In this episode, we found a South Carolina-based steel fabrication company business for sale. Making $12.5 million in revenue and a cash flow of $1.6 million. We then talked about company's potential for expansion, its reliance on cyclical construction projects, and the crucial role of relationships with general contractors and financing challenges, particularly through SBA loans, providing valuable insights into business acquisitions in the steel fabrication sector.
Acquisition Lab and their team have been longtime supporters of the pod.
Acquisition Lab exists to help people buy a business and navigate all the complexities of the process, as well as provide a trusted framework, tools, and resources to support you from search to close.
If you are serious about buying a business, check out acquisitionlab.com or email the Lab's director Chelsea Wood, chelsea@buythenbuild.com and mention us ;)
In this episode, we found a South Carolina-based steel fabrication company business for sale. Making $12.5 million in revenue and a cash flow of $1.6 million. We then talked about company's potential for expansion, its reliance on cyclical construction projects, and the crucial role of relationships with general contractors and financing challenges, particularly through SBA loans, providing valuable insights into business acquisitions in the steel fabrication sector.
Acquisition Lab and their team have been longtime supporters of the pod.
Acquisition Lab exists to help people buy a business and navigate all the complexities of the process, as well as provide a trusted framework, tools, and resources to support you from search to close.
If you are serious about buying a business, check out acquisitionlab.com or email the Lab's director Chelsea Wood, chelsea@buythenbuild.com and mention us ;)
Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations.
For inquiries or suggestions, email us at contact@acquanon.com
Speaker 1:
We have a good idea of who should buy this. I mean obviously somebody with a beard in Columbia, south Carolina.
Speaker 2:
This is heavy, heavy lift type work and it's also it's a difficult business to staff.
Speaker 3:
This is not the kind of business you want to carry debt, because the debt you know. If it's an SBA loan, it's a 10 year loan and you've got to make a payment every month. That's the same.
Speaker 4:
If you crush it, your loan payment scales up. Seller knows that he's got a $5 million target and he's going to get his $5 million. It's just a question of kind of how long it'll take.
Speaker 2:
Welcome, buddy, to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. I'm Mil Snell, one of the co-hosts. We have everybody all the hosts on the podcast today and we talk about a deal that is near and dear to my heart because it's in Columbia, south Carolina, where I live. I haven't signed the NDA on it yet, but I did talk to the broker who I've worked with in the past, and this company is pretty interesting. It's a structural and ornamental steel fabricator installer in Columbia, south Carolina 12 and a half million in revenue, 1.6 million in EBITDA. We talk about the SBA components of doing a deal like this and whether or not it even is viable. Heather takes us to school on the SBA and some of the inner workings and the way that it works up market. It's a really fun episode. I think you'd learn a lot if you've looked at anything construction related or anything that's project based. I'm a big proponent of those and that's kind of a minority opinion, so hope you enjoy the episode and give us a follow.
Speaker 4:
Hey everyone, this is Bill. I'm just taking a quick break from this week's episode to tell you about a longtime sponsor, a major fan of the podcast Acquisition Lab. So a lot of our listeners that you guys tune in every week for our deal reviews. You want to get in on buying a business but you're not really sure where to start. The cool thing about Acquisition Lab is they were created to solve that problem. So they exist to help people buy a business and also to navigate all the complexities of the process. They provide a trusted framework, tools, resources. They kind of support you all the way from search while you're looking to buy a business, all the way to close. So if you're serious about buying a business, you want to learn more about the process and you want someone to Sherpa you through buying a business, check out acquisitionlabcom. Or you can email the lab's director, chelsea Wood, directly. It's just Chelsea at buythenbuildcom. Director Chelsea Wood directly. It's just Chelsea at buythenbuildcom. So how's everybody doing? I'm doing great because we have a whole crew. We got all four.
Speaker 1:
It's early here in California, I know.
Speaker 3:
It's early and I got my espresso to help me.
Speaker 4:
So Heather will get more interesting to the back half of the episode. Just hang in there.
