mike curry thank you for joining me today on acquiring minds thank you for having me you acquired a physics a medical physics business you and a partner in 2014 you're going to have to explain to us what medical physics is and in these last seven and a half years you've grown the business considerably you are still at the helm of the company so we are going to hear the story of a business acquisition your story of business acquisition but start us off mike with a little bit of background on you give us two or three minutes on um you know what you were doing before the acquisition and what led you to want to go out and buy a business sure so i am originally from atlanta georgia i went to emory university where i was an undergraduate business major and directly out of college i took my first job in investment banking uh in the uk of all places and so i worked abroad uh worked there for three years and had a family event uh my father actually took ill and passed away uh from lung cancer which was a big shift in my life and career plan so i moved back to atlanta and i remember as a result of that life event thinking back to my graduation day at college where the dean of the undergraduate business program who also taught entrepreneurship gave me and my mom a big hug when i told her that i got this great banking job and that i was moving to london and she was very excited and she gave me a big hug and whispered in my ear good luck with the banking job but call me when you're ready to be an entrepreneur and i think that she saw how my eyes lit up and how engaged i was in her entrepreneurship class and so i think that she saw that some somewhere deep down that entrepreneurial bug still existed and i thought when i moved back to atlanta um if not now when and so my first entrepreneurial venture was starting a men's custom clothing business called phoenix bespoke with a college classmate and good friend of mine we ran the business from 2007 to 2008-2009 uh and we as many other small businesses felt the crunch of the financial crisis and you know going as a bootstrap business uh into the headwinds of a pretty difficult time in a difficult economy we had to make the really tough decision to um to close down the business but one of the uh pieces of serendipity that came from that process was i found out about acquiring a small business through conversations with one of our key customers and so one of our customers in the clothing business graduated from business school teamed up with a classmate of his and started to search for a small business to purchase they found a business in arizona bought that business they were on the path of growing that business and found an additional business in a similar industry in atlanta which brought him to atlanta to acquire and then integrate that business and so was sitting um one day talking um with you know a client who's who's also a friend and you know over a starbucks coffee and and that's when he really planted the seed and asked the question he said hey you know i know that you have a head for business and you're very entrepreneurial but have you ever thought about buying a business instead of trying to start one from scratch and i hadn't because i think um you know i like many folks um thought that the you know the archetype of an entrepreneur is kind of what you read about an entrepreneur mag or in fast company or in inc where you know it's the bootstrap you know scrappy you know i have a once in a lifetime idea and come hell or high water um i'm gonna make and but i never thought about entrepreneurship through acquisition nor did i realize that you could actually buy an existing business get in the business you know identify opportunities to to grow the business to grow as a person as a leader and produce you know not only a good living but a really good result for the company and for the people that work for you and so with that little nugget of that conversation i started to go to youtube and i found a few grainy videos about uh you know people buying businesses and and i think the concept of you know entrepreneurship through acquisition has has clearly grown in popularity over the years but if you kind of rewind to 2008 2009 there were a few people um but it still seemed pretty far off um but i did catch a video of a professor at stanford university uh by the name of irv grosbeck who is one of the uh you know one of the godfathers of the search fund model which is a path um a specific path towards entrepreneurship through acquisition and you know not knowing who he was or how important he was to the ecosystem i looked him up on google and i just cold called him and he actually answered the phone and was gracious enough to spend 45 minutes to an hour talking to me about you know buying a business about the fact that he had personally invested and mentored other young people who had similar ambitions as myself who kind of found themselves not necessarily wanting to work for a big corporate but didn't have the game-changing technology innovative startup either but wanted to do something entrepreneurial and i left that call with irv with a really renewed sense of excitement because i left the call feeling as though this is something that i could do that was achievable it wasn't going to be easy but there were more people out there who had done it than i thought and some of those people as we progress down our path of acquiring our business turn into really allies investors and mentors so fast forward a couple of years per the advice of irv on that conversation i actually went back to business school um i felt as though there were some things that i still wanted to learn and wanted to use that time to kind of refresh my skill set and use some of the opportunity that i had in downtime to intern to actually work with investment firms that were focused on purchasing small businesses and use that opportunity to learn