Today is an update episode with a guest whose first interview has become part of the acquiring
mine's canon. Jeff Homer came on in May 2024 to tell the story of buying one music school in
Lewisville, Colorado, just a half a million dollars of revenue and turning it into a platform
of 40 schools. That episode was called Art of the Roll Up, 40 businesses, and four years. Link
in the show notes if you haven't heard it. Well, two years on, Ensemble has 130 some locations
across music and dance, plus a set of adjacent businesses, instrument rental, dance competitions,
curricular products. Schools are now only about half the company. Last year Ensemble crossed
a hundred million in revenue. Jeff expects to grow 50% or more this year, and the return for his
earliest investors is measured in three digits, over a hundred X. Now numbers like that invite
the obvious question, which is what any of it means for the rest of us. So Jeff and I spend the
back half of the conversation on exactly that. What's generalizable about his story and what is not?
Listen for his framework for spotting an industry that will reward this strategy.
And for his argument that you have to go live inside that first small acquisition,
that the immersion is what makes everything downstream possible.
We also get into a model that's taking shape, which puts this path within reach of acquisition
entrepreneurs, not just private equity. Consolidation used to be P.E.'s domain. It's now emerging as a
real alternative to the SBA financed self-funded search. And if you want to understand how one of
these works under the hood, Jeff is hosting an acquiring mine's webinar next week, Tuesday,
September 1st, on exactly this. Architecture of an entrepreneurial roll-up is what it's called.
I've seen the slides. It's an incredible primer on this approach. Register at the link of the
show notes or as ever on our homepage acquiring mines.co. Okay, welcome back to Jeff Homer, founder
of Ensemble Performing Arts. Buying a business that requires licenses or operates in a regulated
industry adds a layer of complexity to an acquisition. But if you understand the requirements,
it can also create opportunity. In a webinar tomorrow, Tuesday, attorneys Bill Barlow and
James David Williams return for another acquiring mines office hours. This one on the licensing and
regulatory issues you need to think through before closing. They'll cover how to identify the licenses
and permits a business needs to operate. Whether licenses are held by the company or by individual
employees and whether they can be transferred. What happens when the seller or a key employee holds
a license the business depends on how licensing requirements can influence whether you structure
the deal as an asset or stock sale and how to determine whether you're the right buyer for a regulated
business. The webinar is licenses and regulatory issues when buying a business and it is tomorrow,
Tuesday, August 25th, noon, Eastern. Link to register is right at the top of this episode's
show notes or on the acquiring mines homepage acquiring mines.co. Then on Thursday, the new SBA
rules. If you were on LinkedIn at all last week, you probably saw posts about this. Leading SBA
loan broker Heather Anderson will walk us through the key changes that affect SBA business buyers.
The new minimum equity requirements, the new debt service coverage ratio requirements,
new requirements for acquisitions with a purchase price of three million or more,
the expanded seller transition period and more. This is invaluable knowledge for the SBA business
buyer and Heather is the expert to explain it. The webinar is new SBA rules. What business buyers
need to know and it is this Thursday, August 27th, noon, Eastern. Welcome to acquiring mines, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith,
acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs and on this
podcast, I talk to the people who do it. Running payroll, paying your bills, closing your
bucks and producing financials. These are critical tasks every business owner must do or oversee,
but spending time on them distracts you from the leadership in growth work you want to do.
So let system six do it for you, owned and led by a former researcher, Chris Williams,
system six is a leading outsourced finance team for hundreds of SMBs, including over 50
search required businesses. Chris, Tim and the system six team understand first hand the challenges,
the opportunities of jumping into a business as its new owner. So whether you own your business
already or have one under LOI, talk to system six about how they can give you time back and
improve your financial operations. Mention acquiring mines and they'll provide a free review of
your books and financial ops, a $500 value. Check out system six.com, link in the show notes or email
[email protected]. Jeff Homer, welcome back to acquiring mines. Thanks. Well, it's great to be here.
Jeff, your first interview aired in May 2024. So over two years ago now,
the title was art of the roll up 40 businesses in four years. It was a very popular episode,
not only because of those big numbers, but it was an unlikely business, music schools.
And a very small business that ended up being your platform. You didn't really know it would be
a platform when you got into it. But there were a number of angles to the story that just made
it absolutely fascinating, inspiring, educational. So it has traveled. You're here, of course,
to update us on what has happened since. But let's begin with a quick refresher on where things stood
back then when we heard from you last. Sure. So that episode really just described my journey from
one music school in Louisville, Colorado to 40 music schools and starting to attract
institutional capital for the first time and bringing on a family office investor to partner
with me to grow the platform. So we crossed 40 schools in January of 2023. So that was when we
were sort of giving the perspective on that journey. And since that time, we've continued
at that pace. So we've required an average of a school a month now going on seven plus years.
But a couple of exciting things have happened. We've branched out from doing music to also
serving dance schools. So we're bringing the same sort of back office support and non-classroom
administrative interventions to help support our dance school portfolio. And we've also
started serving non-schools businesses. So other types of performing arts businesses,
music and some rental businesses, dance competition businesses, curricular products,
those sorts of things where they're also founded by really passionate product and student-oriented
people that could use the little back office help. So today's school is only about half of what
Ensemble does, which is probably news to the listener of our last podcast where all we did was
was music schools at that time. Great. Well, we're going to dive in more to that, Jeff. But before we
do, let's get a little bit more context for those who missed episode one. So how was it that you
ended up buying a music school and then growing so quickly? And because it wasn't your intention
necessarily to go roll up music schools. So give us the very abbreviated version of that journey.
Yeah, almost entirely by accident. So I was a career investor. I'd worked at large in
social investment firms in Boston, New York. I moved to Denver in 2018 where I landed at a family
investment office, which seemed like a really cool seat in one that I'd be in for a long time.
The only problem as I described it was that I had too much time on my hands. I went from you know,
a New York private investing job where I was working a lot to a family office job where I was not.
I think I gave a sort of ill-fated quote on our last podcast that the difference between,
you know, between those two things is plenty to run a search in if you're an ambitious,
you know, person that wants to do a bit of a part-time search while you're gainfully employed.
But I went out and looked for a side business like I was looking for a small business that I could
that I could get involved with for a couple of reasons. I was interested in getting out of
the intangible nature of public markets investing where I was curious whether the world was
different in any meaningful way because I'd bought or sold a share of, you know, Google on behalf
of the family that day. I was eager to interact with real people in my community and I was
I was attracted small business for that reason and so I did
what you would now just straightforwardly call a self-funded search.
That was not what I called it at the time.
I called it going and looking for a small business in the Denver Metro,
because that's where I happened to live.
