What Private Equity Buyers Really Want in a Business

It's the fun part though, like it may not be sexy, but it's my favorite part of my job. It's like the part of my job I would do for free. It's a corporate orphan. We have nine businesses that look like a duck and this other one that looks like a swan, right? So the swan doesn't fit or whatever. What we've found over the years is that if you're trying to transform the company, fix it. You have high leverage ratios and therefore height debt service. It's like fighting a war on two fronts and fighting a war on two fronts is never good strategically. Welcome to M&A Talk, the number one podcast on selling a business brought to you by Morgan and Westfield, a boutique M&A firm specializing in the sale of small to mid-sized companies. I'm your host and president of Morgan and Westfield, Jacob Oros. If you're considering selling your business and you'd like to work with me throughout the process, you can schedule a free consultation at Morgan and Westfield.com or if you'd like my team and I to perform evaluation of your company for one time fee of $1,500, visit Morgan and Westfield.com or see the link in the show notes. And today we're going to talk with Eric Wiclant. He is the partner at Space Side Equity and we're going to take it behind the scenes look at their investment strategy. They acquire companies with one to $500 million in revenue in the manufacturing space and Eric. Welcome to the show. Jacob, thanks so much for having me today. I really appreciate it. So tell us about your company. Yeah, I work at Space Side Equity. I've been working here for 15 years. We're a private equity firm and we like to buy middle market manufacturing businesses and control structures and then execute a fix and build strategy with those companies. So we tend to buy things that are in misaligned ownership structures that have some opportunity for improvement. And we use our Port Co-Value creation system to execute first phase one, which is the fix phase, improve them to industry level standards and then phase two, which is the build or grow phase, which is grow them via bolt-on acquisition or organic activities. How do you spell the name of your firm? Yeah, Space Side is S-P-E-Y-S-I-D-E and then equity. It's named after the River Spay in Scotland, which is a Scotch whiskey producing area of Scotland and our original founder, Kevin Dordy, his family's, some of his families from Scotland and the firm has some interesting origin stories in Munich, Germany over a couple rounds of Scotch that helped lubricate the first deal that got it all kicked off and therefore Space Side is a bit of an insider homage to the first deal that started Space Side 20 years ago. 20 years ago, what fund are you on now? We are on Earth. Seven? Yeah, well, no, actually we were an independent sponsor for the first like 12 years. And we're on our third institutional fund, even though it's called Space Side Equity Fund 2, because we had Space Side Equity Opportunity Fund between Space Side Equity Fund 1 and Space Side Equity Fund 2. How was the IS Independence Bonser world? You know, I think there are really good things about being an independent sponsor and then there are some challenging things about being an independent sponsor. The good things are, you know, you don't have LPs to answer to. The bad thing is you don't have LPs to help you carry the load. But by and large, I think it's a little bit easier to do our sort of investing as a fund versus as an independent sponsor. Are you getting a management fee? Is an independent sponsor or no? It depended. Most of the deals that we did, we generally did not do it that way. We just do some sort of, you know, use of our own money such that we didn't need to. But, what kind of like one of the phrases that we, or one of our mantras at Space Side is return capital early and often. And you know, we do that even now as an institutional fund. But we would do that a lot as an independent sponsor to make sure that we were getting ourselves paid. And that was part of the way, like, we were thinking about deals, which was like, what kind of deals can we do where we can, you know, get this company going the right way quickly. And then do some sort of dividend or thing like that, which it's a good way to make sure you're thinking that way because when you're managing other people's money as well, it's really important to get them a return. And in, you know, private equity world, we talk about DPI. So when you, when you've been thinking about that way or thinking that way for a long time, you know, it's good when you have an institutional fund as well because you, you, you think about it, you know, it's your own money, right? And it is our own money because we have a GP commit as well. But when you thought about it as your own money for, you know, 12 years, that never leaves your mind. And I think it makes you a little bit of a better investor, frankly, because, you know, you think about like, hey, how do we get the best return here as quickly as possible? So you were still raising capital as an independent sponsor? No, that was all your own. Some, we