for the next 10 or 20 years so elaborate please yeah I think one of my personal values I like challenging myself I like doing difficult things and I could see how as you grow a company you just hit all of these different challenges the challenges yeah 40 company and then 100 company and then a 200 person company and so I like taking those on and that's one of the things that excites me is that as we grow there'll be new problems to solve yeah and yeah I really enjoy that yeah yeah exactly when I bought the company we were not very growthy right we kind of had done the same thing for a long time um but one of the things we did was just kind of redefine who we were we had become a Healthcare Logistics company and we'd been that for a while but nobody knew that and recognized that um and so that was one of the first big changes is just realizing like hey Healthcare life science that's that's actually what we should do and we should just do that another thing too was we had been a technology company for a long time uh when I showed up we had one engineer literally our website and our software was on a closet and a server um on like the second floor of our building but we just never had thought about ourselves as a technology company even though our customers logged into our software every day they booked and tracked their shipments and then we had our own software that we used to manage them we just never saw those two things about the company and that took years to figure out it wasn't like I came in day one and figured it out and it was really not even me figuring it out it was our existing team promoted up the best people I've always brought in summer and turns so we've had some really great interns every summer who've come in and done analysis well Josh don't jump ahead we're gonna I'm gonna we're gonna give that a lot of time so let me let me let me interrupt you there but I just want to Circle back to the point I was kind of trying to make was yes this company is now growthy but like when you can consider buying a landscaping business your first attempt or maybe it was your second did you envision that that would get you to a business that could be a hundred two hundred more people um Jim Sharp's been a great mentor of mine and he always gave me the advice that the uh the magic of search is the entrepreneur coming in and changing things um so I'd always thought that kind of no matter what I buy I'm gonna change it into what I want it to be and that kind of goes along with the 10 to 20 year plan if you do a funded search and you have five years it's really tough to change a landscaping company into something really fast growing and exciting but over 10 to 20 years you can make it whatever you want so you were whatever business you bought you were going to be on the lookout proactively searching for that lever to pull to potentially even pivot the entire business model to hit upon some kind of growth strategy so so Mercury it's hap it's happened but it wasn't by accident you were gonna you were gonna look for something like that whatever business you bought even if it was kind of a sleepy landscaping business yeah exactly my plan was never to distribute our profits it was to keep it in the company and find a way to use that and if we could you know just go along the path the company was going on to grow great if we had to radically Pivot um great too but that was always my plan and I think that just goes along with that 10 to 20 year outlook well for a guy who didn't know what going public meant and now that and then you started searching for a business that you kind of assume or think that you'll you'll take through that Milestone um you move fast okay um all right so back to your decision to do self-funded uh take us into the process of actually searching yeah um I ran a very Scrappy search I had no money so uh after I graduated I I my wife was working in Boston so he stayed in Boston uh my parents actually moved here a couple years ago the landlord found out that the basement unit of the apartment complex they live in was available so we like literally moved into my parents basement which is great I got to like go upstairs and grab their food all the time um I had no money so uh we lived a very frugal life and I could talk more about that um but the way I started my search was on the uh brokered side I thought you know I really don't know much um so I set up my search Entity I started talking to Brokers you know I reached out through uh Biz by cell and then I kind of started Googling then I found this international business broker Association uh then I taught myself how to web scrape by web scraped their website so I had this Excel of every single broker in their email and phone number I started reaching out to them I realized that wasn't the most efficient so I started getting some interns um I found great success with interns I really enjoyed having interns so I always had some college students as interns throughout the whole time taught them how to reach out to Brokers I taught them to sign ndas I basically said bring me in when you've got a an offer that you've made that uh might go somewhere or if there's a call with an owner other than that you know I kind of taught you guys what to do and you can run with it uh Josh let me pause you there because this is going to be really interesting the so using a team of interns is actually There's A playbook for that and particularly on the traditional in traditional search funds that happens a lot I think it is kind of officially part of the Playbook um were you following that part of the Playbook of traditional search funds or did you do your own kind of thing and figure it out as you went uh yeah I figured out as I went I I was working from home I didn't have money for an office so we were fully remote and this was in 2018 that was very uncommon so I had all these fully remote interns you know basically I went down this website internships.com I think in every way as a Searcher you want to present yourself as an individual entrepreneur except for when you're trying to hire interns when you're trying to hire interns you really want to present yourself as a startup private Equity Firm it's much more exciting for them so I presented us as a startup private Equity Firm looking for analysts tons of applicants one of the things yeah there's just a huge amount of applicants a lot of interest in that role so I had all these interns the whole time and yeah what's been great too is I taught them a lot and I've followed up with some of them and they have these great like investment banking jobs after they graduated college so I feel really good that they got something out of it too yeah and Josh this this um point about kind of you know presenting to interns as a startup private Equity Fund when in fact you know you're a loan guy you know eating ramen in the basement unit of the the you know of this apartment building with no money um and yet they you do teach them something and they do go on to bigger things that that seems like there's maybe a disconnect there how were you so confident that you could really give them an experience worth their time what yeah I I would be daunted to to take on five or ten people and say you know this is really going to be great for you I'm going to further your career knowing that I'm just you know me in my office my my personal office um yeah so yeah I started by doing it myself that's why I reached out to the Brokers I talked to them I saw what that role is you review Sims you make offers you talk to Brokers that's what I realized it actually has a lot of value for somebody um it's particularly if you think about like the entry level jobs they'll have right after they graduate this is like giving them much more responsibility so once I learned how to do it and then I thought okay what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach them and then I'm just going to release them uh I think a lot of people are very hesitant to give their interns a lot of autonomy I literally had interns negotiating uh Lois that I'd never even seen and I just said you know bring me the good ones okay and did you teach them any Financial modeling I mean were they doing running spreadsheets I did yeah taught them all the basics I kind of started really high level here's what we're doing here's the the market that we're playing in um and then yeah I spent a lot of time training them one of the things that made that efficient was that I spent a lot of time training my first scoop of interns but then the uh some would stay on for longer than others and they would train the next group so it became a kind of system that was less dependent on me yeah and how long would the training be just just to get a sense of scope how many hours of training would would your interns get from you this first batch of interns the first batch uh they got a lot you know the their first week they probably had like two days they were fully spent with me and then we did these Friday we would do business school cases we'd review all the Sims that they found and all the offers they were making um over time that got less and less of my time but at first it was it was a significant amount of my time so they're literally making offers on your behalf Lois and and are you I mean and you're not even you're not even giving the stamp of approval to an offer you say only only engage me only bring me in if you get yes to a yes to an Loi yeah or you think we're really close to signing an Loi or if there's a call with an owner it's like if there's a call with an owner I'll be on it everything else you guys have got and on an Loy like so you just gave them really well-defined parameters as to what a a you know the strike price was for a deal and then you'd tell them you know offer the asking or offer 90 of the asking or like just give us a taste of what these parameters look like I mean this is really interesting that you could Empower others to do this yeah it was the standard search criteria no customer concentration uh not cyclical not seasonal about the right