bruce van thank you for joining me today on acquiring minds thank you for having me will you acquired lux out stage curtains a manufacturer of stage curtains so this isn't residential curtains over windows in your home but the really tall heavy fabric ones that open and close during performances at theaters and churches and schools wherever you find stages so one of those really niche businesses that probably you probably weren't even aware of before you saw the business for sale at least i i wasn't until i reached out to you so you bought it two years ago two years ago this coming february and i know from our pre-call that things are are going well so this is a really cool story um and let's let's get right into it start us off with a quick background on you bruce so take us up give us all your relevant background taking us right up to that decision to go out and buy a business sure sure so um i went to business school but prior to business school i got a degree in economics and work for geico in the product management uh role i like that role but i wasn't going to make much money there it's just kind of the nature of the business structure or the business model of geico it's always about being a low uh cost provider so i wanted to go find something else even though i love my experiences went to business school at darden um loved it it was one of the probably the best two years of my life and i got a lot of exposure to a bunch of things and that was where i learned that just like you can go and buy a house with a note you can go and buy a business with the note um the thought started and sort of ended there um i went to go work for an oil and gas company and it was a the role that i was in was was good it was sort of like a cfo role of a small division but the culture of the company didn't really work for me um i just held my breath saved my money invested it over time um they had a nice 401k match and that capital became useful later on when it was came time to buy my business uh for the way that i structured my purchase um but i left there at at exactly three years uh to the day and uh then didn't really know what i was going to do kind of floundered around tried to start a few businesses from scratch none of them picked off i mean i like took off um so i ended up working a couple of odd jobs until i started to beat the bushes of my um my uh my network after losing my third job um uh which i've never lost a job in my life prior to this season in my life but for whatever reason those four years i've lost three jobs in four years um i started to beat the bushes of my network and somebody uh said hey bruce you ever thought about doing the search fund i was like huh yeah well i only only had one case my entire time at darden on the search fund looked into it i had a good feeling about it um had actually even had a dream about it um which and that gave me even more uh sort of made me feel even better about going forward with this path um and then for the next um 15 or so months i just beat the bushes of um i just sort of dove right in to searching for something to buy and fortunately i bought a really really good uh small business and i didn't even have to use any outside capital uh to do it that was the part that really surprised me there's there's a lot here so i'm gonna um pick apart some of some of your story here so first of all darden is uva university of virginia's business school this is important to me because i'm a virginia guy like you you're from hampton virginia you went to to undergrad in richmond virginia at vcu also know many many of my friends growing up went to vcu then you went to uva for business school and you are in uh richmond now so the business that you found is in richmond virginia correct correct it's like maybe it's walking distance from the grocery store i went to when i was a student that close and in fact your search had you had looked at buying businesses all over the place so that you you fortunately i mean i assume you wanted to stay your home found one near home but you you were totally open to going anywhere and and yet yeah you find this one with the convenience store just down the down the black from where you were as a student um the now uh losing the three jobs over those four years so you had been a successful guy you never lost a job before that but you just hit this rough patch in your in your professional life and i i imagine that that got you down so just talk to me a little bit about your head space during that time absolutely i mean i think it was really just a bad i'll talk about my headspace and how i got into that rut in my career so yeah post business school i don't think that you really understand this when you're in business school when you come out it's like when you're in business school immediately when you come out you can basically do anything in the business world but once you pick that thing that you're going to do you're kind of pigeonholed to that thing and so i got pigeonholed into just doing accounting work and i'm i can understand accounting but i'm not a great fit for accounting i don't really care about controls i'm not a corporate policeman all those things that make a good auditor account controller i was more like a not to diminish one type of person versus another but it was more like it was a bad fit for me was like putting an eagle among ducks everybody it can all fly together and and what not but as soon as it's time to go into the water the eagle tries to go into the water it's going to be it's going to look crazy and then if the the eagle tries to go fly too high then the ducks are gonna look at the eagle like they're crazy so it was a bad fit for me and i kept getting these were the only jobs i could find but in my second when i lost my second job um that one really hit me home and i and i and i really was actually suicidal at one point because i thought man i did all this stuff the right way went to the right school especially as a black man in this country uh you don't want any strikes against you because you really basically have to be perfect in order to get anywhere close to what what what what you're warranted um to get um so it was it was rough but um fortunately the grace of god i pulled through definitely with the support of my family um but it was it was a very very rough and low patch yeah and the so do you think that the decision to buy a business and essentially be an entrepreneur be your own boss that must have i mean was that something that you saw for yourself