I wasn't as plugged into the ETA community and the drumbeat of ETA wasn't as loud
back then as it is now where when I go to the Denver ETA,
search for me to up, you know, there's 90 people in the room consistently.
But anyway, so I bought this one, Music School in Louisville, Colorado.
And I think the relationship that I had with that school is very much like
the starting place for Michael Gerber's E-Meth, the book where, you know,
the founder of this school was so focused on the product and the student experience
and that it had been her journey from music college to teaching to owning a studio
that there was an opportunity to bring complimentary skills to the back office,
the non-teaching portions of the studio operations in terms of scheduling
software and customer acquisition and digital marketing and online payroll
and just some of the very basic things of running a small business in 2018, 2019.
So that was the intervention that I took in the first school.
And I started to think that there would be many schools out there that would have this dynamic
of being amazing at stirring students in classrooms, but needing support behind the scenes.
And so I started to think about creating a consolidation platform.
There would be that national back office that you could plug a really outstanding student experience
into and get support on the administrative components
that aren't the passion or priority of many of the founders in this industry.
Well, in some ways, what you just said there, Jeff,
is the case for any business, really small business across industries.
They're under-teched, they're under-professionalized, they have an artisan at the helm.
And yet, it's still easier said than done.
And there are still certain industries where it seems like a natural thing to do what you did.
And ones where it seems a lot less likely.
And music schools seems less likely, even with optimizations that you brought back office support,
whatever professionalizing in the ways that you did.
One wouldn't think that it would end up being a very good business regardless,
even with those improvements.
Give us some of the numbers around that and why that intuition was wrong.
Yeah, I think there were really two trends that converge to make that assumption sort of incorrect.
And I think what you're referring to is we have this conditioning in a lot of our communities
that the arts are not self-sustaining, right?
Your local civic orchestra requires donations to stay in business and sort of full butts
and seats at a concert is not enough to have a profitable self-sustaining arts enterprise.
And so one of the things that's really changed in the landscape is there's a lot of focus
right now on youth enrichment categories and music and dance education are youth enrichment
categories.
And so these are parts of the economy where parents are investing in their kids' futures
and they have high willingness to spend, they have very sticky, long live customer relationships,
good recurring revenue dynamics, like there's lots to like about these businesses.
They're also really fun, like they're great places to spend time because these are kids
that are coming in and having experiences in disciplines that they're passionate about
and they're led by teachers that are also really passionate.
So I think the reason I chose music is I'm a musician, right?
That's my background.
I still take a weekly piano lesson to this day.
So I found this unique area of overlap where some searchers end up buying a vinyl plank
flooring building products business and I got to buy something that was really aligned
with my passion.
And I think that's part of how this ended up going so far.
But early on when I was approaching investors about Ensemble, I had to overcome the objection
that you're implying, which is why are you doing this thing that you're doing?
And I no longer have that objection because there's such a tailwind in this youth enrichment
category that is now intuitive to most people why we're doing and why it's attractive.
The other model that I had in my mind at the time was the most on-trend consolidation
strategy in the late teens, 20 tens, was people buying and working with veterinary practices
and dental practices and of course those weren't early or new ideas, but they were very
on-brand at that time.
And I think in the most positive view, not all of them have gone well obviously and maybe
later we'll talk a little bit about the pros and cons of consolidation as a strategy.
But the most positive view of the dental and veterinary role upset have existed is you're
working with these specialized service providers that really would like to spend their time
seeing patients, be they human patients or animal patients.
And they would not like to spend their time running a practice.
And so in many cases, they've been sold a different vision of how they could spend their time.
And back to what they went to school for and what they are passionate about and the idea
of handing off the administrative to a parent company or holding company that will then
help them do some of those things better or faster and cheaper, you know, was really
attractive to a generation of doctors and those two categories.
And I think music teachers are kind of similar in that they'd rather spend their time with
a student in a classroom and not running the music business.
And so that's another mental model that I had for why this might work and what ensemble
could offer a value to a local school was sort of helped doing the things that weren't
part of that that passionate classroom experience.
Two more things to say about yet that first acquisition of yours, Jeff, I think the other
thing is I recall that you were surprised to find was how those the pulling of those
levers, the adding the tech, the turning on the digital marketing, the whatever professionalization
and back office stuff really moved the needle surprisingly there was there was a lot of
meat on the bone to be had there.
Do you recall, say more about that?
I do.
I mean, it was very energizing, right?
So this is this is the joy of being a beginner in almost anything is you start to make really
rapid progress and that's that's energizing.
It's one of the, you know, fun things that we as adults rarely get to experience like I'm
back at the piano again right and making progress is fun, but it was in that first school
right?
So the difference between a pen and paper schedule and having your lesson schedule on
your phone and knowing ahead of time if your first student's not coming so you don't
have to come in a half hour early and just so some of those small improvements compounded
really quickly in terms of our ability to serve students but also serve teachers make
our staff experience better.
And then going from primarily a word of mouth marketing strategy to having a robust digital
modern strategy in a landscape of competing businesses that were also not on the cutting
edge was was really compelling in terms of the amount of student growth we were able
to to have which is just such a positive thing for the whole ecosystem right?
Our teachers are more busy they're happier they're earning a living there's more people
in the building the energy is there the performances are more lively like there's lots of of sort
of self reinforcing benefits to having a larger student population at a school and yeah
that those early wins compounded really quickly and we're part of the vision for hey this
this really worked why don't we go try it again and see if there isn't another you know
school or several that out there that they could benefit from what we've built here.
Now the thing about it is as well as that works you go you go to other markets you find
that there is a playbook here that you can repeat and that there is a lot of optimization
and value to be created.
And new business you can grow revenue but they're still going to fundamentally be pretty
small businesses and on a per unit if you will per location basis they're never going
to generate that much in terms of earnings.
So the strategy only becomes really interesting at significant scale part of the reason that
you started moving quickly and started doing dozens right so so so because a lot of this
is going to sound very appealing to people but that's an important thing to keep in mind
I think you see this a lot in franchise programmatic acquisition strategies the mine keys
of the world the minuses we you know their acquisition entrepreneurs and both of those
franchise networks.
It's really interesting at big numbers but your your individual might as for individual
mine a key by is not going to throw off that much in terms of earnings you got to do
a lot fair as a fair characterization that's right and that's where this went from being
a side hustle you know there was going to be enriching and fun to being a main hustle
right so I didn't quit my day job until five locations and proof of concept was established
and we had a bit of the playbook built and it was clear that we would be successful if
we if we sort of went aggressively in this direction.
