[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Peter Lehrman and this is Masters in Small Business M A. This show is an ongoing exploration into the vast and undercovered world of small business M A, where we interview both the proven and the emerging owners, operators, investors and advisors whose strategies and methods for transaction success have been put to the test. The show aims to us the nuanced, intricacies the key ingredients and the important factors that can improve your decision making in your own journey in the world of small business. M a. This podcast is produced by Axial, an online platform that makes it easier for business owners and their M A advisors to find, research and privately connect with a diverse mix of professional buyers of small businesses. In addition to learning more about Axial, you can find this podcast, show notes, edited transcripts, and many other related resources, all for
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Peter Laraman is the CEO of Axial. All opinions expressed by Peter and podcast guests do not reflect the views or opinions of Axial. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Podcast guests may have ongoing client relationships with Axial.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Hi, folks, this is Peter Lehrman. Welcome back. This is the next episode of Masters in Small Business M A. I've got a great guest today. I'm really excited for this conversation. He and I have spent very little time talking prior to recording, so this will be almost as new for me as it will be for all of you. Mike Botkin, founder and CEO and managing director at One Outdoor Holdings. Mike, thanks so much for giving me the time this morning.
[00:01:45] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Huge fan of the podcast. I listened to the Emily Holdman one recently and I just started binging all of your interviews. So becoming a big.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. That's good to hear. Emily's.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Great.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Yep. Trying to put something new into this market. There's a lot of great podcasts out there and so thanks for making time for this one. Monaga, a lot on your mind and a lot going on right now. You had a big announcement only a few weeks ago, which we'll get into, which is really exciting. But where I want to start today is you had a great tweet a couple of weeks ago talking about, well, first of all, announcing a transaction for One Outdoor Holdings. But what I really wanted to dig into there was the opening of the tweet talks about you sort of deciding a few years ago, lying in bed, that you wanted to buy a landscaping business. And the rest of the tweet is fantastic. Everybody should go take a look at it. Who's curious about how journeys start and what goes into them. But can you take us back there? Take us back to the best of your ability, to the best of your memory? What were you thinking about in bed? Why were you thinking that just how did that set of thoughts and that desire to start, how did that crystallize.
[00:02:50] Speaker C: In your mind that day? Yeah, absolutely. So I think you have to go even further back a little bit.
I wouldn't use the word poor, but you could definitely classify that and you'd probably be accurate. We did not come from any means, just hard work, single mom hardworking myself and my brother, that kind of thing. But what I always gravitated to, and I didn't realize it honestly until much more recent, was I would be in long car rides, going to basketball tournaments with my friends and their parents and I now can go back and see that I gravitated towards the parents who own businesses. The garage door guy, the event guy, the construction guy, just a number of local business owners in our area that I happen to be friends with and playing sports with and it just always fascinated me and I'd always ask like how'd you start this business? And I'm talking at twelve years old I'm asking these kind of questions. So there was always subconscious curiosity about business owning. And what I did realize even back in high school was, in my view, in a small town outside of Orlando. The wealthiest people I knew were business owners. They had the biggest houses, the nicest cars, they went on family vacations, things that we didn't do. And so as I got going in my career, I became a high school teacher, which was my dream and ended up doing that. And I was a basketball coach and then I left and was with a startup and every move I made in my career I was really betting on myself. And I ended up getting to a really large real estate private equity investing firm here in Orlando. And I ended up becoming the COO at a very young age, which was a whole nother podcast episode. We could do about 27 year old telling the general manager of a hotel what to do when he's had 30 years of experience. Some of those were fun stories, but we ended up more so than investing. We were really the operator behind a hotel, in a water park, in a restaurant and we had a 2500 unit property management company. We had airbnbs under our management. And so what that allowed me to do was start seeing trade businesses and other businesses operate. And what we started doing, kind of stole it from the Amazon approach was and one of the things I spearheaded was buying the trade businesses that serviced our properties. And it allowed us kind of that financial engineering of going out and buying the AC guy, the plumber, the landscaper, the vendors, and really self service. Strictly ourself. No outside customers. So I'll jump back to that tweet in that moment I was the COO of that firm and I just didn't feel like I was controlling my destiny. So to speak and I knew I wanted to take a shot. I was 29, about to be 30, and I just felt like I wanted to own something. I wanted to be in a driver's seat. And analogy I use is I was in the passenger seat of a Ferrari. I had my seatbelt on, we were driving fast and I trusted the driver, but I was never the driver. And for whatever reason, ego, confidence, whatever, I felt like I could do it myself. And foolishness, you could say in a lot of ways, like, I didn't know what I didn't know. And I said, Fuck it, I'm going to get in the driver's seat and maybe it's a Kia and it's not a Ferrari, but I'm going to see what happens. And so it's COVID I'm the only person going to our 10,000 square foot, newly opened office and there's no one on the roads outside of vendor or tradesmen, landscaping businesses, HVAC guys, that kind of stuff. And I just started looking around, biz by Sell and all those other sites, and again, I had no idea what I was doing and stumbled upon a landscaping business ten minutes from my office that I contacted the seller. I ended up striking up a relationship with him and getting great deal terms and laid in bed and told my wife, I think we're going to do it.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Was he actively in a sale process or?
[00:07:01] Speaker C: He was it wasn't going well, it was on the market forever.
I think I have bias to recent success, but it was really a terrible business. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea what diligence was, I had no idea about holding companies, I knew nothing. All I knew was I wanted to bet on myself. I had a desire to do it quickly and I found one that I could do. And I thought, at worst, at absolute worst case scenario, I'm going to bomb this. I didn't put a ton on the line for it, but I'm going to bomb it and I'll go back and work for someone or I'll just be a landscaper the rest of my life. That was the absolute downside. The upside was a pretty big reward to it. And luckily, that happened. But, yeah, it was on market. That was the only deal we've done that was on market.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: You say that you didn't know anything, but you were the COO of a company that was operating with a meaningful number of businesses. You'd seen acquisitions before. It sounds like you guys were vertically integrating into some of your real estate operations by buying the trades. So you didn't know nothing as you approached this, right?