Speaker 2:
Okay, yeah, I'll wake up heather. You're always like when we recorded with molson art. It was like an afternoon recording and he was in a like a bedroom robe, so I'm impressed that you always come ready even it's okay, I didn't understand those rules, so now, now that I know, maybe I'll change things.
Speaker 4:
Now we do the podcast on video and we did not always. I guess pants are still optional, but robes were okay. All right, what do we got today? This is like a big iron construction one for mills.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, mills got very excited.
Speaker 1:
In South Carolina. So it it definitely all right. Let's get into it, all right do I need to read it?
Speaker 4:
uh, I don't have it up, so whoever's got on the screen I can bring it up here. I'll read it. All right, I'll fire it up in case you didn't think the podcast was live. It is absolutely, absolutely live, Okay, so here we go.
Speaker 4:
This is a structural and ornamental steel fabrication company in South Carolina. The asking price the ever popular NA. The cashflow is $1.6 million per year on $12.5 million of revenue, and it's been around since 1979. So it's an aged business. A strategic structural and ornamental steel fabrication company is for sale. It is a full-service steel fabrication business serving South Carolina Period Only. Apparently, they specialize in everything from ornamental steel to structural steel fabrication. The company has grown the business to a gross revenue of 10 million plus in 2022, growing in 2022, growing at a compound growth rate of over 30% the last four years. The purchase comes with a full complement of vehicles, equipment and an experienced staff. I always love it when people quote four-year caters because that means probably they had a great year of growth three years ago. It's been flat since then, but we'll dig into that.
Speaker 4:
The real estate is leased a 23,000-square-foot facility. They get 18 employees. The Carbillies currently house this is a 29,000-square-foot owner-occupied complex in the central Midlands area of South Carolina. The complex consists of multiple buildings, each which serve a different job function. Structure of steel, stainless steel office robot, whatever that means, allowing for more efficient use of space. The company has two major competitors in their area and the company has the ability to double their output in the present facility. The owner will train for four weeks at $0 cost. He is selling because he is retired and this business is represented by Jesse Stone from Murphy business and financial corporations. Jesse looks very nice, not touching his face or wearing a hat and wearing a jacket. It looks like a very nice person. All right, what do we think?
Speaker 1:
So maybe Mills. What do these guys do Like?
Speaker 2:
in dumb person terms, I'm super intrigued by this company Because you can't tell in much detail, but I have worked with Jesse in the past. We did a deal maybe two years ago on the podcast. It was a roll-off container business and Jesse was the broker on that. So I text them. It's actually under LOI, which is a little bit disappointing. Intrigued by this business.
Speaker 2:
I think structural and this is heavy gauge steel. This is not like replacing the siding on your house or something like that. But new building is getting built and they're going to put concrete block up and then set steel trusses and metal deck. That's what they do. But those businesses can be feast or famine a lot of times. They only make money when new stuff is coming out of the ground. New buildings are being built and so they probably take on, like this kind of quote ornamental work also, which might be. You know, hey, I need a new staircase, uh, on the outside of my building, or a new handrail, uh, things like that, maybe custom gates and fences and stuff like that. But my guess is this is probably 80 plus percent commercial nuke.
Speaker 4:
So these guys are a subcontractor, right? So they probably do all their GCs.
Speaker 2:
They might do some work. Act like we've hired folks like this before when you need you know, for example, one of the things we procured like this was people kept running to a building and they needed some like heavy gauge steel bolted to the loading dock to keep people from hitting their concrete wall and would just hit the metal instead. Yeah, I think again, 80% of it is. They're a sub to a.
Speaker 4:
GC on. So when you have a business model like that, where you it's like a B2B to C or B2B to B, I guess because you got to go through the GC, how important are the relationships with the GCs? I mean, are you like, do you have a sales function in this business that is essentially cozying up to GCs nonstop? Is it like one or two GCs that send you your whole business or let you bid on all you know, all your business, all your bids through, come through those couple of guys and if you go sideways with them, you're cut out of market entirely. How do you think?
