Ori Eldarov from OffDeal

As you may know, the fall economic statement brought some massive updates to the Shred program. These changes deserve attention. They're a game changer. Right now, Bloom believes the most important thing every Shred consultant can do is ensure their clients are aware and equipped to plan for these updates. To be on that, it's about educating businesses that now have an opportunity to make a claim but may not know how to get started. Bloom's mission remains the same, helping innovators innovate. That's what the Shred program is all about. The challenge for some businesses will be hesitation. While their competitors move forward and leverage these updates, putting them at a disadvantage if they don't act. June and the team fill main on three quarter themes to watch if you utilize Shred this year. The first, capital expenditures are back. Cost for new equipment or infrastructure to fuel your R&D can now qualify for tax credits again. The second is broader Shred access for public companies. The enhanced 35% refundable Shred tax credit is now available to public companies. That's a huge change opening doors for larger organizations to benefit from R&D incentives. The third is expanding the Shred horizon. With the annual expenditure limit for small companies increasing to 4.5 million and the taxable capital thresholds expanding 15 million to 75 million, more Canadian innovators are in a position to benefit. If you want to benefit from these changes or just chat with knowledgeable experts, reach out to Jude or [email protected] that's S-R-E-D.ca and tell them Evan from the hard part that send you. I'm also happy to put you in touch directly. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Evan McCann and this is the hard part. This shows a deep dive into the strategies, founding stories and behind the scenes insights from Canada's top founders, investors and leaders. You'll come away from these episodes with insights, learnings and tactical advice on building and investing. I'd love to start with your time. Like I don't want to condense all your background into one question, but just from if we kind of dive into it, so RBC investment banking, you worked at a startup as well and Harvard Business School, how did all that kind of background really lead into what you're doing now with off deal? There's a common thread there. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I don't know. When I lived in Canada, it wasn't that common around me for people to start companies. I lived in Vancouver for a number of years and starting a startup was not a concept people really thought about. It wasn't until I moved to London and continued my investment in my career there that I started meaning some people that started businesses. I got very excited about the idea and actually the first idea that I had was to acquire a business. My first idea was, "Hey, we're going to buy a laundromat that runs itself and is going to make all the sense of the world." I realized that's a very saturated space. The second idea I had was I'm going to buy a crematorium service business because there is going demand for cremation services and there's not that many people looking for them. I was wrong. There's tons of people looking for them. I finally found a thesis that got me excited which was Cooking Oil Collection. I as a banker worked in energy transition and power and utilities banking and I saw that there was a lot of demand for biofuel and you could use Cooking Oil as a byproduct for that. If you rolled up a bunch of Cooking Oil Collection businesses, you could actually start selling that for a feedstock for biofuel and get access to some tax credits. I was off 2019 on the side while I was working at RBC in New York. I was looking at Cooking Oil Collection businesses and that was my first experience going to deal with these business brokers and small businesses and that kind of stuff. Ultimately, I was unsuccessful at acquiring a business. I got out bit every single time and then by the time COVID happened, I just didn't have the guts to buy a business that's so levered to the restaurant industry. I took pause on that. I was on a work visa in the US. I didn't really want to continue doing A. I thought that I was just becoming a better banker and not really growing professionally as much. My options were limited. I either had to move back to Canada in the middle of a pandemic or continue working because nobody was sponsoring visas. Then someone said, "If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need a visa and you need free time. Why don't you do business school?" I was very skeptical of the idea at first. Nobody in my network did an MBA and a controversial topic or how much value it actually brings. I thought, "Let me apply to a couple of schools and see if I get in." Somehow, I did get accepted into Harvard. There I said, "I'm going to keep my eyes wide open and just think about what problems do I come across that I can solve myself?" As I was doing that in 2022, a few months before Chad G.P. came out, I came across Generative AI. My mind started racing with ideas. By the time Chad G.P. came out, I knew that I had to do something with this technology and I probably want to apply to financial services. It was just the most obvious thing. It was so obvious that a bunch of other people had the same idea as well. This company that got announced later in the year called Harvey AI, which was like a copilot for lawyers. I was like, "Oh, brilliant. I'm going to do the same thing for