had a couple deals where because of deal structuring, it made sense to work with one or two other parties, but by and large, it was, it was pretty much all our own money. How big is your, is your firm now? How many people? We, I think, are now just got to 14. Our AUM is a little over a billion dollars. So we're, it's under management for those that don't know. Yep. Oh, yes. Sorry. Should have spelled that out. Assets under management. Yeah. Between the three funds, it's about, it's a little over a billion. Yeah. So the investment team and then other parts of space side and then in the port coast, there's a couple thousand folks that work in those portfolio companies, those platforms. What's the toughest thing? Don't know what you do. Yeah, that's a good question. I, I would say the two hard parts of what we do are, so 20%. I would say it's binding the right companies to buy and then the 80% is transforming them to make the fix. Yeah. Make them work 20% fine and 80% fixing. Yeah, because it's like, I just like marriage, right? Yeah. Well, you know, more like 90, 10. Yeah. Right. What's funny about that is it's like, you know, I was joking about with a buddy of mine, who works at a different fund the other day. And I was kidding. No, no, no, no, I was like, I was like, hey, Rob, you know, like the life of a fund, if you think about the life of a private equity fund, longer than a marriage. Yeah, it's usually like 10 to 12 years. It's longer than a lot of marriages in the United States. So it is a little bit like a marriage, especially when you have other partners. And you know, there's give and take and, you know, things like that. So it is helpful to think of it a little bit that way. It is, it's important because it's definitely a long-term relationship. That's for sure. What are the corollaries there? I think compromise is probably the biggest one, the getting to know people well is really important. Understanding, you know, I guess synergy in terms of strengths and weaknesses, how you balance each other out would probably be the third thing. But yeah, it's anytime any long-term relationship in my humble personal opinion, if you want a good one, you're going to have to work at it. Whether it's, you know, a spouse or a best friend or, you know, a business partner or whatever. You know, come prepared to do the work, I guess, is the short answer there either way. So you're telling me what you do is not like it's depicted in Hollywood where you're flying in on a jet and start passing people around? No, not at all. I mean, we're especially different at space side because, you know, we're a firm, we like to say we're a firm for operators built by operators. So Kevin Nick and myself, the three partners, we've all been sea level guys at, uh, middle market manufacturing companies. We've all been operating partners or done operating partner work at middle market manufacturing companies. And we all have decades of deal making experience as well with middle market manufacturing companies. And that, that, you know, with and breadth of, you know, and depth of experiences, incredibly valuable. And what it means is that to your point, we're not probably like things are depicted on like the show like billions or maybe Silicon Valley or something like that. It's, uh, it's a lot of just hard work done every day. It's not, uh, it's not as sexy as maybe Hollywood makes it seem because we spend a lot of time working with our portfolio companies, how we're going to make those better. And because we've been there done that before ourselves and those same, same seats, we know how to kind of, you know, work with them and, and help them out. And it's the fun part though. Like it may not be sexy, but it, it's like my favorite part of my job. What part? The fixing? Yeah. The fixing part, the working with management teams at Portkos. It's, uh, to make companies better. Just I love that. How many tools in your toolkit? Uh, 27 in the Port Co value creation system. So there's 18 in the phase one part and there's nine in the phase two. Now you should know we break things out pretty granularly like for example in phase two, bolt on acquisition is a tool joint venture. a tool, partnership is a tool, divestiture is a tool, whereas you could say that's kind of all one tool, it's all corporate M&A. And then organic, the organic stuff is like five tools as well. You could argue that that's one tool, but we break it out into like new product development or new product launch, new market entry, new geographic entry, new channel entry. And a lot of those are, they're like 90% the same, it's just kind of where you're focusing, whether it's like a new channel or new geography, but we break it out separately. And he said, what was it, one to 500 million in revenue as your target? Yeah, we'll go down to 50 million, but we will not go below 50 million in revenue. And generally, like kind of like our sweet spot, it really is like 100, you know, 300. Why that range, is that where you actually produce lies or is it just an issue of the fun size and how many deals you have to do? All of those are factors, but the bigger factors are the