Speaker 2:
about that. It is definitely that way. I would say the majority of it hinges on performance, like relationships, and then much more about performance. These businesses definitely can change hands, but if they change hands they fail to perform. There's a small group of people who can actually do this work and I would say this business is probably on smaller, medium size of companies you're capable of. There's one of their competitors, and this is in my backyard. I don't know exactly which company it is, I haven't signed the NDA yet but there's one that is massive, I mean absolutely massive, and they have very, very sophisticated equipment. It's probably five to ten times this size in terms of revenue. Um, we've done something like 800 foot long pre-engineered metal buildings where they rolled in huge angle iron and they use, you know, custom cnc routers to pre-cut the metal and all kinds of stuff. I mean this is heavy, heavy lift type work and it's also it's a difficult business to staff because you've got welders who are not just standing around, they're 40 feet up in the air performing this work.
Speaker 4:
So do we think, speaking of FF&E, do we think that's all coming with it? I mean, Mills, is this the type of thing where there's legitimate startup costs? You got to buy a whole bunch of machinery to even compete with you. So is there a mode here, a CapEx mode?
Speaker 2:
I think there probably is. I mean they say it comes with a compliment of vehicles, equipment and experienced staff. My guess is most of that stuff is fully depreciated at this point, but the cost of it would be probably pretty significant. Now it depends on how sophisticated they are. If they just have a bunch of welding rigs, that's different than custom CNC routing and later it can get very complicated. Okay.
Speaker 4:
Is this Mills Unions will be union or not union.
Speaker 2:
Not in South Carolina.
Speaker 4:
Okay, so that's good. Yes, is it? So? You see, this is kind of. This is kind of boom and bust, and you know everybody that joke around here is that you know, one day I'm going to own a dumpster business. The big knock on the dumpster businesses, though, is they're super cyclical with construction, so you have very, very, very busy and you ton it, and then you can be slow for a couple of years. You said that's kind of the same, so I think a huge deal with points would be the local area, the market that they serve, the construction outlook in the area, right? I mean, that is basically the bet. Almost nothing else matters, right? Yeah, and I would say Is that the Midlands in South Carolina.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's Columbia. Where is?
Speaker 1:
the Midlands.
Speaker 2:
That's where I live. It's like the greater Columbia, lexington, irmo, blackwood area. We're definitely a net population growth market which helps. I would double click on not just you know what you're asking, bill. Like is the area growing, but what specific project? If they're doing, um, you know, multi-family which they probably aren't, because most most 200 unit multi-family apartment complexes are frame, they don't have structural steel like this. But if they, let's say, like their business is building quick oil change places, well those markets are getting saturated and you can only build so many more five minute oil change or drive through coffee places and stuff like that. It's getting more and more crowded here, so it's kind of late in the game. Now, if they're doing a lot of K-12 school new construction, which is what a lot of our business is, that's kind of evergreen in some ways and it doesn't really matter what's happening in the broader economy, because we have more people moving here and you need more school space.
Speaker 4:
Okay. So you got to understand the types of projects they're doing, but in the local market. So if they've built a ton of quick lube oil in a city, you just can't keep doing that forever and there's a risk there that you're basically jumping to a new sub-industry without a resume. Like, yeah, you can bid on off it, but if you've never done any office and the two local competitors have done a ton of office the whole time, that's risky. But if you're doing office or you're doing like you said, probably not multifamily, but if you're doing something that has to keep growing with population, kind of either way, you feel better about it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah and bigger picture. On something like this, it's easy for people to say, oh, I don't really like this recurring revenue or it doesn't really withstand macro cycles very well. I think the counterpoint to that is you get paid for doing more project-based work versus you. I put as much as possible on recurring credit card payment because I want as little constant drag as possible. These projects are super expensive and they may happen once every 20 years for this to be working on, but you get paid. In essence, you know a decade worth of margin out of one project if you're doing it right really.
Speaker 4:
I mean, you can make millions of dollars on one project on structural steel like this.