Okay Jeff let's so I let's now hear about where things are how you reflect on how far
you've come and what it what it means for other for the listener and for other people
in ETA and then we're going to circle back to kind of the overall journey here of doing
an entrepreneurial roll up and how you're working as an investor with that now and how that
model is evolved perhaps partly because people were inspired by your story so back to
Ensemble today can you give us a sense of scale be it revenue be it locations I know
that there's there's a number of businesses under the Ensemble brand now however you want
to quantify scale today yeah well most excitingly we serve a couple hundred thousand students
which is just a really fun you know starting to be statistically significant portion of
the country that that we're serving but as of today this is this is July twenty twenty
We have 130 sound locations across both music and dance.
So, we've tripled the size of the business in the three years since we last spoke.
And then we've also built it on these additional parts of our portfolio.
So, we have the dance events businesses, the music and personal businesses,
some of the other parts of our business that serve other studios.
So, they provide coaching, curricular products, et cetera.
And last year we had a fun milestone.
We had a hundred million of revenue for the first time.
So, it's become a midsize business.
And one that's now sort of pushing into the middle market, much more than the ETA landscape.
And yeah, across that time, my role has changed very, very much.
And I'm sure that we'll talk more about that.
But, you know, I'm no longer flying to every school that we acquire
and doing the integration myself and some of those things that I was doing at the time that we talked last.
A hundred million in revenue last year.
And what are you on track for this year?
We'll probably grow the business by 50% or more this year.
Yeah.
Okay. So, on track for 150 million.
And that first acquisition, the one in Denver, I don't think you said with a revenue.
Half a million.
Yeah. Half a million.
So, this has to be one of the self-funded search hall of fame stories,
even though you didn't even self-describe as a self-funded searcher at the time.
Yeah, I wish.
Yes, there's not great record keeping on this.
But I think it's certainly top five allowing for some other outliers that I'm not aware of.
You actually had investors, as you said, you kind of did the first five yourself,
I think, proof of concept, and you went out and raised money.
I had investors from the first set, actually.
But so different ones along the way.
So, from school one, from school five, from school 12, from school 40, different groups of folks.
And how do those early investors do?
I mean, can you give us a Moick?
It would be in the three digits.
100x, 100x for those early investors, very exciting.
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So your role has evolved. We talked about this some on the pre-call.
And as you just characterized, the business now is more of a middle market as opposed to a
lower-middle-market business. There are layers. There's middle management. Give us more color there.
Yeah, so when I look back to 2023, I was really performing three jobs for the business.
I was the CEO insofar as a business with, I think in 2020, it was 17 million of revenues.
So, insofar as a business with less than 20 million of revenue needs a CEO.
And it's not really a full-time job, but owning kind of the mission, vision, values,
strategic direction of the business. That was an important component of my job,
but it was not a full-time job for that business, but I was the CEO.
I was also the head of M&A, so I was leading corporate development, top to bottom,
so I was doing still the majority of the sourcing, but then everything beyond that,
in terms of negotiating deals, closing transactions, going and doing integration,
personally flying to on board, every new school, every new teacher, those sorts of things.
And I was also the regional manager for a huge set of those 40 schools.
So, when someone at the school had a problem, the next person they called in the majority of
cases was me. And so, I was getting a lot of phone calls, at that moment in time,
for my printer is broken, my internet does not working. I have a problem with my building.
The weather is inclamant. Should we cancel? Should we not cancel?
I was dealing with a lot of the very front line components of the business.
And what changed, you know, sort of in 2023 to today, is I built a middle management layer
to scale myself. And to be totally honest, at that time, I mean, I was dividing my time too
fine. Then I wasn't doing a great job of serving the school. So, I think they actually got a
better experience once they got someone that was more dedicated to them at a more reasonable
scale than I was. There's a picture of me from this era that I think is maybe perhaps a cautionary
tale for aspiring roll-up entrepreneurs, which is I was on my family's boat. So, I was, you know,
trying to, you know, get away for an afternoon, I would have a small lead cabin in Canada.
And I have the family dog in one hand, like I'm holding onto the dog's life jacket,
on the other hand, I'm on the phone, like I'm in the middle of the lane, and the cell phone rings,
and like I pick it up because I was really, really deeply tethered to the business of that time.
You know, the regional manager piece was the easier one to solve. We promoted a bunch of folks.
Now we have something like 12 regional managers that serve our 130 schools. And so,
there's a lot more of them to support and help to navigate, help our location managers to
navigate their experience of being part of ensemble. And then we hired a corporate development
resource out of HBS, actually, out of the, someone that took Rick and Royce's class and thought
about, you know, whether ETA was something interesting for them, and they decided to join something
that was in progress other than pursue their own, but they were fantastic. And so, you know,
that's allowed me to step out of not, you know, flying to every new school and every, you know,
and every new new integration that we need to be doing. And then over time, we actually added a
layer above that too, which is we have presidents that run each of the business units now, right? So,
schools used to be the entire business now. It's about half of our business by revenue. So,
there's a president that runs the schools business to whom those regional managers report.
Same thing for our music and parental business, same thing for our dance events business, same
thing for our business that serves other music and dance studios. So, there's like a quite a senior
level now where I think if you ask kind of who our executive team was in 2023, it was two people,
myself and a COO, and today it's eight people. And they're all, you know, accomplished executive
well-paid folks that make running the business, you know, a lot more fun than it was when we were
really grinding it out, you know, one after another. And so, what does your role look like today,
then? Yeah. So, what's left is actually those CEO pieces that I was doing before, right? So,
so capital allocation is one of the most important parts of my job. I'm the person that is out there,
sourcing capital, new investment capital for ensemble, and then deciding how it gets deployed
in new acquisitions. And then I'm still very much responsible for that mission, vision, values,
and the overall culture and strategic direction of ensemble. And so, looking out and thinking about
where we should play, where we should not play, how we win. So, in a question that we often get is,
you know, are you expanded for music and to dance? Are you going to do other things? And, you know,
that's an important question for me to answer. And what we've decided is that we're going to be
specialists in music and dance and be, you know, focused on the performing arts and contrast to some
other youth enrichment role ups that do, you know, gymnastics and some school and sports and
tutoring and karate and all these things. You know, we want to be the world's leading expert in
running music and dance schools. And so, we've decided to be very focused in that respect. And so,
that's an example of a strategic direction decision that we've made that sort of ultimately sits
in the CEO seat. I heard you say something a couple minutes ago that being the CEO for a $17
million business back where you were about when we talked or in that time frame is not a full-time
job. You were doing much more than the CEO role. But that is yet another counterintuitive thing to
hear about your story. Maybe it's about the definition of CEO, but why is a $17 million
business being the CEO of that not a full-time job? Because you're also doing other things that are
way below the CEO pay grade. So, I talked about the fact that I was doing three things, right? I
was doing, I was the CEO. I was the head of M&A, which is a job that has a pay rate. And there's
a regional manager, a set of regional manager seats, which is a job that has a pay rate. I was
spending a lot of time working below my medical scope of practice. I was just not working at the
high end of what I could contribute for the business because I spent a lot of time
being the first call when someone's internet wasn't working, etc. And so, that's where I think
there's an expectation where one of the reasons that we built the business and the way that we did
was back to the challenge you had at the outset, which is that we're buying very small businesses.