characteristics of the portfolio companies that we're targeting. And it's, it's a very quantitative, if you're a stick that we're using, you know, the 100 to 500 to represent a very qualitative rule of thumb. And the reason why not below 50 and, you know, preferably 100 is that companies that are too small, we found or what we would call microcaptials, they don't have the people, processes or systems to implement those tools. Yeah, I'm with, they're too small. Like, think of it as like, you know, to use like a health, right, health analogy. Like the patient isn't healthy enough to handle the medicine, so to speak. Like hiring two guys in a truck to build a skyscraper. Exactly. It just won't work. You can't, you can't do it. And then the issue about companies that are above 500 million is they're too big and have too much bureaucratic inertia to be able to quickly execute the three to five deal theses that we're going to execute in any given deal. So said more specifically and clearly is that if you think about manufacturing companies, there's kind of like three things that customers will pay you for. It's making something. It's consultative selling, telling them, you know, figuring out the right solution for their need. And then I would say developing those solutions, whether their products or services. The problem is when you get above 500 million for like what we like to do, where we're buying something that needs to be structured and transformed. There's too many layers of management to get to the people that do the things that a customer actually pays you for. So you got to go through too many layers of management to be able to affect change quickly. And so that's why I say it's got too much bureaucratic inertia. The layers of management are fighting against your need to change the company to make it successful. What type of ownership structures are you running into that present this kind of opportunity? I would assume it's solo founder owned it 30 years, what kind of characteristics. So family owned businesses sometimes where the newest or next generation of family doesn't want to continue to operate it. Solo owner operator situations, corporate carve outs, public companies that really shouldn't be public. They're too small situations where companies are over and dead sometimes and they need a restructuring to help them or they're moving towards insolvency or are an insolvency. Then I would say other portfolio companies of larger private equity firms and hedge funds where maybe it's not a fit for strategy that they're still trying to execute or they've owned it for a long time. They want out. It's like their last port co in a from five funds ago or something like that or just they're doing some sort of restructuring. So yeah, those sorts of places we tend to find these companies generally speaking. What's your biggest success story? I'd say right now, probably Opta group. We sold that out of fund one into space equity opportunity fund. We sold it to yourself another one of your funds. When we bought it, it had like eight million of EBITDA and when we sold it into the opportunity fund, it had like 80 million of EBITDA. So 10Xing the EBITDA. Multiple expansion. Where do you get there? Not a ton a little bit, but yeah, I'd say that was our biggest success story because it's we do that on a lot of our deals. Where again, we go in and it was it was all improvement from there wasn't acquisitions there. That was all phase one all organic. Yeah, all organic improvement for the most part. Colondetic to 10X. Yeah, so let's see, 2016 to 2023, seven years. Seven years well, did he dump a lot of capital into it? Not a ton. The free cash flow conversion of that business is pretty strong. So we were just able to reinvest a lot of the money back into growth options. The T word tariffs. What's going on there? So I guess my view of tariffs is this. I fundamentally, I guess agree with the impetus for the strategy, which is, you know, there's some opportunities to fix some trade imbalances and kind of reset the global economic, you know, order. I guess I fundamentally disagree with the tactical approach in terms of it changing every day. So I get I understand, you know, and I don't care who's president. I'm going to support, you know, whoever's president, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm very patriotic American. So I, you know, a lot of our country they do well and prosper and, you know, that means the whoever the person is and that seat needs to be doing well. But, you know, I do find it challenging that we seem to have a different approach to it every week. So I hope those that kind of settles down here. It seems like it's starting to settle down and that way if it's settled down, then we can all react to what's going on and, you know, figure it out. But, you know, I also think though for, so that's my macro view, my micro view from like a firm perspective, it's kind of good for us at space. Just because depressed multiples, press failure. Yeah, that, yeah, depressed multiples and buying opportunities. So there are some people they just don't want to deal with it, which I'll