investment banking." My first idea, my first iteration of OVDEL, was actually this AI native operating system for investment makers. I tried selling it to banks and I tried doing proof of concepts and I quickly realized that there's not just bureaucracy and obstacles on the IT and legal side of things, but there was actually a certain unwillingness to change the way you operate. There's a lot of risk of version. A lot of people working in those industries are lull dites in some sense. I got kind of demotivated and discouraged by what I was hearing. I thought, "Okay, well, the second industry I know really well is private equity." Let me apply this same playbook to private equity, smaller companies, less bureaucracy, easier to move. As I started talking to people in my network, I saw that the number one problem for them was deal origination and deal sourcing, specifically in the small business segment. Of course, having tried acquiring a small business myself and being around all these search fund investors at Harvard, that's a space that I understood really well and I decided to start digging and eventually through a number of pivots and discoveries, I landed at OVDO and his current shape and form, which is an AI-native investment bank for buying and small and banging selling small businesses. We apply a ton of technology to streamline the process and to end and we charge success fees to small business owners upon the successful close of their transaction. What is the unlock from a business owner perspective? I would assume they know very limited amount of buyers, so maybe they're not getting the best price. On the search fund side, I have friends in that space as well and I find they are always struggling to find deals and stuff like that. Is it really just helping both sides achieve a better result? There's a few questions hidden in that question. Maybe if we take a step back, who is buying small businesses today? It started off with private equity firms and they went really down market for various reasons. Now a plumbing business that makes a few million dollars in revenue suddenly is on the radar of a private equity firm. There are strategic buyers that are struggling to grow organically and perhaps they would expand into a certain category and acquisition of an established business is a very easy, low-risk way of doing so. Then there are these individual buyers. Historically, they've been high-knit-worth individuals, although now with changes in regulation of a small business administration, you can get loans, or up to $5 million with zero money down to acquire a business. Almost every owner has heard from a buyer. It is not a new concept to them that they can sell the business. They know they can or at least they think they can. And actually 80% of transactions in the United States for businesses under $10 million in EBITDA occur through what's called a direct sale. That means it's a transaction between a buyer and a seller and no-am and advisor is involved. That's a common path to an exit. That's troublesome in a few ways. First, any one transaction has a very low probability of happening because buying or selling a business has a marriage between a buyer and a seller and so many things need to align in the product mix and the end market and the way the business runs and the vision and the strategy and the size and the vocation. Tons of deals just fail at the 11th hour. If you put yourself in the owner's shoes, you've spent maybe three or four months with some stranger that emailed you or called you on selling your business. You're tired. You've answered every question they had. You've had to talk to your CPA and lawyer and probably incurred some costs and then they ghost you or the deal just falls apart in the 11th hour. They try to retrain you because they learned something about your business from three years ago and now they can't do the deal. And maybe you even tried twice in you and both times the deal didn't work out. You just give up. You think that all buyers are a waste of money. time you just don't do it. Now, if you are one of the owners that did sell their business, did you get a good price? Well, first of all, how do you know? You can't really check the value of your business online by logging on to your fidelity account. And actually, the whole reason for why these buyers reach out to you directly is because they can get a better price. There's no competitive tension, right? The data shows that one-to-one deals close, you know, for 20 or 30% less purchase price than when there is a auction involved. And by the way, you got to look at Wall Street. Like, every deal on Wall Street is banked for a reason, right? Because there's prices covering. You can go to your board and you can say, "Hey, we got five offers as the best one." Right? So there's no reason why the same shouldn't exist for small businesses. It's just really hard. As a small business owner, say you own a roofing business, how the hell are you going to know who's going to buy your business? You might know a couple of competitors in your local market. Maybe you don't even like them. You don't have a relationship with them. You don't want them to know that you're selling. Maybe there's a handful of private equity guys that called you or emailed you, but that's about it. But in reality, there's hundreds of potential buyers for any business. And so what we do is we leverage technology to surface those buyers and engage them directly, which is much more robust than just listing a business online on a marketplace