before this rough patch or do you think that you saw it as a path out of the rough patch or a combination of the boat of both of those or what yeah good question it was both i mean actually in my darden essays i said i wanted to be an entrepreneur i just didn't think it was going to be possible and at that time i only knew about starting something from scratch and changing the world like making the next facebook or something like that uh but uh so it was always in my my heart to do that it just i just didn't know how i was going to get back there matter of fact actually when i was in high school um instead of going to get a job what i did was i sold candy and drinks in high school and made a little profit every day enough so that i didn't have to go and work and i could feed my fast food habits and buy some clothes and stuff like that so once i had a taste of it back then it was just a matter of figuring out how to get back to it um in my adult life and it took a while but i got here so this this person that told you about search funds or said have you considered a search fund while you were out there kind of figuring out what was next this was just a colleague of yours somebody in your network uh this was someone in he wasn't even really in my network so i beat the bushes of the dart network and i talked to a gentleman who knew the ceo of buzz franchise brands and he said hey why don't you reach out to kevin that was that's his name's kevin um and while i'm in kevin's office we're just talking because i was looking for work that was in tidewater and there wasn't there's there aren't many like highfalutin high finance jobs basically out there um and the thing that he that's when he at the end of the conversation he said that he said i might be able to put you in contact with somebody and that's um that sort of just began the whole thing for me uh from there and so you this person mentioned search fund to you remember that from your darden days a case study at darden but what you proceed to do is not not the traditional search fund where you raise money and with the the whole that whole structure and model you just were going to buy a business for yourself you had saved up you're really good with money you'd saved up all this money over over the course of these years and so you had enough money to make uh down payment uh or the the 10 to 20 percent and bring on the sba loan as the other piece um so so tell us so tell me more about the search are you uh you had said to me in our pre-call that you looked at at businesses all over the country were you just were you looking for a particular type of business if you weren't geographically constrained obviously we're all financially constrained you had that constraint but what other constraints did you have i i didn't care about the industry i didn't really care that much about where it was i just cared that i could find something one that i knew i could scale and and wrap my head around i wanted something that i could not i felt like i couldn't mess up um with my highfalutin uh uh nba ideas because we all have and think that we know what we're talking about and then the market gives you a sense of a slap in the face and says no this is what i really want um and then i wanted something that i could get at an acceptable multiple right i didn't want to overpay i think if i so for those three things they were very important to me um in my in my search and um i think they they suited me pretty well uh when it came time to have the end result and so did you were you just looking at biz buy sell or did you reach out to brokers around the country or what what were the actual mechanics of your search yeah good question so i mean i kept the i i didn't have a crm system like as like some searchers have yeah today and i i applaud those who who do that i wasn't that sophisticated all i did was put things into a spreadsheet uh matter of fact it wasn't even a word i mean a microsoft spreadsheet i had google google sheets of things just because i was that cheap not not even excel man you were using i don't even know like no so uh but but i put everything in the spreadsheet so i would wake up every morning um and my now wife she was my girlfriend back then she said oh my gosh you don't have a job but you are like working out working everybody i know with the way that you're you're searching but i would wake up every morning check the listings um inquire about things check the listings meaning meaning biz by sell or stuff in your inbox brokers as you had sent you stuff in your inbox or what brokers sent me things in the in in my inbox but i mean i feel like if you want a really good deal you you have to search it out and beat everybody else to it and that's just the nature of things like fortune favors the bold and one thing that i have is that i can be bold enough to like really knock on doors everywhere and beat everybody else to the chase um so that's basically what i did i looked like your biz by cell and anything that looked interesting i would introduce myself and i would stick stay up with brokers because you know you have some brokers that are very responsive and you have other brokers that are not responsive at all and it's just a matter of knocking on that door so you can there's assignment here i won't show it and pull it down but i have it in my office that says persistence and it's a calvin uh coolidge uh quote because if there's one thing i absolutely believe in is being persistent and this this role is actually very or doing search if you are a persistent person it doesn't really matter how smart you are per se you have to have a certain level of it but beyond that you just have to be extremely persistent in executing um and and keeping your deal flow up so that's my story and i i stuck to it probably i don't know how many businesses i looked at but my guess is it was in in the hundreds at least per month probably in the thousands uh most of them uh it's just like dating you swipe left on but every so often you find something that's a good maybe and you pursue that thing until you get all the information that you have and then you make an offer and that's basically what i did i i uh using uh not to put too fine a point on it but using biz by sell primarily for your deal flow and the reason i'm interested in that is just because you know you hear people um say you got to get off biz by sale you got to do proprietary search and then you hear other others of course say the proprietary search is a huge amount of