size about the right multiple with a large seller's note um escrow asset purchase all that so I just taught them the standard criteria um it worked really well my first Loi was it came in from one of the interns it was a landscaping company about five months into when I started searching and and circling going a little bit further back the the Outreach so the scraping and the cold Outreach to Brokers they were also doing this piece uh yeah I iterated on that a lot just like I iterated on everything in my search at first I would reach out to the Brokers uh through email then I found that they just weren't as responsive to email so what I taught the interns to do was uh you know I kind of broke up the Excel spreadsheet here's your 100 Brokers I said go to their website and look at what companies they have listed um find one of those and call them call them up explain who we are ask about that company and then try and pivot to what else they have hey do you have any other deals anything coming online soon um I found that was really effective I found emailing Brokers was just never effective but calling them worked really well wow this is quite a quite a an internship program and and have you in subsequently compared what you built in this internship program to the traditional search fund style internship program I wonder how much how much intersection there is there I'm not sure I suspect that um I I suspect that they do roughly similar tasks I think I gave mine a lot more autonomy than they give there so um yeah I mean I've never heard that interns are actually submitting or even coming close to submitting Lois on behalf of the behalf of the Searcher fascinating okay they're really smart kids like people underestimate how intelligent these uh college students are but they're really smart and motivated and uh and you use again internships.com and and you just took and so there's applicants from all over the country or world even exactly yeah because I was having everybody remote they ended up being all over there were a couple in Boston and we'd just like meet up at a Chipotle for lunch every now and then and then at the end how many interns in total did you ultimately work with uh it's hard to say I typically had three to six at a time Summers were a lot easier during the year it's much harder to find interns um so I kind of accepted that I had some that were part-time during the year um not sure exactly 10 to 15 maybe uh probably more than that probably in the 20 to 30 range oh wow okay and in managing 20 or to 30 no they're not all at the same time but still like managing these folks didn't undercut the additional time that you got I mean I guess not you just as you keep saying you give them so much autonomy that you really didn't need to manage them yeah by the end you know we would just do like a one hour meeting on Friday um but at first I spent a lot of time training them but once they were training each other and the system was really running just about an hour or so a week it's amazing Josh that's really cool um and then what criteria were you were you I mean you've already said the kind of search criteria but what about geography were you were you looking to move anywhere yep move anywhere um and at first I started saying any industry I was like oh you know whatever the industry is I'll kind of pivot into what I want over time I got much more narrow um but at first I was open to anything what did you narrow down what what industries were you open to before that you eventually disqualified yeah by the end I was just looking for a unique business I talked to hundreds of companies in every industry you can imagine and I was just looking for something different um and that that was actually what my criteria was by the end I was like if I've seen before why why different why is that so important to you uh one it's like one of my personal values I like being different uh I figured that uh a company that was unique uh would have some sort of great Niche um I just I always think that if it's uh one of whatever there's just more competitors people know about it uh when you find that this is the only company in the US that does something that's some seems like a great opportunity sure one of one versus one of N I guess um okay all right so you're doing brokerage search at first with these interns at first so take us through because I know it evolves yeah so I did that signed up my first Loi um I dug into that it was just uh you know a lot of what the broker presented wasn't was kind of Flowery and not actually the truth um so in my first month after signing the LOI I did my own diligence I found a lot of problems um it was just more Project based than it seemed um I also decided that wasn't an industry I wanted to be in because there are just so many similar ones you know that was like a one of you know a thousand um so I broke that Loi uh everybody gave me the advice to switch to proprietary but I was pretty stubborn so I stuck with brokered um I like to be different yeah exactly I did a little bit of proprietary but not that much um uh so I stuck with broker and I signed another brokered Loi um again this was that uh it was a printing company it was in an area I really wanted to live um one of the problems there were two owners and um I signed an Loi so I went out to visit them my typical plan was I'd only go visit you if you were within driving distance or after we signed an Loi I just didn't have the money to do that so I went out and visited them and I spent the day shadowing them two owners and they did everything themselves every time we were talking they were like grabbing the phone we went around their plant they corrected everybody I was like this isn't a company this is just the two of them there's no way I could replace that so then I broke that and I was finally convinced to go proprietary great you know it's interesting Josh a lot of people go in the other direction they they start proprietary and find that it's just not efficient to be be sending out these cold emails and then they just kind of narrow down on just brokered search and here you are going in the other the other direction as in so many ways one thing I found as I switched to proprietary I just found better companies I was like wow I've never seen a company that does this before brokered you know you get like there's a couple types um that you just keep seeing on the proprietary side you're like wow this is unique yeah yeah yeah you know and I recall us talking about that it does feel like like just looking at if if you treat Biz by cell as kind of a proxy if you look at business myself you do see the same sorts of businesses over and over like probably 50 or even maybe 60 are one of some kind of you know landscaping or construction or remodeling business of course gas stations and salons and in restaurants and Retail and and what else and and kind of a FedEx or um kind of logistics or Amazon or Logistics business I mean you start to feeling like you feel like you know that's the market of business buying and of course it's a good reminder that it it's not there are are all sorts of very unique businesses out there that are one of one or one of two yeah exactly and there's certain ways there's like archetypes of businesses there's like crew-based businesses and different things like that too that you're like okay I haven't seen exactly this but this is really similar to something else I've seen and you had eventually decided you didn't want a crew-based business this was one of your just ultimate disqualifiers right which exactly again counterintuitive because you liked so much being in the military and basically running Crews so why why did you decide against that I just thought it's harder to grow every time you want to you can't add new customers at a limited cost when you add new customers you have to buy new equipment and hire new crew members uh it's more geographically limited I think that's why you see a lot of Acquisitions um so I just thought you know I'd have to really change that a lot more than if I could find something that has some scalability in the business model sure yeah fair enough um digression here Josh I you've now said that this is one of my personal values um a couple of times maybe two maybe three times and it also seems like um to get a little meta having personal values is one of your personal values what's that about I mean we all have personal values but probably not as well defined as yours I think like knowing yourself is the most critical part to any sort of Entrepreneurship I think that when people try and decide should they go funded or self-funded uh what type of company they should buy it's all about knowing yourself that's one of the beautiful Parts about the search itself you're alone by yourself for like one to two years everybody's telling you what you're trying to do is impossible and you get to really know yourself really well um and so yeah I think that that's like one of the keys and whenever you see people make mistakes and how they search or what type of company they buy it's all about them not knowing themselves and so did you have such well such kind of explicitly defined personal values prior to your search or was it the search process that kind of had all these bubble up and had you kind of codify them exactly during the process even when I started out with you know I'll buy any company and then I was like actually I want something unique and then oh yeah actually maybe there's something about me that I like unique things um so search really kind of helped uh shed light on yourself to yourself and it really taught you a lot about yourself absolutely yeah it's one of the really nice things about the search process you know all right let's get into your proprietary search this is this is another chapter where we're gonna spend some time so tell us what you did yeah I love proprietary search because there's just details and uh the details are fun so um the exact reason most people don't go ahead yeah so the way I started you know I went to uh didn't have