like this by sell. I think that's a nice segue in like like an online kind of like marketplace. And we kind of talked about this in the pre-chat of why marketplaces kind of struggle with like that SMB market. Why did you explore doing a marketplace? Was it just off the table day one? Like why do things not really work that way and why is like off deal a better option there? I think every entrepreneur who tried to do something in the SMB M&A landscape has thought of a marketplace, right? I mean, it's the most attractive business model if it could work because it does not involve any labor, it's pure software margins and theoretically it can scale. And of course, everyone's looking at Zillow and saying, I'm going to build a Zillow for SMBs, right? So it seems obvious. And you know, why commentator teaches you like if an idea is obvious, there's probably a reason why it hasn't worked. You know, look for the dead bodies and try to figure out why it didn't work out. So I would say there's two primary reasons. One, liquidity. So for any marketplace to function, you need high liquidity, right? If I take an extreme example of a NASDAQ exchange, it has very high liquidity because every Apple share is the same. And if I was to sell an Apple share and you were to buy one, well, you know, exactly where you're buying because it's a it's a homogenous, fungible asset. Now, if you're looking at buying or selling a small business, well, you know, there's different types of services they offer. There's different types of customers. They serve. There's different business models. There are different sizes. Their management team makeup is different. They're geographically dispersed. That's a huge thing, right? So not every business can be operated remotely. So you what you introduced now is a ton of heterogeneity on both the supply side, which is what kind of businesses there are and on the demand side, what buyers are looking for. And when you have such poor liquidity, a marketplace is almost impossible to spin up. I will give an honorable mention to micro acquire acquire.com, which was able to do that with micro SaaS businesses because there's a lot more homogeneity in those micro SaaS businesses, whether it's an app or a website, it can be operated remotely, you know, like it's much simpler, right? So that can probably work to some extent. Although when they decided to scale to larger transactions, they did have to hire a lot of customer success people and they do do a lot of outreach and things like that. Now, I'm just going to my second point. When you're selling a business that you worked on for 45 years and you've opened the gates every morning at 6 a.m. and you had to hire and fire people and you have to shovel snow yourself and you do your own books and all these things. And now you're trying to sell your business for three or four million. You're not doing that with a click of a button on some marketplace like you're selling a pair of shoes, right? And an almost important transactions in our lives occur with a human at least today, right? Real estate, cars, life insurance, a high net worth wealth management. There's a reason why, right? Because a big emotional component evolved to it. And so that's what Avio tries to do, right? We combine human expertise that human touch with cutting edge software and technology on the back end. I sometimes call our company an AI mullet because a lot of the AI is actually abstracted from the end customer, but it powers our internal operating system and allows us to do so many deals at the same time. It allows us to turn around evaluation report in a few hours versus a couple of weeks, right? That's the pitch and that's the vision. And we think it's a winning model because there's just so many small businesses that need to change hands over the next 10 to 15 years. We charge a 5% success fee, right? And so if you think about the enterprise value that needs to go through the system, it's in the trillions of dollars, right? And we offer a very human, very high trust service to these business owners to achieve a life changing out. With that mullet model, I'm just curious to some, like, if we kind of extrapolate like the business model of like a big investment bank that is chasing like massive IPOs and huge teams of analysts crunching away lots of people, hours involved with that. Like how are you kind of extrapolating that model? Like you mentioned, like AI and all the technology that you're building, but how you extrapolate that model down to like scaling to probably maybe get to the same overall deal value at some point, but you know, just smaller per like on per average there. So there's a couple of things here, right? One is how does OVDO run as a company and as it relates to scaling and all of its job functions? And the second one is how does it relate to actual M&A execution? So on the M&A execution side, I would say that our technology has already automated a work up to the associate level, right? So the first pass of the valuation, the first pass of the financial forecast, the investment teaser of the SIM, the NDA management, the data room, you know, managing due diligence requests from buyers, all that has been either fully or mostly automated with AI. And by the way, the benefit of being a service business is that when you know, Chad Gbt comes out with, you know, O3 model, we benefit from that directly, because that means that the surface area of the types of tasks that, you know, our software can handle just increased, right? But I think there's even a more