Speaker 2:
I mean, we'll be on projects and they'll have huge crawler cranes out there and you know multi-million dollar jobs, some of them Now, this company being $12.5 million in revenue. Their average job size is probably in the $250,000 to $500,000 range, but that's a huge average ticket. The problem is but again it's something I've grown comfortable with in our business they probably have six to 12 months worth of backlog just on a pure revenue basis, if I had to guess. But you have no idea where your revenue is coming from 18 months from now. There is a cliff potentially. But the counterpoint to that is this business has probably consistently made money for the past 25 years or whatever 50 years, almost Right.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, it's been around since 1979, which I guess has been a good time to bet on the growth of South Carolina during that time period.
Speaker 2:
Now, the caveat to all that is, this type of cyclical business that's project-based does not do well with a high level of… yeah.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, Heather's over there sweating yeah.
Speaker 3:
These are great businesses without debt. Like you said, you get a great margin because of what you're taking on. Uh, but this is not the. This is not the kind of business you want to carry debt, because the debt, you know, if it's an SBA loan, it's a 10 year loan and you've got to make a payment every month. That's the same Uh and and project work just doesn't work like that. I thought I thought it was interesting. I had two questions that you just answered, which was one was average project size. So if it's smaller like that, then this is like 25 to 30 projects a year, which is a lot, it seems like to me anyway. And then the revenue visibility. That's the other thing a lender would think about. Well, it's project work. How far out can we see the revenue? And if it's a cliff in six to 12 months, yeah, there's another reason why debt doesn't want to go there.
Speaker 2:
Heather do you see a scenario like this where, if the purchase price and the terms were right in the AM, if it's SBA, it's 10 years or?
Speaker 3:
nothing. It's usually just 10 years or nothing. You really can't get too fancy with SBA loan structure like that, the amortization or the term. I'll give you the reason why is the loans really need to be homogenized to be valuable to the bank? Because they sell the guaranteed portion in a secondary market and if you make it too weird it's not going to fit in these homogenized pools and it loses its value to the bank. They're not interested in it. So you really kind of have a generic one size fits all 10 year. You know, maybe you'll get six months of interest only here and there, but that's about it.
Speaker 4:
So that's. It's so interesting to me how the upstream markets for collateralization of these loans drive the downstream origination of the loans so much. I mean, you've seen in residential mortgages like that's why there are only like three or four structures of residential mortgages that exist, and it's not because other structures are impossible, it's not because you can't do an eight-year arm or a three-year arm or whatever, but there's no market to collateralize and sell them. And then you start to realize that what you think are lenders are actually originators. And it happens in SBA too. The SBA banks, lenders are originators. I mean, heather, do you know like what fraction of SBA loans get sold, get packaged and sold, versus what get held on the bank's balance sheet?
Speaker 3:
I'm going to guess it's more than 50%. The bigger loan, the bigger banks do carry them on their balance sheet and when they look at the math they think it's still more valuable long-term to hold, especially if they have excess deposits. It makes more sense. But the smaller banks, which make up the bulk of I think what everybody knows, is the main SBA banks they sell. It absolutely makes the economic sense for them to sell. The one thing to caveat there when your mortgage gets sold you're suddenly making a payment to somebody else. When your SBA loan gets sold you don't even know it because the originator has to keep the unguaranteed portion and service that. So the secondary market is invisible to the actual borrower. They don't know when or if their loan was sold.
Speaker 4:
So to expand on that, you said the unguaranteed portion and the guaranteed portion. So to a bank, to a borrower, you borrow $5 million, like it's one loan, and you sign a personal guarantee and you feel like you've guaranteed the whole part. But you're talking about a government guarantee, I think, on the back end. So can you kind of break down from the bank's perspective what a loan looks like as far as the guaranteed and unguaranteed part?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, yeah. And, by the way, your personal guarantee is, on the whole, $5 million, regardless of this backend arrangement. So the arrangement that makes the banks excited about doing SBA loans, which is good for all of us, is that the government is guaranteeing 75% of the loan to the bank. So the bank has your personal guarantee and they have the SBA standing and saying hey look, if this goes bad, we're covering 75% of the losses, of whatever might get lost as long as you follow our rules, which is why banks are so focused on compliance. Sometimes they're overly focused on compliance and not really on, like, the risk, and that's the reason 75% of their risk is based on following the rules. So if a loan defaults and the bank liquidates any collateral that it has, then there's a loss that SBA is picking up 75% of that loss and because they guarantee that 75%.