blame them. Like I don't really want to deal with it either, but I'm willing to deal with it, you know, to get a return compensated for it. Yeah. We're kind of designed for dealing with difficult situations. So, you know, what what people call a crisis, a lot of P firms, we call a Wednesday opportunity, right? So it's not, I don't know, we don't get as worked up about it. It's just something else to deal with it and we have dealt with it and we'll continue to deal with it, but also would be opposed to it not creating chaos. Is it fixing or you capitalizing an opportunities? Little bit of both. A lot of the companies we buy, you know, they're in these misaligned ownership structures. So what that tends to mean is because they're in misaligned ownership structures, they tend to be, you know, underloved and therefore undermanaged and therefore underperforming. Well that underloved and undermanaged, you know, point of things where, you know, maybe if the company had a little bit of capital to do some things, they could create a lot of opportunity. You know, we're not opposed to taking advantage of those situations and, you know, the people selling them are like, I don't want to deal with it anymore. You know, they've just kind of thrown their hands up and a lot of times it's had, you know, somebody else deal with it and or it doesn't fit our, you know, our corporate strategy. We have, you know, you know, nine businesses that look like a doc and this other one that looks like a swan, right? So the swan doesn't fit or, you know, whatever. And we're like, fine, you know, sell us the swan, you know, it's beautiful to us. Right? Well, we'll deal with it. But, you know, maybe maybe it needs different care and feeding and, you know, we're happy to do that and we're happy to do the work to, you know, do some of the fixing to get to the, you know, situations where we can invest in it. What percentage of companies in that size range do you think meet that criteria in terms of that need fixing from an operational standpoint? It really depends on how you define fixing. And what I would say is this, at most every business that I've seen that's between $105 million of revenue has some sort of opportunity for improvement that can improve the value of that business. Now the question is like, where I'm a spectrum are they, right? And like, you know, are they too far gone to be able to do the fix? So for us, I would, my guess is it's probably, you know, five to 10% of the businesses out there in any given year fit the criteria that we're looking for, you know, relative to that, where we see there's some sort of actions we can take that create value. And it's just a matter of finding the ones where the sellers want to sell them. And, you know, we can buy it at the right, you know, in the right way to make everybody happy at the end of the deal close. So foreign Buffett strategies by a was a great company to good price. What's yours? Not so great company to good price. - Yeah, so yeah, if his is by a good company at a good price, ours would be by scratch intent company at a great price and they could into a good company. But we, it's interesting. So Buffett would describe his investment strategy as value in investing. We would say probably more like, we're very similar, we're more deep value. So we're okay if something needs to be improved a little bit to make it into something good. It doesn't have to be good to start where a lot of what he buys is stuff that's already good. And for us, something that's a little bit scratch and dent, it's okay. We'll put a new layer of pain on it and buff out the dense and we'll have something like he buys to start with. And we usually do that in the first six to 18 months. - Wow, that's fast. Well, let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, let's discuss the strategy more depth and we'll take a quick break and we'll be right back. - If you're a regular listener of M&A Talk, you know the secret to successfully selling your business's preparation. Whether you want to sell your business now or sometime in the future, my team and I can help ensure yours prepare it as possible. We can perform an assessment of your company, which includes a valuation of your business, a review of how easy your business will be to sell, a summary of deal killers that can derail your sale, a list of things you can do to maximize value and insight into how buyers will perceive your business in the actual marketplace. The assessment has a one time fee of $1,500 with no commitments and a 10 day turnaround time. To get started, visit morganandwestfield.com or see the link in the show notes. Now back to today's show. - Welcome back to M&A Talk with Eric Wyclent. What kind of return do you have to get? That return. Well, let's actually discuss that. What's your, and do you use IRR as your target return or another metric? - I can't talk specifically about space-ides or turns due to SEC rules, but I will tell you that private equity is generally trying to target returns in the mid teens to high teen IRRs. And I would tell you, we target return. We would like to do better than that when we can. - How