[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: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Masters in Small Business M-A-I am your host, Peter Lehrman. It's been a few weeks, busy start to the year. Looking forward to getting back in the interview chair. I'm extremely excited to have the founder of SunPro on the podcast today, Bob Filehi. Welcome to the show. Looking forward to diving in with you.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: Thank you, Peter. I'm glad to be here.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: In the last 20 or so episodes, we have spent a lot of time interviewing investment professionals, professional acquirers. We've interviewed some business brokers and investment bankers. We're going to switch it up and interview born and bred owner operator today, which is really appropriate. I'm excited to do this. Bob, let's get started. There's so many places to dive in. It's a really, really cool story, most recently culminating with a fantastic exit. We're going to start at the beginning of the beginning. How did you decide you wanted to be an entrepreneur and tell us how this whole story got started?
[00:02:15] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. Appreciate that, Peter. I go back to where our family was, and that was Grand Rapids, Michigan. And in 2006, we had made the determination as a family that we wanted to leave the clouds and rain and snow and make our exit south to Florida. Valerie's parents were located in Florida, and we felt like the best place we could be if we relocated was to be somewhere within a reasonable distance so they could watch our daughters play sports and things at the time we had a third grader, fifth grader, and one that was going into 9th grade, and we felt we had to make the exit then before she got into high school. So we all packed it up. And during that period of time in Grand Rapids, prior to six, I was in the pull end of the tractor trailer combination. I sold semi trailers, flatbeds, dumps, refrigerated trailers and dry vans and various things, and sold them to trucking companies that were located primarily in the Grand Rapids marketplace, was not only sold to companies that were trucking companies, but we also sold to independent owner operators. What I had done in that industry was I relocated from Detroit Marketplace. And I think it went back to like 1988, was in a sales territory for about five years. And it was everything north of Kent county, which Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kent County's centers, Grand Rapids, everything north gets a little rural. So I did my best to scramble around and meet new trucking companies in the northern area of Michigan. And then eventually the organization, which, who I work for is a company called Fooloff. They ended up, unfortunately, the largest supplier of semi trailers went out of business. And I found myself realizing that my only expertise at that time was semi trailers. And I opened up a small little dealership in the back corner of a trucking outfit, a Ford heavy duty trucking outfit. And that goes back to about early 90s, where I kind of gained the experience working for a large organization, realized I had to make a living selling semi trailer. So I started in the back end, and I ended up picking up some different trailer lines, different manufacturers, and actually it started to evolve and became fairly successful. I took on a couple of partners in the business. We owned about a six acre site that was in the middle of Grand Rapids. And even though that was successful, we knew that our future was going to be south and had an opportunity to talk to my two partners, and we made the exit. So in 2006, we sold everything we had, asset wise, home, had a rental fleet, and relocated ourselves down to Sarasota, Florida. And so in six, I spent a little time deciding what I was going to do for the future, knowing that I was going to get into a small business of some sort. It wasn't going to be anything where I was going to be an employee. I had the mindset, business background, and the drive to understand that I wanted to work for myself. So I looked around for small businesses. I went through little different brokerage sites and kind of looked for something that in our area, whether it was a pool cleaning company or whether it was just minor service organizations that I could kind of get my head wrapped around and figure out how to grow it. And I ended up deciding, and my brother was a large supplier in the Detroit marketplace of retractable awnings. And so I got to talking with him. And real fast forward, let's say in 2008, I had not done anything from a standpoint of business wise, and the large percentage of my net worth was in the marketplace. And if we all know, 2008 was not the best time to have money in the market. So it basically sapped a large percent of what I had sold. When I went down to Grand Rapids, my home, half of the business wasn't quite retirement funds by any means, but it was a way that I could figure out how I was going to do it with a small business. In any case, 2008 hit had an investment account that basically went down to about 40% of its original value. And I said, well, I'd better start hustling. So I talked to my brother, and my brother said, hey, I have a retractable awning kind of seminar. Not seminar necessarily, but a convention. It's called Ifai. It's the fabric association that a lot of the retractable awning manufacturers put together. He said, I've got a booth in Orlando, because I'm thinking about taking my retractable awnings out of the Detroit market and maybe doing a wholesale operation there. So I went and joined him at his booth in Orlando. And it was like something that I got to the point where, okay, this has got to work. I've got three daughters entering college. We've got sizable monthly payments going on my investment account, shrinking as we speak. And so I got in the booth and learned a lot about retractable awnings from my brother. He had a couple of employees up to the booth, and then we were passing out cards as if we were going to sell these retractable awnings on a wholesale basis. A fellow came up to our booth and he was located in Orlando. His own business was, it was a small little business that he had. And he said, hey, these retractable awnings are terrific. I sell these retractable awnings and I might pick up your line, said, have you ever heard of motorized screens? And I had. Not for the exterior. I had for the interior, but I didn't have for the exterior. So he showed me the idea of these exterior motorized screens that would help from sunshine, keep insects out of the backyard. All these various advantages that you could have by having exterior screens that are very similar to interior motorized with a remote control, but they have sidetracks in them, so the fabric remains encased all around. So when the wind blows, it stays where it's supposed to be. So he said, hey, when you're not busy over the next month or two, why don't you come to Orlando? I'll show you what I do for these motorized screens. We sell them typically. This is him now talking. So we sell them typically in the villages of Florida, and they buy them for garage door openings. And the homeowners love them because it gives them some added bonus room for their garages. They drop the screen, bucks don't come in, wind blows through. And so there's a lot of advantages of it. So I went to a shop, and the shop was. It was small. What he would do was himself, he was 74 years old. He would go out and sell the product in the villages. His son would manufacture the motorized screens, and they would install them within a couple of three days. And it was kind of this process. And he had the idea of having the extrusions and all the things that are associated with the motorized screens he had in the small little quanzet hut shop. And there was stuff kind of like on the floors, and there was things that you could look at, say, this was a very small manufacturing situation. And I just kind of said, not a lot of people know about motorized screens. I'm not really certain how that would go. But we sat down at lunch, and he offered me an opportunity to buy into the business. And basically what it was was duplicating what he had in inventory. And we would capitalize in checking account for what the inventory number was. And then I could take the inventory from Orlando down to where I lived, which was Bradenton Sarasota area, and figure out how to manufacture, make, and then grow this into not only selling him these motorized screens for his Orlando business, but also to other dealers that would do the same thing. So we ended up negotiating. He owned the business. I actually thought, at this time, I'm really risk adverse. A lot of my money gone in investments. I had a few things rented down here in satellite trailers in Florida. That wasn't working out well for the people that were paying the lease payments. And so I got my brother involved in another fella. They came up with the $26,000, and so we capitalized the organization. $26,000, Sun Pro, motorized runnings and screens. I went over with a u Haul, and I picked up all the inventory from Orlando and brought it over to Bradenton. And at the time manufacturing facilities in Bradenton had taken a big hit because it was eight, nine problems where a lot of the smaller manufacturers were out of business and different things. And so I found a reasonable location at about 10,000 sqft. We ended up putting up some tables and a couple of sewing machines and trying to figure out, basically, it wasn't a catalog on how to make motorized screens, but the fellow came over from Orlando, kind of taught us how the layout was, what you have to do, how to make them, how to do that. So we capitalized in checking account with $36,000, and we picked up one dealer at a time. And so we started off with a fellow from Orlando and his business. And so we had cash flow coming in because we delivered to him in Orlando, and he write us a check for the product, and then it was okay. Who else sells these things? Who else sells motorized shades around the country?