Speaker 3:
That's the part that can be sold in the secondary market because it's got such low credit risk to investors. An investor can buy that and know there's no risk of loss of principal. There's only prepayment risk really to an investor when they buy those loans.
Speaker 4:
Interesting. So the bank eats the first 25% of the loss and if there is excess loss the government covers it.
Speaker 3:
It's not first in, last out, it's not first in, it's peri pursue or pro rata. So let's just say a million dollars is lost, the bank loses 250 and the SBA covers 750. It's peri-pursue or pro-rata. So let's just say a million dollars is lost, the bank loses $250,000 and the SBA covers $750,000.
Speaker 4:
But once they sell it, then it kind of becomes the bank holds the entire risky portion right Because they've sold it. No, no, that's all Okay. So there's still risk of you buy a government guaranteed slice of an SBA loan. You can still lose.
Speaker 3:
The investor can still lose 25% also. Nope, they can't. Nope, they are covered when they buy that 75% piece. Whatever happens, they're not going to ever lose principal. So it trades just like government bonds.
Speaker 3:
But obviously the interest rate on a loan is much higher than where the bonds are trading and that's why banks make money on it, because the investor pays a premium to kind of buy down the rate a little bit. The investor will still end up with a rate that is better than a comparable government security. And their risk, their only risk, is prepayment, and prepayment to an investor in that case would be either default or the borrower literally prepaying. It doesn't matter to the investor. Either one is kind of a potential loss of the premium they paid. So they're guessing how long, what the duration of this loan will be or its loan pools will be, and there are all kinds of analysis that's provided to investors that follows the constant prepayment rates, the CPR of the pool. So when interest rates are fluctuating, prepayments speed up or slow down and that affects the premiums ultimately that the investors pay.
Speaker 4:
It gets a little complicated. Yeah, a prepayment is either default but also a refi or a sale. If somebody sells a business right, it all gets all a prepayment. So that's the nice thing about spreading having a pool of loans. I bet it's relatively constant. As you said, the CPR, you can assume X percent get prepaid every year and you can model that into the price you'll pay for the loan.
Speaker 3:
That's right. That's exactly how it's done. Yeah, and again, all of that goes on in the background and it's what makes these great for banks. The other thing that makes it great for banks is the liquidity. If you know the good old Silicon Valley bank crisis that we just had, changed the game for deposit stability for all banks, especially small the smaller the worse it is. So their deposit inflows and outflows used to be much more stable than they are now. Now there's a flight to quality to big banks if you have a lot of excess deposits. So for a small bank to be able to make a million dollar loan but take 750 off their balance sheet, they don't have to hold deposits against that. Now that's another really big benefit to a bank. They don't have to have as much in deposits to cover those loans. So there's the ability to sell for premium and there's the ability to sell for the bank's own liquidity purposes. That make it really, really attractive.
Speaker 4:
But in order to do all of that, you need all the loans to be homogenous, 10-year term kind of standard. So you get packaged up so that investors get the benefit of spreading risk across loans, so then bringing it back to this business. That's why SBA gets really tough for project-based businesses like this, because the standard structure that's been agreed upon is a 10-year amortization with equal monthly payments, and it's a loan structure that's better for a stable business rather than a cyclical business.
Speaker 2:
Heather, I have a question on that. Go ahead. Would this be SBA financeable if you put 50% down or more? I mean, is there a scenario where the SBA or reader would say, okay, yeah, I can push this through, I'm comfortable enough, given the debt to equity?