any money so I got a Boston public library card um I logged into a to z databases they pull information from every Secretary of State database there's like 14 million companies in there but most importantly it's free um so that's the name of a product A to Z databases yeah it's really great uh the information is not the most accurate but uh that sometimes is a positive one of the things with proprietary is if it's easy uh everybody else is doing it so yeah sometimes you gotta kind of do things in the harder way yeah so I built a database that I think was like 70 to 80 000 companies when I did was I filtered out instead of filtering in so instead of saying like these are the next codes or these are the industries I want I just said like I want everything and then I went through one by one and eliminated the things I knew I didn't want I went you know pretty broad on the criteria too in terms of Revenue size and you're established knowing those aren't the most accurate and so to be clear you are you have a now a membership to A to Z databases via your your your Pub your public library card your Boston public library card this is something that basically this database is basically a database in theory uh of all the companies in the US and you can basically just search them based on criteria you know age where they are Revenue Etc that data of course is uh not that you know not super accurate as with all of these databases but it's a good starting point and then it just spits out a list of companies and you're basically just kind of do are you doing this from Boston Public Library or can you log in remotely and do this from your web browser at home oh I started there and then I did it remotely from home uh one of the things that was annoying about A to Z databases although I think they've since switched was at the time you could only download like a hundred companies at a time and you had to click through every 25 so there was a point where I just like got monsters and spent like 48 to 72 hours just like clicking and downloading and then adding excels to excels until I had these giant excels that took like five minutes to load and then I uploaded those all into the free version of HubSpot so okay so you're you you do this search in A to Z databases based on the criteria that you're looking for you say all companies and then you start filtering out types of companies you already know you don't want um 70 to 80 000 the search results are 70 80 000 records of these businesses that meet your criteria in the US and you start exporting those into Excel uh a hundred at a time so that's whatever 700 times that you had to do that is that right yeah yeah that was fun and then you've got this giant worksheet um that you can it's kind of you know you can you know it's basically your own little database on your hard drive that you can as you did upload into as a CSV probably in top spot and then great you've got your arms around this data and you can start emailing it does A to Z databases actually provide a contact info contact Point person including an email uh sometimes there's a person rarely there's an email sometimes there's a website domain sometimes there's not and the information is really inaccurate so even once I had all of my companies I went through um and cleaned them so I just went through the first one and I looked at the name of the company and I was like is there anything in the name of this company that I know any company that has that in its name is bad and I should clean it out of my database so I'd get to ones it would be like city of something okay I'm probably not going to try and buy the city so I'll like eliminate all city ofs for my database so I spent a long time like really manually cleaning it just one by one um before I uploaded it and I still you know made mistakes I emailed this uh City about buying their pool and uh the guy responded and it was that was fun you emailed this city about buying their pool what do you mean uh it was like I guess somehow the company was like listed as like the pool of this city like a public pool it was like some small town because the guy responded and he was like yeah I'll check with the mayor but I don't think our pool's for sale uh and yet I would think going line by line through the 70 000 record database uh or Excel sheet would be perfect for interns where were the interns at this point um yeah I didn't use them for that part just because I knew it was detailed work I went line by line to about 500 of them but it would just be really hard to explain to them um what like I was trying to do there and it didn't take that long took a day or two so now you've got and so by the way so a to A to Z databases this is something that sorry you said it is free but it but it's not one of the ones that we hear about and which I guess is as you said that's kind of the edge because the ones that you hear about are the ones that everybody's using and Blasting the same people or businesses but why is this one so obscure um it's free through most public libraries so yeah I'm not sure why other people don't use it um but is it something that I could I could get a membership to now and even even if I wanted to pay 50 a month or something could I I'm sure you could but I'm sure you could get a free library card through any library right right no I'm just wondering why like if it's something where people kind of only learn about it if they go to the library or if it actually has a consumer-facing product I think people have a consumer-facing product but you know it's not perfect for emailing because you often don't get names you often don't get domains and you almost never get emails interesting okay A to Z databases all right great so you start emailing people this is so what's your final list after you've called the 70 or 80 000 how big is your final list yeah so I kind of did two things with the so I got it I think I had like 80 000 I downloaded and it was like 72 000 I uploaded into my HubSpot database and then I did two different things I did one path that was kind of my automated path and then one that was my intern cleaned path and I cleaned some as well myself the automated path uh that's the fun part uh so you know I took the whole list I ran it through hunter.io um if you know you have an owner's name and uh domain there's a chance it'll find their email address um you do have to be really careful about spam traps and sometimes it comes up with these implied emails where it's like first dot last at domain.com it's probably not going to work so I only use the top ones also you have to pay for those so I only wanted to pay for the ones that I was really sure were were going to be good so I did that and then I ran it through a couple tools to remove spam traps um again if you get like really deep into the details um there's these email addresses out there that can cause you problems in your email campaigns and from that I got about 10 to 15 000 um companies and so that was my like automated campaign then I took the rest and that was interns so I gave them all free accounts to my free HubSpot database and you know I gave them a couple hundred a week and they would go through one at a time I taught them how to see is this a good company or not figure out who the owner is try and find their email Market good if it's good and then I'll add it into a separate email campaign and I did a lot of exciting myself too just when I had free time so you your automated batch was the was kind of like you ran them through email Hunter and you had what you thought was like really good email addresses good data and you automated those that was about 10 or 15 000 you said yeah exactly and then the other 55 000 or 57 000 you did the same process but manually you had your interns manually going through line by line right and from that we ended up emailing about uh it must have been about ten thousand so we must have cleaned a lot more to find ten thousand that we thought were relatively good yeah yeah so ten thousand the interns and then 10 to 15 000 and automated so your your final Outreach is 20 to 25 000 businesses yeah I think it was twenty two thousand uh so yeah twenty two thousand wow um okay and what is your since we're we're sewing the Weeds on this why don't you just tell us what the you're messaging for the email look like iterated on this a lot um at first you know I was hesitant to talk a lot about myself and be very personal um then I came to see that like that's the differentiator as a self-funded Searcher right you're not a private Equity Firm these owners are getting tons of emails from other people uh so I really by the end I made a much more personal message so I kind of had this long first email talking about myself and my background and how I found their company and what I was looking to do for my career um and that long first in I had a little picture of uh me my wife and my dog and I had to like really dig into the details of the email spam rules to make sure that it was like the minimum number of pixels so it's not a HTML email which is more likely for you to go to somebody's junk yep um so then um but yeah I had this long first email that that in the end got about a five percent response rate but then I rest I did these automated follow-ups um and those got all of the responses you know my next two emails it's got about a 10 response rate each just really simple um just wanted to check in and see if you got this or like should I stop emailing you really simple messages that a lot of people said they would see that they'd scroll up they'd read my whole message and then they'd say oh wow this is like a real person and maybe this is a fit for what we want for our business and so uh two questions there when you say response rate do you mean any sort of response or a positive response uh any sort of response so I got about a 25 response rate but about half of those were like stop emailing me so 12 percent or responses and positive responses yeah by the end at first my campaigns were far worse but as I iterated on it by the end that's what I was