effort with that without a lot of uh response um and you know we're all on biz by sell anyway i mean it's a very alluring website with i mean i'm constantly checking it anyway um but um anyway so i'm always interested to hear from successful searchers who use biz buy sell pretty much exclusively and did in fact buy a business from the site well so let me add a caveat to that i started out with the proprietary search but what i found with the proprietary search was deals are much harder to come by and then most sellers they just think their baby is far more valuable than it actually is in my experience yeah um they may want eight times ebitda for a business that is shrinking and that was one of my experiences and it was like i can't offer you that because there's no way i can make any money on this deal i probably can't even get a bank to accept the terms of financing this at this at this multiple like you got to have some give here so what i found was that sellers who have a broker they at least have some of this that come down to earth for their valuations yeah and the broker their broker has done the hard work of showing them what the realistic valuation of their businesses and they're also motivated to sell so i said you hope that their broker has done that done done that work uh to convince you she's done their job yeah if they've done their job right right yeah but also it's just the whole dynamic of like when somebody has is in has put out there that their thing is for sale you ha you as the potential buyer have a little bit more leverage than if you're going around to all these business owners who aren't thinking about selling and then and they're just like well sure make me an offer like you automatically have less leverage and you have to make them an enticing offer presumably um if you haven't been thinking about selling so cool all right so you now i remind me you actually went down the path on a few businesses and that you really wanted and it didn't work out give me give me quick details on one or two of those stories yeah sure one was one was a concrete company i founded it had an acceptable asking multiple from my perspective uh try to put an offer on it the broker just ghosted me and then came back months later was like oh yeah we raised the price that we went after somebody else who could do blah blah blah for the financing i don't remember exactly what what all he said that one stung uh really really really bad pretty early and the another one that stands out in my thinking was a landscaping company there was a landscaping company that i wanted to purchase um that uh i didn't want to pay more than uh one point uh was a 1.275 for the business based on the math that i could see that was the high end of what i wanted to pay for the business i think they were trying to sell it for 1.5 or something like that um and the guy the seller called me a nuisance because i was trying to ask him a question about the advance i was like hey i need your your help here to to explain to me what these ad backs are so that i can substantiate this valuation that you're asking me to to pay and he said you're a nuisance you're probably going to drive my people away and all that all these other things i was like okay we'll find out i'll back away from this deal yeah apparently this is not a good fit for me yeah and there has to be that chemistry between the buyer and the seller how dare you ask about some questionable ad backs exactly which is the same question that the bank is going to ask right for the yeah but anyway a year later that broker contacted me and said oh yeah bruce uh you know that that business is for sale now for uh 8.50 and i was like man i dodged a bullet with that one so the guy actually sold the business for uh or was selling it putting it back on sale for 850 instead of the 1.5 and i was fighting him for 2.1.275 yeah so it's just it is what it is so through all of this bruce you talked about persistence and we talked about how you had you were on a coming out of this rut in your career were you feeling discouraged in the search your girlfriend tells you that she's so impressed with how hard you're working even though you're not actually gainfully employed um you and i both know of course that you're you're working toward a great uh outcome but it might be hard for somebody who doesn't understand search to see that or understand that um and and you just hear i hear from my guests and and from the ecosystem so often that search is extremely lonely extremely demoralizing filled with rejection um you know it's it's basically it's a lot like sales like a sales effort um so so how's your head spaced during this search during this very frustrating search on the heels of a very frustrating professional um you know three years four years yeah i mean i think my my headspace got better i mean the headspace was the worst after the second job lost i thought the third one i was like okay these people are idiots and i just don't fit in anybody else's company that's what i kind of just walked away from under what with the understanding of and so i knew like i knew there was something out there for me i just didn't know what i didn't know where it was and like plus also like i told you i had a dream for whatever reason when i first started to consider search fun doing a search fund i had a dream one night that i was pulling my car into a parking space and whatever business i had bought in this parking space was in the middle of of the hood somewhere uh and and and it just so happened that the business that i bought is is kind of in the middle of the hood of richmond so uh so i felt like i was on the right path um once i kind of got up there i was like okay this is where i need to be and and then actually after that it's just a matter of sort of like i told you in the pre-call it's like it doing this is just like taking a full course shot and it's just a numbers game you put up as many shots as you can in a certain amount of time and eventually something goes in um if you do it the right way now you want it to be a shot that you actually want to make because you don't want to overpay for a business yeah obviously yeah but but that's that's really kind of how it is so i mean i think my headspace when i started the search was much better um i still had like a lot of the bitterness from all the crap that happened to me but i was just like okay well that happened to me and i kind of have to move past that and go forward to to to getting my own business cool so