[00:08:12] Speaker C: I knew how to get a deal, really know. I didn't know all the search terminology, I didn't know all the ETA terminology, I didn't know the processes. Like, I hired a real estate attorney because that's what I was exposed to. And as a COO. Yes. I had a lot of bandwidth and visibility into what we were doing and I was taking the people side of it and the operational side of it and making sure that diligence was done. But from a financial perspective or even leading the deal, I mean that was our CEO and our CFO and I was really left to deal with. Make sure we have a plan post close and make sure it works. I was really like that aspect. So you're right, I did have visibility in doing it. But what I learned the most was the relationship aspect and the people side of it, which helped post close, which is why I think it was a success post close.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: So was that roughly sort of like the first business that you spent some real time getting serious with the seller on or had you gone through sort of a pipeline process? By the time Zero, that was the.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: First seller I spoke to. I had an urgency to go be on my own and it was COVID. People weren't doing meetings, people weren't taking calls. It was very weird timing. I ended up getting to know the broker because we bought a property management business off that broker previously. So that was a definite connection. I don't recommend this at all anymore, but it was a sub million dollar revenue business. Again, you have to understand the mindset. I just wanted to own a business that was the mindset. I had a peek into what the upside could be, I had a peek into what the downside could be. But my entire goal was to go buy a business and it just so happened that one was there. That was the first guy to answer the phone call. I had a relationship with a broker so I could get a deal done pretty quickly at favorable terms. And the risk for me on the favorable terms was it was 50% cash up front and 50% seller note, which you're never going to find unless it's a shitty deal. And I ended up raising the money for the down payment from an investor and so my risk was letting him down and just personal time into it. But I was willing to take that.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Were you married at the time, Mike?
[00:10:26] Speaker C: I was, yeah. And I had a baby on the way. So there was a tremendous risk in terms of the personal life from a professional life is where I said the risk wasn't really there because I was confident enough if it didn't work, I'd find a way to repay the investor and I'd find a way know, make a living. But from a personal standpoint, it was a tremendous risk. And a quick note to that, like when I told my parents, my mom and my brother, hey, I'm going to quit this unbelievable firm I'm at, that you guys brag about, that I work at Am, I going to go buy a landscaping business. They cried, literally cried tears. So it was not a great, like, hey, you can go do it moment. It was like, you're an idiot. What are you doing? You've lost it, that kind of stuff.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: What about your wife?
How well did she understand what was boiling up inside of you to do this?
[00:11:13] Speaker C: Beyond supportive. If she wasn't supportive, never would have done it. We had long conversations about the risk, and she was encouraging. And I think if you asked her, I think she would say she knew I was going to do it regardless because I was just so hell bent on becoming an owner. At some point, we thought it was going to be of the firm that I was with. I think COVID rejuvenated our CEO. He was older, and I think he's a better wartime CEO than anything, and I think he saw COVID as a wartime CEO moment. And we're friends to this day. We're phenomenal terms. He understood what I was doing. But to answer your question, the wife was extremely supportive and was willing to go on that ride with me.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so important. So if you look at Mike Bodkin online now, and you look at One Outdoor Holdings, there's a website, it's a holding company. You buy landscaping companies. There's clarity around One Outdoor Holdings for anybody who wants to go and get familiar with the quick story. How much of that was conceived in your mind at the time that you made this first acquisition? Or was this just a one off acquisition and then you worked your way into more of a conceptual framework around One Outdoor Holdings now sort of stands for and how it articulates itself?
[00:12:35] Speaker C: Great question. I think I had the vision for it. I wasn't great at articulating it. I wasn't great at speaking it because my history and it was not a long history, but my history in doing this kind of stuff was only in real estate. Like, we were buying land, we were buying properties, we were buying hotels, and we were effectively a holding company in the real estate world. But I didn't really know about the business side of that, that people oh, my gosh, a lot of people go out and buy businesses and this is the structure and this is the way you do things. I was learning as I went now. It was a very quick learning. Within the first six months. I had it all conceptualized. I had the vision, I had the clarity. We doubled the EBITDA of that first acquisition. I went out and raised committed capital from an institutional investor with the thesis being what it is and what you see today. What I learned in those first six months that provided the clarity was I saw an industry that was misvalued. I saw an industry that was you're able to have good multiple arbitrage if you do it right. And I saw there was opportunity of being acquisitive in a specific geography, which was Orlando. And our overall vision for one outdoor expanded as we got better at this and got more notoriety. But that became clear within the first six months that this was really possible. And my knowledge and education of the space grew as well from listening to podcasts and reading books and meeting people online and talking to people on Twitter. I mean, this was when SMB Twitter kind of really started taking off within the same time span. So it really helped my learning curve. Like, people ask me where I learned how to do some stuff and it's.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: Like Twitter, it's an amazing platform for sure. And you gave a huge amount of credit to a whole bunch of people as part of that tweet, which was really cool to see. Let's spend a little bit of time just on this business, this first transaction, and then I want to get into landscaping as a thesis, which is clearly what it became for you. So the day one, post closing day one, just give us a view of the cockpit of this business. Like, day one, you get into the plane, you've closed the transaction. What are you staring out at?
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Yeah, day one, I'll tell you. So I went from an operator to an operator of a smaller sub million dollar revenue business, to an operator of a much bigger business, to an operator of a business that's pivoting to then hiring a CEO and acquiring a CEO, and really managing the CEOs and more of your traditional holdco style that it is today. So that's where it started as an operator of a small business. And where it ended on our transaction date was I was managing CEOs of our platforms of extremely large businesses. So to go all the way back to day one, funny note, the most senior tenured employee, the best employee, the guy that the seller raved about, like, he's the guy, he's the gasoline to this thing. Within two minutes after my opening speech, if I'mike bokkin, how's everyone going? He said he's never going to work for anyone else besides that guy, and nothing against me, but he's out of here. So I got punched in the face within minutes. But listen, it was a business that was around for 35 years. It had a great brand, great reputation, so I got that part right. And getting reputation right is almost more important than anything else. I got the financial diligence wrong. I got the operational diligence wrong, but I got the brand right. And good dude, good people, good employees. Of those initial 18 employees, 16 are still with the business, which I think is a huge credit to them, the seller, as well as what we did. But yeah, it was a smaller business that had a mix of commercial and residential. Subsequently, we acquired the largest residential landscaping business in central Florida. It was doing 1200 units and we were effectively a residential landscaping business. We pivoted shortly after, within months, to full commercial. So not only did I go in those stages of management and ownership and running the business to not running it, but we also pivoted from a residential landscaping business to a commercial landscaping business for very clear reasons why, which I can get into if you're curious. So I kind of got to see the entire spectrum of the landscaping industry.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Why do you think he quit? I mean, just back to your first comment about the top sort of top employee. Do you understand that?