interesting and less obvious way of like how does an truly AI native firm operate today? I mean, AI native is kind of a buzz word or what does it mean? Right? And I like to explain it saying that we have more AI employees than real employees today, right? And so what does that mean? Well, every single employee has their basically personal AI assistant that tracks every single client communication, all of our slack, all of our emails, and tells them what they need to do for the day. Where are the deadlines? Right? Like imagine, imagine that, right? We have no VA's, no administrative staff, no support staff. We've already built custom AI agents that do that, right? So we have a custom agent that collects data on each business and updates our database and can research these companies at scale to find those that would match a certain criteria. We have a custom agent that does data entry. So the sales people and the MNA advisors don't need to update the CRM, right? So every client communication, whether it is a call, a text, an email, a Zoom, everything is being tracked and collected in a structured output and goes into our system of record, right? Sales and marketing has a ton of custom agents built to come up with organic content based on customer conversations, you know, help with, you know, blogs and videos and all these types of things. When you look at it that way, you know, yes, there is more AI employees than there are human employees at off-deal, right? And it allows us to handle a much higher volume of business with much smaller number of FTEs. And what's interesting is 80% of these things are not MNA specific per se. Now, they're built with the MNA service in mind, but really is just applying technology to these previously very manual, very time-consuming tasks and just completely delegating it to a technology that can now reason and think analytic. I'm curious like if we tied back to that like human experience that you were describing when someone's selling that business and awesome to like dive into the technology aspect, but I think fundamentally at the end of the day, it's yourself for a team member at off-deal dealing directly with that business owner. So how do you think you kind of build an edge there? Like obviously technology, the speed, everything there. I think that's very attractive to the business owner, but how do you think you kind of win on that human aspect? So I think it comes down to who do you hire and how do you implement a continuous feedback loop for them to train and get better, right? And so let's start with who do we hire? And perhaps it's helpful to first flag who are the so-called business brokers today. The vast majority of business brokers are former or current real estate agents. Why? Because the business brokerage business actually emerged from the real estate brokerage business because back in the day before business transactions were as common as they are now, a lot of businesses had a high component of their value that comes from from a building or from land. And so real estate agents were a natural conduit for those transactions. Now eventually the industry matured and kind of broke off into its own industry called business brokerage. But by virtue of inertia, a lot of those professionals are from a real estate people. I will say, I'll go ahead and say that I don't think that's the most natural skill set for selling a company that has business models and cash flows and all these different things. So we want to hire people with deal experience that understand finance, that understand deal making, deal structuring, et cetera. So right off the bat, you're dealing with a completely different talent pool. We also structure our incentives differently. In a traditional brokerage model, you operate entirely on commissions. You might charge a high upfriend fee, which also creates weird incentives. And perhaps it becomes a primary source of income for you. And as opposed to the success fee. And so if you're a business broker and you're operated two or three person shop, you're eating hand-to-mouth. And if you're eating hand-to-mouth and you're doing a couple of deals a year, that introduces certain pressure on you to close a deal or convert a customer, even if it's not necessarily the best outcome for them. And of deal advisors don't have that. We completely take care of deal origination and prospecting for them. And we pay them a base salary. And then they make some success component off the transaction. But that aligns their incentives a lot more with the best outcome for the customer. So right off the bat, I already mentioned to you, there is a different talent pool going into the industry now through off deal. And the incentive structure is different. And the final thing is, how do you help them learn? And that's where a lot of the technology comes in, where you are constantly gathering data from all customer calls that you have. What are the multiples? What are the how are buyers looking at things? When you had 100 buyers involved in a deal, and they have asked collectively 1,000 due diligence questions, a large language model can analyze them and say, OK, here's the Pareto-efficient questions. There's eight questions that account for 99% of the overall question pool. That helps you anticipate things. You can see how buyers are looking at businesses of a certain type. And then you incorporate that into a playbook, into the organizational knowledge, and you incorporate that into your next transaction. What are your thoughts on SMB trends? What kind of