[00:11:29] Speaker B: What did he need from, like, why did he bring you in? You were up in Detroit at this booth. Why did he get a hold of you and sort of bring you in on this? What was his motivation? What did he need out of you, and how were you initially helpful to him in developing the business that he already had based out of Orlando?
[00:11:48] Speaker C: Great question. I think he actually. What it was, it was a convention in Orlando. His business was in Orlando. So he was within 15 miles of this convention facility. Right. And if you went over to his shop, you could see that he was trying to manufacture these products not only for himself, but he knew that there was a wholesale potential, that he could find other dealers to sell this to, not only his own retail business, where he only had about six or seven employees. So really, then he looked at me and he said, I can't get the wholesale off the ground. Is there any chance that you would be based upon your business background and do you understand retractable awnings? How about if we become 40% partners of the business?
Here's our inventory, here's somewhat of the playbook. We'll buy from you because that'll loosen up time for my son. He'll go out and sell and we'll do some different things, but we won't have to worry about manufacturing. You manufacture. And here's the price list from a wholesale basis that we had figured out when we were going to roll this stuff out. But you could see in his facility, there was a bunch of what you would call samples and different things that he never sent to any dealers because he didn't either have time. And actually, the situation where some of the people in Florida, which 50% of our revenue was from Florida, some of it saw it as competition to him. Him having his own retail and then manufacturing. So he basically ran into dead ends over a year or two year period of time trying to manufacture wholesale. But I think it was more about execution. Didn't have the ability to hire more people and try to execute that with the time and 70 plus years old and basically was a local salesperson, a direct to consumer with a manufacturing. And so just didn't have the makeup to be able to do it. He felt like after meeting me at the booth, enough talking about the products, and he sees that I'm going to be potentially selling retractable awnings in Sarasota brains. And he thought, well, here's a nice complement to your awnings is these motorized screens. And 40% is better than nothing, right? And so he felt like maybe I could turn it into something, right? And so again, started brother in law Valerie and we got to manufacturing these. And what we realized early on when we started reaching out to some of these dealers that bought these and that basically they get up in the morning thinking about selling retractable motorized screens or potentially retractable awnings, is that the suppliers, the manufacturers, the wholesalers, they didn't do a very good job. I just felt you could see it. You could hear it from the people that were in the industry. The 800 pound gorilla was up in Canada. All the shipping that they would do. See, the thing is about exterior motorized screens is these can be up to 30 foot wide, right window motorized screens, they typically, because the roll tube is relatively small, they max out like at 12ft. But exterior, we use larger roll tubes, we use larger motors. Everything's larger. So we can take them up to 30 foot wide. And quite frankly, we go up to 22 foot high. So we can make these monster screens because they're geared for the exterior. Well, what happens when you ship these out by common carrier, contract carrier, there's a lot of damage issues. So we were hearing about all these damage issues from other manufacturers. Specifically, if they were a long distance away from some of these dealers. And the dealer makeup is a five or six employee operation. They've got one person selling, usually the owner. They've got two to three people up installing, and then you've got a person answering the phone. That's kind of the makeup. They do approximately one to 3 million in revenue annually. And they stay within a specific region. And that's the dealer makeup that buys from us. On a wholesale basis, right? So one, we felt like, okay, the manufacturers aren't being dealer centric. They're more concerned about themselves. They've got twelve and ten week deliveries. Their pricing is up to a certain point. When you do deliver the product, it's damaged. When you try to call them, there's nobody there on the phones to answer for customer service. So we felt like if we could make a dealer centric organization, manufacturing, and really be more concerned about the dealers than we were ourselves, we could grow this. And we didn't know really the opportunity to grow it, but we knew we could grow was my, I was kind of charged. I was in the office while Valerie's out sewing, Jerry's out cutting up, was to find some individual dealers that could make a large impact into our financials, individuals that were already buying from other manufacturers, but that we knew we could out service them. And so we searched out these larger dealers. And most you get some reluctance, but then you realize you keep with it. The other guy's making some errors. The other organizations delivers a product that's damaged, and all of a sudden they're kind of like what I told everyone is, hey, just let us be the b plan. Let us be the b plan for you. If you could run across different sizes, different things, or you need something in two weeks, or you need something a week and a half, just let me know, we'll get it done for you. We don't have to have an exclusivity to our dealerships. And in fact, that was part of one of the things that I wanted to make sure we weren't part of, and that was we got exclusive dealerships. What I wanted to do was build a generic product, because when you look at our competition, very similar, you have two pairs of tracks. You have a bottom bar, you have a hooded housing and a roll tube, and the fabric and a lot of those parts. Although you have your own profiles. As far as the aluminum extrusions, a lot of the material, the mesh materials and things come from the same United States suppliers, right? So I just looked at as, let us be a generic provider and have an extreme high level of service. And forget about touting the sunprone name. Tout your own name, dealer tout Orlando screens and awnings. Tout Tallahassee screens and awnings. So that approach initially really came to gain some real traction because we didn't have to have contractual agreements. I could be the b plan, and then I usually went from the b plan to the b plus plan to the a minus till I got the a plan, just because of old services. And so that's how we were able to manufacturing roll the business from that one dealer in Orlando to last year, 2023. I think we had 400 dealers. 50% of our revenue was from Florida.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: 50% from Florida. Okay, so the original capital that went into the business, the $36,000, did you guys form a new entity, or was that, did you guys preserve the entity alongside the Orlando Collie? Or you create a new entity?