getting and HubSpot allows you to send out this volume of emails no I didn't use HubSpot because their email tools paid uh so I use this and it was pretty expensive I used a tool called persist IQ it's also paid when it was pretty inexpensive um I had to actually have two different uh accounts because I had two different emails um you know I use the Gmail as the domain and um or as a hosting and so uh you know there's a limit to how many emails you can send per day I think it was 500 at the time I heard it's 400 now so I had to have two separate accounts for all the follow-ups I was doing so your impression is that these owners are getting a lot of emails for sure yeah I mean I've gotten those emails so I'm sure they're good and from Searchers and private Equity all of the above yep exactly I've gotten a lot of emails from Searchers it's kind of funny and uh and when you get those emails do you is there anything now you as owner kind of see that they're doing wrong or and or that you yourself did wrong when you were doing Outreach um I tend to just ignore them I you know I'm nice I don't like Mark them junk because I know that'll hurt their email campaigns but I just tend to kind of ignore them I just find it funny I'm like oh it's interesting yeah it is funny that whole process Okay so these 12 and a half percent of you know of 22 000 although it got to twelve and a half percent so that wasn't across the board you didn't talk to whatever 12 and a half percent of twenty two thousand is did you uh I I got a lot I definitely did a lot of owner calls I I've always tried to like guess at how many owner calls I did it was uh probably over a thousand I did quite a few really over a thousand calls with an owner um yeah I think that's right I really am not sure the final number uh but a lot of those calls are really short um yeah I got to the point where I was ending calls in under a minute oh wow how can you end a call so quickly uh you know at first you talk to everyone so somebody responds and you have like an hour-long phone conversation with them and then at the end you find out that this is just not going to work the company's too small it's too large the person doesn't want to sell they have problems that would make it impossible for you to finance the acquisition to a bank so I kind of wrote a script I practiced it and I really was uh really I followed it really closely and I spent very little time unless I knew it was a company that actually would be beneficial because I didn't want to waste the owner's time also I don't want them to waste an hour talking to me and find out that it was never going to work well what what is this magic script Josh that that allowed you that saved you ultimately so much time and allowed you to quickly disqualify a bad owner yeah uh so by the end I would say um hey it's uh great to meet you is it still a good time to talk and they'd say yes and I'd say well like you saw in my email I'm looking to buy a company that does one to two million dollars of profit every year that's not dependent on any single customer with an owner who wants to sell in the next few months do you think you could be a fit for that and you just learn everything right away and you save yourself time you save them time and then you just going for the jugular like that in terms of information they don't they're you've already warmed them up I realized with the email and you've gone back and forth around it let's scheduling the call and so forth but still that's pretty direct that was fine yeah um and I think that people appreciated that I wasn't trying to waste anyone's time that I knew what I was looking for I knew what I could Finance what I couldn't and did they understand what you were doing or were they like who are you like what are you or they were like because they get these so many other emails like it they they got it yeah the ones who were ready to sell got it because they'd been exploring selling for a long time and thinking about it the ones who you know I was like the first person they ever talked to about selling they're not going to sell anyways so yeah that really wasn't my concern is there anything more to say about the fact that this proprietary search process led to one of one companies these interesting unique companies was there more to say about that I just found some fascinating companies sometimes the you know deals wouldn't work out but I found like really interesting companies so I learned a lot no my wife always makes fun of me because we'll like go out and I'll be like oh I talked to a company who's like the distributor for that or who does this random thing oh yeah it's kind of fun cool and any any ones there that we should know about any interesting businesses that you didn't know and yeah the most interesting one uh so this guy does the uh no he's a nacho cheese distributor for um movie theaters but not gas stations there's a different size nacho cheese machine um so I was talking to him and I love nacho cheesy those little nacho cheese cups so he sent me like three cases of nacho cheese cups and so my wife and I were making like mac and cheese using them it was amazing uh yeah that's cool yes perfect perfect search business all right um all right so tell us about the discovery of mercury oh yeah I met the owner Mercury had three owners um which made things a little more complex but you know I met um the founder of the company because he was in Boston we talked once and then we went out for dinner um so it happily it was just in the same place where you were exactly I was just like well I think you're just you know a train ride away how about I come eat you for dinner um and so then I started learning about him learning about the business and it was just a perfect fit the three of them were looking to retire and uh they didn't want they had friends who sold the private Equity firms or sold to competitors um they cared a lot about their employees and making sure that their employees had an owner who was gonna care as much about them and about growing the business as they did so in many ways they were looking for me as much as I was looking for them and that's why it was such a perfect fit I spent a lot of time with them just meeting them learning them learning or learning about the business from them because it was proprietary you didn't have to like sign an Loi and then do my due diligence so we went back and forth for about five months so by the time we signed an Loi I knew all of the details of the business they knew they could trust me uh we had all of the details negotiated already so we didn't have to do this negotiation post Loi the whole time we would just look back and say well this is what we said in the LOI and and they were yes you were building trust but um I mean there must have been an NDA at some point I mean I mean there must have been some kind of professionalization of the process yeah we signed an NDA early on um and then they sent me information and I would make offers and we'd go back and forth and I'd say well tell me more about the company and I could find a way to pay more money and then I learned more about the business and I'd say wow this is actually a great company and you know it's going back and forth with banks trying to figure out how much I can get from them um from an SBA loan so we just went back and forth for months and and and how long into these five months was it that it took you to actually submit an Loi um we I think we signed well I submitted Lois early on uh maybe a month or so in I started sending Lois just so we could really get into the detail and go back and forth about them and I said versus stock purchase escrow all that but it took us yeah about five months from first meeting deciding that Loi and then another five to six months to close oh so almost fully a year by the time from that first dinner to closing yeah I think that's right I think it was like 10 or 11 months yeah and meanwhile you're continuing to search your your process carries on yeah although as I got further along with them I really trickle down whatever else I was doing because by then I just talked to so many companies and I knew that it was going to work like I knew that they were really trustworthy I knew there was nothing hiding um I knew the QV would come back and say this is exactly what they said you know I knew nothing was going to pop up I just I trusted them and I knew so much and given how long this process was five or six months to uh Loi five or six months after that to close you know time kills all deals did you particularly pre-loi did you that just feels like a long time to be going back and forth and granted this is proprietary so you're kind of having to educate them you know that's one of the reasons we like broker is because Brokers have done the hard work of setting expectations and educating them and getting the the seller to collect all the information and now you're having to do that and you know I just I could just imagine the psychology of like every email to them over those four or five months asking them for more information pressing on this prodding on that on on that no uh yeah that definitely happened what I did was I had uh once a week lunch with each of the owners so I would just talk to them um and that's where I learned most of my information that's why I learned about the company too so because the process was longer uh it made me actually much more effective taking over the company day one because I really knew all the details don't you wonder if at some point they were like you know let's get on with it are we going to sell to this kid or or what sort of thing uh I think they were but I was really transparent the whole time I'm using this SBA loan here's the details of it they talked to other SBA lenders so they could understand how long it takes um so they they understood we were very transparent um with everything well and I guess you had a number of advantages I'm sure but two of them were that you were local so they they were I mean they you know they met you early on I mean there's there's