okay so how long is your is your search taking when you find lux out how long has this been how long did it take from when i started the search to when i closed or yeah yeah well how long did how long had you been searching when you found lux out and then once you found lux out how long did it then take to close on the business yeah i saw i started my search in uh november of 2018. was it november no i'm sorry i really started it in in january of 20 2019 okay like officially um found lux out in july of 2019. okay and it didn't close on lux out until february of 2020. okay so six months of six months of searching uh and kind of just searching without really anything going anywhere very serious then at month six or seven you find lux out and then another six or seven months before close yeah because it took a long time to negotiate uh it took like i had my signed loi around i want to say thanksgiving of 2019 um and then that's that and then i presented that to the bank and then it took a long time for them to uh get all their ducks in the in the in the row so that we could uh we could close on the business so can you can you tell us about lux out what what tell us a little bit more than i said in the intro about what it does and then tell me about the size of the business and and any of the numbers that you can share on your uh on its revenue and your offer for it etc yeah sure sure sure so lux out has been around since the 40s uh in some form it started out as a company called tuckahoe drapery cleaners used to clean curtains but now is in the business of manufacturing uh stage curtains um for for theaters and our industry is very what's attractive about our industry is that it's kind of geographically segmented uh the nearest competitor to the north is in pittsburgh the nearest competitor to the south they're actually a couple of competitors in the in north carolina and one in south carolina um one in georgia that i can think of there's several in florida but we kind of mainly have a pretty good foothold on the mid-atlantic because there's only so much space in this business and if you don't know what you're doing when you're making stage curtains and when you're bidding them you can very quickly drive yourself out of business i actually saw somebody do exactly that uh even in my short tenure uh here so the bulk of the business is the stage curtain business we do it for new construction and we do it for for replacements um we have some things that are that are key differentiators from us from everybody else for one we have an online quote tool for uh for our stage curtains um so any person can go up there and if they know the dimensions and the specs of exactly what they want they can do that my sales people use the online quote tool and then they quote it for the customer um we are to my knowledge the only company in our industry that has something that transparent um the other thing that we have that kind of differentiates us is that uh we make our curtains in a certain way that makes them safer and they look better the folds still the pleats stay in the curtain from top to bottom uh in a way that's a little bit better than everything else that i've seen that's out there um so that's sort of the key differentiator there then there's another part of the business where we make shades uh uh window shades we have a high end line of window shades called lux out shades and we have a separate website for um for that let's see what else should i say about the business uh we are for in terms of revenues revenues are in the seven figures i plan to grow it substantially uh but hey that the the pandemic came and definitely changed some of those plans but still we're back in the now we're back in a place where it seems like we're we're on the path to growth again as a company just from what we've seen with our orders i wanted a business that was hard to mess up um it was very important to me um and one thing i also like about this business is that it has a long um sales cycle right like so a school district made or a construction company may decide to purchase their stage curtains two years in advance um and then so the orders place for that that amount of time that's the long end the high end of it is that long but it may be shorter especially for a school district um and then we may make them and then it will take a certain amount of time for us to make them and bill and then collect on the cash and everything like that so even with the disruption of the pandemic we still were all right we had our best year in 2020 uh as a company um even though our orders uh were down uh substantially and i don't think that's unique to us as opposed to anyone else and then in 2021 we came out all right we crawled forward um and now in 2022 it looks like we're looks like we're going to be in a really good spot uh for growth um as a company as far as what i paid for the company i i gave you the number of what i was talking about for the um uh for the landscaping company so you could tell that i was looking for companies in the that were less than two million in purchase price that was just because of what i could afford at the time based off of my savings uh but i got this company the cool thing about it i i got this company in it at an awesome multiple it was when it was all said and done it was at a two uh two times ebitda uh for a company that had been growing uh pretty substantially and i think part of the reason i was able to get that actually the main part of the reason i was able to get that is because i looked in places that other people didn't look right i think for larger targets everybody's looking at larger targets for one and then two the broker had reported uh cash flow but didn't really understand that the cash flow that you reported was wasn't even ebitda it was the net income and it was the net income after the previous seller and his wife um paid themselves a salary so i that's how i was able to get it at such an aggressive and because of my digging and my persistence i was able to find oh this is like a great deal and i can't believe anybody else that everybody anyone else passed over this deal uh based on the terms that uh that i was able to get it for so the broker under price to business essentially yeah yeah by by a lot and what that did for me was it made it so that the moment i purchased the company my net worth went up substantially um which was great well you're especially kind of like your equity i mean you meet had immediate equity because you know in