[00:18:37] Speaker C: You created a new llc. Under that. We capitalized it, the 36,000, and then in exchange, I brought the inventory over.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: You brought the inventory over. And did he own any of your newly created entity?
[00:18:51] Speaker C: Yes, 40%.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: So he owned 40% of that.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: Okay, got it.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: And then he was your first end dealer, right?
[00:18:58] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah, I see.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: So you were kind of his a plan, day one. He was your anchor dealer.
[00:19:04] Speaker C: Day one.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: And you controlled the wholesale sort of manufacturing and fulfillment for him, day one. And then you began looking to grow your dealer network as sort of like day number two. Right, exactly.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: I'd love to hear just, like, a little bit about the business and how the business works in terms of just how money flows out of the business and how money flows into the business. When you're a wholesale manufacturer of screens and motorized screens and awnings, just what is the business model?
[00:19:31] Speaker C: How does it work?
[00:19:31] Speaker B: How do you guys get paid? Just nuts and bolts of sort of how the money moves in and out of the business.
[00:19:36] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So we, early on, I met an individual that developed, that was a developer of software. If you could imagine, all motorized screens and awnings that we manufacture are custom made. So the dealer is out at typically a residential. About 80% of our business was residential, 20% was commercial. So if you could imagine a dealer in Orlando is over at residential home, he's measuring up for motorized screens and awnings, and he has his retail numbers, and he sells the product to the Mrs. Consumer. He then goes back to the office, or he can do it on his phone as he places the order to the exact dimensions of the product. Right. Very familiar with how he's going to install it, very familiar on how he's pricing it, very familiar on the specifications. And we have training to help all that. But early on, it was individuals that were in the industry already that we were just kind of taking share from. So he would sit down at a laptop or a computer, and he placed the order through our software. Software would come to our manufacturing, obviously directly to. With manufacturing and then we have customer service agent one or two that would just kind of look through the order, make sure there wasn't anything unusual, and then we would replace the order to production. We typically would produce the product within ten business days.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Did you get paid upfront or were you paid upon installation? How did payment work?
[00:21:00] Speaker C: Yeah, so we would then manufacture the product and really one of our secret sauces were we delivered. So to kind of get around the problem with commercial freight and LTL freight and the damage that's occurred specifically with our type of products, we decided early on we were going to buy pickup trucks, dually pickup trucks with Gooseneck trailers. We were going to outfit the Gooseneck trailers with a fold down ramp with racking inside. Then we were going to have delivery zones set up as we grew a dealer, he was in a specific delivery zone. We had seven drivers and they would drive these and they would have typically 15 to 20 drop offs to these dealers and they would help unload it off the back of the rack. It's all hand loading. We didn't have to cardboard anything at all like all the other manufacturer stuff. And it was part of our secret sauce that we do that. Then while we're there delivering it, we were paid by credit card full, 100% of the transaction. So we didn't really have a receivables. There might have been some dealers early on that wanted to stay on the receivable side. Well, we convinced 95, 97% of our dealers to just handle this by credit card. So we then had a part of our accounting team would then know where we're delivering and when and what time. And we'd be doing the invoicing as we're delivering.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: And you were delivering to the dealer, not to the consumer, correct?
[00:22:29] Speaker C: That's correct, yes, that's correct. We were just providing a product. They provided their own advertising, they provided their own leads, their own sales, their own consumer base and their own installations. We just provided them a product at a wholesale basis. They typically marked it up about two and a half times wholesale for an installation cost. And so like any wholesale. So now we've got software that's helping us through the process, we've got our own trucks and trailers that are helping, and we're growing our dealer network by primarily service. And there's word of mouth going around that we're probably the best at the service end of things.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Why were you guys the best at the service end of things? How did you become the best at the service end of things?
[00:23:15] Speaker C: One, obviously what really helped us on efficiency, from data boarder to data manufacture, was the software that helped us implement and how many motorized screens and retractable awnings we could actually manufacture. So we slowly built in. Our software was we take the orders digitally, and then we would digitally disperse those to the manufacturing site. So each individual station, to make this read from their tablets what they had to make, as far as, like, a roll tube station, knew what the length cup was, the mesh station, the bottom bar station. So we had kind of electronically, we were able to kind of push the sales order out to each station, and it made it very efficient to where we were up to about 130 screens a day. We're talking about screens that are 25 foot wide, 20 foot wide to 30 foot. So we had a really efficient process of manufacturing, and then we had a really efficient process through our software, again, of distribution. So with our own vehicles, our own drivers, our own trucks, we would set up our delivery schedules. A lot of the incoming orders were not, like, first in, first out. They were placed into routes. So, conceivably, if we were going through the Nashville, Tennessee round and we were going to South Carolina routes, we would be able to. If an order came in today and the dealer called us and said, hey, when's the truck leaving for Nashville? I'm a dealer in Nashville. Let's leave it on Wednesday. Hey, I got this order I just sold to this customer, and they really need it. By Friday, it would be on the truck. So those kind of things that we were able to give a value proposition that was really kind of unheard of in the industry. And our industry was made up of about seven regional manufacturers. The industry itself was growing dramatically, but we were kind of leading that as well. And we were fortunate. We had some tailwinds from COVID where a lot of people were. A lot of consumers were spending money in their backyard, and we're part of that whole process, whether it's a retractable awning or a motorized screen. But that's how I feel. We won in the marketplace now about four years into manufacturing and really understanding the product.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: And what year is this when you're four years into manufacturing? Just place this in time. Is this 2012?
[00:25:37] Speaker C: So about 2015. Okay. Okay, so 2015, 2016. My daughters are now finishing college. One went out west, California. Mara, she finished college in a company called Scripps College, Claremont Colleges. There's a consortium of about five schools out west there. She played basketball, ended up getting a master's degree in economics, and she worked for another organization for about a year after that. I said, our retail. I'm not paying much attention to the retail. We're kind of really focused on manufacturing, and we were doing really migrant retail. I hired a friend and was selling, and then we'd go out and install. It wasn't really a business, but we ended up doing about a million and a half in retail dollars. So we had some sort of semblance of business. We had some really nice five star reviews. I said, I think I've got an opportunity here for you and your sister, your two sisters, whoever want to come and take our retail to a different level, because we can help support the advertising, we can help support the business side of things. And so you take 2016 to where we were last year. They took a million and a half dollar business, and last year they did approximately 28 million in retail.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:26:51] Speaker C: Yeah. So that was a really large addition to our manufacturing revenue. Was our retail growing dramatically?