really no um substitute for kind of being able to meet in person and feeling like you're familiar that just accelerates trust so much second the fact that they had these friends colleagues in the industry that had sold to private Equity or um or competitors and kind of the outcome wasn't a happy one for them or at least not for their employees they already kind of your potential competition was already at a disadvantage they want it like you said they were looking for you they they were shopping you yeah exactly it's one of the things you kind of don't think about when you start the search process but there's this whole other side of people who are looking to sell and they're looking for the right buyer yeah and what your offer I assume I mean you're building trust back and forth I assume your offer is kind of just going to be an industry standard kind of multiple for a business like this yeah exactly I was just following the search criteria I kind of knew what the bank could Finance um the new SBA rules are great you know they've changed and they're even better but at the time I just kind of went to the max of what I could get from an SBA loan and the seller's note and then I had to raise some equity and they did the the point about valuation was there a moment of disappointment on their uh on their side that oh this is only worth three or four times our our annual profit we thought it was going to be worth much more uh they'd been thinking about selling for a while so they were pretty familiar and we went back and forth a lot so you know my initial offer went you know they negotiated me up a lot um so you know because we went back and forth so much it wasn't like just here's my offer taken or leave it I learned more about the company too actually this is more profitable than I thought um Josh did you at all given how long this was this this back and forth was going on this back and forth was you are again building trust going out to to what do you say a meal with them lunch or or dinner once a week with one of them well I did lunch with each of them uh by the end at first it was like once a week with one of them and by the end it was every single week with each of them so did you find it all that like the the hazard of your own psychology the kind of the sunk cost fallacy I mean you've been you've invested so much in this deal by month seven eight nine ten that are you saying to yourself you know I need to be clear-eyed here I might not be seeing something some red flag in this deal because I'm so committed at this point I mean that's the danger that's the classic danger yeah when again uh Jim Sharp was a great mentor of mine throughout it and he would every time we'd talk he'd say what's the percent chance of this closing and basically as the percent chance of it closing went up I spent more time with them and less on other deals but at first you know when I was like I think there's a 25 chance of this closing I still worked on a lot I also just kept in touch with all of the previous offers I made knowing that you know people will change their expectations or the business might change in some way so I just kept in touch with all these previous deals and I figured I had enough in my kind of pipeline that one would work great okay well there's a lot to say about your uh getting in there and actually running the business so anything more that I didn't ask about that you want to share about the actual search and then transaction well you just on the search side you just have to be really Scrappy particularly on the self-funded side you have to really get into the details of like what emails are gonna work and how you talk to owners and all the details the things that you get better at over time when you're searching is talking to owners because on the proprietary side you have to explain to them what networking capital is and how you set a Target and how you do a true up and you have to explain the escrow and the Reps and warranties that's all on you as a Searcher and the subordination of the seller's note so you just get better and better at answering those and that's like one of the things you get really good at over time is just when somebody says tell me about working capital and how it's going to work in a in the transaction you need to have a really clear succinct answer that shows them you know what you're doing otherwise they're gonna ghost you they'll stop talking to you you won't know why but it's because they don't think that you're a real buyer yeah yeah and so you experienced some of that you were had choppy explanations initially and you refined them over time exactly exactly so you successfully buy this business of almost a year after sending out that initial email what uh tell us about the first 30 90 days yeah so I we closed uh January 29th 2020 uh right before covet of course we didn't know that at the time so you know I was replacing the three owners and I was kind of learning what they did and I'm not gonna make any changes at first and then everybody one-on-one um then about two months in covid started and it was like wow we have to work remote um you know I don't want my sellers coming in anymore I don't want you know nobody knew who was going to get sick and what would happen so I told them like just you guys can stay home uh so then I had 12 direct reports uh when I was searching I read traction the EOS book and I thought that was pretty cool system I really liked the idea of it my plan was to wait about a year to implement it assuming that I thought it was the right fit for mercury um but now three months in covid I've got 12 director ports we've got to have everybody work remote nobody's ever worked remote before um literally Anybody Everybody had desktop computers it was kind of a risky situation and I said okay I'm just gonna jump all in on honey OS so I hired in the US implementer um he's fantastic we used him for two years and we really reorganized the company the accountability chart who reports to who what our values are what our mission is who our target market is so that was a really big change about three to four months in I wouldn't generally recommend it but with covet I just didn't really have a choice and I'm sorry why why why did kovid accelerate you're doing us you know I had 12 direct reports and we all had to work remotely and it was just uh I was like it was a Structure it was It was kind of something to a North star that everybody could be working toward yeah exactly we didn't have an organizational chart like who really reported to who we didn't have like a clear target market it was a little bit chaotic and I thought I can manage that and person I can ask people what they're working on and kind of tell them what to do but as we try and figure out this remote thing that we've never done and I thought you know this is just a great opportunity and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna miss out on this chance to to make this really big change and I figured covert would be a great excuse there's this pandemic everything's changing uh you know I could use as an excuse to make these changes I want to make a little earlier yeah yeah and when you say 12 direct reports does that mean that the business was 12 people plus the three sellers I know the company was 43 people um but 12 of them reported to me at first okay 43 people and can you say anything about any of the other bullet points in the business Financial or otherwise uh we did in like the tens of Millions for revenue and actually Josh we should so we should mention this because you kept saying how little money you had as you were going through the process which kind of forced your the scrappiness of your search uh the tens of millions of Revenue and you said you raised money for the deal so did you put did you have any give your own money in the deal I was quite negative by the end uh I started uh I got a bunch of credit cards and I you know I kind of maxed them out and made the minimum payments for a long time by the time we closed I was very negative on personal money um so I did not have any money wow man that's impressive uh of buying a business with tens of millions of dollars in Revenue with none of your personal money in it not to say that I'm here advocating buying a business with no money down um but that's effectively what you did now of course you earned it through all of the the process that we just um listened to for the last 30 minutes very interesting okay circling back so it's so you decide to do EOS and you've you kind of rattled off a few things there Josh but give us just a minute on what EOS is that comes up a lot but I've never done an episode on it so but give it give us a minute or two on it EOS is amazing it's an entrepreneurial operating system it's just an organized system for running a small business uh it forces you to do the things that you should do you have to have an accountability chart that's their version of an organizational chart where you put some bullet points of what each person's role is who they report to uh you have to have company values a mission a defined target market there's a meeting Cadence they're called L10 level 10 meetings uh it's it's a really great the meeting Cadence that you do there's a quarterly meeting Cadence there's these rocks which are kind of big things somebody works on for a quarter you set up the scorecard about different metrics you track um it's just a really organized system uh I think for a lot of small businesses they just don't have those types of things and it really helps you take a business from where it kind of was to the next level yeah and people are receptive to it because it feels like yes is the as the one as the owner is the one presiding over the this organization it's great but it feels like if I'm an employee and all these new processes and scorecards are being put in place I'm rolling my eyes and I'm saying man this thing just got really corporate this really got bureaucratic uh doing it during covid really helped because I said hey team like this is chaos we have no idea what's