And so, we could not afford a gold plated luxurious set of corporate services.
We needed to be lean and scrappy and still support our schools effectively, but in a cost-effective
a way because of the need to be proportional
with what we invested at the parent company
versus what we could support and sustain at the field level.
And so one of my early rejections from an investor
for Ensemble was someone that is a acquiring minds guest
and that I looked up to very much and respected very much
and took their rejection quite hard
when they told me that the units we were buying
were too small and that we would never reach
the type of scale we were hoping to
because it would cost too much an overhead to manage them.
And I didn't agree with that,
but I turned it into sort of a North Star Metric
for Ensemble and I've always managed the business
thinking about the ratio of our investment
in corporate or parent company level shared services
as a percentage of the profit that we generate in the field
and making sure that that number is both healthy
and showing some benefits of scale over time,
meaning that ultimately it's declining
as the business grows.
And so that was an early lesson that became a guidepost
for how to build and scale the business,
but ultimately the journey that I went on
was player to player coach to coach, right?
And at 17 million of revenue,
I was very much still in the player coach receipt.
I was doing a lot of work.
- And so Jeff, at $17 million in revenue,
still the business is not profitable enough
to have hired proper resources for these second and third roles
that you were doing regional manager, for example.
You needed to get even beyond that level of 17 million
to be able to afford for people to take this off your plate.
'Cause $17 million, I assume that's $3 million of EBITDA
or $2 to $3 million of EBITDA, that can hire a few people.
- Of field level EBITDA, sure.
But if you're gonna spend less than that
at the parent company so that you can support
some of the debt financing that you may have taken on
to grow the business.
But even if you do make,
and maybe we relate in making the regional manager investment,
but we would never have had a chief marketing officer
at that size or spectrum or like someone
that was a really incredibly effective CFO
within a great resume.
There are roles that you need to grow well beyond that
to have specialists in, at least at the level
that I would, do we have a VP finance?
Yeah, sure, we did, and they were great.
But we didn't have a CFO, and so that meant
that when we needed to make strategic decisions
about finance, I was making them.
And that's the business owner journey, right?
And there are more fractional resources
that exist today that are more helpful in getting access
to some of these things to get the most impactful
five hours a week of someone's time
to help you make those decisions.
But the business owner in a mid-size,
low-8 figure revenue business, I think is often
making those kinds of calls and serving
in those kinds of roles for the business.
Yeah, yeah.
And as you pointed out, especially in an ETA or OLAP context,
where there's gonna be a lot of debt,
the founder of such a business who gets to 15 million,
probably doesn't have a debt payment
on hanging over the business as well.
So the nature of what you're doing today
is much more kind of true CEO, setting strategy,
setting vision.
Does this suit you?
Or do you miss the old kind of scrappy operator days?
This is something that you talk about, I think, on panels.
What size of business do you ultimately
want to preside over acquisition entrepreneur?
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
It's one of, it's, in my view, one of the least
talked about differences between funded and self-funded
searches, what size business do you want to go by?
Well, will that imply about your CEO experience?
So before you think about economic differences
between funded and self-funded search,
I think about the experiential differences
is much more significant.
But they are very different.
I mean, at the, in the early days,
I knew almost every person that worked in ensemble.
I would go spend a significant amount of time
at each of our schools, I knew the teachers by name,
I knew all of the administrative staff.
There were very few folks that worked for us
that I didn't know personally and couldn't try to connect
with and help them feel part of this larger thing
that we were trying to accomplish.
I now need to do that through other people, right?
So I'm now a manager and a manager of managers
and a manager of manager of managers.
And it's a totally different skill set.
It's required an extraordinary amount of growth from me
and of me and I'm certainly not done and arrived on that yet.
My prior managerial experience was like managing investment
associate analysts at large investment firms,
which is very different, which is a very different thing.
I am enjoying it, like I am really still
having a tremendously fun time doing this.
And the challenge of getting out of bed every day
and running the biggest company I've ever run
is still really fun for me and one that I'm excited about.
And I'm bolstered in that by having really smart new colleagues
that I didn't have before, that we've sort of been able
to add along the way both through acquisition
and by hiring folks.
So it's much more of a team approach
than it is an individual effort, which is much more fun
and rewarding.
And then there's also some really exciting culture benefits
when you start to build up those layers that I think
we've come to appreciate.
So in the old days, if we made an acquisition, I would go.
And I would introduce them to Ensemble
and my vision for it and why I was there.
And I would make them all kinds of promises
about how their life would get better.
And they would make a decision as to whether to trust me
and sort of see whether what I was saying was true
or to have some skepticism.
But now we're sending people that are telling a personal story
instead, they're saying, hey, I was acquired by Ensemble.
And it was really great for me and for my career
and for my school.
And now I'm going to be here to help guide you through that.
And it's very different than having me make promises
rather than having someone kind of offer testimony
of their own experience.
And so I think that layer of culture that gets built
is really fun and exciting to see.
And I think Rick and Royce do a good job of highlighting this.
But I think one of the primary benefits of the ETA path
is being able to positively influence the careers
of a bunch of people around you that just didn't have access
to something higher octane when it was a small business.
But being able to take some of the people that
have a growth mindset and have skills and desire
to do something bigger and have them come along in that journey
with you is tremendously fun and rewarding.
Well, Jeff, what a lot of people say
about owning, running a business is that the strategy
is the fun stuff.
And so an argument against buying a small SBA style
business is that you're really going to be blocking
and tackling and be in the business, not on the business.
And of course, the goal is always on the business,
on the business, on the business, which
means making the strategic decisions
and not having to sweat out the minutiae on a day-to-day basis.
And so that's where that could be the purest definition
of what the CEO does.
Vision and sort of branding of the business
and then the highest level strategic decisions.
Is it as good as it sounds?
I mean, you're doing the funds, the stuff
that everybody else kind of wants to be spending all their time on.
Look, it is really fun.
It is, in my view, more fun than the early days.
I think also there's a--
you can pass down problems that you've done 50 times
to folks who are wrestling with them for the first time.
And so they're fresh and exciting and rewarding
to solve for those folks that are now
in your middle management seat.
So there's also just sort of a natural growth there.
But there are commensurately larger challenges
that emerge as well.