much you have to grow a company by to achieve that 'cause I would assume it is leverage. - Yep, so we do use leverage, but we're a little bit different than a lot of PE firms. And what I mean by that is a lot of private equity firms will use a five to seven X leverage ratio, which is pretty high, five to seven times eva dot as their debt levels. - And they're buying it with 10? - It depends, but we would prefer to use, yeah, I mean, probably high single digits. We would prefer to use like a two to three X leverage ratio. The reason why is it goes back to the strategy of the fix and build strategy. - You need a little wiggle room there if things go wrong, right? - Exactly, that's exactly the issue. So what we've found over the years is that if you're trying to transform the company, fix it, and you have high leverage ratios and therefore, height debt service, it's like fighting a war on two fronts and fighting a war on two fronts is never good strategically because you can't focus. And you don't have to your point, you don't have the wiggle room. There's no room for air. - How much do you have to grow eva dot by in whatever your target is, three years, call it? - Our like kind of simple rule of thumb. It's, and again, you know, there's, I think of it as like what's in the middle and there's outcomes on both sides of this. But like generally speaking, how do we always ask the question, can we double eva dot in three years? And so that's usually for us going through phase one, mostly phase one, and it's more about eva dot margin improvement versus top line growth. However, we will do, you know, once we've fixed the company, we will then look to grow it. So that's what I call the fixed and build strategy. But improving the eva dot margins and then growing the top line with improved eva dot margins, you can get to that doubling of eva dot in a few years. How often are you tempted by a company that doesn't fit your thesis? - Tempted probably every day and then. - The partners check you. - Yeah, that's it. I mean, check each other. - Everyone else checks each other. - Yeah, we check each other, right? And it's, because you look at some of these companies and you're like, ah, this would be so much fun to like, own this or run this or, you know, whatever. And then you gotta be, you gotta be really honest with yourself, right, which is like, okay, does this really fit our strategy and what we know we're good at. And, you know, we told, we told LPs on ourselves, this is the strategy. So, you know, does it, does it fit? And, you know, but yeah, every day there's something, something pops up, right? Where it's like, and then okay, it's not probably every day, but probably at least, you know, every two or three weeks, there's something that comes across our desk, or it's like, you probably like, it's one of those things where, you know, if you were a multi-billionaire and you were bored here, like, you know what, I'm gonna buy this company and this would be fun to like, own, like, there, for example, there was this company that we looked at, I don't know, you're an half or so ago. And I was, I was really interested to see if it could fit our strategy, it didn't, but it was a sports products company. And they sold things in a sport that I competed in in high school and really, really loved. And I was like, oh, this would be so fun to own this company. But it wasn't really a great fit for our strategy, given how the CEO and one of the owners really thought about the company. Great guy, loved him to death. I mean, I actually even offered to help him, you know, you know, after we decided, you know, not to buy from coming just like, hey, here's some things you might wanna think about to, you know, help you out, you're great dude. But, you know, he doesn't really think about the company, like private equity, thinks about the company. He's more like, how do I grow it as fast as possible to beat Nike versus like, you know, how do you generate a, you know, return for your LPs? - How do owners, founders think differently than investors? - Yeah, so it, in a word, time frame. So most owners and/or, you know, larger publicly traded companies that's an assumption of perpetuity, right? Whereas in private equity, it's an assumption of a five year plus or minus a couple year old period. So, you know, said differently, you know, we're a little less patient, you know, relative to that. Now, we can do things like continuation vehicles where we sell to ourselves and keep owning it, which I think that's been a great invention for the industry. I would argue that some, some people would argue it's a bad invention, but if you're doing the right things with it, you're using it as a way to continue value creation. That's a great invention. - Still more growth to be had. - Yeah, then it's a great invention. But so, so time frame is the biggest thing, and then I would say, I was joke that in the private equity industry, you need to be a bit of a dispassionate third party. What's your biggest challenge as an investor versus if you were the 100% owner of a company and operating yourself? - Yeah, so the short answer is we have, as a private equity firm, we have investors called LPs, limited partners that we need to get a return for. So we need to think about it through that lens, and you're on a shop clock, right? So think of it as like, you know, playing a sport like basketballs, maybe a good example, or maybe lacrosse nowadays, but think about like what basketball or lacrosse was like pre-shot clock versus now like post-shot clock. - Oh yeah. - That was crazy. - Yeah, in private equity, we play in a shot clock world, right? As soon as you buy something, you're on the shot clock, because at some point your investors want, they want their money back times, you know, two or three or, you know, whatever their expectation is. And so that's the big difference. Now, I think that's good in some ways, and it's bad in some ways. And then the other big thing I would say is debt, although we try to take that out of the equation that's based side. A lot of private equity firms know, do use a lot of debt. So they're on a shot clock with a lot of debt, which creates a lot of stress, you know, in a company or a can. But those would be the two big answers in my opinion. But I also think, you know, what's, you know, I've always said this, like the best company to work at is either a publicly, a large publicly traded company that has a little bit of patience and the willingness to think longer term, or a privately traded company that has the sense of urgency of a publicly traded firm. And it's hard to, it's hard to find that. It's like you want, you know, you don't want people just sitting around not doing anything. You want them to be obviously focused and excited and really motivated to get stuff done and create value. But you also want to think about it in a longer time horizon than a quarter. It's like, what can we do today that creates value two to three years from now? Not what's our next earnings release going to look like? How does a family office fit that description? Yeah, so I love working with family offices personally. And the reason why is they tend to have what I just said, which is set a sense of urgency where appropriate, but also a good amount of patience. So usually family offices, like the first rule of, you've ever seen movie like Fight Club, right? And the first rule of Fight Club is we don't talk about Fight Club. Well, the first rule of family offices, we don't lose the families money. So they are now different ones are different. They're different ends of the spectrum. Some of them, you know, they're out there and they're like, hey, we want to act like a hedge fund and we're looking for, you know, 20 to 30% IRR or greater per year. And then you have others who are like, you know, we kind of want a little bit better than the SMP 500, but with less risk. They're more conservative and the aggregate than P. Yeah, so it really just depends on who you're dealing with. And I mean, honestly, that's also true of, you know, or can be true of, you know, other, you know, LPs, whether it's, you know, an insurance company or an endowment or, you know, you know, different groups of investors. So you really got a really neat, don't understand, you know, who you're dealing with. And, you know, the joke we have a little bit about LPs is that they fall into two groups. It's, it's bi for great, bi for cater very much. So, 80% of them, I would say they are folks where, you know, they're, they're managing other people's money oftentimes. And so they more invest to keep their jobs, right? They tend to be more conservative. Then you have 20% that invest more to get a return. They're much more concerned about, you know, hey, how do I grow this pile of cash as quickly as possible? Because that's their mandate. And it's not that either is bad or good. It's just, you know, a different way of, you know, thinking about the world. So for us at space side, we tend to get folks that are a little more focused on a return versus conservative, conservative approach, which is fine. I mean, it's, it's, you know, what fits? I mean, now we do have large endowments and insurance companies and things like that in our fun, to be honest, but they tend to be like the, you know, the, the more savvy investors that have been doing it for a long time. What's your favorite type of LP to work with? I wouldn't say like one, you know, group, whether it's an endowment or insurance coming or whatnot. Or what characteristic? It's characteristics where I love the ones where they really understand what we do and how we do it. And then they're also like really willing to step up and like help us, you know, and offer opportunity for us to do our job better. So like we have this one LP and we were looking at this company that was a cabinet company. And you know, we were talking to him about he's like, Hey, you know, what kind of, you know, we talked to him like every quarter or so. He's like, what do you guys got going on? We're like, Hey, we're looking at this cabinet company that, you know, we're kind of interested in. And he's like, Oh, really? Like what kind of cabinets do they make? So we're telling him about it, right? He goes, Hey, would it be helpful