[00:17:11] Speaker C: I get it. I don't agree with it or understand it. The seller let these guys mow lawns on the side and on the weekends he built up a decent route. He had a great relationship with the seller who he worked with since he was 17 years old. He was now in his forty s. And from what I could tell and just conversations afterwards with other people, it seemed like he was kind of always promised the business could be his after the owner was done. But listen, how could I fault the guy? I didn't know him, he didn't know me, and he was taking a shot to work for himself. Like good luck.
[00:17:46] Speaker B: It's a good example for anybody who's buying a business that no matter how careful your diligence is, you're just going to get some big surprises on the other side of closing. And sometimes the surprises are not at all the ones that you roughly were anticipating. You could have felt like the people were fully locked down and it was this other thing that was an issue. And all of a sudden it ends up being that the people who you thought were going to be your great partners for the next ten years end up being the first ones to raise their hand and say they're getting off the bus.
[00:18:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll tell you, we bought a small business like that, and we bought a much larger business and more stable and professionalized business. And there's always people surprises after. So I wouldn't even relate it just to size, to your point. It is you're going to be surprised regardless. And the surprise could come from senior management not being on board with your vision, senior management being pissed at the previous owner, senior management being positioned wrong, and you find out they're actually really more talented in a different position, which sometimes is welcome and sometimes is not. I mean, you are dealing with people and everyone has their own thoughts, everyone has their own ideas, everyone has their own agenda. Everyone has a certain level of confidence, whether it be low or high. It's one of the things to navigate. And it's why I think we were able to go back to your original point about my previous firm and what I really had visibility to go back to. I had a ton of visibility into people management. I had a ton of experience in it, all the way going back to being a teacher and a basketball coach. So I was able to navigate those waters, I think, pretty well. And I would attribute that to being a big part of our success, of being able to read people, see people, communicate with people, listen to people, and really direct them to the right seats on the bus and to motivate people that were on the wrong seats to change. But yeah, there's always surprises after it doesn't matter how big the deal is, how good that your diligence is means nothing. We went from having no diligence items, really, to having 400 line Excel sheets of diligence, and it didn't matter. It's people at the end of the day.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to get to that. I want to get to some of these follow on transactions that you've done, because I believe you've done somewhere in the high single digits in the last two and a half years, right?
[00:20:03] Speaker C: We did six. Yeah, we did six in a total of 22 months.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: So we'll get to that. You mentioned I want to just cover landscaping briefly. This is not per se, like a landscaping episode. I do want to just dive in a little bit on your comment about landscaping being misvalued. How did you figure that out? What do you mean by that?
And did you know that when you bought this business, this first business?
[00:20:27] Speaker C: I didn't yeah, I'll go backwards. I didn't know. I saw how profitable landscaping businesses could be when we bought one at my old firm to service ourself. And I saw the inner workings of it, and I started seeing competitors and how they operated. So I thought you could obviously easily change it and make them more professional. But I had no idea the differences between residential and commercial. I had no idea the nuances I had none of that. My comment about they're undervalued is it is an extremely large let me step back for a second. I want to be clear.
I get hit up constantly about searchers doing landscaping businesses or people that have landscaping businesses under Lli. And there's a big difference between residential landscaping businesses and commercial landscaping businesses. So I'll touch on the commercial side because that's kind of where we pivoted to and where we ended it and where we saw the most value. But strictly from a value perspective, you can buy really good million to $2 million EBITDA landscaping businesses for four times if you can run them right and grow them and professionalize. And they are not professionalized at a million to $2 million of EBITDA. They have some, but not a ton. It is generally a guy who's been in the landscaping industry for 2030 years, and he just built good relationships, but archaic systems, all that stuff. So if you can come in and add value to it and professionalize it, and understand the people and relationship side. You can end up transacting for a much higher multiple as you've grown. It organically, and you just created a ton of delta.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: And is that true for residential and commercial, or does that comment skew towards the commercial side as well?
[00:22:10] Speaker C: Totally skews to commercial just because of the contracts. So it's recurring revenue. It's recurring contracts. Like, we have contracts with Disney and the Marriott and Hilton and hospital organizations and large real estate firms like JLL. So those are really secure, valuable, trusted contracts. People are spending other people's money. So it's a $250,000 landscape enhancement job at hospital. Well, that's not the property manager's money. That's the hospital organization's money that they're spending that's budgeted. A resident at your house or at my house, if someone wants to do a job, I'm the one that's paying for it, and I'm going to be the biggest critic of it. So it's much more personal items. So you're getting people that are spending other people's money. You're getting a budget, you're getting budgeted amounts, and it has to get done. So it's not like, oh, we're going to cut back advertising this year. We're going to cut back software, we're going to cut back people or office space. You have to do your landscaping.
You have to do it. So you're getting a trade that has to be done.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: You got to mow the lawn outside the entrance to Disney World, right?
[00:23:21] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's something that you can point to that provides value and provides higher pricing on items or better quality of retaining or recruiting. So it has to be done. It's other people's money, and it's recurring revenue from three to five year contracts. So it's a great space. I was going to ask a little.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Bit about the contracts. How much of the contracts floats versus is sort of fixed in in terms of contract value, how does it float? With changes in labor, changes in scope of what you guys take on, just how much is fixed and locked in versus has the ability to float through the duration of the contract.
[00:23:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I've actually thought about this a ton. So all of our contracts did have escalators in price on an annual basis. The problem was, especially in the last year, the cost of our employees, our equipment, all that stuff has risen at a higher rate than the rise of the price. So how we combated that was we became much more specific and narrowed down the customers we were going after. So in this space, because those contracts are valuable to have, because you can budget out your business for three to five years, there is a level of bottom feeding on the prices. Like, if you want to get in the commercial space because there's public budgets in a lot of cases, you can just go and be the bottom bidder of every contract and make your money up later. Find a way to make it up. So what we started doing when we started seeing the cost rise of everything was just be more dialed in on the type of customers we're going after where the bottom price isn't an advantage to them. So, like Disney, they're never going to pick the bottom price. They are a huge value add customer. They're a huge quality customer. So they care about quality, they care about the stuff we implemented. They care about the professional side that we had and we valued that. So those are the type of customers we went after.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: You mentioned that there's this opportunity for arbitrage a little bit in terms of what you can buy landscaping businesses for. And in some ways, I guess I understand that there's arbitrage, but it sounds like it's maybe a little bit less arbitrage and it's maybe just doing a lot of hard work after you've bought a business to professionalize it and fundamentally making it more valuable. It's not like you can buy it over here and sell it the next day over here for a much higher price. It sounds like there's a layer of professionalization that actually creates the opportunity for real profit and for a change in valuation.