from people who made a living identifying business opportunities for small businesses knowing that that was a key missing ingredient to my skill set at the time and uh by the time i graduated business school from the university of chicago in 2013 my business partner today and long time friend from way back in university days at emory university both decided that we were at a point in our careers where we wanted to take this leap we wanted to work together as partners to identify a small business and we were going to do it together and we raised our search fund we moved back to atlanta from chicago and new york respectively we got a shoe box of an office we got a couple of interns from emory our alma mater and we started to call business owners and we found a business just outside of baltimore doing medical physics and almost eight years later uh and wait wait mike you're you're jumping ahead here so yeah okay so so let me let me hop in here with a couple questions so um did you was booth uh as associated with search funds um in 20 you you went there 2012 2013 was that yes right because it is it's certainly associated with them today although i've talked to a couple of other people who went to booth a little bit earlier on and who said that yeah at that time like the difference between going in 2011 or 2015 in terms of search there was a big difference so was search search funds was that something that booth students were doing during your your time at booth um not nearly as much as you would find today so i kind of feel like i was in the the prehistoric ages of eta at booth um there was definitely a lineage of people who had done it over the years and so it was a small enough community of booth alum over the years and so over the years could be spanning from the mid 90s through 20 you know 12 13 there may have been three or four people so there wasn't a huge data set and there weren't a huge number of people who were attending the school who were you know reaching out to those folks so to that effect it was a pretty tight-knit small community but people were pretty responsive when you did reach out what i will say is entrepreneurship through acquisition and search funds started to gain in popularity and i can remember that a close friend of mine alex hodgkin who is also a booth alum he as well as professor kaplan at the school were really starting to wrap their heads around um you know seeing what was happening at schools like stanford at wharton um at harvard business school at other schools um at northwestern and starting to see that this was something that was of interest to students and so interestingly enough i got to be a fly on the wall at many of these conversations i was the president of the entrepreneurship through acquisition group uh while attending booth it was a really tiny group and to see it now and to also see a class being taught in a conference being held right it's really remarkable to see uh but in the early days um i think the school was starting to see that this was something that was of interest to students as well as alumni so i think schools have also done a really good job of not only um presenting this career path to students as they're getting their degrees but then circling around um as people have been out of school three years five years seven years where they may be thinking of doing something else with their careers and and reaching back out and engaging people um with resources and tools and and and and options to pursue this so that's one thing i do do want to share is that i do think one of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship through acquisition is it is not um solely um the the the path for newly minted mbas i know a number of people who in their 40s 50s even beyond have pivoted from their careers have retired in some way shape or form and decided that with their experience or with their relationships and contacts or they know a particular industry cold that there are opportunities for them to identify you know interesting businesses that they want to be involved in as as kind of the operators and leaders of those businesses so it it really is you know i want to kind of share that it is a path that is available for a really large swath and diverse group of people that's great that's a that's a great point mike because um certainly i'll be the first to admit that all of my guests have been people in their probably 30s and low 40s maybe a couple people in their late 20s mid late 20s um but um like many things in business you know in your mid-40s or or later that you know um you just stop hearing people talk to you you know they're they're talking to 20 year olds and 30 year olds so mike when you when you went to booth you were already enamored of the concept of eta you'd had your conversation with uh the stanford guru you'd done your youtube research where you basically decided even before you started at the program that you were going to buy a business after business school or it was just kind of percolating but you weren't sure what what path you were going to go on yeah i would say to be honest i was probably 90 percent sure and um by the time i got to the end of my first year i think that was the real gut check moment because i know myself and i know that i'm a pretty competitive person and so if you start to go down the path of recruiting for banking or for private equity or for um technology or consulting um you know i know that if i had gone down that path and done a summer i would have wanted to do well during the summer which you know touch wood would mean that i may have had an opportunity to come back full time and then i would have had a much more difficult decision to make and so at the end of my first year i made a really tough but right decision for myself um to not kind of throw my hat in the ring to do some of that traditional summer internship recruiting yeah and i was fortunate