So I am privileged to have a leadership team
where five of the eight people on it
have been CEO of something, whether it
was something we acquired along the way
or a business that they founded.
And so I'm in a room of folks that are used to being in charge
and I'm in charge of that room.
But I have to do so in a way that is respectful and navigates
that dynamic.
And sometimes I'm more successful than other times.
But there's also when you have layers of management,
there's effective filtering that happens.
Problems get resolved at appropriate levels.
But the ones that get through to you
are really big problems.
And those still arrive on your desk.
So there's still the same dynamic of you sit down
on Monday morning and you have three or four things
you'd like to get done for the week.
And then by 11 AM, you're totally off track.
And it's different.
I would say one of my co-workers has a really good analogy
that I like for this, which is that she
was running a business that we acquired.
And she took an important executive role
with ensemble on a go-forward basis.
And she says that she felt like her entrepreneurial experience
of running a business with four million of revenue
was that she was out on the open ocean in a speedboat.
She was small, she was nimble, she was going fast,
she was doing her best to build the boat.
But like the waves come and you get wet.
And she got off the speedboat onto like a cruise ship.
And it's not as nimble, it's slow, it's lots of things.
But you're no longer feeling the impact of each wave
it strikes the bow. You have a boat that you can steer with a longer time horizon towards
a destination that is farther away and perhaps more of interest to you. And so it's that's a little
bit, you know, like metaphor and whimsy, but there's real truth in that. And that the stability of
a larger business allows you to look further out because you're not beholden to the loss of one
customer, the loss of one employee. Like those are the those are the those are the day-to-day
firefighting experiences of running a small business. And when you get to the place where that's
no longer going to ruin your Monday, you do get to look out further and make, you know, more
strategic plays, but also then the problems that that when they do come the problems are more like
icebergs than they are than they are regular regular ways that that that you're going to encounter.
And so look, it's it's I mean, I think Patrick Lencioni did a good job of framing leadership as
as an obligation much more than a privilege in terms of it's an important job that I do for
the business. It's not a reward for the last five years of success that we've had. It's an
obligation that I have to our team to continue to show up and and push in a productive direction.
And where are you taking the business Jeff? What is the kind of the current far sure or north star
or where you're headed? Yeah, well, what we are doing is working. Our schools are having success,
you know, joining our platform, retaining the local branding and local staffing that made
them unique and really positive places of of dancing music education. And our goal is to continue
doing what we are doing. So we're still adding about one or two schools a month to our portfolio.
And our goal is to continue that. We have set a target of having 250 locations by 2030. So we're
really excited about that as a as a vision for the business. So, you know, just kind of again,
roughly doubling the business from here. And of course, we have this new and exciting portfolio
of non-schools businesses where we're providing similar support and sort of national scale back end.
And there's lots of fun work that we're doing in that space too. So 250 schools by 2030, you know,
tens of thousands of students that were serving inside of those walls and a complimentary set of
products and services that we can offer to make sure that we're giving them a really complete
experience within the ensemble family of companies. Jeff, you and I had talked about roll-ups,
private equity, consolidation strategies, the reputation of those out there, the fact that they
don't always work. There are horror stories abound through through the lower middle market and
mainstream businesses of a private equity gone wrong. Seems like things are going well here.
What do you think? What are you careful about knowing that there are lots of examples of private equity
doing this badly? What are you careful to avoid or are leaning into doing right? How are you getting
this right? Yeah, it's a really thoughtful question. I think there's probably three components
to answering it. The first is the ownership model we've selected. So unlike many consolidators where
ownership is rolled at the subsidiary level, so if you're a vet that joins a vet consolidated
or you roll equity at your practice level and you retain an incentive to have your practice
perform really well and there's an orientation around kind of the next exit. Ensemble has chosen
a partnership model where owners that are rolling equity roll it in the parent company. So there's
only one set of owners across the entire business that ownership group is actually today the largest
single owner of Ensemble, which is exciting. So there's real vested interests from folks that are
from this industry and care deeply about its future and are helping to steer the business.
So Ensemble is a partnership and one where I've been very fortunate to attract talented entrepreneurs
that care deeply about this space and know much more about it than I do and are able to help us
steer in a productive direction. The second thing is I've then been really careful about the types
of partners we've selected for investor capital. So I'm really clear when we talk to investors that
we are a youth enrichment business and our first job is serving kids and that's a really important
job and it's important not to get distracted by customer lifetime value and price elasticity
and some of these sorts of things in terms of like we we will make money and we will have a good
result for everyone if we do a great job of serving serving students in the classroom and providing
those great experiences and we will not if we fail to do that right. So the framing the long term
outcome as being the way that we will win both for the student and for the business I think has been
effective and we've been able to attract long term folks that are that are interested in playing
that game over you know over a long time horizon and finally I think we're fortunate that we are
in an industry where the things that we can do as a large business are not extractive they're not
to cut costs or slash investment or raise prices or sort of you know those other things we can do
things that are intuitively positive for the business in terms of investing and customer
acquisition to have a larger roster of students to support a you know stronger base of teachers
etc. where we have really straightforward opportunities to grow the businesses that we
required in ways that are aligned with reasonable ways of creating value right like serving more
students I think is a way that people are are happy to see businesses be successful as opposed to
some of the more financial engineering or extractive you know type strategies and so
because that has been so available to us it's been really easy to stay disciplined and make sure
that that's where our attention has been has been focused and not on financial engineering or
leverage or other sorts of things that we might have that have perhaps been distracting to to
other consolidators and other categories. The team at Pioneer Capital Advisory has started
offering Perry Pesu debt for SBA business buyers that means they can help unlock up to three
million dollars of conventional debt on top of the five million dollar limit of SBA seven
a loans so Pioneer Construction larger more complex acquisitions listen to our story with Enika
John for one of their clients who did just that buying a 10 million dollar business as a first time
self-funded searcher. The Pioneer team has closed more than 100 SBA loans averaging timelines
well below industry standards founder and owner Matthias Smith in COO Valerie Stash bring over two
decades of SBA lending experience Matthias and Valerie have a full bench of analysts and associates
who work your deals with them a true deal team not just a single point of contact visit pioneer cap
dot com or click the link in the notes. And let me just understand that last point so it's the
nature of the industry that has allowed you to give in you this benefit and that's because the
the industry is less mature maybe than other industries that are consolidated or there or it has
there's just a lot of growth ahead of it so it's it's less about red ocean and more about
kind of growing the pie. If I could sort of characterize for you at the typical
bread and butter acquisition that that we make it is a school that was founded by a teacher
which is someone that was really focused on the on the student experience grew the business
primarily by having a great reputation as a teacher and for attracting other great teachers to
the you know to the to the experience this is another topic I talk to prospective searchers about
as sort of this like jaker of idea right that everything that sounds like low hanging fruit
in an in an ETA context like oh my goodness this business doesn't have a CRM they haven't
invested in you know in in in uh SEO SCM CRM like like all of these sorts of things um have an
upfront cost and a and and a delayed and a benefit that sort of a cruise over time and so
the the converse of that is that there just isn't there's no fat to cut right these are businesses
that have been run really lean by families that would otherwise have taken that money home to their
you know to their kitchen table if and so so they're not they're not run in a in a profligate way
and I think um especially when you're working at the lower end of the lower of the lower market
or kind of where ETA the sweet spot of ETA you're dealing with family run or you know sort of
entrepreneur run businesses and almost never do they air in the direction of over investment
they almost always air in the direction of underinvestment and so we are stepping into a situation
where there are really attractive investment opportunities in the business where we can bring
capital technology software etc and get really positive ROI such that that's so much more
interesting than pursuing a cutting strategy um and same with sort of the because we're working
at the low end of the lower market we're often buying businesses for three to four times cash flow
right and so that means that we can get attractive returns to an
investors without using leverage or financial engineering or some of these things where we
don't have to have a goofy structure to make a good outcome here because the out of the
box cash cash cash return is attractive and I think that's where that's those are the
pitfalls right is when you start to you know look at examples where the primary driver
was extractive price increases where the primary driver was staffing redundancies where
the primary driver was financial engineering or leverage and that was the how we're going
to make money and in other consolidating industries that fail and I think where we say hey we're
buying great businesses that have really strong recurring revenue that's driven by students
having repeatable positive experiences in disciplines in which they're passionate and
we inherit all these investment opportunities that have high inherent ROI and straightforward
paths to grow the business like it's exciting to dig it in against that and it takes me back
to like the question you asked earlier was like you know how did you get from one to two like what
was the motivating factor and it was the compound early wins in that first business that led this
to be more than just a side hustle for me and it meant that like that's where we invested our time
and effort when we went to build the larger platform was on the things that were fun the first
time you know having the stacking the wins on on better customer experience and better staff
experience for for people that came inside the door you may have just answered my next question
which is going back to the success you've seen so far and and and contrasting that with a lot of
roll-ups that that don't perform as well or or outright fail how much I what I didn't hear you say
is where this all started and I suspect that does play a big role in the success meaning
that you bought a very small company and you were very involved and you were very involved for
up to $17 million of revenue and beyond versus the traditional private equity acquisition
the consolidation strategy where there's a platform acquisition which is large-ish and then there
are tuck-ins along the way but but but that I guess the biggest point of contrast there would be
just be the size of that first acquisition your quote platform we we should put it in quotes because
it was hardly what we think of as a traditional platform acquisition was was just this anybody
little business that you got really involved in I have to believe that all of this downstream success
is related somehow I think that's right I think what you're describing is one of the the bits
of magic in the ETA strategy is getting the type the caliber of entrepreneur into the into a size
of business that would like almost never those things would almost never overlap right where you
have a really high performing searcher that's coming out of a top MBA program that is taking on
a business of a size that would just that would just never otherwise attract them as an employee
but will attract them as an owner and I think that's that's part of the rocket fuel of ETA is
that when you immerse when you have a high performing searcher that you can sort of immerse
themselves in a business that is disproportionately small relative to their skills magic can happen
and and it's fun you know to see across hundreds of episodes that that you've done you know many many
many versions of that story we've bought some larger businesses over time you know we've we've
required some businesses that had you know tens of millions of revenue and I think we still took
a similar approach to really getting invested there and maybe that was because that was our that
was our DNA from starting really small it's still my advice to to aspiring consolidating entrepreneurs
that like you got to go live in that first business for a variety of reasons you'll learn a ton about
about you know the category that you're that you're going to spend the next five 10 years of your
life in you will be a much more credible sourcing in your sourcing conversations to be much more
credible with with other entrepreneurs in the categories you talk knowledgeably about their
business you'll be better at underwriting the business because you've lived in a new set of the
front desk and you have a deep understanding of what's actually going on inside the PNL and being
able to triangulate and so I I think it's it's definitely valuable to be able to immerse yourself
in a business that is small relative to your abilities and I think that is a as the world is
coming down market just generally people are are buying smaller and smaller businesses and what
qualifies as a platform is getting smaller and smaller I think that's a benefit where you're
getting entrepreneurs that are spending time inside of much smaller businesses and are able to
learn at a at a field level that you're right would would not be possible if you if you were a
private equity firm and you made an investment in platform company and you expected that platform
company CEO and management team to run a lot of that for you and my the reason I embarked on
the CTA journey was to cut through that right to to not deal with management teams but instead to
go write a small business and interact with customers and employees Jeff you just said that you
talked to ETL entrepreneurs I said earlier that you're on panel so you're you're visible out there
and part of that is that you're you're making investments in this sort of strategy so for our final
few minutes together let's hear your thoughts on the opportunity set out there for would be
Jeff homers for people who are who want to do something similar want to try to do something similar
to what you've done you invest in that you think about that you encourage that even so so first
how generalizable is what you've what you've built yeah I think there's a lot of there's a lot
of generalizable takeaway I think if you were to abstract the ensemble story I would go back to
the Michael Gerber e-miff you know sort of framing and sort of anywhere where you have a small
business that was founded by someone was a specialist in providing a service and where the growth
of that business has pulled that entrepreneur out of providing that service and into managing the
business where they're now at a relative kind of comparative disadvantage right they were they were
among the world's best at providing the service they're probably not among the world's best at
managing the business there's an opportunity for for ETA I think to be an attractive fit for
that business because you can either get the owner back to doing the thing that they love to do
or just on to their next part of phase of their life if that's you know if that's where they've
gotten to from a retirement or a relocation perspective but I think that that story over and over
and over again is an attractive one for ETA whether it's standalone acquisition strategies or
consolidation strategies and one of the advantages of called consolidation strategies is that you
can support that that that archetype of entrepreneur over and over and over again right so
what we did at ensemble was we thought about what are the functions that an owner is performing
inside a music or dance school and then can we get corporate or parent company shared services
stood up to essentially provide those same services on a fractional basis to the field and leave
the field level staff just responsible for taking care of the people that walk through the door
and great customer service and it made their it made it so that we could have general managers
instead of needing owners at the at the field level so just to say the next sort of thing about
that like in my view owners of a small business are typically doing three things they are the HR
function for the business they decide who works there and what roles they play hiring firing you
know compensation the org structure etc they're typically doing the entire revenue cycle
management they have their hands you know tightly on on revenue collections the bank account payroll
disbursements those sorts of things so finance and they have their hands deeply in marketing
both because as the owner they have the most incentive to grow the business but also because
marketing tends to be a large line at them and there's this stigma around like you know I know
half my marketing is wasted I just don't know what's half like so there's they want to be involved
in growing the business both because they benefit from it but also because it's a large expense
and they want to have control over it so when we thought about what our shared services needed to
look like we needed recruiting and HR functions we needed finance and payroll functions and we
needed marketing functions and that's where we started our shared services portfolio and today
that's 90 people and they do way more than that but that's those are the things that we started
standing up and centralizing and leaving the field level folks free to just like run a music school
and serve students serve teachers with the benefit of this national scale back office that
we put together and I think that's very replicable across a wide variety especially of service
industries that all makes a lot of sense Jeff but I still think that there was something about
how small you bought in the industry in which you bought I mean we we all know about the home
services roll up and you know if you can get to a certain size there's going to be some shared
services and so on but but starting very small as you did in in businesses that unit by unit like
your the person you tried to get to invest and to client counterintuitive businesses ones where
where the individual business it's almost you have
to consolidate to make a meaningful business, you can have a standalone, I guess you can
have a standalone music school, you said you've now acquired some of those, but you can definitely
have a standalone HVAC business that does a million and two million dollars of earnings
a year and not have to go out and consolidate aggressively to make an interesting business.
But that was one of the features of your consolidation where and that would be, as we talked about
earlier, that would be a requirement if I wanted to roll up some legacy brick and mortar
franchise thing, like a mine key.
I'd need to set out from day one to get to 20 or 25 sort of thing.
So look how to through that lens, if you would.
Yeah, well, so we've seen the invention of a financing solution to solve exactly that
problem that I am deeply envious of and that did not exist when I was raising money for
ensemble, which is this committee capital vehicle, right?
So increasingly we're seeing entrepreneurs that are focused on roll ups, go out and instead
of raising us, you know, doing a self-funded search or even a funded search to acquire
a platform and then raising money for the platform from there, they're going to investors
in advance and saying, here's a category that I'm interested in and I think would benefit
from a consolidation strategy.
And I'd like to raise 10 to 25 million today with a plan to go by 10 to 20 of these.
And so there's a few things that are happening there that are totally changing the game
from a consolidation viability perspective.
The first is the ability to target smaller by compensating with repetition, right?
So I'm going to buy 10 much smaller businesses rather than one, you know, medium size business.
And the structure is set up out of the gate to allow for that.
There's a elimination of the path dependency risk, which is if your goal is to buy 10 of
something and you struggle digesting the second one, that's okay if you've raised money
to buy 10 because you'll average out your learnings and you'll get better as you go.
But if you've raised money deal by deal, that's going to be a big problem in terms of raising
money for the third one when the second one is struggling.
And so there's out of vantage and then there's an increased interest in this QS tax advantage
for getting all the equity in and out quickly initially and then perhaps using leverage on
the back end.
But there's sort of tax incentives that have been created or at least harnessed for the
benefit of these strategies.
There's a brave new world in consolidations and it is folks raising committee capital vehicles
to go start platforms to go start a platform rather than needing to acquire a platform,
which I guess is the difference that you're driving up.
Well, and I think another difference is that a consolidation strategy historically was
the domain of private equity and even maybe even smaller private equity, you know, kind
of independent sponsor private equity.
But independent sponsors are still buying much larger businesses, usually two and three
and our average at mine's capital, the average business that we invest in is $4 million
of EBITDA.
You bought a business with $100,000, $150,000 of SDE.
And so the consolidation strategy becomes, it feels like it's much more accessible to
an ETA, a searcher, an acquisition entrepreneur, somebody who might, as you said, otherwise
just by an SBA finance business.
So this path, which once was, as I said, the domain of private equity now feels like
an individual acquisition entrepreneur might choose between, do I do an SBA self-funded
search or do I do this committed capital roll-up strategy?
Fair?
Yes.
And I think that's also a response to market conditions.
I think, you know, the last search, Stanford search fund study showed the close rates for
search funds are continuing to decline.
It's getting more competitive to go by a $4 million EBITDA business like the kind you're
describing at mine's capital.
I think generally speaking, as data availability has gotten better, everybody that owns a $2
million EBITDA business is getting three meals a day from a broker and from an intermediary
and whatever about would you like to sell your business.
And so I think it's just gotten harder to find the 1980s center of the fairway ETA deal.
And so one of the responses is to come down market like the whole rest of the world is doing
and say, there are still wonderful businesses with, you know, not $4 million, but $400,000
EBITDA that are out there, what's a way that I could, you know, that I could come up with
an attractive investment strategy, you know, based on that.
And consolidation strategies have been an answer to that question.
And I think they're also, you know, the farther down market you go, the more intrinsic value,
I think you can find in consolidation strategies like should Delta buy United and like, will
that be good for consumers?
Like probably not.
But you know, if I take a local music school and I plug it into a platform where all of
sudden it has the teachers are not getting benefits and they're sort of like, you know, positive
student-facing economies of scale and resources that weren't there before, is that good for
the world?
I think there's a much stronger argument for that being true than there is farther up
market.
You're taking jobs and meaning that the entrepreneur's seat in a very small business is really
more of a job, unless of a CEO or a type role.
And you're turning it into, you know, something that can really be, you know, a fulfilling career
for an ETA, for someone that's interested in ETA.
There is a lot to say about the actual architecture of doing this and you are going to host a
webinar on that very topic.
The working title is "Financing for a Rollup Entrepreneurs" or "Financing the Rollup"
and it is exactly about this.
You've done it.
You are, as I said, you are investing in other entrepreneurs doing this.
You're even raised to fund or in the process of raising fund, raising a fund to systematically
invest in searchers doing this, correct?
Yeah, we've done eight or nine platform deals with this very similar group of investors,
targeting, again, consolidation strategies as a primary value creation lover and we're
looking to formalize that now.
Great.
Well, the registration link and the date and so on will be publicized when we actually
this episode, our conversation here, heirs, Jeff, so for the listener, you should definitely
come to that to get really into the weeds.
I've seen Jeff's slides.
It's going to be really a fantastic session to get into the weeds and really understand
this model deeply.
I do have one slightly technical question about this approach and then I'll start wrapping
us up, Jeff.
Just on this, again, for the kind of self-funded searcher who's the majority of the audience,
then I heard you say the committed capital vehicle, the evolution there that they're more
common than they were.
You develop a thesis, you raise a bunch of money to go off and do a consolidation strategy.
Versus, how would a self-funded searcher think about doing that versus buying that first
quote platform, that small business, that $400,000 SDE business themselves with an SBA loan
and then raising capital, just the sequencing of things because presumably they'll be able
to strike a better deal vis-a-vis their investors if they've already demonstrated their ability
to close a business, to run a business, to grow earnings in that business somewhat.
They're already in the industry, they probably have access to deal flow.
This is no longer a concept.
They've got their first one under their belt and maybe a year or two of experience.
Any thoughts on the sequencing of things?
Yeah.
What you're describing in the latter was my experience.
I had the benefit of immersing myself in the very first business, but it was one that
put more risk into the platform for me.
If you were to make a pros and cons list or an order of operations list, in a self-funded
search deal, you have the advantage of time to go pursue a variety of options.
You're bringing a deal to market that investors can invest in or not and so there's no search
risk or portions of the capital that are going to non-operating portions and that's
why self-funded economics have always been better than funded economics.
You can cut a very attractive deal, even more so today, in terms of the operator or entrepreneurs
share of the future value that's going to be created by your investment of time and
effort and growing that small business.
When you come back to raise money to buy the second business, you still have a very small
platform, if you will, right?
The first business you bought, it was a small business and you probably traded for three
to five times cash flow and you have a second business that you're putting together and
to get the case for re-rating that platform is not especially strong and so you're going
to need to dilute yourself a couple of times in order to build up the platform to a meaningful
level.
The committee capital vehicles sort of cuts through that conversation and says, "We know
we're going to need ten of these to get to any kind of meaningful re-rating."
let's just get the money invested first. We can figure it out. There's also a pretty significant
advantage from a risk mitigation perspective. I spoke about the path dependency earlier,
but also the fact that most committee capitals do not use leverage as part of their initial
set of acquisitions. So it's committee capital. You know it's there. You don't need a bank to
fund it, but you also don't have a bank there if there's a wobble out of the gate.
And so you can grow your way into a platform where you know what the overhead expenses are,
you know what the profitability vendor-lying assets are. And you can then go and take a season
portfolio out to a lender and say here's what I actually have as opposed to here's what I think
I'm buying. And so you're almost trading off kind of certainty for the equity investors versus
a certainty for the debt investors, and you get a better deal in both respects. So I think
the self-owned path you can probably eke out more personal economics, but you take risk
along the way of you know whether the whether the platform grows and evolves in the way that you
expect. In the committee capital case, you know you get that you mitigate that risk and you
also mitigate the leverage that you need to take on out of the gate. And you have one additional
advantage, which is there's more willingness if you're if your plan is to go build a platform,
there's more willingness among your investors to have a little bit more platform resource,
especially because again you're not using debt as a primary financing strategy out of the gate.
So there's more willingness to have a commit you know to have a VP finance that maybe you can't
afford in the model that I was talking about earlier like you know some some starting to have
those shared services resources like the regional managers that we talked about half an hour ago
earlier in the journey because one you have capital and support for where you're going,
but two you don't have debt on the business at the start. So you have more flexibility around
making some of those platform investments. So maybe you'll have a more a more enjoyable early
consolidation experience than I have being on the very front line of the business.
No holding the dog in one hand and the phone in the other while whilst out on the lake.
Jeff you did say that you're in floor I'm talking to you in a hotel room in Florida.
This is your 91st flight of the year. So I would be remiss if I didn't point out to the audience
that a successful acquisition strategy also means traveling like crazy. Obviously you're you're
looking all across the country and rolling up businesses by the dozens care to respond to
that reality of your personal life. Yeah it's not for everybody. I think when we thought about
regional versus national we had to make a sort of pragmatic conclusion about we had goals in terms
of how big we would grow and a time you know a time horizon over which we wanted to achieve that
objective and that just sort of necessitated a national footprint in order to have enough
surface area for opportunities to present themselves. I think you could do a valuable
consolidation strategy within a region. There's many examples of them on on your podcast.
Actually one of my favorite strategies you know consolidation strategies that we have not talked
about that I think do have inherent value are businesses that have a route density dynamics. So
where you can do consolidation and you can have your technicians or whatever it is spend more time
doing work rather than driving from job site to job site. Those are businesses that I think make
you know make sense intuitively for consolidation strategies and so those are inherently you know
local or regional. So you don't need to put in 91 flights you know by by the end of June or
July every year but to build this business I had to and I think I still get on the plane because
I think it's important to be out there you know in front of the team and you know leading from
the front on M&A that we're looking to do on on team events that we're that we're that we're
doing on events that we're producing for customers like I I just I find value in in being out there
and and I'm experiencing that but it means that yeah I I wish I had a dog will but but the dog
wouldn't have a very good life so so here we are I I'll have to save that for a different phase of my
life. To close this out Jeff any final reflections on what your story should tell us about ETA broadly
as a path. That's a weighty question. I have had a tremendous amount of fun doing this and I think
I've had fun for a few reasons. One we've had incredible success more than I had any right to hope
we're expect and that's been really fun. Two I was able to do that in an industry that I was
passionate about and cared deeply about and it wasn't something that I adopted because I you know
found it through a search and came to love it. I've I've loved this since I was six years old
and I get a tremendous amount of value of getting out of bed every day and knowing that that's
what I'm going to work to do and I've been very fortunate to build a great team that I enjoy
working with and that are you know I've added to my experience of being along the journey and I
think there's probably something in there you know throughout right where the highs will always be
you know be more fun than than the lows but but on average the average ETA result is good and this
is going to be a fun and rewarding path I think generally more so than you know slogging it out in
the middle ranks of a private equity firm or the middle ranks of a Fortune 500 you know tech
company or whatever that sort of strikes people to ETA is the promise of having impact seeing that
impact and participating in you know in a reasonable share of that and so that part is is fun
I think if you can align your search with your interests you know you'll have more success for a
variety of reasons you know from pre-closing through post-closing and I think the most rewarding
part of the journey for almost everybody is you know the people that that come along along the way
so I think those are are generalizable but look I I have the benefit of an incredible amount of
survivorship and hindsight bias so yeah listen to the rest of the the acquiring minds catalog to
get a party on perspective you are Jeff one of those episodes I mean you're you're in the your
first interview is in the in the canon and it's just one of the standouts of a of an exciting
inspiring outcome so anybody who only listens to the Jeff Homer episode one is getting a
misinformed view of the entire ETA and set of outcomes it's just really a neat story
it's only gotten cooler since in these last two or three years congratulations on your success
really great to see you kind of turn back around and invest in others doing the same thing behind you
and as I said everybody watch for the the webinar we'll email that out a financing for roll-up
entrepreneurs so if you want more Jeff or you really want to understand this strategy deeply come
come to that it's going to be a phenomenal session so link to that will be in the show notes of
today's episode as well as on the the acquiring minds website as always Jeff Homer congratulations
and thanks for coming back thank you hope you enjoyed that interview don't forget to subscribe
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