Is that true, or do you feel like there is fundamentally more of an actual true arbitrage?
[00:25:53] Speaker C: Well, so I have to answer that two different ways. One, you're absolutely right. You're 100% right. Where I guess you'd be wrong is, and it's specific to us, is we were really an aggregator of these businesses. So as we're buying them, if we did nothing with them, they were instantly more valuable just by being a part of a bigger platform. But to your point of where you're 100% right from, and we definitely went through the approach you're going to is, and maybe this will explain some of the shift in our businesses and shift in how I handled sellers and acquisitions, but I looked at what was transacting, right? What were these businesses buying, what were they trading for? Okay, the businesses that were trading for the highest multiple were being sold to other P firms or strategics. And their characteristics were this, this and this. They were on this ERP. They had this kind of customer mix. They had this kind of clientele. And I just started reverse engineering that all the way down. They had good management teams. So in a silo, a lot of these businesses where you're 2 million or a million and a half less of EBITDA great business, the seller's largely done well, and they have a little bit of a management team and they have some stuff, but they don't have it all in a package. So, to your point, you're right. We would buy a business, we would make sure the seller stayed on, which was a huge shift from our earlier approach. We only bought businesses where the owner stayed on, and we changed our profile of that from 60. Year old guys retiring to 40 year old guys that just wanted some chips off the table. I want to keep going, but we put in the ERPs, put in the accounting processes, made sure the senior management team stayed, made sure that they had new trucks, made sure the equipment was nice, everything that a buyer would want to see. We made sure we checked the box. So when the day came for us to transact, we were ready and able to capture a higher value.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: The change in the owners that you targeted sounds like a significant change in approach. And I think one of the things that we see a lot is business owners thinking that selling means retiring. And of course, there are sellers that are retiring, and retiring is a perfectly reasonable thing to do after a lot of hard work. But I think there's a lot of business owners that don't realize you can sell your business or at least sell a lot of your business and continue to go hard and go at it if you really love your day job still. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity there. If you can target the right owners who have a misunderstanding that selling means you're stepping out. How did you guys find the 40 year old business owners in the landscaping category? It sounds like most of your transaction activity was off market. What was your targeting technique like? What was your profiling technique? How did you uncover these opportunities?
[00:28:37] Speaker C: I'd love to hear about that. I get asked this a ton, and people are always disappointed when I say the answer because I don't think you can duplicate it in a lot of ways. We were very specific to Orlando, so that helped in Central Florida. But when I realized the power of the seller, which everyone always brushes the seller off right, like, I'm going to buy the business, he's going to get out of here over X period of time, and then I'm going to run the business, or I'm going to put a manager in to run the business. Like, whatever your technique is, post close. And what I started seeing was, like, these businesses are such a mirror of the guy that's had it in the owner. Whether it's the people, the contracts, the customer, the customer types, they are a mirror of the person. And when we're buying a business and we're taking that guy out and throwing him away or he's retiring or whatever, you're missing a huge component of the business, and it's very hard to replicate. And one last point, and this became common sense to me after I learned this, but a guy is 60 years old. He wants to sell it's on market. What do you think they've been doing the last year in the business? You think they're spending a lot of money on capex? You think they're investing into their people. You think they're doing the right things by the customer? Or are they just trying to grab every dollar they can because they know they're going to be selling and they want to get all the value themselves. So instead of fixing problems, they're giving the guy a raise because he ain't going to have to deal with it for much longer or they're taking the lower customer or all those bad things that happen. So on those two aspects, we switched from the 60 year old guy to the 40 year old guy. And what the 40 year old guy represented to me was a guy that's been in the industry 1520 years, probably has kids still in school, so not really can't retire. Like when you think about moving to the beach or moving to the ocean and you're done with life and you're still young enough and ambitious enough where you want to go to the next step, right? But you may have some liquidity issues. You may want money to pay for college or to buy a new house or you've been doing this for 20 years and it's dog year type years and you just want some reward, right? Like this is a brutal, never ending cycle of there's no thank yous on a daily basis, right? And so what we found was we could take those guys who are true to form landscape guys or good business guys and the whole story, right? Let them have some chips, let them take some money out, but they have to roll and they have to stay in the business. Not at an ownership level, but maybe a division president or a general manager. And they get to go back to the basics of the fun stuff that they enjoy without having to worry about the insurance, the accounting software, the hiring and firing know, going out and getting loans and every piece of equipment has their name on it, literally because they're PG it. So we switched and targeted that. And I'll tell you, we got better and better and better as a company. And this is like, no shit, Mike, of course you did. But we got better as we kept that talent.
Just our bench became such a valuable asset. It really helped us when we transacted, when we sold the consistent comments to us was, your management bench is deeper than we've ever seen. And it was because we were keeping talent in the game. Sorry. And I'll answer your question about how we found them. And this is the part no one ever likes to hear, but we bought the first business. I treated the seller well, I treated his people well. He told a guy, that guy contacted me, we had a good relationship, treated him well, and it was literally a trickle effect of that, of us treating the people well. And think about you're in business for 20 years, who are your buddies? Industry guys. When you're similar age in the industry and someone finds out you've sold, and you have a good relationship and yeah, man, Mike treated me well. Mike paid what I think is a fair price. Mike kept his word. Everything he said is true. Why would someone not want to sell to you? Why would someone not want to be a part of that? And we were able to sell a vision of more is better, bigger is better. Come join the team, and let's go. One of our acquisitions did come from Twitter. So Adrian Pinto in Georgia came via Twitter. He was a 30 year old searcher. He bought a business, ran it for two years. We built a relationship, and that's how we acquired the Georgia business, was really through Twitter.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: It's awesome. You answered the sourcing question. I actually think that the management depth and the bench strength comment and what you did there is actually worth spending more time on. Did you ever bump into a situation with the more sort of 40 year old profile of owners where you couldn't transition them into their new role successfully?