happening in the world we're going to do this system and people at that point were like okay we'll do whatever I just want to make sure I still have a job and I'm safe from the pandemic yeah way to turn a way to turn a crisis into an opportunity there Josh yeah and and talk to me talk to me in a minute about leadership So you you're a guy with already leadership experience uh in the military and maybe elsewhere um was there how did it feel stepping into the shoes of these three gentlemen these three founders and being much younger and being not the founder et cetera et cetera yeah from the military side it's the exact same uh like as a army officer you take over a 40 organization everyone's been there for a while they all know what they're doing and you don't uh it's very similar to kind of taking over new organizations in the military so that felt pretty pretty normal um and I kind of knew how to do that and you know I knew to come in and I'm not making any changes I want to understand what each person does you know the difficult things I'm going to be there so we run this night operation I spend a lot of nights with our night operation um just being present learning what they did that part all felt very normal and you know um I've wondered where in the military yes you you have a lot of leadership training leadership experience but you still kind of have at your back the authority of the US military like there are there there is accountability and consequences if if your direct report doesn't do something it's you know the buck doesn't stop with you Josh but when you're when you buy a business if somebody is defiant or what's the word I'm looking for just you know it just says no or whatever doesn't do something you want there there's no there isn't this entire giant apparatus behind you that kind of gives weight to your words it's just Josh this Rando who bought the business who's probably younger younger than me so doesn't that feel different yeah that's the case during the search too um you know I'd always think like help's not on the way it's like just me out there um so you know when you're searching self-funded No One's Gonna Make You make offers and you know push you to only close a good deal and when you're running the company uh you know typical most self-funded Searchers don't have a board it's kind of just you out there um and you have to be really self-motivated it goes back to that know yourself I'm really self-motivated and so I knew that that wasn't an issue for me but I could see some people want that my boss told me to do it so I have to do it uh you're not gonna get that in self-funded search well but also not not just that sorry not that you where does your Josh's motivation come from but when somebody one of your direct reports for example like the authority that your words carry when it's just you seems like it would be less when you're this random guy who bought the business than when you're in the military and the the your words carry the authority not just of you who their commanding officer but the entire military behind you it's like they there's a system there's a context to your Authority yeah but not not when you buy business right EOS helps solve that because EOS um you bring in all of the kind of best people in the organization the potential leaders and they're involved in making all the decisions um and then you kind of promote them up and have this leadership team of people who are the most respected most experienced in the company and so it's not just Josh it's the leadership team which is these five people who have been here for 20 years and you respect um us really helps help solve that even when you come up with the company values you talk about who are the best people company what do they do well okay like that's what our company does oh interesting so you back into the company values you don't you don't like company value you sort of uncover what the company values already are by virtue of of the of the characteristics of the good leaders in the business exactly and it's the most respected people so everybody in the company says oh yeah like that person does do a great job and that's one of their values we should all do that oh wow neat and can you say how much it costs to hire an EOS consultant I think it's like 20 to 30 000 for a year Tom they're really beneficial some people try and implement it themselves I would definitely recommend finding somebody to help uh you have this external that's another thing that helps too is you have this external party uh my us implementer implementer is fantastic uh he was a previous business owner my whole team had great respect for him so it wasn't Josh saying it or EOS saying it it was uh this implementer saying it who everybody really respected yeah and and how long does an implementation take you said it's 20 to 30 a year so is it is a fully a year-long process two years that's what they typically do two it's typically a two year process and then you're off on your own and that's exactly what we did wow so he's involved and is he showing up at the office I guess it's covid but in in generally would somebody be showing up at the office weekly I mean how what what is the cut your contact with this person look like uh they have this particular Cadence um it's like you do this initial meeting and then you do these two vision building days and then it's basically quarterly and annual meetings so at first there's a couple meetings and then it's one quarter once a year or twice a year okay and so the you implement EOS it's transformational um you have mentioned Jim Sharp a couple of times uh tell people who Jim Sharp is uh Jim was a previously a small business owner he was a professor at Harvard Business School and he's a mentor to a lot of self-funded Searchers he also posts a Blog it's really fantastic I'd highly recommend uh reading his blog um and Jim's just a great uh he's got a lot of uh experience and uh what Jim does really well is he just really cares about Searchers um he's not like in it for himself he's in it to help you learn so one of the things that you had said that he says is when you're out there buying a business looking to buy a business you actually are in fact buying a business to change it not in the first 90 days you know you choose choose your timing well probably later than sooner but in fact let's let's not delude ourselves you want to put your imprint on this business elaborate on that yeah that's why it's entrepreneurship through acquisition like particularly on the self-funded side it's real entrepreneurship you really changed the business into what you want it to be um especially if you have a 10 to 20 year period did so that's you know one of the like what U.S did was it helped us clarify what do we do today uh so we kind of look through all of our different customers all the different markets the services and really clarified who's our target market and how do we serve them today but then I spent a lot of time myself and then I brought on these summer interns um from MBA programs to really dig into the analysis what's the market what are we best at uh to decide where should we go as a company Perfect segue so elaborate elaborate on that because this was the kind of epiphany yeah so um when we first did EOS we had three Target markets there was three different Industries um then when I had the my first group of Summer interns uh they were all fantastic and they just dug through all our data and said you know this is really a Healthcare Logistics company you guys just don't realize that all of our new customers are Healthcare all of our best customers are Healthcare that's what we do best um that's really what the company is we just haven't called ourselves that so then when we made that pivot we're just going to be Healthcare life science um that's like our only target market shipping for these healthcare companies everything else kind of just naturally flowed through that right so okay of course we need to upgrade the software to what they need we need to reorient our teams and the network our pricing our costs like everything just kind of naturally flowed from the from that decision and what were the three Industries before legal health care and uh yeah we did Professional Services which was like legal and um then we did Healthcare life science then we the other one we called technology it was like shipping servers um or things like that okay okay and so when these this your interns have this kind of conclusion after pouring over the data do they need to convince you and or and or leadership I mean or because it's a that's a big decision was there kind of a lot of back and forth or did you all see their findings and were like oh my God yes obviously let's do it a lot of back and forth but when they were doing their analysis they were really involving everybody in our team asking them questions um so everyone was really involved so by the time they had their conclusion it was pretty obvious that we should do this but it took us a while to come to that conclusion uh it took us months to really decide to go all in on one industry and and what percentage of the business did it did health care and Life Sciences represent it was probably 70 or so percent of the company 60 to 70 percent now it's probably 80 to 90. and were you going to fire the 30 to 40 percent of your customers that were in these other two now non-interesting Industries uh no we thought about that but we're like no we want to keep serving them so we even today have some customers some law firms and some other customers who aren't Healthcare life science companies I think what we do actually is really beneficial for them and so they they've still enjoy it um so we haven't we didn't want to fire anyone we just kind of thought okay every new customer will be Healthcare life science and over time the percentage of customers who are Healthcare life science will be really high and so was there any if you if you didn't have to fire that that 30 to those customers that represented still 30 to 40 of your Revenue was there