theory you could you could flip the business and and turn a profit so yeah you now so that maybe the broker didn't didn't do the best job of evaluating the business um evaluating valuing the business the the owner from what i understand from our pre-call was it was a businessman so i assumed he had some sophistication and he he you would have thought that he might have caught the fact that he was selling a good thing for too cheap what do you think about that yeah i i think i i that's to this day i still scratch my head about that um i think he was just more at a place where he wanted something in his lifestyle as opposed to worrying about what he sold the business for yeah um he wanted to make sure he left it him and he wanted to make sure he left his baby and his staff with someone who was really going to care for it and i think that that's that's that's one thing the other thing is when my business is very it's not very capex heavy but it's very labor intensive because it's very labor intensive and there's such this long sales cycle in this long cycle to collecting cash there's a large portion of the balance sheet that is dedicated just to working capital so when he offered the price i think when he did the initial offering price he was thinking this is the price of the business without the working capital he kept the receivables and the cash and all these other things and what i did was i said well i need all the receivables and this amount of cash because i don't have that much money and i need you to uh to to leave that much in here um with the business and i'll go a little bit over asking price uh on these on these terms and he accepted it ah so you you just got you got a big chunk of working capital without it affecting the purchase price too much nice yep and you you said a few minutes ago bruce that you liked the long sales cycle did i hear that correctly why is it that you you like that typically people i i think that typically people um shy away from that yeah i mean i think there's pros and cons to it but one thing i do like i said i liked about it was the it basically insulated me when the world shut down yeah and nobody was in any theaters yeah anywhere i it insulated myself and my staff i didn't have to lay anybody off um we had some lean times but but i didn't have to do that i was able to keep everything going and if i had a shorter sales cycle at that it wouldn't have worked yeah yeah it just wouldn't work so yeah and you talk about growth and wanting to grow the business um but you also mentioned like you know there's only so many this market is only so big there's only so many curtains stages that need curtains so when you talk about growth um are you thinking acquisition of of you know the pittsburgh company or the north or south carolina company or are you just talking about organic growth are there are there a lot of stages going up uh in the mid-atlantic yeah there's not it's not that there's there's a bunch of stages going up but if you think about it though think about it this way a school district goes and they build a that school is probably going to be around let's say 75 years in that 75 year time there's their curtains are going to last them maybe 15 years of pop so that's five times where they have to replace their curtains per school and if you multiply that times all the schools in a given area there's quite a bit of opportunity um for the replacement market even if they're not building a bunch of new schools so that's one thing but in terms of the way that we we grow we have a culture it looks out of being significantly more aggressive uh at pursuing the business we don't i'm not saying we were pests or or anything like that but but we will persist most other companies yeah we're persistent most of the companies will wait for the business to come to them we don't wait we go after every the customer chats us does anything we're going after um uh after that lead and going to chase it down um to really make sure that we can do everything right by the customer um and turn it as many of those leads into sales as possible so um that's worked that's what they did before uh i don't and i think the challenge that a lot of others in our industry have is that there are a little bit more because because they've been around for a while it becomes easier to be more complacent complacent with the business model yeah um just take orders rather than yes yeah exactly and and we don't uh we just don't have a culture to do that so there's a it's an element of volcanic growth that goes into just doing that that has been proven before um and it very much aligns to how the focus of how i did business when i was a product manager analyst at geico um it's the thing that differentiated geico from other insurance companies growing organically in an old industry like that um the other thing is if i'm able to acquire something that's that already exists i'm more than happy to do that i mean i would love to have those conversations with anybody um in the industry um and i would have to of course make make sure that it's under acceptable terms uh for both them and for uh and for myself um but but yeah that's that's how we're planning to grow and we'll see we'll see exactly what happens everybody has a plan and then you get punched in the face that's what mike tyson said well but you've um in the business for two years now two years next month so um how has it been compared to um you know what you hoped and expected before you actually bought the business and got in the seat matter of fact i found you because you posted this great um essay on search funder shortly after you bought the business talking about you know what it what that transition was like uh it was really great but that was very shortly after you've gotten in the seat we're now you know a year and a half or almost two years later so so talk to me about how how things are compared to what your expectations have been yeah it's it's the i will put i would say these two years have been the best of times in the worst of times uh simultaneously they've been the best of times because the money i made my first year i was more it made up for all the crap that happened in the other years of my life where i was just wasn't that naked it was it blew my mind um and and that was that was great um and to be able to be preserved for the business to be not just preserved but preserved and thriving during that time that that was really really way more than what i thought it was going to be um and i