[00:33:18] Speaker C: It was one of the things we spent the most time on Diligence with. I think the positive of these guys is apparent, right? You're getting a 20 year vet to be on your bench to help with other things. You're bringing their vendor relationships, their customer relationships. You're bringing all this stuff into your orbit. The negative is you're taking a 20 year business owner and putting him on a seat where he may have control of a division or segment, but those guys are high confidence guys, high ego guys, high well, I've done it this way type of guy. You have to balance that. You got to be really good at balancing that. And you got to be able to give them enough rope where you're not choking them. But at the end of the day, they also got to be aware their name is not on the loan anymore. It's someone else's. So there's a higher answer here. There was a tremendous challenge with that, with some people. Listen, it would have been our biggest deal, and it was a tremendous company. It hit the dartboard square in the middle of what we wanted, and we passed on it twice. And each time we got very close to the finish line. And I just had a bad feeling in my gut that this owner would not play nice in the sandbox after transacting, like, just something like the questions they would ask or the lack of response or the time you have to start judging every single thing about an owner. When I randomly call you at 08:00 in the morning, how do you answer? When I call you at 08:00 at night when I want to say, hey, I'm in town. Let's go to lunch real quick? Unannounced. I started diligencing people a lot more than the business. The business was simple. What were the contracts? What were their employees? What was their equipment. Check. Check. Great. The business was fine. What are the people like? What are the owners like? Because one of the things I said earlier, the business is a mirror of the person. So if you can diligence the person, then you've diligence the company. You can't diligence the company without diligencing the person. So you might as well spend all your damn time diligencing the person. And especially for us when we're going to keep that person and bring them into our orbit with other owners that also have ego and also can say, well, I built this and I've done this and I've done that. So, man, it's like putting an all star team together and trying to get them to be teammates for the rest of the season. It's tough. Yeah.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: When they were owning and running their own business, obviously they're the owner, they're the decision maker. Everything's got their name on it, including the loans, including the decal on the side of the truck. What was the title that you tended to give them post closing? Were they running their business but just no longer operating the administrative side of the business? Did you find these owners going into a relatively repeatable role post closing, or did you feel like you kind of had to use your basketball coach chops to sort of create these more custom roles post closing for each one of these guys? Or was there some repeatability to what you did there?
[00:36:23] Speaker C: I would say more often than not, custom roles. Because, listen, the last thing you want to do is take that guy and put him in a role that he really doesn't want to do, but he's only going to say yes to it so he can get his business transacted on. But he's really not going to be there was no, like, be our employee for a year and then you can leave. It was, you're going to finish your career with us, so let's make sure we get this right up front. So we were putting know, one guy became a branch manager. One guy became director of construction. One guy was a director of maintenance. One of them became our CEO of our Florida platform. It's all customized, but all know, and this is part of the diligence. What do you enjoy doing? What do you like doing? What do you get a thrill out of doing? What do you not like to do? What bothers know when that side of the business calls? Are you like, shit, I can't believe I have to answer the phone. I hate this.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: So were they working across some of the businesses that you had acquired in some of these roles, or did they stay within the specific business?
[00:37:25] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think this is a good distinction. So we had two platforms. We had a Georgia platform and a Florida platform. Most of the acquisitions happened in the Florida platform. And what we did is we just made two super branches. Really? So we started taking these acquisitions and saying, all right, these customers go to this branch, those customers go to that branch. This staff lives closer to this branch. They can all go there. This one goes to that one. And so instead of having six branches just spread across a very similar geography, we brought everyone together. And that allowed us to have some roles where that guy could kind of be stretched across the business versus just his customers or his guys, which I think helped.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Were they owners of the Florida platform? Part owners of the Florida platform, or it sounds like they weren't owners of the whole overall holdco.
[00:38:17] Speaker C: Right, yeah, no one had ownership of the holdco. But out of the six acquisitions, we let two guys roll equity into the individual platforms. Got it.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: And otherwise they were rolling equity just directly into the business that they had sold.
[00:38:34] Speaker C: Yeah, we didn't let anyone roll equity. We were doing 100% buyout until the last two. The last two acquisitions was the Georgia CEO and the Florida CEO. So we wanted them to have vested interests and we let them roll and they wanted to roll.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's really interesting because when you keep the bench strength and you keep the talent, obviously you get all the upside of that. But then now you're wrangling a bunch of sort of buccaneer founder, business owner guys and you're trying to professionalize things and so just navigating that is a bit artistic.
[00:39:08] Speaker C: What you have to realize and go back to is that I also was operating the business until we were comfortable enough to have someone run it for us. And so you have part of my imprint and footprint on it, which I am not an industry guy. And then we had an industry guy's footprint, and then you have to bring people underneath that guy. And it was a challenge because it was such a short time. We never let one thing kind of dominate the air and we just change to this guy's strategy. Change to this guy's strategy from how we handle meetings and how we handle one on ones and how we handle this that. And the third, it kind of took on a few different personalities. And so you had to manage not only the personality coming into the organization and how that was, but you also had to handle the existing personalities and the structural change and personality change of the business. So the best way I've been able to describe it was we took an all star team and we told them to keep playing with each other for the rest of the season. And there's tremendous challenges in that. I mean, think about you're a business owner. If you want to leave at 02:00 one day, you leave. If you want to put this lunch on your credit card, you put the lunch on your credit card and telling guys like, hey, man, you can't do that anymore. That's not company policy, or whatever the case could be. I think that's really difficult for some guys. And luckily we navigated it and we handled it, and we had to bend on some stuff and we had to say, okay, we'll let this one go. It was definitely a challenge. It wasn't easy. What were the battles that you decided.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: To pick there and what were the ones that you decided?