to talk to one of the largest like designers and distributors on the East Coast? And we're like, what? And he's like, yeah, my, he's like, my college roommate owns Bob, Bob, and he basically, buys, you know, these, you know, this kind of cabinet to go into like, you know, these high-end houses on the East Coast that he does, you know, he designs kitchens and bathrooms and basements, like, you know, these places, you know, they use a lot of cabinets. And we were like, yeah, that would be freaking phenomenal. This guy, if we could talk to him, he's like, no problem. Let me text him right now. So he texted the guy. And literally the next day I was on a call with this guy for six hours asking him everything about like the cabinet industry and like, how he does things and, you know, what to think about and what he likes and manufacturers and what he hates and like, and it was invaluable to the deal. And so, you know, something like that. Or I have another LP that's out in San Francisco. He's on our investment committee. He's not the biggest LP in the world, but that guy used to run a hedge fund. And so now I just invest all his own money. And I'll tell you in this industry, it's hard to find mentors. He is a great freaking mentor, right? And I can call him up anytime and be like, hey, how do you know, back in the day when you were, you know, doing this and doing the hedge fund thing, how did you use to think about X or Y or Z? And, you know, he'll, he'll have a very direct open honest conversation with you. And, you know, being able to do that is like super, super helpful because there's just not a lot of people you can do that with. So, and then he's also like helped us like find other industries like, I love you guys. Like, I want all my friends to invest in your fund as well. So, you know, he set up with set us up with meetings and things like that. And so those kinds of people like they, you know, they, they understand what we do and why we do it and why, you know, what's good about it? What's bad about it? Why it works? You know, why sometimes it doesn't work? And then, you know, they're willing to help us do it better. So those are the LPs we love. It's like, you know, they, they, they bring more than just a checkbook, right? They, they bring the ability for us to get better as a, as a firm. So we, we love talking to those, those folks. Well, Eric, as we wrap up the show here, if you had to send one message to entrepreneurs in this space, one tip, what would it be? Yeah, just, I, I guess I would say prepare like if you're going to, if you're going to sell a business at some point, start preparing probably somewhere between 12 to 24 months ahead of time. And it's one of those things where the return on that effort is really, really high in terms of, you know, try to do it, do certain things while you're trying to sell a business become really difficult. So if you prepare early and often, you know, that, that's a, that's an easier way to go about it. So that would be probably my biggest piece of advice. And, you know, we're always willing to talk to folks, you know, if they're looking to sell a business, you know, if it's some sort of helpful thing we can do for them, you know, we'll do that there. We've definitely had some situations where we've talked to people like three, four, five years before they sold a business and, you know, a couple of those times we've ended up being the people that bought it, even and, you know, it's, we're willing to have those conversations if helpful for folks. Let's plug your firm. How's about your firm and your kind of companies you're looking for? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're space-side equity. You can find us, you know, on the internet pretty easily. Space-side is spelled S-P-E-Y-S-I-D-E equity, all on word. And you can find me, my information on LinkedIn, Eric Wiclint, it will probably be in the show notes if you're, you're looking for it. But yeah, we're looking for middle market manufacturing companies, 100 million to 500 million revenue. So if you have one of those businesses and you're planning on selling it any time in the next few years, give us a call. We're happy to chat if that's helpful. Oh, Eric, it's been a pleasure. Wonderful conversation. Thank you for joining us. And we'll definitely have to have you back on in the future. That's Eric Wiclint and Eric, thanks again. Thanks so much, Jacob. It was great to be out. M&A Talk is brought to you by Morgan and Westfield, a nationwide leader in mergers and acquisitions for small to mid-market companies. If you've enjoyed this show, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Learn more at morganandwestfield.com. While we take reasonable care to select recognized experts for our podcast, please note that each podcast presents the independent opinions of such experts only and not of Morgan and Westfield. We make no warrant to guarantee your representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided. Any reliance on the podcast information is at your own risk. The podcast is for general information only and cannot be considered legal or professional advice.