think that's part of the reason why when you purchase an existing business you want something that is growing and doesn't require a ton of capex in order to continue to grow um i think that's one thing that a lot of searchers um should probably give some attention to um because i i really lucked out when it when it came to that it's been the worst of times just because i mean the orders fell substantially like i said um during that year even while we were doing very well so um and i won't say the the exact percentage but it was it was it was a lot and it was enough to be to be felt um i would say that second quarter of 2020 we like it was nothing was happening it was sort of like we were just a a ship without a paddle at certain points and then it kind of came back and then it came back full force um and then the other thing that i would say is like there's a lot of opportunity in certain markets that we had previously we had sort of dipped our toes in and now we're diving right in um too and i won't go into what those markets are unless the competitor hear me and doing exactly what i'm doing um but what we we think we found the secret sauce um two entirely new markets yeah two entirely new markets into uh growing um the business substantially i wouldn't be surprised if we i don't know what this year is going to hold especially with the with the omicron variant but if i it would not surprise me at all if we grew 25 to 50 this year um which is really good growth especially in the old boring industry yeah uh like like my own yeah yeah and on the heels of a pandemic so yeah you had said that because of the long sales cycles that insulated you from the from 2020 being a bad year yeah but those effects were going to catch up with you at some point so all those sales you didn't make in q2 2020 that capital was not going to then come in at some later date i assume in calendar year 2021 um and you had said that 2021 in fact is when you felt it but that it was still basically a profitable year like so so when when the code effect the covet effect did eventually catch up with the business tell me what the effects were with some specificity if you can sure i mean well the the if we still had the profits but they were down about i'll put it this way the profits were up in 2020 from 2019 by about am i thinking of this right i want to say a third they were up from yeah up in 2020 from 19 by about a third and then down in 2021 by about half and that's this is after paying myself my salary of course i'm thinking of things that just hit the the income statement um and and you have to also think that in 2020 we had that there was that uh that time period where the sba was covering the bank notes and things like that so there was an extra boon to it um and in 2021 that went away i mean that was that was gone that was completely gone away um that year actually no it's actually less than half whatever it was it was less than half because i forgot i made a a charitable donation um toward that name but it just sort of moves in in ebbs and flows in that in that way and the way to um and that's as much probably specificity as i can kind of give you without uh really really opening up my my books um there yeah did that answer your question that that's great uh the size of the business in terms of employees what what is what is your staff to look like how many folks well yeah about 25 folks 25 yeah oh yeah that's and and so the manufacturing is done by your staff or it's outsourced yeah it's done by us yeah we make it right here in richmond um we have i don't know four sewers two shade makers uh in richmond we have two sales people two customer service people two installers and then we have staff in um in in texas and north carolina also so we try to cover we try to dominate the south as much as possible and why is this not something that an industry that's been outsourced to china oh yes because it's next to impossible to do that's a good question yeah that was one of that was one of the questions i had when i was looking at the business it's the lead time of so every stage is different so in order to do our business you have to have someone that not only pursued the lead but actually went out to this usually i mean you can have you can train a a drama teacher to measure you can walk them through how to measure occur i mean uh measure a stage but usually you want a professional out there who says oh no we need this kind of fabric we need this this is the structure this is how it's laid out this that the other blah blah blah and then they can send the specs to the work room now if the work room that made it wasn't were in china that would be a nightmare scenario unless they could get everything perfectly uh done right like everything that's in that person's head is right on the paper and there isn't much need for back and forth communication for clarity for things that can go wrong all these other things and if it came like from the from east asia they could make it but if they do did something wrong like say for example they made the curtains three inches too long yeah well then that has to go all the way back to china yeah and and then come back and then hope that it works again and so because we're closer to our customers um and every stage is different that's why i have a business yeah it's pretty hard for it it'd be difficult for like amazon to come in and do my business or or anybody else that you can think of just because of the nature that because of that nature of it it's so sort of custom and there's so much back and forth and there's so much room for error so just give us a sense just roughly i know a lot of variation how much does your typical school auditorium stage curtain run yeah it varies um it depends on the size of the stage i mean for an elementary school you're probably looking most elementary schools um to replace their curtains is probably going to be four grand that's my guess to put the track up and and do all that other stuff it's going to be significantly more expensive because putting track which is what the curtains hang on is a little bit harder and it's certainly harder to do the rigging which is done that new construction um but as the school gets bigger middle schools will be we'll say 7 500 to 8 000 something like that and then high schools are probably going to be usually excuse me high schools are probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of uh 10 to um 10 to 17 000 depending on the size of the high school and the number of