any other perceived risk in doing this I mean if it what were the risks yeah the risk is really funny in retrospect we all thought maybe Healthcare life science shipping is too small we're like maybe this is just not a big enough industry for us to be a large company in uh now as we see it it's massive and there's all these niches within that um you know I think the industry itself is something like 100 billion dollars of Revenue worldwide but at the time we were like you know maybe we can't even double the company just doing this one industry and so what was this pivot going to entail no longer marketing to um kind of shipping technology server type products no longer marketing to Professional Services so your marketing Direction your Market positioning your go to market kind of changes the software needs to be updated to to really be sort of customized to this industry what else yeah sales team um our Partnerships so we became the preferred Shipping Company of mass bio that's the non-profit that serves all the biotechs in Massachusetts our operations team that's all they learned is you know how do we be the best in the world at shipping medical devices or life science research materials or diagnostic kits uh really everything about the company changed over time it wasn't like a tomorrow everything changed but over a year and a half I mean today we really are a Healthcare Logistics company that's that's all we do and did you find that narrowing your message and and and positioning yourself is just focused on this one Niche has also accelerated your you know your ability to make sales and and you know your your growth within this niche in every way yeah like just to give an example on that SEO marketing side right we're never going to win on Google for like shipping but what we can win is un 3373b uh biological sample shipping and so you know we win all those terms and then when people talk to us we say okay tell me about your samples uh let's talk about if they're you know exempt human specimens or category b or category a uh we have you know our Network who does the shipping we have different carriers who can do each one so everything about the business change to just serve those companies yeah excellent and rewriting did you rewrite the software I seem to did you say earlier that the software was really crude and in the server or was that that was the website yeah server the closet what exactly what was it what did it look like and then what did you take it to yeah we had one engineer and all of our software was literally in the closet and had been updated in many years and only did one type of shipping we offer about six types of shipping depending on how you think of it and only one happened through our software the rest were through emails Excel files or phone calls um so we went through a lot of iterations um but now we have a our engineering team a product and a design team uh We've launched new software we launched in April we're constantly iterating on it um and so now so you built this essentially SAS Cloud tool from scratch yeah exactly uh it's not we don't charge a subscription but it's uh exactly this Cloud software very modern um one side of it is customer facing they can go in book shipments track shipments the other side is internal facing we use that to manage our customer shipments uh we track all of our customer shipments for them and so we manage that internally well that sounds like building a SAS tool I know it's um you know it's not a product that you're releasing to Market exactly but it's it's still essentially something that your customers are going to use quite a heavy lift to build something like that from scratch yeah it took a long time and a lot of iterations uh we're on our fourth head of product uh I was at a product for a while that did not go well uh we we're on like our third attempt at engineering uh in terms of like different models of doing engineering um everything in Mercury whatever our company values is Relentless Improvement and we just iterate on things I think our current uh setup is is the final probably but uh at least the final for now who knows what the company will look like in a couple years um but that took it was not an easy path well and so for a guy who was a product manager intern or was it a proper job at Amazon in turn turned out you weren't a great PM uh in the real world yeah yeah like I knew high level what to do but as you get into the details I had no idea okay uh Now remind me let's get into recruiting the dream team that you you now have um that's a big part of the story we are coming up on the end here the that first hire was a PM wasn't weren't they yeah tell the story of kind of realizing you want to hire kind of real strong Talent the challenges and then how all that played out yeah so the first big hire I made outside was our at the time our VP of product he's now our CEO um and uh that was that really transformed the company I mean he's amazing and he's entirely transformed the company uh it was hard to recruit somebody because if you looked at our website we were not a very attractive company uh if you kind of looked at what we did what our current state of our software was it was not very attractive I worked with a recruiter um and then it was kind of me selling the vision um and he saw that and it was a perfect fit and so he came in built our product function have since promoted him to be our CEO and once we had him once we had one really strong uh kind of outsider on our leadership team that really changed everything uh he helped push us in different directions uh than we hired on uh our net now our CMO who also does our people operations so she does marketing and people operations uh she's also amazing really transformed the company brought on a CFO um so just getting that first critical hire was really helpful to do that future ones because then that person and you together can really present a vision for the future because you're really selling the company to these candidates uh yeah in yourself and Josh what this VP of product who's now CEO and as you just said has been really transformational for the business did you expect were you looking for somebody to hire to be transformational or this it just ended up being that way what were you in retrospect this person was a hugely influential hire did you is that what you were looking for going into it it's usually influential higher yeah I knew bringing on an outsider who was really competent was going to really transform the company I didn't know what that would look like um I just knew that we needed the product today all of our good hiring we've done as a company has just been hiring for what we need today uh We've made a lot of hiring mistakes I've made a lot of hiring mistakes that's always been trying to skip steps trying to get uh what we need in three years or five years um and he was exactly what we needed today and he also was what we needed in a different role and by VP of products the product is this Cloud software the SAS tool exactly software the software that our customers use and we use internally so that really is that really is core to the experience of your customers and to the entire company it's not just the logistics of shipping it's also this software is this kind of spine of everything exactly and it's Unique to our customers there's no other software out there that's directly for healthcare companies doing just the logistics so all the details in there about do you need dry ice or 2c8c uh phase change materials and is this un 3373b or are these exempt human specimens and if you're shipping it internationally uh the different rules our software just does that so if you're a Healthcare company and you log in uh it's exactly geared for you wow very very powerful um and this pitch as you as you just said to bring somebody in and how there was a bit of a domino effect you brought him in and it made the second and third and fourth uh strong higher easier help people understand how you do convince somebody to come aboard your ship somebody who probably has um maybe safer or maybe more glamorous uh prospects than working for your small sleepy little company yeah I mean that's where like it's entrepreneurship right it's just you out there there's no help on the way you just have to find a way to convince somebody so I just really sold them on the vision it's like I know that's what we look like today uh I'm gonna be running this company for 10 to 20 years this is where I want to go uh this is the market opportunity I see this is what we have today we have this software we have hundreds of customers who are using it uh these are the things I've talked to them that they're asking for um and he saw that vision and he thought it was a great opportunity for him and this conversation in in finding this person was after the recognition that you guys were going to focus on the healthcare Life Sciences exactly even though our marketing didn't show that so I had to kind of explain that but you had this really clarified Vision dialed in at this point and then you went to Great really cool so yeah so I guess um kind of the the to to to abstract your advice it would be like having a very clear Vision in Direction and something that's appetizing and and kind of a mission a sense of a mission something big and important I mean I guess I'm saying the obvious as I listen to myself that sure helps hire people exactly and you're not going to know it at first you know it takes years for you to know where you want to go uh where I thought we were going to go six months in or a year in was totally wrong but by the time I hired him you know I kind of knew what we wanted Josh we're going to close out with um some stuff that you said at the very top your long-term plan about the IPO potential here but before I ask you those final questions is there anything about the story that I've missed that you want to share make sure we share I know I think it's a critical decision as a Searcher just decide if you want to do funded or self-funded I just think that's like a