Speaker 3:
Low leverage could be the solution. Yes, I mean. What a bank would do is go back and look at a 10-year historic cycle and say, okay, how cyclical does this get? And at its low point, do we feel comfortable at this very low leverage? That could solve the problem. The other thing that banks will look to, of course, is the personal balance sheet of the personal guarantor, and if they seem to have a little excess cash or assets that could fill the gap, that would be another way to get over it. Both of those could help.
Speaker 4:
By the way 75% government guarantee and you've got 25% at least in buyer assets hard collateral you're pretty safe from a loan.
Speaker 3:
You're getting there, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:
So bringing it back to this deal if SBA is not there. We see a lot of these deals where this is a good business. You got 15% margins. You know. Let's assume they're in the right, as Mel's mentioned. You know the right types of construction. It's in a growing market, but it's not SBA finance.
Speaker 4:
Well, like this is the recipe for seller debt. I mean because it's going to be tough, I think, for a new buyer to come in with all equity. But the recipe here is a seller note which can be flexible. You can scale payments up and down based on the cyclicality of the business. It basically looks like and I'm simplifying but the structure that I kind of love and there's lots of iterations on this which is I'll pay you X percent of revenue for a certain amount of time or until X dollars are paid, and that X dollars is basically the seller note.
Speaker 4:
So if you want to sell this business, for what was the asking price here? Oh, na, this was NA, but it's got one and a half million of. You would say it sells for $5 million, and I'm not sure it would. But if it did sell for $5 million, you would say I'll pay you 10% of revenue for 10 years or until $5 million is paid. And that is very, very flexible buyer financing where you can't get upside down. If you have a slow quarter, your loan payment scales down automatically. If you crush it, your loan payment scales up and seller knows that he's got a $5 million target and he's going to get his 5 million bucks. It's just a question of kind of how long it'll take.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, and I give Jesse credit. Jesse did not play the SBA pre-qualified game here, so he didn't throw that out. He kind of hinted yeah, that maybe you need to do something else here so do we have a good idea of who should buy this?
Speaker 1:
what, in summary, do we? Who do we think is the right buyer? I mean, obviously, somebody with a beard in columbia, south carolina what, what, what are the other?
Speaker 2:
somebody beat me to the punch, so there's somebody else out there. Maybe they also have a beard. I mean, I I was curious if it's a, if it's a bigger, you know, if it's one of the other competitors in the field. That would probably be the first choice and you could Google and find them, and Jesse probably has done that. The other option would be and I've seen a lot of GCs do this where they try and insource one of their subcontractors. A lot of home builders do this with cabinet shops and then they realize why they don't want to own a cabinet shop. I've seen GCs in source structural steel and you think roofers are a rowdy bunch. Structural steel erectors are up there on the list too.
Speaker 4:
Potential also good buyer. I mean, this is harder with no SBA. But the most senior in-house employee, right, these types of things, somebody who knows exactly what's going on, has worked here for 10 years and wants to be his own boss Oftentimes this is a great transition. The owner knows him, the owner is willing to do a flexible seller note and you kind of buy the guy into it over time is an excellent buyer for this Mills. Do you think the local competitor is actually a good buyer? So if there's three bids for every project in this market and you buy it as bidder number one and this is bidder number three, now there's still two bidders, you're already bidding on every project anyway. You would kind of just like this person to go away, to go out of business and or to. I guess what I'm saying is this is more of a defensive play, right, so your revenue doesn't get more than what you're already putting on projects right, yes, yeah, it's a huge dilemma when I look at other roofers for sale.
Speaker 2:
If they're too close by, it kind of defeats the purpose, because I want one less better in the pool and I don't want to have to acquire them for them to go away. It depends on the skill level, though, and the bench of employees. If you're having trouble growing because of skilled labor shortage which every single one of these guys is and every trade is, if you could say, pick up 20 employees who are really, really good in the field, that helps catapult your growth, and maybe you can assimilate savings by folding them in. Uh, but there's no, you know, there's no contractual kind of long-term, you know, revenue that is is worth transacting over. This is just project-based. So yeah, that's a huge dorm. I think about it. Project-based, so yeah, that's a huge dorm.