things are you seeing? I know there's splash out there. That's doing things with pool services businesses. Talk about search funds. Do you see this accelerating? There's also, I think the term is silver tsunami or something like that, all these people retiring. It seems to be talked about more and more and bigger news outlets. How do you see things projecting forward? Does the space just get even bigger, more intensity, more players? Do you see that trend happening? That's a very broad question, but I would say that, just like anything, especially within VC circles, I think trends become memes. And perhaps get a little bit overblown. So there's two in particular that I will highlight that I'm somewhat intrigued by but also skeptical of. So the first one is the convergence of venture capital and private equity is fascinating to me. So the thesis now is, hey, enterprise SaaS is sort of saturated. And there's a lot of competition. And by the way, there's incumbents. And even the not the incumbents, but there's like startups that are at Series D that are still moving fast. It's very hard. And people have procurement fatigue. And there's many reasons why enterprise SaaS is sort of hard. And so people are looking at all these trillions of dollars worth of small businesses. And they say, hey, there's these businesses that never had access to enterprise SaaS. A lot of them run on pen and paper. We can build software to largely augment and improve the operations and performance in the unit economics of these small businesses. So that was kind of like the first wave of ideas and people quickly realized, well, wait a second, the average contract values are very small. And the CAC required to get through SMVs is very high. So the WTBD CAC doesn't work. And by the way, I can actually acquire a small business and just become tech enabled service and build the software and use it myself. So that became the second wave. The second wave is I'm going to start buying out all these businesses. And I'm going to build higher Stanford engineers and I'm going to build all this custom software. And by the way, we're going to have 100% adoption rate of that software because I'm the owner of the business. And that's where PE and venture capital started converging. The judges allowed that whether or not that model is going to work from a financial or a turn perspective or to certainly compelling. And I'll be-- if I was an entrepreneur considering an SMB M&A-led startup, I'll be thinking about, well, what does technology actually accomplish in this business? Does it increase revenue per employee or reduce cost per employee, at what extent? And then what does the investable universe? How quickly can I grow what multiples? And does the math make sense? And I see a lot of people involved in that strategy that don't have deal-making experience and I think that's a mistake. I think the best combination of folks to pursue that strategy would be a software, a technical co-founder, ideally with some relevant experience, and then someone with an M&A of private equity background. The second trend is the Silver Synonyme trend. And I think that is grift. I think the argument goes something like, hey, there's 10,000 business owners retiring a day. And there's all these businesses that don't know that they can be sold. They're going to shut down. I think, look, the data shows that there is less than 2 million businesses in the United States that are between half a million and $100 million in revenue. And so can businesses below half a million in revenue sale? I mean, some, but a very small percentage, because it's more of a job in many cases in actual business as a self-sustaining. In some point, it's easier to build a denoval business and acquire something with 300 can revenue. And then anything over $100 million in sales, while they're going through a proper investment bank, they're going to go through a bizarre or jane-p-security or whatever. So really, if you're playing in this 500k to $100 million range, and probably you're really playing in 2 and 1/2 million to maybe $50 million range. And so that is not 10,000 boomers that are retiring with businesses. So that solar tsunami is not as big as people think. Now, it is still worth $3,000, which is what we're excited about. But it's from a numbers perspective. It is in the hundreds of thousands, not tens of millions. And the second thing I will say, it is a myth that owners don't know that their business can be sold. Their phones are ringing every day. They're getting emails from private equity guys every day. And oftentimes, sometimes they're detriment because they think their business is sell when they're sitting on a golden egg. But actually, their business would not be ever purchased by a private equity firm. And actually, that's one of the things that off the old tricep help with is that what is not acquired by a private equity firm because it doesn't have recurring revenues, or there's too high of a customer concentration, or whatever, it might be acquired by a strategic buyer. But strategic buyers are just other mid-size businesses. And they don't have an M&A function, they don't have a Corbida function. They don't have the resources to do the outreach every day. They don't even know that you exist. And so that's what Avio does, right? We identify those strategic buyers, and we can reach out to them directly, notify them of the opportunity. And in our experience, companies do seriously look at acquisition opportunities because it's really hard to grow organic. On the