[00:40:45] Speaker C: Great question. What was the battle that we let go? Honestly, I kind of said it not knowing you're going to ask that, but like, meeting structure. I came from a place of, like, we need agendas for meetings, and we got to have accountability after the meetings. And one of the guys was not an agenda guy. And one of the guys was like, hey, we'll all just talk amongst the office and we don't need a meeting every Tuesday at 09:00. And to me, I was like, that is so backwards of how this should be done. Like, you cannot run a business that way. But he was a firm believer you could and he thought kind of the office chatter was good for them. And it's one of those, like, I just step back and say, like, all right, I'm not the CEO of this business, so he needs to run it how he wants to run it, or I'm not the manager of that division. They need to run it how they want to run it, or letting vendor price turn. Like, just letting things about a business where they do take on the personality of the guy running it. I had to check myself a ton that I'm not the operator of this business, so I may disagree with some of this stuff and think there was a different way, but I always had to remember it doesn't mean it was the right way. Just because I like having agendas for meetings doesn't mean you have to have agendas for meetings. Just because I like having a standing 09:00 on Tuesday with a sales staff doesn't mean you have to do that or that's the right way. So it was really more about me checking myself than changing how the business operated with that person. The business had to take on a life of the people running it. And I went from being intimately involved in decision making to only understanding decisions at a higher level. That impacted us on an air quoting here, a global stance and had needle moving decision or risk rewards to it. And everything else was someone else's decision and someone else's call. And I had a tweet about this that everyone says they hate micromanaging. I argue that people don't really know what micromanaging is, but what I did and the phrase I started using in the business was I'm auditing right? Like, I think everyone as a leader or CEO, whether it's at the operating level, business or at the holding company side, there needs to be audits done, the whole trust by verify. And I'm not verifying because I don't trust you. I'm verifying because my name's on hook here. So we are going to make sure it's done this way, and we're going to have clear communication lines of what you're responsible for and I'm responsible for. And that was a challenge, but we ended up getting through it.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: When you look at the six acquisitions that you did, where do you think you got better over the course of those six the most? What are a couple of areas where you felt you were gaining more and more skill and competency as a holding company operator over that two and a half year chapter? You made a lot of headway in two and a half years. You bought six businesses. Where do you feel like you've made the most growth as an operator yourself in the world of particularly on the acquisition side?
Where do you feel like the flywheel of progress spun the fastest as you got more and more laps and more and more at bats?
[00:43:55] Speaker C: I have this conversation a ton with people. I think what we did well, and what I got better at was keeping the main thing. The main thing. I seriously have a 400 line item Excel due diligence sheet.
I try to use as little of that as possible, and it's because I want to keep the main thing. The main thing. What business are we in? What is this? What's the risk? What's the reward? Right? We're in landscaping. So are the contracts good?
What is in the contract? Is that happening, and are we getting paid for it? What are the employees like? What is the equipment like? What is the marketability of this branch and this item? How do they fit? And then what is the leadership like? That's it if they've been truthful with you and you can verify all the financial, the bank statements and all that kind of stuff that you have to do to protect your investors. But I've seen so many people like, well, I'm going to spend all my time thinking through this or diligencing this, and that has no bearing on an outcome. You're focused on 5% outcome scenario, and you're missing the entire boat. Like, are the contracts right in this industry? Yes. Is the equipment good? Even if it's no, as long as you know that going in, you're fine. Right. You have to plan for the capex. If it's good, then great. You know, it those are the needle moving things that happen post close that turn your acquisition from success to failure. A failure post close would be, hey, they had 25 contracts, but actually they haven't been getting paid on seven of them, or they're about to expire in two months. So there's a huge risk factor in them. So that turns an acquisition to a failure pretty quick. When you lose seven contracts out of 25. So just continuously keeping the mindset of what's important and what are we doing here? I had to learn the industry a little bit to get to that point, but I just spent too much time diligencing shit that didn't matter. So I don't know if that's the answer you're looking for, if that's a great answer, but just keeping the main thing, the main thing covering your basis, making sure you're doing diligence the right way, making sure you can answer every question to your investor base and your board. But I'm not going to sit there and harp on something that has no meaningful needle moving ability post close. I think it's a waste of time, and it doesn't matter, especially if it's something I can fix, right? I'm trying to think of an example to give you. I'll use a truck example. One of the businesses we diligence had terrible trucks, right? And I think you could have spent a ton of time worried about that and thinking through that and going through repair logs on that, just spending an enormous amount of time on that. But I knew we could fix it going forward because we got brand new trucks for all the branches, and it just wasn't something I wanted to spend a ton of time on. I knew why the owner let them kind of go to crap, and I was good with his answer. I didn't agree with his answer, but I was good with it. So check it off and move on.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: Did it impact valuation? Did you guys get stuck on that or not even.
[00:46:45] Speaker C: Well, and that's the other thing, right?
Instead of sitting here beating the seller up for three weeks about bad trucks, hey, man, you have bad trucks. You know you have bad trucks. We're going to invest in trucks. We're going to need to use this term as part of the deal to get it done. Agree or not? And how could you not agree, right? You have bad trucks. You know you have bad trucks. I know you have bad trucks. I don't want to argue with you about it. This is the mechanism we're going to use to derisk us having to go buy new trucks. I think when you can talk clear with sellers and you can talk plain English, I think it helps telling them their valuation just went down half a turn and not really giving them reason why. And to speak clearly, I think it's where people mess deals up honestly. And you got to also remember, like, I want these sellers to stay in the boat post close, so I need them to have a good relationship with me. So it's just more peter, you got bad trucks, right? Yeah, I got bad trucks. You haven't spent any money on them? No, we put some money over here. We did this. Trucks were lasting on my mind, but they're serviceable. All right. Peter well, we're going to have to spend probably 500 grand on trucks post close. I really only budgeted like a quarter million, so we're going to have to make up that other quarter million on some form, whether it's an earn out or whatever it is, we're going to have to get some valuation back on that. Is that okay with you? How could you not say yes?
[00:48:04] Speaker B: Mike, I want to ask about the One outdoor team. How did the One outdoor holding company team change over two and a half years? Has it been the Mike Bodkin Show.
[00:48:14] Speaker C: This whole time or only the good times?
[00:48:19] Speaker B: How did the team related to the holding company, the acquisition of these businesses? Leaving aside the operations, the operations across the platforms, what have you done there? What did you do? What changed and what stayed the same over that two and a half year period?
[00:48:35] Speaker C: Yeah, so starting out, it was just me and then when we went and raised institutional capital, I took on Peter, who is in my Twitter post and is part Know One outdoor with us. He worked for the institutional firm and so he joined the team to essentially be a part of it with one outdoor and was a tremendous asset and opened like I had no financial background. Right.
I can't model with the best of them. I can barely turn my computer on. So having someone that had that kind of background and could do it and also assist with acquisitions in terms of financial diligence certainly helped. But the biggest thing that Peter helped with was he was an operator before he owned and was an investor in a towing business in Wyoming, a successful one. So it wasn't like taking on institutional capital and taking on a partner that either had similar characteristics to me or was strictly like a PE guy and a finance guy and had no idea what the hell I was talking about when I said, yeah, we all know the trucks suck and we're just going to live with that. And they can't figure out why I'm saying that. Peter was someone that could relate to the inner workings of a business because it's people and it's messy and it's not always right. And just because we budgeted this doesn't mean that's what happens. And just because we perform at this doesn't mean that's what happens. There's nuance to all of this and there's people in all this. So taking on a partner like that made us ten times better, move a lot faster.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: How'd you find that firm that you raised capital from?