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Can you talk about the relationship between retail and the dealer servicing network? Where is there tension there? Was there tension there? How do those businesses interact with one another?
[00:27:10] Speaker C: Yeah, great question. So kind of, again, early on, realized, here we are manufacturing in Sarasota, Florida, Bradenington, and we really didn't have a strong dealer on a western side of the state from Tampa, Dalga, Naples, really didn't have anybody that was really taking charge. So we started off in Sarasota, Manatee, just to kind of, because we're right in our backyard. And there was some really nice growth areas in the Manatee county. And Sarasota county, probably the largest growth in the state, was happening in these two counties because there was a community called Lakewood Ranch. And they have typically the largest new home starts. They're always in the top five in the country for new home starts. So we had this kind of burgeoning communities around us, and it lended itself to a real opportunity retail wise. So we started there, and we really weren't upsetting any of our other dealers. They just knew we had a retail spot. But there weren't many dealers we could upset. And if they were, they weren't doing enough to scare us that they would leave us. So we called back the company, sun protection of Florida. So we have now two separate entities, two separate financials. And by the time Mara was finishing college and I was training her a little bit on Quickbooks and different things, know, small business operation versus analyst type information, this was like, okay, what's a receivable, what's a bayable, what's a balance sheet? That sort of stuff, which was kind of like small business. Well, one, she kind of took that end of things, and then my daughter graduated, my youngest graduated from UCF and she had a business degree with a sales major. They had UCF little different than a lot of universities in that they had a major for selling. And so they had sales teams that competed against other colleges and sales, and she was on that group. And so she comes with kind of like an educational sales background, books that she read for the universities and things. And so she took over the sales team. She hired a bunch of kids from her sales group at UCF that were part of her group and placed one kid in Orlando and then another fell in Miami. And it kind of started to kind of grow outside of Sarasota and Manatee county. But again, what was interesting, like, if you took a look at our footprint of Florida, yes, we had a lot of dealers, but there wasn't really anybody that was really going to be the 800 pound gorilla that would say, hey, wow, don't do that, or I'm out. And we'd be nervous that they left. Right? So if you look at then the numbers at the end of the year, you take our 350 dealers, some production of Florida purchased last year, let's say 7 million in wholesale dollars. Our closest other dealer was a fellow in Arizona and Houston. They were up to route two, right? So substantially, they made a big impact into our wholesale manufacturing.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Your retail store was your best customer.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: And they grew it. Now they've got over 110 employees. Got a lot of young salespeople that are energetic. They put together processes to sell at the consumer level with tablets, electronics. And what always amazed me, and this is what I told them before, they really got rolling, I said, I'm not necessarily listen, what you're going to be providing the manufacturing business is going to be it. The most important thing that you're going to be able to do to grow this business is the five star warm beeps. So if you looked at some protection of floor and you googled it, they have about, I don't know, maybe 700 today, and there's not one below a five. So they really kind of serviced that. They kind of did the same thing we did to our dealer network as they're doing to consumers. If you got an upset consumer, best thing you to do is take care of it and make sure that they're happy. At the end of the day, that person will write a paragraph, two paragraphs on Google Review, and that's about $20,000 in advertising, in my opinion. So one of the things that we had to do is to make sure that that same process, and my daughters, they get scared when they get a four. They call me up and say, hey, listen, I hope you don't mind. We're looking. We got. But they didn't. They change it to a five because they do something or whatever they have to do to make sure that that customer realizing the importance of our organization, having nothing but five star review. So what became really after you look at kind of the growth of Sunpro. So we go from $36,000 in inventory. In 2011, when I hired Mara, I hired another individual that ran our manufacturing. Mara running the SBF and my daughter running the sales team, Ashland. Then I hired an individual to run our manufacturing company, brought him in just kind of an involved story of how he and I came across each other, but it was through my brother and retractable awnings. And I realized early on he had far greater experience and expertise for scaling an organization than I did. Right. I went back to the semi trailer business, and we might have done 20 million, but it was a completely different type of business. The transactions were different, everything else. And so he and I just thought was like one plus one equals three. And he wanted to take the whole thing over. His name is Mark Elderton. And so in 2019, I basically made him the CEO. Mara, the CEO of Sun Protection of Florida, Mark, the CEO of Sunpro. And I took a backseat and I just kind of guided, and we would do forecasting annually, November, December, about, okay, we got these initiatives, we got the growth potential, and then we'd run budgets and pnls for the entire year, which was relatively simple because you just took the history and then kind of added, hey, what do we think we're going to do? 20%, 30% based upon where we're going to go? How many new markets are we going to go into? Laura, from a retail perspective, are we upsetting any of the dealers based upon where we want to go? Because one of the things that we realized early on is we couldn't rely on our dealer network to really make a great impact unless we brought in a big number of. But self protection of Florida can make a big impact because they're spending two to $3 million a year in advertising where the other dealers necessarily were kind of adverse to growth. So where we realized that we could continue to expand our retail was we'd go into markets where it made us a little nervous that the other dealers would, and they'd call us, but it never financially impacted the dealers. We really never saw a drop in the dealer revenue because we went into that marketplace. If anything, it went up. So we felt, hey, wait a minute, this is working. We got a case study that shows it works. Case study that shows both of those works. And then our goal, when we sit down, kind of like Mara Ashlyn, Mark Valerie sat down and looked at, okay, where do we think, based upon the industry growing, our companies growing, what is next year in November, what does next year look like revenue wise, for sound protection in Florida? Okay, let's put that whole forecast together on a monthly basis. What does the numbers look like? Based upon some protection growing to that, what is our number? And while we're picking up 100 new dealers, we've got some protection growth. Those numbers should look like that. And so we would just forecast both of those items. And at the end of 2022, I realized that we needed to pull some discounting away from the retail because I felt like our manufacturing. So if you looked at the PNLs, the manufacturing was like really fixed. And they were just like, they would keep everything they'd made to the bottom. Right where the retail buying vehicles, we salespeople, we'd be moving people into middle management. And so we kind of watered down the p and l through the retail. And so what I wanted to do was say, hey, we got to work a little harder to sell things to consumers. We're going to take an 8%. They typically got a 20% discount from normal. So our other dealers were paying book. They're paying 20% off. Now. We had ten other dealers at the time that were discounted, but not to that heavyness, but they almost deserved it based upon the volume they were doing. So I dropped their discount down to twelve from toy. So the 8% was going to stay in the manufacturing because I said, we need to get our net incomes. I don't worry about getting to 100 million in revenue. I want to get to 10 million in EBITDA. That was my.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Why was that? Why did you think like that?