curtains and things like that um and then larger auditoriums they can become very huge you can spend you could take we just did a job uh in richmond actually uh we just did a job at the main street station um in richmond uh which is where the uh the the governor elect is going to have his i guess he's swearing or his party or something like that he's having some event there in a few days once he gets sworn in um the guy who did all this upset in the politics of the country and everybody was looking at virginia yeah but he uh he's doing it there and that was a i won't say the price of that job but that was significantly more expensive than the most expensive high school i've ever we've ever done so it just varies like that so when we see that guy giving his speech on tv and in the background is a pulled curtain or maybe a closed curtain we'll know where it came from you will know exactly where it came from yeah it came from us the uh a couple more questions for you bruce um when i talked to you the other day you were working from home as many of us are but you actually made a point of saying that you try to you really try to create some distance between yourself and the business because you know you you've just got the approach as as we all should of working on the business rather than in the business talk to me about how you how you approach that and also um weave in just like your first six months in the business because while many acquisition entrepreneurs want to buy a business and eventually be working on it rather than in it they find themselves at least during the transition period working very in the business did you have to do that and just talk me through all of that yeah yeah the short answer to your last question is i definitely had to do that i actually went out on and did some installs of stage curtains myself because during the labor shortage we couldn't get guys to come to work to save our life uh we couldn't even get people to accept job offers i would come in above other offers and they still would go and pick somewhere else it was it was rough so has that passed is that over is the label labor shortage over here yeah that well that part is the worst of it is done we have a good team uh we actually have a couple of good team of installers um now and and we're in a much better place but that was that was probably the roughest part of 2021 and i'll and i'll say this and then i'll answer your other your your your question um about working in the business versus on it more broadly but uh just to give you some perspective we had in a given month we need to do a certain amount of business we had a dry first three months of 2021 and then the fourth month in april that month came and it was like everything fell out of the sky because now all these like school districts they knew what they were going to do whether they're going to let kids back in and things like that and so everybody's focus wasn't on covey and then one thing i like about our business is regardless of whether regardless of whether you get stage curtains now or next year you're still going to need them at some point um so the demand doesn't really go away and evaporate so we had just the heavens fell from from an order's perspective that month uh but at that same time we just didn't have anybody to install them so it was it was it was a very tough spot um but i make sure not to do that on a regular basis like at least one day a week i need just time to just sit by myself and in quietness and think maybe i'll go play a video game or something whatever it is to kind of think about the problem do something else come back to it and try to have some sort of uh solution uh for it i was able to do that a lot more the first year and now fortunately i mean now that i'm not necessarily installing as much as i was before i'm able to do that again and take a step back but it's it's critically important at some point you're going to have to go in and do that one thing i would suggest to a new ceo and i'm still having to do this with my people and getting some pushback from them um is every job especially every critical job you won't really know which jobs are really critical but every job you should have some sort of desk documentation of this is how you do the job in case the person decides to up and leave or um they get coveted and you're out for a very long period of time and the work that still needs to go go on like you need that for the sake of your business continuity so um were there processes written down by the previous owner or have you had to write those from scratch oh we had to write those from scratch yeah i was actually so he's a very controlled man but i was very surprised that he didn't have that yeah before but i think that could be just because of my experience as a ceo kova has shaped my experience as a ceo so i think in in term in very real terms of something that he never had to think about when he was in my seat so i don't know uh but yeah did i answer your questions yeah okay um bruce have you ever managed people before in your previous jobs had you been a manager yes uh yes i did i i i had but they were always like the folks that i kind of managed and oversaw were all accountants um never had to manage a sales team before uh never had to manage an operations team um before and that all is different but it's not prohibitively different i feel like darden prepared me pretty well for it i assume you also had never managed as many as 25 people before when you manage the team of accountants it was probably just a small handful yeah so how was that when you rolled in day one looking at 25 faces looking back at you it was challenging i think it was challenging because everybody was on edge i wasn't because i was just like really calm in my life experiences that maybe just like say okay well whatever happens i'll roll with the punches but people were really on edge multiple folks crying people blowing up at each other i mean just in the first week it was i wasn't i didn't wasn't prepared for emotionally what that was going to be like i think when you start out in a business as a new owner and ceo especially a small business it's more like a family and you have to be very prepared you just have to be prepared because people bring all their childhood issues to their family and they bring their family issues to work and so you're you're just going to sort through a lot of that um and he said this and she said that can you believe that and so did you have to get in there and kind of solve those problems or did you just kind of let them dissipate on their own and kind of let let the you know let let things calm down kind of on their own as people adjusted to the new reality both um some of them warranted me resolving them other ones i said this is this does not affect the bottom line of my company this is you all need to figure this out as adults so it's it's you just kind of use your judgment yeah um there but it wasn't there was never a one-size-fits-all solution for that two more questions for you bruce both both personal the so just just to um highlight something that you said earlier about the money aspect so this you you said basically like you were just kind of amazed that you bought this business in in the first year you you not only paid yourself a salary but the business also generated uh let's say six figures in in cash flow um and so you go from an unemployed guy to a guy who not only not only has a healthy salary i assume is managing 25 people but is also now the owner it's it's not yours fully yours for another 10 years assuming you have the typical sba loan but essentially the owner of a business generating six figures a year in profit do i have all that right and and and if i do would you just reiterate how cool that is yeah it's it's it's it's hella cool man i i think it's i'm living a dream of of previous seasons of my life and that's one of the things i always told myself when i would go home and complain to my wife is like oh babe i gotta come over here and babysit and all this other stuff and and and then i'd get the reminder this is exactly what what you asked for in another season of your life so it's but it's but it's it's great so far man i wouldn't trade it for the world and and do you feel like acquisition entrepreneurship that kind of was the path that was waiting for you when you were going through those frustrated years of getting laid off or fired or whatever yeah yeah i think i should have done this a long well i mean i think i did it at the right time for my journey because i mean if i had done it prior to when i did it i probably would have been more arrogant but uh but it yeah i didn't understand how realistically doable it was and to me it was always like the the whole thought of an of a search fund okay that's what the that's what the the kids at uh hbs and stanford do that's not what i mean darn's a good school it's a very it's a good very good school but yeah like oh i wouldn't do that especially not and especially coming from darden i probably was probably i don't know for certain but i probably was one of the least wealthy folks among my classmates so it really i wouldn't have thought that i was going to even be able to do something like that um but it all worked out uh pretty beautifully and the returns you get i mean i know a lot of people kind of are scared of the of the sba notes and everything like that but the returns if you do this thing the right way you may get you may legit get a uh four or five hundred percent return and have to pay six percent on the capital and that difference you keep so it's it if so if you find something that's relatively stable just go for i to me i think it's worth it to just go for it so great last question bruce in your in your uh post that i referred to earlier on search funder you made a point of saying that here you are in richmond virginia which during the civil war was the capital of the confederacy you're an african-american man and you just you just made a a very personal and very historical uh point about all that you can you can kind of reiterate that for the audience sure absolutely i would love to so i'm from hampton virginia hampton virginia is where point comfort is it's where the first black folks came um to this continent in 1619. uh it's a family called the tucker family so that's the place i was born the place that i have my business is in the capital of the confederacy these people made an entire country to keep people like me from doing what i'm doing right now and i just feel elated elated elated elated that i'm able to do that and realize the dream um because i feel like that's just what was missing before i mean there are some folks that are that are good allies and there are other folks who want to try to disrupt and destroy uh people uh like me and regardless of whatever the case if if my family has their own wealth basis we don't have to really worry about that so um hopefully if if it works out uh when myself and my wife have children we won't have to uh they won't have to necessarily go work for someone else they can if they want to but they won't have to go and beg somebody not to fire them three times when they know they're qualified to do uh work so i'm really excited about that that's awesome that's that's really powerful and do you is there any um thing that in your search that as an african-american man you felt made your search different than it would have been for somebody like me and that and that maybe somebody else in the audience who's black person of color listening to this should know yeah absolutely i mean i think and i sort of talked about it earlier i think the guy with the lawn care i mean with the landscaping company when he called me a nuisance i think he just wasn't used to black people asking him questions that he didn't want to answer and he had some sort of hostility toward that and you're going to run into that in this world it's just if you're whether if you're anything other than a white male you're certainly going to run into it and if you're a white male you're probably to some extent going to run into it but you're just going to be more keenfully aware of it uh keep keenly aware of it you made up a word uh but you'll be more keenly aware of it if you're anything um uh other than that but you just take it and with strides keep it going and don't let it make it hopefully it makes you better and not bitter uh when it's all said and done so i i if anybody uh i if anybody wants to lament about their their woes of going through that experience i'm more than happy to uh to be an ear uh to to to to yeah to encourage somebody through through that rough patch well perfect segway how can people reach you bruce what's that what's the best way to get get a hold of you yeah best way to reach me is b van so bruce van b uh v a n n at l u x o u t dot com and uh yeah i'd love to hear from other searchers this has been really a fun interview bruce thanks a lot all right thank you will you have a good one you too