really big decision a lot of things you can reverse that's something that is really tough to reverse and even just going down the search route you know if you do it it's not a one or two year commitment it's it's a really long commitment so it's something just to think a lot about before you jump down that route yeah you know one observation I'll make about you Josh is you know this theme of you're used to very um motivated I mean everybody listening to this podcast is going to be a motivated person but you're particularly motivated I'd say and um self-directed and you like you you like pain you like you like walking through walls um and so maybe that's not everybody um one thing that I've now heard a couple people who did both traditional search funds and then self-funded say about the benefits of a traditional search fund is that actually um they liked doing that as their first search because you do have kind of the apparatus of your investors there are well-defined parameters it really it's mostly I'm not sure it's those parameters it's mostly just there's kind of a baked in support network there in the form of your investors and that's apparently really part of the model and um I think for a lot of people that is um quite beneficial and maybe for you that seems less beneficial because you're so good at figuring things out on your own care to respond yeah I think a couple things one you can Network for advice so I talk to a lot of other Searchers people who are in the same stage as me a few years ahead or even longer than that so you can get all the advice you need you also can pay for advice they've been a couple times where I've needed some outside Consulting advice and I've just paid hourly for that far better than giving up equity and control of the company one other thing that I think you said in our pre-call when you were making this decision about self-funded versus traditional didn't you talk to a couple of of your colleagues who've done traditional search funds they were on the other side of exiting and they were kind of depressed didn't you tell me that yeah one of the things that drove me to say like I want to run a company for 10 to 20 years every time I talk to somebody who's like recently sold you know they just don't know what to do next and as I think about myself I don't know what I would do next uh growing an organization is what motivates me um and so that was something else I thought about and I don't want to do this for five years and then be unhappy that I had to sell yeah it reminds me of kind of a famous Silicon Valley story where Mark Zuckerberg was offered a billion dollars by I think Yahoo to sell Facebook when Facebook was still very very young but clearly getting traction and his his kind of calculation he didn't even treat the offer seriously and his calculation was like well there's nothing more in the world I'd rather be doing than running a fast-growing social network so if I get that billion dollars from Yahoo then what am I going to do I've given away the thing that I'd you know the thing that if I were if money were No Object I'd want to spend my time doing is what I'm already doing so no thanks I'll just keep doing what I'm already doing because this is this is what I want to get up and do every day yeah that's awesome yeah that like self-motivation like I don't go to work to make money I really don't care about money but I like doing what I'm doing because I get to solve challenges well let me ask you about money uh for a second you just made it very clear that you don't care about it but certainly it must feel nice to be earning a proper salary Now versus the having to be so Scrappy um before no I've kept my salary really low Even in our operating agreement I could increase it and I haven't increased it um yeah I paid off my credit card debt that's all I really care okay Josh well let's just um I I don't want to be repetitive here because we've touched on it a little bit but you know you're the long-term plan here you talked about going public at the top um just articulate it for us one more time indulge me yeah I mean I think we can we can become a very large company uh as a healthcare logistics company it's a huge market and we're Tech enabled which is really going to allow us to scale we're doing a lot of things internally as a company to improve operations improve our software our marketing um a lot of different things we've just we stayed really close to our customers we learn what they want and we're doing a lot to improve it um so I think we can become a very large company that way over time that technology we're developing to serve Healthcare Logistics companies we can use to serve other markets but we're staying very focused for now sometimes I accidentally throw our organization off where I talk about what we're going to be doing in three years or five years or seven years and I just need to stick with the focus of healthcare life science but that technology we're building will be able to propel us to grow even larger in a few years you know I'm surprised that the opportunity isn't already locked down Josh because um shipping and Logistics is you know the Indus the world's second oldest uh profession no it's an ancient industry I mean moving stuff around is is nothing new so I would have imagined that there'd be this just enormous players in this market who are already moving sensitive Goods around uh there are there's a lot of carriers out there and then there's some startups that are trying to be kind of a platform for shipping um but it's an industry that has a lot of niches being good at shipping diagnostic kits uh does not mean you're good at shipping food and beverages or vice versa and so that focus is really what allows us to be really good and there's just not others who compete in exactly our Market it's actually much more complicated than it seems there's a lot of regulatory complications it takes a long time to build Josh so so here here you are uh presiding over a business that as you just articulated could really become quite a big business you want it to you want it to go public that doesn't I mean I don't know a lot about that process but it seems realistic to me um seems feasible doesn't seem crazy um you had also said at the beginning that like no matter what business you bought even if it had been a landscaping business you were going to find you were going to really proactively look for a way to make the business kind of growthy and and take it in a direction that could it could be exciting in in fast growth so that may be the answer to the question but the question is this could you I guess for people listening to this who love the idea of buying a sleepy business that turns out to be this this business that can be pivoted into one that could be a startup with going public potential how how can they connect those dots like it's easy for us to to see where you are now and connect the dots in retrospect but looking forward you couldn't have seen this like you is as well as you got to know those sellers you didn't know until a year into this business until you had interns really pouring over the data that this was the opportunity so even if you had a quote thesis like it's really you know it probably wouldn't have been super accurate actually I think you just said that like you did think that you were going to take the business in a direction in month three and month six that and that would have been the wrong direction so even you know so even you changed your mind even after getting into the business so I guess I'm just how does somebody do what Josh did buy a sleepy business and make it go public tell us how to do that Josh I think it's you know just like I talked about like knowing yourself personally it's just knowing your company and the industry and spending a lot of time thinking about can this company become something great uh is there a certain Market we can Target or doing something else maybe I have to take the profit from this business to buy something else that's fast growing and turn it into that I know some searchers have done that in the past so I think there's always a way you just have to spend a lot of time really knowing your business and your market and what your opportunities are I think if you um if you try and do something too early it's a mistake um but if you try and come in with a thesis it's just going to be wrong but so long as you have that 10 to 20 year period you can do anything in 10 to 20 years and and so it's not like you chose an industry with great with great Tailwinds for example it's not like Healthcare Logistics is blowing up so as long as I I ride that wave there will be some opportunity there uh well initially the company was just kind of a logistics company I didn't even realize it was Healthcare Logistics yeah right we riveted it into the fast-growing uh target market yeah yeah great fascinating Josh congratulations on your success to date uh it sure will be interesting to see uh what you know what you do over the next 10 or 20 years how can people reach out Josh how do you prefer they do that if they want uh just message me through Linkedin um check that a lot talk to a lot of Searchers I like talking to people who's considering search giving them ideas on how to do it so I'm happy to help anyone do you ever tell somebody considering a traditional search fund to yes do it or are you solidly in the self-funded camp I'm pretty far in the cell phone to camp but you know I think for some people traditional is the way to go if you're looking to buy a software company off the bat you're not going to do that in a self-funded world uh if you're looking to buy a really large company it's kind of tough to do that self-funded um if you're looking for a lot of support you're not okay with that like help is not on the way it's just me out there traditional might be the way to go so I do think there's some people to fit for Josh Meadow thank you very much sir for coming on and sharing your story how fascinating yeah thanks Bill 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