[00:35:29] Speaker C: Because I'm 63 years old. Right. And I thought that for us, with all the momentum that we had, we had a terrific story to tell, and somebody's going to be really interested in that story.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Were you starting to get interest in the business from acquirers? Was there any inbound coming your way over the course of this growth period, with retail going from a million to 28 million and then more and more margin being kept by the manufacturing business when you made this decision? I guess let's start to transition to like, since you mentioned 10 million of EBITDA. That's obviously a big number. And there's a lot of acquirers who are interested in a business at that scale. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. What kind of inbound were you getting at this point?
[00:36:13] Speaker C: Well, I thought it would be some two years ago. I felt like I needed to know what it was going to take for us to maximize outcome on an exit.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: This is about two years ago you started thinking about this.
[00:36:26] Speaker C: Yeah, it was probably beginning of 2022.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:36:31] Speaker C: And so I went to a seminar and got a lot of information as far as timing, valuation, interest rates, all these various components that go into kind of like an exit strategy. So I took back with it an idea, kind of like, all right, we want the best outcome for the family because I've got daughters in the business. Right. I'm not sure we didn't want to do 100% sale. Would we go to a private equity company and roll over and still maintain this? And so I learned about that whole kind of process from the standpoint of just getting a little bit of background on what's important in that whole area of exiting. And I sat down prior to 2023 with our group, Mara, and I said, we're going to loop some discounting over. Sorry, Mara, you're going to have to pay more money to buy the product from my manufacturing. But I feel like if we look at where we are on the PNL side of things, I had heard in some cases, and different things, that getting to ten in EBITDA, 10 million, separates a lot of organizations. And once you get over TEd, even the multiple increases. Right. Which kind of surprised me to hear multiple increases as you gain more. So a goal was to get to 10 million with ad back. So an adjusted EBITDA was to get to those numbers. So that's where I was kind of like leaning in towards for 2023 and everybody hit their numbers. I mean, 2023 was a strong year, retail was a strong year for manufacturing. And then when we actually kind of decided that in June, it felt to me like we are on some really strong momentum. We got really some good things going here. I think we got a great story, and I think we could get a great outcome. So I decided that I would actually reach out to investment banking. What was interesting about that is we had a long term CPA that was done some nice things as far as some advisory stuff and done all our tax returns and things. And he had advised us that he wanted to take us out to the marketplace and get a success in fee, and he knows a lot of the players, and he's done some emanating transactions and things. And my daughter Mara was like, you're never really going to know the true value, dad, unless you go to the marketplace and have multiple opportunities. And I had to convince him that that's what we were doing. And we did. And then for us, it was like, okay, so what investment banks do we actually reach out to go to? And what I did, as I kind of googled local Tampa based investment banks, and I looked at who, the ones that put together deals, and you look at all the situations that they do and kind of look at their websites and different things, but I wasn't certain that should I just stay in Florida with an investment bank that's in Tampa or Miami or whatever, or should I actually just kind of reach out to the broad base investment banks? And so one of the things that I did do was go to axiom, and I just went directly to Peter, your website, and I googled m a activity.
I think probably on the first page of Google, your website came up. And I went in, I started reviewing the website. I thought, hey, this is terrific opportunity for me to get at least five to six leads so I could reach out to those leads that really fit our profile. So you plug in the numbers, revenue numbers, EBITDA, location, your place. And then all of a sudden, we had an individual call us from your organization that said, hey, we've kind of diagnosed that there's like, really probably six or seven organizations that we have that really know your industry well, really have strong outcomes in your specific industry. And here they are. So we interviewed them all, and it was a great lead source for us to go out and reach out. And then we took it from there by setting up time schedules and Zoom calls with, I think it was at the time, I think we met with about eight different investment banks. And there were some really, I mean, really strong people in that industry that we had talked to based upon those leads. And we had to decide on one, and we decided on one out of Chicago called Peakstone, and the rest is history. It was a wonderful process. I mean, obviously not without some anxieties and different things. So we started in June, and then we went out, and the case study was this. We had quite a few responses. Being in the outdoor area of residential, it's got some real nice tailwinds with people putting fire pits and pools and falls, waterfalls, all this very stuff. And so our products fit right into those tailwinds. And so we had a lot of responses from private equity companies to individuals that were directly in our industry.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: Hey, Bob, before you continue this piece of the story, I'm curious. You met a lot of different investment banks. You spent a bunch of time doing that. You interviewed eight.
[00:41:52] Speaker C: That's a lot.
[00:41:53] Speaker B: Most of the owners who we refer to, banks, probably don't get much higher than three or four. Can you just share a little bit how you made the selection, the ultimate selection? Like, how did you make, how are you evaluating them, and how do you feel like you ultimately made the decision in this case to go with Peakstone? Just what was going through your mind? How do you think you broke apart the decision and ultimately made a decision since you met a bunch that seemed compelling? Because I think that's a very interesting question for a lot of owners, is they get introduced to investment bankers through one source or another, or they get referral or they're using axial. But I think just hearing how you went through the selection process, I think is probably pretty interesting. So I just want to spend a few minutes on that and then we can keep going.
[00:42:46] Speaker C: So made the decision that I wanted my daughter involved in every one of these interviews.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Which daughter?
[00:42:53] Speaker C: My middle daughter that was financially operating, some protection, affordable. She had that master's degree in economics. She went through analyst school. Well, she was a proponent, obviously, for us going through investment banks to make. So her and I set up Zoom calls. We send the emails out, kind of set up times to have the discussion. We would go through the process of sending our financials, and then we'd have the second interview. Right. And where we wanted to go. I mean, the thing is that you have to live with these folks for nine months, and you have to have trust in them that they're going to do everything they can to get you the greatest outcome. You have trust in them that they have the right sizable Rolodex to introduce you to organizations that would have a big interest for you. You would also like them to have a similar culture. We're kind of laid back. We're just kind of a certain type we enjoy, have fun, joke around, laugh. And so it wasn't anything that we were looking for, anything that was outside of that culture. So we got done. Round one, send the financials. Round two, give us some idea on valuation.