to um you know to land a uh an internship with a local private equity firm with the understanding that there was a a less than 10 percent probability that there would be a job for me at the end of my tenure at business school which was great for me because again that also aligned very nicely with that nudge that i would need to get out there and continue with the plan but it also gave me an opportunity to learn again from people who are evaluating businesses every day looking at business models talking to business owners and so i learned quite a bit in that internship and being a fly on the wall and seeing how professionals look at businesses and um you know frankly how um the process of evaluating and buying and running a business particularly a small business is is art and science everything doesn't translate purely into the numbers and there's a lot of art in terms of building relationship and uh you know making sure that you uh you know engage with that team and sell the team on the vision for the future of the business that you want to build and a lot of that stuff you just can't find in a powerpoint presentation or in an excel spreadsheet mike do what do you say to people who want to buy a business who didn't get any pr don't have any and didn't go out like you and get some private equity experience all the stuff that you just talked about um that you learned in that in that stint at the private equity shop that was so valuable to you can i go out and buy a business if i don't have that experience absolutely um and what i would say is there are probably more resources at your disposal today um kind of virtually there are you know online communities like searchfunder.com there are linkedin groups now i think there are a lot more affinity groups there are small business lawyers and small business diligence experts and an ecosystem of people who can help uh kind of help you navigate the path so i think that those are not uh you know having private equity experience or interning at a private equity fund is not a necessary condition whatsoever but what i would say is before you you launch a search or embark on the path i think there are a number of books that have now been written about you know entrepreneurship through acquisition i would say do your diligence um again i think there are a lot of communities a lot of the members of those communities are pretty open to engaging with people who may not have all of the experience that i alluded to earlier but have a desire to buy a small business and so i think that there are a lot of people and resources that you can tap into before you have to kind of jump out and do it on your own so i would definitely say do your research um you know get books get engaged in online communities you know look at a lot of the material that's on youtube you know go on linkedin and find people who have done it you know reach out to people such as yourself right by virtue of your platform you know people who've done it before and what i find that's really encouraging about the eta community is folks who have done it tend to be uh pretty open-minded about paying it forward and and and passing along wisdom and introducing uh people who want to do it to other folks that that can help them along their path so there's lots of resources there's lots of paths there's lots of people who want to see you be successful so there's no need to have all of that experience but there's also no need to go it alone and feel as though there's no one out there to help cool mike so when you you and your partner were getting serious about buying a business um did you consider why did you choose the traditional search fund model versus self-funded or some other way so i would say the the practical answer was there were no funds to sell fund so yeah i was i was gonna you know i was gonna get a a nice healthy bill at the end of my two-year stint at the university of chicago um and that's part of the answer and i'm being a little bit facetious but i would say the traditional search film model was the model that i knew the most about i would say that the self-funded path has grown in popularity and that ecosystem has really expanded in terms of banks that understand the needs of self-funded searchers um service providers um i think all of that is really grown and and i'm glad to see it um again i'm the the traditional search model is what we did and what worked for us but i'm a proponent of eta more broadly and and whatever path fits an individual you know their goals their lifestyle um and their means i i say go for it but i would say just familiarity with the model just the reality of of kind of you know our economic circumstance and particularly my economic circumstance finishing school and i think the last piece though and it kind of goes back to this this concept of community uh the traditional search community as keith and i kind of sat down and and and thought about it you had a former investment banker and myself and keith who is a recovering corporate lawyer today but was it was a practicing attorney at the time who had an ahead for business and an interest in business but had never run anything substantial right so my previous entrepreneurial venture was two people that was a bootstrap startup and really we were only accountable to and for ourselves yeah but buying a business with employees and you know customers with you know long-standing relationships and systems and a complexity that extended far beyond you know my two-person venture we wanted to surround ourselves with a community of people who had seen past where we had seen up to that point from a professional perspective operating a business and so what we wanted to get out of the traditional search in our experience and i think that i've uh now been able to connect with some folks who have done it on their own and self-funded and they've created their own ways to create