[00:50:04] Speaker C: This is going to be a recurring theme. Twitter.
So we're about three months into the very first deal. It's going well. I'm unlocking a lot of levers and I'm learning fast and moving fast. I find another business I want to buy. I put it out in the world of Twitter that I had a much bigger one and needed to raise capital. And by the way, I have this thesis about landscaping. I'm just not a guy trying to go out and buy lawn mowers for the rest of my life. And the original thesis was not solely tied to landscaping. It was more about the outdoor service products that we could eventually tie in together and create kind of this weird ethos that worked. And Peter wrote back and said, hey, I'm interested. I was an operator before too, and I work at this firm now. This is what I'm looking for. Let's chat. And we built up a relationship over the next couple of months, and it was like, all right, this works for you, this works for me. I'd much rather take on one investor than have 75 people that I have to talk to on a daily basis. And they gave me the rope to act and move how I wanted to do. And I treated their capital like it was my own with trust and respect.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: It's an awesome set of answers I want to cover. You've been on the buy side for the last sort of 50 minutes of this interview. September 26 or September 29. You found yourselves consummating a transaction on the sell side, if I'm not mistaken. Although I know you're in some way or another going to be probably very involved in the future from here. So I'd love to just have you share your own transaction with one outdoor with the folks from LP First Capital. What is the transaction?
What have you guys done? Leaving aside price and terms and all those things, just what have you done here? Where are you taking it from here? And then we started the podcast talking about you lying in bed deciding you wanted to buy a landscaping business. So I'd love to maybe conclude by asking what made you lie in bed and decide that you wanted to sell this entity into its next chapter? And how did you get to that point to complete the circle?
[00:52:09] Speaker C: Yeah, great question. And that's an interesting phrase you use, complete the circle. Because that's one of the things that I looked at internally. But first and foremost, when you take on outside capital, you have a duty to return that capital and return it plentiful. Right. Give someone more than they gave you and to commiserate with the risk that they took on. And we had no mandate to sell. We had no mandate to transact. We had no mandate to do anything. If anything. Big discussion that the board and I had was, we're selling early, right? Like, the plan was not to sell two years in because we're not able know, kind of really see this thing through and let it breed. But over the last two years, thomas runs LP First Capital and I developed a relationship. They are in the landscaping space. They are one of the top five largest landscaping companies in the country. Just so happened. To be headquartered in Florida. So there was a great connection there. And we just kind of always checked, you know, I think strategically on his part, he was staying around the hoop a little bit, seen as we were growing at a high clip as well. We were making headways. I developed great trust with Thomas, great respect for him, great respect for his team. We started discussions in the summer about, like, after. So our most recent transaction was the Georgia one in Atlanta. And Atlanta is a hot market. Atlanta is a market that not many people can get into for a variety of reasons. And we were able to bust through the doors there and get in. One that became very attractive for them was being in the Atlanta market because they were struggling to get in there. And when that news came out that we made the Atlanta acquisition, thomas and I reconnected and just had a very clear and upfront conversation about what something could look, I, you know, said, hey, here's what's important to me, here's what's important to our team, here's what's important to our investors. Does this work for you? And he went back and talked to his side and he came back and said, yes, this works, this needs adjusted, this needs adjusted. But yeah, let's do it. And less than 90 days later, the deal closed. So it moved really fast. The reason why was outside of the it was my duty first and foremost to Return Capital, and I saw an opportunity to do that, so I can check that off the list, but I felt like I could do that at any stage over the next couple of years. I thought we were really building something of value, and we did, but we were building a deep management team and a deep bench, which was highly valuable. We were in markets that were very valuable and very people were trying to be acquisitive in those markets. And we were. And we had good customers, we had high value customer, high name customers, disney, the hotels, the hospitals, all so but with saying that I needed to go to someone we could trust and could handle the management team moving forward and that the management team trusted moving forward. So it was Return Capital plentiful yes, management team felt comfortable, and our management team met their management team very early in the process to get comfortable. And if our management team said, hey, Mike, I'm not with these guys, then our answer would have been no. Their management team felt our management team was very strong and very deep, and our guys felt very comfortable with them and that they were going to be able to also have similar rope and similar autonomy moving forward. So it was trust with the buyer. It was respect for the buyer, and it was a duty that I had for our investors. From me on a personal standpoint. Closing the circle is such a great phrase because in a short time, and this is a selfish answer, but in a short time, I was able to go from a guy buying a business to operating a business, operating a bigger business, acquiring businesses and doing the diligence and all that, raising capital, managing people, running those businesses, managing and acquiring businesses outside the state, and then transacting that business and selling it. So I was a buyer, operator, manager, seller, and I think to go through that entire line within two and a half years, I think, was a lifetime of experiences. And one of the other things I'll say, and I don't mean to ramble on this, but it was meaningful to me, was don't fuck with happiness. And I looked at the deal, my wife and I went away for a weekend and we had to decide if we were going to do this or not. And I wrote down everyone that mattered to us in our organizations, from investors all the way down to branch managers, and I said, are they going to be better off of us doing this deal than not? And are they going to be happy? And literally every single line it was, they're going to be happy, they're going to be happy. They're going to be happy maybe because of money, maybe because of position, maybe because they're going to get more autonomy with this new group than us. Maybe because their operations is going to be better than us. Like, for a variety of reasons, money was not the sole factor of me checking happiness. I looked at it as a holistic approach. And if the ten people around me are all going to be happy with this deal, it would be a disservice to them to not do the deal. And one of the ways I relate that is like, everyone in their life has been to an event or been to a party and you're having a great time here and someone in your group is like, hey, let's go to the bar next door, or let's go see that person over there, let's go over there. And you go over there and that part sucks and the party dies down. And you're like, Man, I was happy as shit. Over like, that was a great party. Or I had a great conversation with Peter over there. I can't believe I left it now no one's here. So that was the feeling I constantly had, was like, they're all happy. Don't keep going and ruin happiness. Take the deal. And so we did.
[00:57:55] Speaker B: So what's next for you, Mike?