Each one of them, we talked about valuation and what they would do if they were contractually, what the success fees were. And so you take all those into considerations to your culture, success fee, trust, and who can get the job done for you and we felt most of them could cover that. We really didn't have what we would say, oh, that's for sure. An X. We had a tough decision, and I let my daughter make the decision and really happened. So I think, like, if I could give any advice for somebody that was going through this is definitely don't go down the path of one individual CPA, one individual investment bank. It's the most important decision you're going to make in your life. Make sure you're making the right one.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: So that was June of 23.
[00:45:02] Speaker C: Yeah. And then from there it became a process of letting Mara handle the subprotection of Florida go on, or let Mark handle the manufacturing, and just make sure that hopefully we're going to hit our numbers based upon demand and everything else, because really what has to happen is the momentum needs to continue to carry on. And because every month you're redoing your financials to put them in basically an earnings format to where everybody's looking. Anybody that was interested was continually looking every month. So if you were going to show the slightest drop, there was going to be a lot of questions then. They certainly did. Everybody got to where the numbers were right on the retail, the numbers were right on the manufacturing. We were continuing to show on momentum. And so the Peakstone goes out to the marketplace, and we had 290 NDA site. So that was organizations that were wanting to look further into the financials after they sent out this eight and a half by eleven page. That was kind of a teaser. So set out the teaser, 290 signed.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: NDAs from 290 different acquisition entities of one sort or another.
[00:46:19] Speaker C: Wow, okay. And then after the NDAs, they set out all the information, if there were any ones, that we weren't certain whether or not we wanted to release financials to because they were strategics, we might have held off for a while. And then it was just like, let's go. Whoever signs an NDA, we're going to release the money. So the next stage of the process, as we went on was iois. So out of the 290 NDAs, 60 organizations had iois. So we had 60 different iois, and that's a letter of interest or initiation of interest. And so we knew we had a sizable group, and we took the top twelve valuations of our business out of those 60 iois. And they ranged, interestingly enough, and this is pretty much seeing case studies, the iois ranged from 40 million to 110,000,000. So everybody that looked at the same numbers, same situation, same industry, there was a spread of about 70,000,003 x and we ended up taking the top twelve and then deciding on the top six we'd have in house management meetings. The bottom six we would have Zoom meetings with. And then to see if they wanted to take, we all wanted to take it further with them. And at the end of the day, after the process ends, totally 100% comfortable that our organization and our family got the best potential outcome. We could have conceivably have had very comfortable with the outcome, the ending and how it all transpired. And I couldn't be happier for my family and for our organization to do that. I feel very comfortable that our employees are going to be well taken care of. We bonused them all at closed. We did a lot of different things that other organizations do. We had a terrific culture of employees. That was the hardest thing for me to separate myself from is that I'm no longer an owner of the manufacturing company. The organization that purchased us is Hunter Douglas. They're a billion dollar multinational organization that's primarily on the inside. And they felt that they wanted to increase their opportunities on the outside, but they're in the motorized screen business and so they knew everything about what we did, how we did it, the motors, we buy all the different stuff we did, and they could look at our financials and say, hey, listen, we can reduce some expenses in the purchasing, we can do some things and integrate, and we can take this culture and advance it. They weren't like they were going to consolidate it into something where a standalone still called sunprove, motorized awnings and screens. It was a stock purchase and it just kind of all worked out well. When it all came down to kind of evaluating, we had some private equity companies that had higher enterprise values.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: I was going to start to ask you a little bit about that. Yeah.
How did the final bids vary in terms of prices and terms, and a lot of times people sort of say, oh, if a company is for sale and they're running an auction process, the only person who's going to win is the person with the highest price for smaller sort of lower middle market businesses. I found that that's not true. I found that a lot of times that's not quite true. Now, you can't be the lowest bidder and win, but you don't have to be the very highest bidder in order to win. So I'd love to hear a little bit of the details there, whatever you're comfortable sharing.
[00:49:59] Speaker C: So again, to go back to the twelve highest ones on the iois, there were two strategics, and there were ten organizations that were private equity. A couple of the private equities had higher valuations than $100.
I think once we got to the point where we were deciding on which organization that we wanted to proceed with under an exclusivity, we looked at a few things, and one, capability to close two, time to close three, right culture. All of those kind of had to be in alignment with us. You kind of go through this process, and you say, okay, I'm seven months, eight months into this process. I don't really want to go three more because the private equity company's got to find a bank behind the deal and got to do this where if you having sizable cash horn call it, you've got some leverage to be able to purchase these organizations like mine and make it real easy on the seller.
And that's really kind of where our thought process was. As a family, we felt that we had a very fair offer.
They had done a tremendous amount of due diligence prior to the LOI, and it just made for a really nice and comfortable transition to close where some of the other higher ones didn't quite do as much due diligence. And so you really never know where it would navigate to. Nor were we. I think once I got to the CerT point, it was like, all right, my age and retirement and different things. So I felt like, okay, I have the capabilities of rolling over a certificate, and maybe for the next bite of the apple, it might be even better for me. I felt like we had gotten an enterprise value that I was comfortable with. Bottom line.
[00:52:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So Hunter Douglas was able to acquire the business without any form of sort of financing contingency from a lender, it sounds like.
[00:52:11] Speaker C: And what they ended up doing is they ended up purchasing 100% of the manufacturing business and 70% of the retail.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: I was going to ask about retail.
[00:52:21] Speaker C: So we rolled over. So there was two separations of valuations. One was a retail valuation and one was the manufacturing valuation that combined for the entire closing number. And they wanted to put the organizations into two separate divisions rather than consolidate the two. So what we did is we had an offer to roll over 30% of the valuation of the preexist, the valuation of the retail, and we rolled that over, and my daughters now own 30% of that. And we brought in our third daughter for the 30%. So they have employee agreements, and they have a 30% ownership with a put call option in five years at the same EBITDA or at the mUltiple. Typically, when you look at organizations like ours, I think we ended up with about a nine multiple. And from what I'm led to believe, being that this is my first time through the process, Beard is. That's a pretty high multiple for a small business organization. But I think with the tailwinds, the growth, and they have a strategy to kind of own the outside and the motorized screens like they do the inside. So I happen to be in their way, in a sense, they'll make all the good decisions from a cost perspective on raw materials and different things that they can do to kind of really, and the business today is stronger than it's ever been, so I'm really happy for that.