opportunity side, we spoke about this in the pre-chat a little bit of that timing. And I found that a really interesting question, like the timing of when you're kind of talking to these owners. And once someone's made a decision, hey, I'm going to sell my business. I feel like that's very obvious. Maybe they're doing searches, reaching out to their network. But it's almost like that step in front of that of like, hmm, I don't know. I didn't know I could maybe make that much, or oh, someone is willing to buy my business. Actually, I might explore that. Like, what do you think about that timing? Yeah, so timing is very hard here. And we strongly believe in not trying to convince someone to sell their business. You should only try to sell your business when you're emotionally ready to sell. Again, the emotional aspect here is very important because if you've been on entrepreneur your whole life and you're in your mid-50s, what are you going to do after you sell your business? That's an important question. And people should have a plan for that. Some people are not ready to sell from a practical perspective. Their business is just not in exit-ready shape. So the way we think about it, there's two categories of business owners. There's those that know they want to sell, now in the near future. And we deal with those owners in a certain way. There's more about, OK, here's the valuation, here's the buyers. Here's how we're going to find them for you, et cetera. It's more tactical. And then there is the owners that are a few years out. And by the way, I didn't even point only 5% to 8% of business owners are selling their business. Roughly 9 out of 10 business owners are going to speak are not selling today. So with them, it's education led. So we're saying, hey, we don't even know if your business is sellable. And we know that the timing is not quite right. But here's the playbook. Here's what you could do to push those multiples up higher. Or if your business is not sellable today, here's the things that you could do to make it sellable. So for example, maybe it means that you need to hire a GM to automate yourself out of a job. Maybe the owner is working lots of hours and you know, wearing 10 different hats. And we say, hey, we know from our experience exactly how buyers are looking at pest control businesses. Here's the 10 things you'll look at. Here's how the multiples work. Here's how the ranges work. And here's what you can do over the next few years to get to the top of that range. And by the way, what we do is we earn trust with them. They might give us a referral to a neighbor. I had that happen this week. Someone said, well, I love what you guys gave me. This is so valuable. You're the first ones to tell me not to sell right now. I agree with you. And by the way, my neighbor actually has a fertilizer business and he's looking to sell and I told them about you guys. Right? So focusing on the long term, I think, as a winning strategy here. And again, because of the incentives we talked about earlier, where you're living hand to mouth, you're a two, three person business brokerage business where you're made a private equity firm that needs to deploy capital. Now, you're discarding that 90% of the market is not actionable today, right? And there's a lot of opportunity in doing something with those owners. On the founder led sales side, we talked about this in the pre-child a little bit too, but it was just really interesting with like, you kind of leading that. And then how are you thinking about kind of like bringing people into the fold, scaling them up and like building multiple versions of yourself there? I'm a big believer that as a founder, you got to do things first yourself. Like even take, you know, our marketing, paid marketing strategy. I've never done it before and being my co-founder and Chad G.P.T. figured it out and did it ourselves for a month or two before we brought on an expert to help us with that. So, you know, this trope of founder mode, I really, really, really believe in it. You got to be able to do the job yourself before you hire for it. And so every single thing I've done myself, or between me and my co-founder first, before we start to think about, you know, bringing on others to do it. And it's a gradual process, you know, in the art of giving away your legos, right? And building that trust with the employees you bring on. But, you know, philosophically, we would never hire for a role, no matter how out of scope it is for us, that we haven't tried doing ourselves first. And so everything is being dog fooded and tried personally, like, you know, whether it is doing cold calling or cold emailing or SEO or paid ads or M&A deals or whatever it is, we do it ourselves first, always. And then we develop a first version of a playbook. And then we hire an expert who has experience in that domain. And when we work with them to refine that playbook, and eventually, you know, they become someone who can train other people to do what they do. And that's how it scales. But I'm still very involved in every single aspect of the business. And you're right, I do a lot of owner calls myself. I do sales calls myself. Still, I want to be very close to the ground truth of how our messaging aligns with owners are looking for and all these kinds of things. So every little detail of the business, I can blur it off any metric in any job function of the top of my head. So I think that's the winning strategy. Probably a very broad question, but like, what are your thoughts on trust? And