that brain trust and that advisory board for lack of a better term around them but what we saw as being an advantage for us going down that path was it was something that had been done before so there were people who had experience with the model we were going to get investors who many of whom and most of whom in our case actually had sat in the seat and run a business so we were going to be working with and learning alongside people who did know and understand the pitfalls and challenges that we were going to be facing both from a business perspective and also just from a personal and emotional and psychological perspective it's very hard to go from being a type a personality get the gold star individual contributor to really having to create results through other people it's a very big shift in what you're being asked to do right as a banker as a lawyer you know it is very project focused and you really contribute and make sure that you're part of the project is up to snuff but you cannot you know achieve all of the objectives that you want to in a small business on your own and so learning how to humble yourself learning how to spend more of your time coaching than doing it was really helpful for us to see that we were surrounding ourselves with people that can help us make that journey and make that transition as leaders so that's kind of why we decided to go down that path and just two quick follow-up questions to that the transition to leadership exactly what you just touched on that when you're an individual contributor you just have to make sure your own work product is is as perfect as you want and then the rest is somebody else's responsibility and then now having to lead people and you know basically extract the wrong word but um you know get them to put their best uh put out their best work how how did you find that transition because i think a lot of searchers are are going to have will have to go through a similar transition where they've never necessarily led before how was that for you personally so it's a tough transition and i'll tell a really quick story about two years into us by having bought and run the company we were struggling keith and i were struggling there were more problems um than we knew how to fix at one time and we had multiple stakeholders so we had investors we had employees we had customers and everybody needed something from us and trying to figure out how to get everybody what they needed was really challenging and i remember one day driving home from work and going back to this concept of community actually talking to another search fund ceo who was a few years ahead of me and keith but also went to our alma mater and so i knew i knew of this guy and i knew that he was in the search community and he scheduled some time to talk and we just needed someone to vent to that and this is hard and how did you get the team to do this and how did you get your investors comfortable with this and the one thing that he shared um or two things that he shared that really helped us on our journey is one he introduced us to this book written by ben horowitz called the hard thing about hard things yeah and reading that book and seeing the honesty and transparency and vulnerability of an individual who didn't have it all figured out um admitting that as the ceo he didn't have it all figured out and that he still had imposter syndrome and he still was wondering whether he was building the right culture and treating people the right way and making the right decisions it almost gave me a sense of comfort that i'm not the only person that keeps we're not the only people who've gone through this and struggled through this so that gave me a sense of comfort and then the second thing that he shared which really i think was a transition point for both of us was he let us vent for about five straight minutes about this person that person this situation and he said the best advice that i can give you is as the leader of the company you should recognize that it's all your fault and i just and i i was floored by that and he said what i mean by that you're like you're like i was calling you to make me feel better exactly and now i feel not even slightly but materially worse because it's all my fault but what what he was saying was there is just a different level of accountability and responsibility and until you make the transition to say right i did not cause us to cause all of the problems in the business right i don't get to direct all the personalities that i interact with but until i kind of make that switch in my brain that i am responsible for the results and that i have to take the reins versus letting the business kind of pull me along or let investors pull me along or customers kind of jerk you around and i think at that point i think one it didn't solve all of the problems but i think that it gave us a sense of a greater locus of control and a greater sense of agency that it was up to us to manage right employee issues right it was up to us to manage how we wanted to relate to our board of directors right it was up to us to if if we had a relationship with a customer where we were giving our all and we just kept getting blessed out we had to manage that relationship and if we felt as though that customer relationship was abusive and wasn't good for the team we we actually we're the people who got to make that call and so we had to make some of those decisions to say hey um this is a great paying customer but at the end of the day you know we've sent three team members to service this customer and all three of them have come back you know upset crying or you know not exuding kind of their regular posit positive energy it is our responsibility to fix that and i think once we started to feel as though we were empowered to make those changes and not be at effect to them i think things started to change and we started to build a respect from our employees and we started to build a trust and the one piece of advice that i would give people is when you buy a business you don't buy the hearts and minds of the employees right and you know a lot of people want to make a lot of changes and they see growth potential and they see all of the great things that they want to do with the business but that is only truly achievable once you've earned the respect and trust of your team and you have found a way to clearly articulate what you and your vision is for the business and how they can work with you to help achieve this vision and that that vision is going to be better for everyone and that's something frankly that we struggled with in the early days and and coming from environments where we were individual contributors um and pretty well paid for being individual contributors um we kind of came in with the mentality that you just come in and you know work your tail off and you leave and that's reward in and of itself and at the end of the year you know when the bonus ferry comes it takes care of itself but the business that we bought it was more like a family and you know the first thing that we learned very quickly is that people appreciate and respect money but money was not our best tool in the toolkit to motivate and to build alignment and it kind of blew our minds and you know you always think about you don't need to pay attention in business school to the touchy-feely organizational behavior classes but those are the classes that i think i drew upon the most yeah to understand why people come to work to understand you know something as simple as the ceo and president sitting down to have lunch with the admin staff every day something as simple as the president and ceo taking out the trash yeah all of those things um contribute to i think winning the hearts and minds and so i think a lot of people in business forget that particularly as you lead a business and you want to grow it there's only so much that you can do on your own and you're really creating a challenge for yourself if you skip that step of getting to know your people and thinking about the culture that you want to build because you can come in with the the greatest powerpoint and plan an excel spreadsheet but that's not really how getting everybody wrong in the right direction and achieving those objectives works in practice from our experience one of the traditional searchers that i spoke with recently his his interview actually aired today his first two weeks in the seat he just interviewed every single person at the organization so he didn't you know none of his to-do lists none of his vision ideas none other things on his powerpoint uh or even as even in his own mind were a priority that was just all put aside in fact i think he even kind of went in thinking yeah i might have some ideas but i'm really not going to understand this business until i get in and live in the business and talk to everybody so um let me do that and he did it systematically every single person and and that's one of the things he now recommends to searchers coming up behind him you know another way mike that i i might characterize this um and you can please correct me it it it almost feels like when you guys got in there in this first year or two that you didn't really feel like it was your business like your business at kind of a visceral level it felt like you were maybe you'd been hired to be the ceos but you had bought this business and owned this business and needed to internalize that as much as if you had founded it from scratch is is that is is am i onto something there about kind of the emotional shift that occurred you're absolutely correct and it is a shift and i think that um that's why i think you know what what the searcher that you alluded to is i think that's the right start but i think that it's those deposits over time as a leader are the things that are going to build trust so for example uh when we uh when we when we bought the company in 2014 we we talked to employees we brought in a third party that gave us some great intel on some very anonymous intel but what we recognized is that we were very forthcoming that we wanted feedback we wanted to make things better we wanted to make it a better place but no one believed us right and so i would get in my car and keith would get in his car and meet some of our staff you know on site or close to their homes and just grab coffee and catch up and so we would we'd ask them hey what's going on what could we fix and a lot of the times people would just say yeah everything is fine yeah and we knew that everything wasn't fine but we knew that there was a culture that we inherited um where people didn't necessarily know whether or not um you know the leaders really wanted to hear what was going on particularly negative feedback or if there were areas of improvement that would make things better ideas and suggestions kind of fell on deaf ears and so i think for us you know we did get some really good feedback in the first year and then spending the second year showing people that we cared about the feedback and we action some of the things right we we and we never promised that things wouldn't change and we never promised that we could solve all of the issues in the business overnight but i can tell you that you know once we started having staff meetings and we said hey we listen to you guys and across these three or four dimensions we hear you loud and clear we got to fix these things and then being able to report back to the staff right in this bucket issue number one we fixed it yeah right and then you know over the course of the next year after having you know shown that we we were credible in that the culture that we said that we wanted matched right where people could say well hey i just had a meeting with mike and keith and i know they keep saying that they they value healthy debate and they were debating with one another and then i told them here's what i thought and i left the room and no one chastised me and they actually heard me and between the three ideas on the table they took my idea and now my idea is the idea that's helping to solve one of the challenges like that process started to to build it where cycle like emotionally and psychologically it started to feel like our business and our team yeah and it just took time and it just took time to build that that trust and and once you feel and there isn't isn't just one day you get out of the bed but i think it's just a feeling that when you feel as though people trust you and trust the direction that you're taking the business in then it feels like it's your business and you know you're not pulling an organization you know forward but people are like i see it i believe it i'm contributing to it you know i can raise my hand if things aren't going well but um if i see a problem part of the culture is i gotta own it so i can't just throw monkeys and complaints on mike and keith's back and then go home i've got to actually raise my hand and say hey i don't think that we're doing this right and so i'm going to put together a little committee of people and we're going to come up with some options and solutions and so it took us about two years to really feel like the team trusted us that we had really properly stepped into our authority as the leaders of the company and then from there we started to i think start to move the business in the direction of the original plan and i think that all goes to say as well this path is not a microwaved path to success so for people who think that you know oh i'm going to jump in and in 12 months i'm going to solve these challenges i'm going to you know quadruple this business and i you may and if you can do that bless you that has not been our experience i don't think that that is the typical experience um i think what is the typical experience is that it takes time for you to build your muscle as a leader for you to build a trust with the team for the team to get in sync for you to you know to add some people to the team that help you get to where you want to go and it's really about building that momentum so that the things that you really wanted to do with the business now you have the momentum for years and years to come to achieve the success that you want but i don't you know i would not tell people with a straight face that you know this is a path that typically leads to microwave results i think it's more of a patient consistent effort and i tell people people probably overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in five and so it was really special um actually in our fifth year of ownership to take uh some of that feedback that we got in the first year because it took us a while but we took a slew of feedback um positive and negative and we put it together in a presentation and we shared it with the entire company and at year five we did just a little bit of a retrospective so we showed people how many employees were at the business the size of the business the type of equipment that we had the benefits that we had the customers that we had uh the leadership structure and opportunities for career advancement so we really got to show people it it didn't seem like it because it took time yeah but let's all take a blast to the past when mike and keith showed up um you know 50 miles north of baltimore in horse country with cufflink shirts completely out of place right where we started and then where we ended up five years later in being able to honestly and proudly report that to a large degree the issues and opportunities addressed in the feedback session have been executed against and that the company was larger the company was on better financial standing um people were making more money you know more take-home the company had grown um might mike share some of those specifics with me how many how many employees was it when you acquired it and how many was it five years later and if you can talk revenue and sales as well locations anything any metrics that would be interesting sure so i'll i'll focus on kind of headcount which is is a good barometer for for kind of sales but when we started there were uh 16 people total in the business um including keith and myself five years later we were at 34 people and essentially we doubled the technical staff which just as a rough benchmark kind of approximate so that we doubled the size of the revenue of the business to have enough revenue to support you know 10 you know essentially doubling the technical staff and we've grown beyond that and so we've gotten each person on that team their own set of equipment where people were sharing equipment we've markedly improved the benefits package the time paid time off policy continuing education policy we've improved again career opportunities we were a flat organization at 16 it was mike and keith and everybody else and today we have a president of that group we have two senior managers that report to the president we have team leads we have now a regulatory qa person we have a client service manager where that was a flat side of the business and so we've been able and this is actually for me the most rewarding um part of part of the gig is um you know we hired a woman in 2015 to be a part-time admin from craigslist and she is now our director of hr and uh head of integrations for all of apex and so we took kghp grew it took some of our learnings built a larger organization and have continued to acquire businesses under under the new banner and to see people from that original team in 2014 and 2015 progress and blossom and do things that frankly you know sitting around the lunchroom table in the early days you know folks thought we were crazy that is truly um i think one of the most rewarding kind of elements and i think that