[00:54:00] Speaker B: It sounds like your daughters are really strong on the retail side. So it's really cool that I was going to ask you about how did you think about your daughters and their opportunity in the business? But it sounds like the answer to that is pretty straightforward, which is because they were driving the retail business, and the retail business had a head of steam going from 1 million to 28 million top line, and I'm sure it was continuing to grow beyond that. That was the perfect piece of the business to retain and roll equity. And so you sell all of the manufacturing business, then retain a very meaningful amount of ownership in the retail business. That's where your daughters are absolutely shooting the lights out. And that's really cool. That's a really cool way to sell a business in a way that is integrating the next generation.
[00:54:50] Speaker C: Yeah. No, that raffle outcome came out to be terrific for the entire family. And they obviously, being 10% owners of both entities, initially have an outcome that they had. So they've had a nice February J.
When you're talking about 29 year old, 30 year old, 32 year old. I couldn't be happier for them. Yeah, I couldn't be happier for them because they worked very hard at it.
[00:55:17] Speaker B: And Valerie and you were the founders of the business together, right? I mean, wasn't she? You guys were the original mom and pop with the 36,000. Where has she been hiding out in the business all these years? And how's she doing?
[00:55:30] Speaker C: Yeah, so she ended up taking kind of a little bit of a backseat as for probably four or five years ago, she went from solving to hiring a seller. Right. And then kind of like hiring hourly employees a couple every week. So she was engaged in that and kind of overseeing manufacturing side of things. But we had a fellow that I used to sell semi trailers to that ran a really sizable organization. He was a general manager of a big trucking outfit. And he ended up retiring in our community in Bradenton, Sarasota. And so he said, listen, I don't want to stop working. And that gave us an opportunity to relieve Valerie of running that entire manufacturing facility. And he took it over for a couple of years. So he was a transition before then. What happens? It's really nice. As you're growing your revenue, you can then bring in little management people that can handle some pretty sizable tasks that you used to wear a hat for. And so as we were growing revenue and growing profits, I had no problem. And Mark would say, hey, listen, I think right now we need another technical guy or we need another customer service guy. There was no way I was going to slow the train down. Just agreed to it. Hey, listen, Bobby, we're looking at a couple new manufacturing.
And so I was always kind of reinvesting in the business. The one thing that I found value in, specifically if we were having a net income, good net income and things, was for us to purchase new machinery and then just bonus depreciated off. So it reduced the net income because these were all pass through businesses that I had, the llcs, so our k ones would get lighter. If we bought a bunch of machinery and depreciated, it would add huge value the next year, from an efficiency standpoint, manufacturing. So our entire shop was built on equipment that enabled us to buy it at a 30% to 40% discount, just by virtue of the fact that we fully depreciated and took advantage of bonus depreciation. So that's one of the things that I feel like really helped us going forward year. Even if we financed, it didn't matter.
We're still going to take advantage of the reduced k one, and also the advantage of what it adds from an efficiency standpoint to our manufacturing. Not only quality, but the volume that we could put through it. So I bought every year. I'd be buying two, three, four pieces of equipment. In fact, we have equipment being delivered now that I already prepaid for.
[00:58:07] Speaker B: And you were prepaying to take advantage.
[00:58:10] Speaker C: Of certain tax frame marshmallow.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: I want to dive into just the exit, like the mind of the owner a little bit on the exit. You said you went to a seminar. Do you feel like that seminar that you went to was like the seminal moment in you taking the exit seriously? Or were you thinking about exits even earlier than that? Could you maybe just share with the audience just what has been the level of thinking that you've done about the value of the business, exiting the business over all of these years, was it always there? Did it begin to really build in the last three years or five years? Just how has your psychology and your general amount of thinking on exiting ebbed and flowed and just take us through a little bit of the ups and downs and the psychology of the owner. When you're thinking about the exit, you.
[00:59:05] Speaker C: Think about it early. Sixty s, sixty two, sixty three, sixty four. I'm 64 years old now. So when I started thinking about, obviously, being in Sarasota, Florida, Bradenton area, filled with a lot of entrepreneurs that have sold their business and moved down here. They got big, beautiful homes, they're on the water and different things. You look around and you think, I've got probably 95% of my net worth turned into this organization at the age of where typical retirement takes place. So you start kind of thinking about turning all of that business that you've worked 60, 70 hours a week, on weekends, Sundays, doing financials, and turning that into something that can benefit yourself. When you start looking at net incomes and multiples, you're like, well, typically, I'm not going to be able to make this kind of income ever from the business. If I did, the business would have to leverage itself. And then if I leverage it, it's got more risk for me. So anytime they apply more, you take out our money, you apply more risk for yourself. Right. So for me, it was more along the lines, I think, that I started thinking about it in early 2022. And I ended up getting a phone call from a sales representative from generational equity. They're a sizable organization that puts together a lot of merchants and acquisition. So they offered me to come down free of charge to Miami, Florida, to come to one of their full six hour seminars. So Valerie, I and Mara went to the seminar, and we actually signed up with them. I was totally convinced that they were not knowing much about merger and acquisitions for small businesses. I kind of felt like they could give us a terrific outcome, right? So they had a representative come like, three days later and walk through our facility, and I signed up for the opportunity to come up with a valuation, and we would be reimbursed for those dollars if, in fact, we had an outcome with them, didn't commit us in any way of them representing us in the marketplace. But it was more along the lines of, okay, we'll get you a valuation, we'll tell you what. This. All those sort of things. So the seminar was educational, the process of going through what we did, and then I've got to talking with others, and then I've got to thinking about the process. Mark kept telling me I was too early in that. I mean, we're just getting started, Bob. We're kind of out. I was glad I got the education.
We ended up getting the enterprise value and what they could potentially do if we wanted to go on to the next stage. But I didn't think that. I just felt like we needed a little more private or smaller kind of expertise for what we were going through specifically. Once we got to a certain value, I felt a little more comfortable with a smaller investment bank. And that's really kind of what started me to think about the next. But it all kicked off by going to that generational equity and then having an individual come in and then realizing potential valuation. But I'm certainly glad we didn't pull the trigger for a couple of reasons. One, we grew dramatically from that date forward, and then two, I felt like we got the right organization to represent us in the marketplace after that. So that really kind of started now. What was kind of going through my mind personally was in 2022 that we had some hurricanes that were close to our facility. There were some things that, uncontrollable things that could happen. And I felt like we're getting to a point with where we're at today. If we can't have the next outcome because of something that we can't control, shame on us for not taking the right time at the right time for the right pace. So that's really where I decided we're going to go full steam at this process. And listen, if the valuations don't make sense for us, then we'll continue to move forward.
We were in no worry. We didn't have really any debt on the building. I mean, any debt on. We leased the manufacturing facility. The only debt we had on was for vehicles. So we didn't have any line of credit debt, so we didn't have a lot to pay off post close or during the closing process. It was just more like I texted my family after the hurricane went through south of us about 40 miles, and you could see it felt terrible, the damage that it created. And I texted my family, I said, if this was 40 miles north, I'm not sure what if it rips open our manufacturing facility, we're down for six months and we're going to lose a lot of customers.
I think ballot need to really pull some chips off the table and take some risk off. And that's really kind of where mindset was.
[01:04:04] Speaker B: Makes perfect sense.
[01:04:05] Speaker C: So going through the process I didn't realize it would. I don't know if nine months was typical, but it was, let me see, started in June, ended January 19. It's actually seven months. And to me, the process gets pretty time consuming. It required a lot of my time from the standpoint that I didn't want it to require a lot of mark and Mars. Mara did a great job on the sum protection side, on the retail, because she has access to all that. But I had to do all the due diligence pretty much on the manufacturing side, but I was glad to do it, obviously. And so I responded very quickly on every request. And I think that that helped accelerate the process to close as well, 100%.
[01:04:46] Speaker B: We get asked a lot by business owners who kind of want to try and do it themselves, and we always recommend that they not try to do the sale themselves because it usually takes them away from the business. And sounds like you really benefited from not only having some really competent family in the business, but also it sounds like Mark was also able to remain totally focused on running the business while you were running point on the sale process. That's an important takeaway for owners, is if you can't put together a team and you had a banker, you had a banker, you had Mark, you had your daughters, a lot of people working together all at the same time to keep the business moving forward while you were transacting at the same time. And when it all of a sudden is one person trying to run the company and sell the company, it can be a real mess.
[01:05:37] Speaker C: Yeah, it absolutely can be. Because probably through this process, I was spending 40 to 50 hours a week. And some of it was 08:00, 11:00 at night. And really, I give credit to Peakstone because they had a guy that you felt like was available, 724. They had an individual on their staff. They had three basic employees, including the founder. So they had three total individuals. And one was really the diligence driver for sure. And so for me to kind of have my CPA only taking vacation a week or two and going here and doing that, nowhere close to the kind of output and just really would have been something that would not have had anywhere close to the amount of organizations that were interested in our equity, no question. If there's anything that I learned through this process is one buyer is no buyer. You got to ample and for multiple reasons. And you never know who they are and where they're coming from and who they are. But I got to meet a tremendous amount of people and some very good people not only in the investment banking community, but also in these organizations that were interested in us. We met some very influential individuals that we felt would have helped us, no question, grow.
But when you kind of put it all together, we ended up with the best opportunity for us.
[01:07:04] Speaker B: I was asking my team, what do they want me to ask you? And you've answered so many of their questions. One of their questions is, what are you most excited to do now?
[01:07:14] Speaker C: Great question.
[01:07:15] Speaker B: What are you excited about now? What are you going to spend your time on in the next, I don't know, six to twelve months?
[01:07:20] Speaker C: Yeah, a couple of things I am not really active at all with SunprO or sun protection for. I'll get phone calls from our periodically, and I'm still doing some really minor stuff there, but a couple of things. Have a condo that's on Main street in Sarasota. About a year or so ago, I went to work out. The place was closed, so I decided that was a workout facility that's in this nine story building leased to an individual, and it was closed. And so I was talking to the cardiologist that I have.
I have him in a concierge service I do monthly. And I get a chance to see him often. And he had this. I said, I think I want to get into the fitness business.
And he comes from a cardiology medical background. So I leased this facility, which was kind of, it's old, but we're cleaning it all up, and we're doing a fitness facility connecting with recovery equipment. So we're doing that cryotherapy and saunas and all this kind of stuff that can help me in my.
[01:08:31] Speaker B: Help. You live forever.
[01:08:34] Speaker C: So I'm going to join my life. I ended up buying a nice home in Sarasota. I'd been looking at it prior to close and was hoping it was still available after we closed, and I didn't. So I purchased a nice home there, and I got boat out back. So I plan on enjoying my life for sure, and watching my daughters.
[01:08:52] Speaker B: Fantastic.
[01:08:53] Speaker C: Do what they do.
[01:08:54] Speaker B: I would love to see if your daughters can, with the 30% ownership of the retail business, can play it back again over the next few years here. Seems like they have a really cool.
[01:09:04] Speaker C: Opportunity there and very, just exactly. I think really one of the things, they were kind of hit brick walls a little bit, went into Texas and they went in. So they started to spread outside of Florida, and all of a sudden the costs start to go up and different things, and they were kind of hit a little bit of a wall and where they ended up landing with Hunter Douglas is they took their division and put them into underneath an organization called three day Blinds. And this was primarily they're in manufacturing, but they purchased a retail organization out of California and they went from a 60 million to this year doing 500 million in four years. So they want to give the playbook to my daughters and work with them and support them to see if they can expand it across the country. So be really exciting for them if they could get anywhere kind of in that kind of momentum, the demand and things. But they already set up with business intelligence and also the ad programs and all the different things that kind of how they grew into multi salespeople organization. So hey, I wish him luck. Call me if you need me.
[01:10:13] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Bob, this has been so great. I mean, I've learned a ton. It's been fun to just take a deep dive into this category of manufacturing and outdoor products. Also, super cool to hear about your daughter's transaction. Peakstone. I just can't thank you enough for giving us 80 full minutes here to share the last 20 plus years of your life. It's been a great story and I look forward to staying in touch with you.
[01:10:38] Speaker C: Well, hey, thank you, Peter. I felt like it was really important for me to sit down with you. I think that when you go down to what you provided for us as far as a way of an opportunity in your organization, that you deserved me to sit down and talk to you because it really helped me decide which organization I was going to go into and then eventually who was going to purchase our organization. And so I want to thank you for having that for us.
[01:11:05] Speaker B: Well, like I said before we taped, if Axial can have a small piece of the puzzle where the business owner has the rest, that's where we're hoping to be so grateful for the credit and appreciate it. But huge congratulations to your whole clan and your whole business and all your employees. Sounds like an incredible end of one chapter and beginning of the next.
[01:11:26] Speaker C: You got it. Thanks, Peter.
[01:11:27] Speaker B: Thank you, Bob.
[01:11:35] 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 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.