[00:57:57] Speaker C: Yeah. So we rolled a meaningful stake into the acquired United Lane Services under LP. First Capital. So we are first and foremost cheerleaders and trying to drive as know, positive momentum and needle moving items as we can over to United and be fully supportive and making sure the business stays just how it was, if not better. For me, personally, we hired CEOs, so they're kind of handling all the day to day stuff. And the work with United moving forward on an ongoing basis for me, I don't know. I felt like I just had a lifetime of experiences in the last two years. The one outdoor brand is still there, and we're still trying to go on and figure out what to do next. It's clear that what we did worked at some level. So can we replicate and duplicate that in a different industry?
[00:58:45] Speaker B: That's amazing. Such a cool story. It sounds like when you wrote the list of people and sort of asked whether or not they were going to be happier, it sounds like in many ways you maybe kind of did. Like, if you'd only put yourself on that list, it sounds like you would have probably been very excited to keep on going.
[00:59:00] Speaker C: Right.
[00:59:01] Speaker B: But because a lot of other people were going to be very happy. And you had an opportunity to return capital, you had a business that had a lot of momentum, that you almost sort of stepped away from your own enjoyment of the process, all the work that you'd been doing, and sort of said, this is a great moment to sell. There's a lot of people that are going to get great return on capital. A lot of people who I've asked to come on this journey are going to be happier if I make this decision. But you yourself maybe could have gone either way on it. Is that a fair characterization of it.
[00:59:33] Speaker C: Totally fair, and I think it's important. Listen, no one's crying for me, right? I made out okay. Like, great momentum. I think what I enjoyed in this process was being a part of something cool. Right? It's a great story. And I got to selfishly, right? This is a very selfish comment. I got to see and experience people's lives changing, giving people when we're buying these businesses, there's no hiding this. Like, we're giving people millions of dollars and seeing their life change and their kids life change. To me, that was awesome.
Look at how many millionaires we created in 24 months, right? That was an amazing feat and something I'm very proud of. And I will preach that as a crowning achievement of mine. And there was a lot of people on that list. You're right. And I cared about their happiness. You're right. Because this is kind of cliche, but we wouldn't have been able to transact with all those people literally and figuratively. Like, one of the conversations we had with the buyer was, we have a deep management team, and they're like, that's great. That's also a huge risk, similar to what we talk about of are they going to stay? Like, if this person says no, we don't know, if this person says no, we don't know. So we had to go through one by one and make sure. Are you good with this or not. So that was very important for us. But for my personal happiness, one, I owed it to my family. It was a very long 24 months. It was twelve hour days. Some days were brutal. I missed a lot of soccer practices, a lot of dance stuff, a lot of phone calls at night, phone calls at 03:00 A.m., especially when we're trying to sell the business and go through that process. I was nonexistent as a father and husband for 60 days. Nonexistent. And I needed time to step back and breathe with our family and my life. But outside of that, like, on a personal or professional enjoyment level, what I enjoyed was the input. I enjoyed looking for businesses. I enjoyed getting to know people. I enjoyed diligencing people. I enjoyed closing people and putting them a part of our business. I enjoyed the input, the output, the money and the story and all that. And doing your podcast, that's great. And I'm super happy we get to do that, and there could be a lot shittier outcomes than doing that. But for me, it was all about the like, we sold the business and it was great. Like, let's get back at it tomorrow. Billy, I don't mean to go on a tangent, but Billy Donovan, the Florida basketball coach who won two national championships, unprecedented, going to be a hall of Famer. He was doing an interview after he won his second championship, and the guy said, oh, my God. How does it feel? You just reached the pinnacle of life. You've won two national championships. And he said something very profound, which I didn't understand until this moment. He said, I couldn't believe that's all it was like, you spend your whole life chasing the championship. You spend your whole career trying to sell a business and change people's lives. You spend your whole every waking moment thinking about a practice or a game or players and championships, or in our case, the business, right? A customer, the employees. What's next? An acquisition and the wire hits and the deal is done. And you're like that's it. That's what this brought. And that's not to say money is not great, because it is. Right. We all do this for money. I think people that say they don't are full of shit, but there's got to be something more about this than money. And I found out for me, it was at that moment that it wasn't about the money. The money was something that I had in my head that I was chasing. But what I found out was the money didn't drive me, the input did.
[01:03:23] Speaker B: So have you retained the ability to pursue something new with One Outdoor?
[01:03:29] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So the transaction was at the operating company levels, and they bought the platforms and landscaping. So we are actively I'm actively searching for new industry and new platforms for One Outdoor holdings.
[01:03:42] Speaker B: That's such a great place.
[01:03:43] Speaker C: Not in commercial landscaping. Obviously, I can't do that.
[01:03:47] Speaker B: Understood.
[01:03:47] Speaker C: In the Southeast, that category is off.
[01:03:49] Speaker B: Limits for a little while at least. That's a great place to leave it. I'm super excited to see what the second chapter holds here as you think about where to set your sights next. This has been a ton of fun. I've learned a ton. I'm really excited to share this episode. Thank you very much, mike, this has been great.
[01:04:07] Speaker C: I appreciate what you guys do at Axel and I appreciate your podcast. And listen, if it wasn't for people like you, I wouldn't have learned half of this stuff. Right. So we appreciate you. I appreciate you and looking forward to building a relationship with you guys over there. And I'm one of your biggest fans, man. Thank you.
[01:04:22] Speaker B: Mike sometimes ask, where did you learn the most over the course of this chapter of your career? To my guests. But in this case, I already know the answer is Twitter.
[01:04:32] Speaker C: That's right. Exactly right. Listen, people being willing to share the good, bad and the ugly. Right. So that was helpful for me.
[01:04:39] Speaker B: Yeah. All right, we'll leave it there for now. Mike, thanks again. Look forward to more.
[01:04:43] Speaker C: Absolutely. Thank you.
[01:04:50] Speaker A: If you enjoyed this episode, check out Axial.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast as well as our recorded Axial Member Roundtables, some downloadable tools for Dealmakers, Axial's quarterly league table, rankings of top small business acquirers and investment banks, and lots of other useful content that we've created over the course of time. If you're interested in joining Axial as either an acquirer, an owner considering an exit, or as a sellside m A advisor, you can get started for
[email protected] as well. Lastly, if you have ideas for podcast show guests, feel free to reach out to me directly at
[email protected]. I promise I will respond. Thanks for listening.