we've like touched on elements of that throughout the conversation. But if you look at something like, you know, goal, man, Morgan Stanley, like, these brands just like people just inherently trust them, even if they don't even know anyone at that organization. How do you think about like building that as like a startup and scaling that? I'm sure that's branding. That's the education component. Like, there's all these elements you talked about, like, but how have you been thinking about trust? Because I think that's just so important with what you do. So the short answer is that you can't start with ad day one, right? Trust is something has to build organically over time. And the way you do it is very different than how you get your first 100 or, you know, 200 sales, right? So the way I think about it is sales is op X and it's linear. Marketing and brand building is tap X and it's exponential because it compounds on itself, right? And so if you think about brand building, yes, there is content and social proof and all these things that you can build, which is great. But the only truly defensible mode that you can build is reputation and word of mouth, right? And that is something you can only do by focusing relentlessly on the customer and delivering and over delivering against their expectations, right? And by the way, that's why one of the reasons why I thought this industry was very attractive is highly fragmented and has a very low net promoter score. And so when the competition has a very low net promoter score and you over a well in people with value and you don't even ask anything in return, you create a bunch of vanguels. And then when a conversation of selling a business comes up with a golf course, they, you know, their, their buddy says, hey, I think it's time for me to consider my options. They will think off deal, right? And it scales. It scales because every owner, every owner I've talked to has at least half a dozen other SMB owner friends, right? And so when they're next time they're getting beers and someone brings off the topic, if we did our job well, they will mention us, right? And so it will take time by it. I am confident that by focusing on what's best for the client and not necessarily pushing them towards a sale right away and giving the one an honest opinion and keeping their best interests in mind will get us there. And that's why we structured our incentives internally to align with the customer. I love to jump a quick fire around and I want to know something that you're currently listening to or it can be something you're currently reading. I've been listening and reading a lot of content by Alex Kormozzi. I think he's a phenomenal business leader and a someone who gives noble shit advice. And he's someone who overwhelms people with value to earn their trust, right? Like he doesn't ask you for any money. He, he, he just gives you so much value that you want to work with him at some point in the future. And I, I think any startup entrepreneur should invest meaningful amount of time in, in, in consuming his content, which I think is a kind of outside of the information diet of most tech founders. And then I, I just talked to a lot of owners right now and, and just learn their stories and learn how they live. It's very different than how my network in New York City lives, you know, and what problems are coming out for an overgun. And it's, it's very interesting. So I'd say a lot of my learning is coming from the field. And then just from, from speaking customers. What are you most excited about over the next few months personally as well as professionally? They kind of go hand in hand because as a business owner, as a founder, you know, my company's my life right now. But I guess something that I didn't quite appreciate when I started the company is how cool it is to create jobs and like create an economic unit that that can poison five to ten people and everyone is rowing in the same direction towards a same mission. And everyone's excited coming to work. I think that's really cool. Like I had this moment the other day like, wow, I'm supporting this many paychecks now. And that, that is really, really special. And I'm really excited to close our first and second deal on Q1 and deliver a life changing outcome to one of our customers. I think that's also really, really special because sometimes you, you know, dehumanize it by calling it an M&A transaction, but really it's someone selling their wife's work. And they care about this as much as they care about their baby or their children. And I think seeing the transaction come through from start to finish is going to be really rewarding as well. Last question from me, but how do you deal with hard times building a business is not an easy thing to do. Is there anything that keeps you kind of centered and balanced when those hard times are happening? I just really believe in myself. I know that I can get it done and I know I'm the guy to do it. I have a brilliant team and we're all working towards the same vision. And maybe it's hubris, but I just cannot see a way I fail. And every time it gets a little bit hard, I just remind myself that it's part of the journey and that I will persevere and most startups fail because people give up. And if you can, if you're not going to give up, you can't lose. I think that's an awesome message. I'll leave the episode off on thanks so much for coming on telling us more about off deal in your journey. Thanks again. Thank you. 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