that's something that people don't uh think that they will feel as rewarded by um because you know obviously there are financial rewards you know by owning a business and growing a business and you know building you know your wealth and financial independence and the like but i think also i don't think there's a greater feeling than seeing potential grooming potential and being a part of helping somebody achieve their goals and vision and mission and life and give them access to opportunity and i think that that's a it's a really cool position to be in you know running a business and because you're running a small business and you have a pulse of what's going on the feedback and the impact that you're able to make is a lot more direct right you are directly involved in you know the hiring and the culture that you're building and how people are compensated and uh what new challenge you're going to take on next and how are you going to give this person an opportunity to prove him or herself is just a direct one-to-one feedback loop of being able to create impact um you know for yourself but before your team mike we're about a time but i want to ask you a question related to why you so i i found you because of that article that you published in entrepreneur magazine that was basically advocating acquisition eta entrepreneurship through acquisition but this article is from august and you've been talking about and excited about eta i guess going back to those grainy videos in 2008 2009 on youtube so why now what what inspired you to publish this article at this moment in time so i think a few things um i think candidly i was working my butt off for a long time and i just wanted to make sure that that that i was i was being a good steward of the business um but i think the second piece is uh you know both keith and myself uh were really impacted um by the killing of george floyd and a lot of the um conversations that were happening in the country around social justice economic justice and access to opportunity and i just observed in a lot of the press that i read that there was a lot of movement and activity to uh to open the aperture in terms of opportunity and diversity for entrepreneurship particularly in the startup world which i think is great and i think uh is sorely needed um but i think that this path of entrepreneurship through acquisition i think both from a from an ethnic perspective from a gender perspective from an age perspective from a professional background perspective i think more people should be educated and made aware that that this is a career path and opportunity and i wanted to um to highlight that um there are different ways to achieve success and that all of that success um doesn't look the same all of that success doesn't come from the same background and i think the big thing that keith and i try to do when we do do things like write articles and and speak at schools or in other forums is we try to demystify the process and we try to let people know that on the outside looking in these people who go out and buy businesses a lot of whom are very polished and very smart and sometimes it can be daunting and people don't feel as though they can do it or the story that they hear is i bought the business i was really smart everything worked swimmingly well and you know i'm a rock star and i wanted to just share that our story wasn't that and our story was rocky and there were times where we doubted um whether or not we would be able to be good leaders of the business and you know i tell people a true story um there was a time early in our um our leadership period where you know i drove home and i sat in a grocery store parking lot and i cried and i called my mom um and asked her you know i spent all this money to go to business school am i doing the right thing am i really cut out to be a ceo or a leader of a small business and you know i just want people to know that it's not easy but it's doable and i want more people um to at least investigate it as an option and as a path if they truly have that entrepreneurial bug and i think that is just another way to express a desire uh to lead to manage to grow outside of kind of like i said going back to 2008 2009 kind of what seems to be the typical perception of what entrepreneurship is which is you know taking an idea from scratch and um you know building a startup there's there are other paths i just want to make sure more people and more places from other backgrounds no matter how you slice it see someone or hear from someone that it's achievable and doable and you know keith and i you know where we can also put our money where our mouths are but definitely we definitely put our time where our hearts and intentions are and we we make as much time as we possibly can to connect with and shepherd and guide or make introductions to people who are who are considering this path so if people want to connect with me i want to learn more want to talk to people who've done traditional search self-funded search and anything in between um i'm happy to to be a resource and helpful if i can well that's that's great mike and that was an awesome sentiment you expressed there so let's let's leave it at that and why don't you share with the audience how people can reach out to you if they if they need your help or guidance or just want to uh talk about what the possibilities are sure i think the easiest way to connect with me is via linkedin um so first name michael last name curry i am the ceo of apex physics partners um and um besides that you can shoot me an email at m curry c-u-r-r-y at apex physics partners all one word dot com and happy to be a resource if i can that's great mike thanks so much for for coming on and sharing your story uh the downs and the ups and um congratulations on on getting through those first two years thank you very much and thank you for having me i really enjoyed this