Speaker 4:
I think about it All right. So what do we think? Let's kind of wrap this up. What do we think it's worth and are we interested in it? It's got 1.6 million of cashflow. It's been around for almost 60 years, 12 and a half million in sales Mills. What's your bid?
Speaker 2:
I don't know enough and I'm hesitant to to say because I know Jesse's going to listen to this episode, and I told him hey, if your LOI falls through, please call me.
Speaker 4:
Okay, so I don't think we're accused.
Speaker 2:
I think you're in the right ballpark, but I don't know enough. You could get under the hood of this thing and go, wow, this is worth two times or less. Or you could see, hey, this is worth two times or less. Or you could see, hey, there is some value here.
Speaker 4:
I would probably pay more than most because we have some really beneficial overlap. Yeah, okay, yeah, I mean, I think this is probably a two to three times deal, depending on the quality of it, and you're going to need some seller financing to get it done the right way, I would think.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I think 3x max.
Speaker 4:
Okay, so probably transactable. You just got to have the right buyer with a reasonable or low amount of debt or the most flexible type of debt in order to get this done. But you know there's a deal. I mean obviously this deal here.
Speaker 1:
It's under li, yeah I think this is a good deal. This is potentially up there with the worm farm for a good like. Wouldn't be good radio, but this is actually a good business to own for the uh, for the acquisitions anonymous fund, one for us to pile in and buy this business and then then we could like live tweet mills going in there and dealing with it Be fantastic. Just saying install mill.
Speaker 4:
I'm, I'm, I'm if, if, if you notice whatever Girdley proposes a deal, it's always yeah, we'll just buy it. And then we install insert other host name as CEO.
Speaker 1:
Uh, I visited. We install, insert other host name as ceo. Uh, I visited, I visited with a private equity professional, 25 year experience a person yesterday and uh, he was, he, was he. She was very clear, I'm not an operator, but I know how to hire them. I was like, oh, like that sounds really good at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:
That's what I mean they got to raise money.
Speaker 1:
They got to allocate money, recruit the right people yeah, and I mean the other thing is they often make the hard decisions that other people won't like. Having having dealt with it multiple times on both sides, like, like there's a level of ruthlessness required and some of them managed to do that ruthlessness, I think, in a way that is kind, and some of them do it in a way that is unkind, but they all, I think they all think it's kind Anyway, but I mean there's varying spectrums and I have friends that have been PE CEOs and it's like, oh wow, like there's some stuff that happens. It's very, very sharp elbows. All right, I don't know how we got there, but we're buying this to Mills and CEO. Yeah, we'll be nice to you, mills, you'll be a great CEO.
Speaker 4:
It'll, yeah, yeah, we'll be nice to you, bills. You'll be a great ceo by the end of this podcast. I'm living in the caribbean on a boat making pizza. Heather's digging worms in california mills, has put out structural steel and girly's here by himself just rambling into the airways hey, somebody soon's gonna make these youtube videos.
Speaker 1:
They're not themselves, all right, oh, by the way. By the way, just so you guys know, you know I've been basically like screaming into an empty room on video for the past nine months and so we're actually getting coached by the Clips guys to actually make videos that work. So we're actually recording their sessions coaching us in terms of how to actually make good videos that actually how meta. Yeah, it's like there's always content in there, but we've had some success. My last couple yesterday was the first one we've had that's broken 11,000 views for my shorts. So yay me, I'm huge in Japan, huge.
Speaker 4:
I'm huge on shorts, all right. Well, thanks for tuning in to Actors Anonymous. We'd really love it if you guys would follow us on Twitter A-C-Q-U-N-O-N on Twitter or recommend this podcast to a friend. We are trying to get more people interested in buying businesses out there, and if you are buying a business, you're one of those people and you need an SBA loan, call our friend Heather at Viso Capital and she would be glad to help you out. She's just started her business less than a year ago and is looking for more SBA borrowers. So if that's you, give her a call. As you can tell listening to this podcast, she's literally the smartest person in the country about FBA lending. So you should call her and with that we'll wrap it up. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous.