Ep 289: Building a $15M ARR Hold Co Through Acquisitions & Saas Growth with Pascal Levy-Garboua

How many businesses are there to buy in just one year? Hello, I'm Jaryd Krause. I am the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Pascal Levy-Garboua. I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly. He's the founder and CEO of Noosa Labs, which is a holding company that buys small, profitable bootstrap SaaS companies between 150K and 800K ARR.

He has four companies in his portfolio right now and he's spent over 20 years in the tech industry, where he's launched two venture-backed startups. He was the first executive hired at Cheka and has invested in 140 startups with 15 successful exits. Now, in this podcast, Pascal and I talk a bunch about why he named his business or his whole company, should say, Noosa Labs.

Great story, especially if you know much about Australia and the beautiful coastline there. We also talk about how many businesses he bought in just one year, what mistakes he made with the different types of businesses, the first three acquisitions he made, and also what he learned throughout his due diligence.

We dive into how he grows these businesses in terms of sales and business development. We talk about relating it to renovating a property and renovating a certain type of product or a certain type of SaaS business. We talk about the risks involved with SaaS businesses that he found and faced through the acquisition phase.

We also talk about his philosophy and the goal that he's wanting to get to, as well as how he wants to get to that certain goal within his hold code. Pascal, as you can imagine, has a world of knowledge. He's a great person to speak about acquiring businesses and I'm sure you're going to absolutely enjoy this.

Before we dive into this podcast episode, if you're looking at acquiring a business, don't go away and do it yourself. Take the guesswork out of it by getting my due diligence framework. You can get that at buyingonlinebusinesses.com/free resources. It's helped people make millions of dollars and save millions of dollars and it's something you should have in your toolkit for acquiring an online business. Let's dive in.

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Pascal, welcome to the Buying Online Businesses podcast.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, I've got a million questions and so I should as a host. But firstly, it was very lovely to meet you. here.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And so when I found you, I was like, wow, you've done some pretty awesome things that we're going to get to. But Noosa Labs—Noosa Labs is your holding company, right? When did you start this and why Noosa Labs? Because, I guess, just a background for people. Yeah. Well, how did you come up with the name Noosa Labs, I guess?

Because, I mean, I absolutely started the company three years ago. and initially, as New Salams was supposed to be, I wanted to create a company, mostly to get income for work from outside France. And I was looking for the name of a company. I had just come back from a trip with my wife and my daughters around the world.

And we spent some time in Noosa, Australia and for my daughters and me, it was one of our favorite places. We absolutely loved it there. We had so much fun doing bodyboarding at 7 p.m. being our own version of a surf bum, a beach bum. And so when I created the company, I said, Let's create; let's use a name that my daughters will connect to rather than some random name.

And so that's why I use Nusa Labs. And then after that, I defined better the strategy that I wanted to use for Nusa Labs and what I wanted to do there. And I thought it was a cool name. And I also think that it's a name that reminds me of these good times. And so I like the aspirational aspect of it.

Yeah, I applaud that. I think it just sounds like what you are building now has really good energy and it's linked to something blossoming out of a beautiful place, I guess.

Yes. I mean, sometimes at some point, and we'll talk about it. We bought two businesses at the same time and we were struggling and making some mistakes. And I remember that I was using it in all-hands meetings, taking photos of koalas that were not in good shape. And I feel that we need to do things that we think are right and not overextend ourselves too much. And Nusa is a good reminder of that balance.

I totally agree. Just for people that don't know about Noosa, Noosa is about three hours north of where it was originally on the Gold Coast and Noosa is in a place called the Sunshine Coast. It's a beautiful little town. Actually, I just missed out on a property that I was going to purchase in Noosa, but it's a beautiful little town that has, like what you're talking about, bodyboarding at 7 p.m.

It's got a beautiful national park and that national park is on the coastline and there's a big walk you can do all the way up to Hells Gate. And there's a bunch of different bays that you can hang out on the beach; some bays, you know, have a lot of people having picnics. And then, off from the beach, right next to the beach is a huge, massive national park in terms of forest and you can see koalas there.

It's really pretty special, with some unique special features. Yeah, it's unique. It's very beautiful. It's a nice mix of a nice town and real nature. That was really special. Yeah. So I want to ask about, like, just going through your whole career; there's a lot. I mean, we might need a couple of podcasts to go through the whole career, but you spent 20 years in the tech industry in SaaS, fintech and AI, chat boxes, image processing, and as the first executive pilot checker.

Then you increased that marketing and business development team from nine employees to 300 employees. What made you decide to go from this type of work, you know, and you've obviously invested in a bunch of great startups—Notion, Chekka, Kuros Energy—and what has made you decide to go from where you were in your career and what you were doing to creating your own holding company?

What was the motivation for that, I guess? I think that the biggest motivation for me was to find a place where I could be uniquely suited to be good at. When I was in San Francisco, I lived there for 12 years. I was in Silicon Valley between 2008 and 2020. And, as you mentioned, I invested in some great founders. I was the founder of a few startups. I was an executive at a few startups. And when you do all the different jobs, I would say that I have done.

You start seeing, okay, what brings me energy? What do I need on a day-to-day basis to be happy? So that's number one. Number two was that I knew from talking and seeing a lot of amazing investors that investing full-time was not bringing me joy that much. I mean, I like investing, but doing that full-time brought me FOMO and lots of mental health issues that I wasn't really happy to live with.

On the other hand, I also knew that I was not geared and wired more. I was not wired the same way as exceptional founders of tech startups are. Like the founders of Notion, Checker, and Cuso Energy, they are uniquely wired to be obsessed with one problem that they're happy to solve for 10, 15, or 20 years.

That's not who I am at all. And so I asked myself, Okay, what is a job that I could do for the long term that would bring me energy and for which I am uniquely suited? And I had seen serial acquirers like Constellation Software from Canada. I had studied that almost by chance when I was a checker because we were partnering. My team was partnering with vertical SaaS businesses.

And I said to myself, Maybe that's something closer to what I'm doing. And then I looked at different strategies and eventually settled on the one that I'm pursuing today with NUSA. But I think I'm much better at taking some basic product market fit and going to the next level. That's much more than my skill set. And I like the fact that I can be obsessed or whatever with some small problem, but I don't need to be obsessed with it for 10 years, right? My team does, but I don't.

And that's great. And that's the right balance. I love that you started with fulfillment. I think a lot of people start with money goals and then go away and start with fulfillment, which is awesome because I believe the more fulfilled you are through the work that you do, the better work you're going to do.

And you're naturally going to attract and magnetize different people in your team and different things in your business That is, think the opposite way around of what most people believe manifesting is like: just think about something and it's going to come to you, versus, like, changing to be happy and the happier you are, those sorts of things can come to you. Right.

Have you noticed anything that has happened to you since starting Noosa Labs? the more you've found, like the things that you love within your grasp, the better things will go for you. I would say that starting a company is always hard, right? And so at the end of the day, if you're going to start something that is difficult, you need to start it and make sure that it brings you energy and that it brings you joy.

Because there will be shaky days. There are days where, if I look at two years ago, there was like the SaaS recession period where one of our SaaS lost in one quarter 25% of its revenue overnight, like in one quarter. And we had nothing to do with it. Everybody was happy with our products. They just decided that they were going to cut costs or that they were removing agents for their team because they were slashing costs in their company, et cetera. I mean, that sucks.

And you can't do anything with it. It's not your fault. It is what it is. And these days, you need to be able to say, You know what? It's fine. I like what I do. I'm working with people who like what they do and we like working here. And that's going; it's all going to work out. We're going to learn from the mistakes we made when we bought this business, for example. And I think that's very important. I mean, if you're only doing things for money, I'm sure some people can be successful, but I don't think that I can. I mean, I've always said to myself that I've been the most successful.

When I did something for which I would have accepted no money as a reward, whenever I did something for money personally, it never worked because then you're driven by ego. You're always stressed out because you're saying sh*t. This goal is going to be further and further along. If you look at the best founders in tech, for example, and not only intact, but most, let's say, in tech, because that's a world I know, the founder is not building notions for money.

The notion—I mean, the notion—founders spent three years building a product in a kind of cave almost with no proof of anything that was like success. And he would not have done that if he had done it for money. If he had done so, he would have said, You know, I'm going to flip away to do another business. And I think that's very, very important. It needs to come from somewhere else, because otherwise the only choice you have is to be successful very quickly. And that's much more difficult.

I totally agree. Most people listen to this podcast, just as I do. What we're doing is fulfilling. And that fulfillment comes from lifestyle more so than, I mean, alone. You're right; money can change. You know, money's a tricky thing in terms of how your ego reacts to it and things like that, that's for sure. So I don't want to get caught up in that conversation alone.

I just think it's great that you've gone away and done what you wanted. I guess that is success for you, which is amazing. And I think everybody should be doing that, really. Now, how did you, your, I mean, you sort of alluded to it before, but how did you create your acquisition criteria for the first, I don't know, one company, the second, third and fourth, I guess, is it based off some of those acquisitions that you had studied and learned about whilst you're still in the tech space or, what was your target acquisition for your first purchase?

First of all, it changed over time. At first, my initial thesis was much more complicated and much more local, based in Europe. I was going after bigger businesses, et cetera, like one to 10 million ARR businesses, SaaS businesses, and vertical ERPs. And I talked to hundreds of them through a kind of outreach campaign. And one of the things that I realized by doing that was that they were going to be expensive.

And even if I put in some money on my own, I would have to create a big syndicate of co-investors to build the first one. My goal was to buy not one, but like five or 10 or whatever. So I said to myself that it was going to be a very dilutive exercise and would put a lot of pressure on me to raise money and to execute according to the investor's goals and needs.

And at the time I just had my third child, like eight years or nine years after my second child. So kind of a late baby. and I said to myself, Do I really feel that I could execute on that? And I said, No, I mean, I want; my wife needs me to be around. And so that doesn't work. So, at the same time, there was this online platform called, at the time, Micro Choir. It's now been remade to acquire .com.

And I was looking at what they had and I saw a lot of businesses that were very profitable doing 10 K, 10, 12, 15 K of MRR. And I said, I mean, if I buy a string of those that are generating a lot of cash flows, maybe I can get to the size of an acquisition of some of the businesses I saw from my initial pieces in less time.

I made a first acquisition that way and then a second, six months later, like four months later, and then a third and a fourth, another four or five months later. And so, in less than a year, we bought four businesses. It was too much. We made a lot of mistakes. We actually sold a lot of these businesses after that because we made some mistakes. But since then, we've changed. realized that.

When we're doing 10K a month in revenue, it can be a little bit tricky. It's a little bit small. We look for businesses now mostly that are doing, that are a bit bigger, that are doing 200K of ARR. So 200K of annual recurring revenue. Same profitability, like 60 % plus, but bigger. And the cap is around $800.

I mean, frankly, the cap is based on what I can afford. It's not that I don't like a million-dollar ARR business with a 70% EBITDA margin. It's just that I cannot afford to buy it. And so I need to be... don't be accountable to the investors and make decisions. So today I'm using only my own money, the cash flow of a business, and we're using debt—expensive debt nonetheless. But eventually, we'll probably raise money from investors. We have investors that are interested.

You do what we do. So when you say that debt is in France, where are you getting your debt from? my company is, so I live in France indeed, but my business is in the U.S. and Delaware, C.C. I'm a U.S. citizen also, and the business is based in the U.S. for various reasons. The most important one may be that a lot of the businesses we buy are based in the U.S. easier for us to do when you're buying assets from a US company; it's much easier to transfer those assets to a US entity. Yeah, and typically easier to get financing in the States than in many other countries. I know that compared to Australia anyway. There is this startup called Wupos, which is a lender specializing in acquisition financing.

And so we've been using them for the past three years. We've used them on four of our last four. Yeah. Yeah. I'm about to go on Bupo's podcast shortly and have somebody from their team come on my podcast as well. They have been around for a while now. As you said, you've been working for three years. They might have only started three years ago, to be honest. It started, yeah. Yeah. I was one of their first customers. A VC friend of mine mentioned them to me.

And I started working with them shortly after. Yes. So for the listeners, it'd be great to learn from some of the things that you had done that didn't really, weren't, or didn't play out exactly as you wanted to. you some great things from them in terms of, like buying four companies in under a year or a year.

I bought three businesses in three years and that was too much for me. What are the things that you learned? Why would you not do that again? And why would you, or who would you suggest, do that? Who would you suggest, maybe not do that? why? Yeah, I mean, I think that the problem of buying four businesses in a year is technically possible, but you need to know what you're doing.

And frankly, it was the first year of me doing that business and I didn't know what I was doing. So I think that the biggest mistake was buying more than we could chew at that time. Now, if I look at some of those businesses, what mistakes did we make? I think the first three businesses we bought were in the end, mistakes for us, frankly.

And there were mistakes for different reasons. The first one we bought was a business related to WhatsApp, like a kind of WhatsApp CRM. And it was a very good business in many dimensions. Like we grew it a lot. It was a lot of fun to operate. But when we bought it, we thought we were playing in a gray area of WhatsApp in terms of service, but we unfortunately learned after a year and a half that we were not in the gray area but in the red area and we got a season disease letter from WhatsApp, and we had to shut that business down so that was quite unfortunate and that taught me that as enticing as businesses that are playing in the courts of these mega giants can be, it can be incredibly incredibly dangerous. They can shut you down at a whim. So the margins that you're making kind of aren't like you're; you're making a margin. It's almost like a player who makes a lot of money for a short period of time, like a soccer player or rugby player. You're making a ton of money, but enjoy it well because it won't last forever. singular burn and churn. Yeah. So that was my first lesson to not.

play too close to the sun. And the sun for me is all these social platforms with billions of users. Obviously, if you're doing something that is 100 % kosher and 100 % compliant with your API, that's great. But the reality is that the best services you can create for LinkedIn, Twitter, or whatever are not 100 % clean most of the time.

The second thing we've learned is that the second business we bought, when we made an offer for an LOI, we learned after the fact that it was actually at the peak of the revenue of our business. And during due diligence, the business decreased by 10, 20%. Right. And so how long was the due diligence period where it decreased that much? It was two months, like a month and a half, two months.

And so It dropped a lot and it was the end of the year. It was like November or December. And I made the mistake of thinking that there was some seasonality, maybe or whatever. Well, no, it was not the revenue. It was decreasing. It was the MRR and these customers were not going to come back because they were pissed at the platform. And so that was really bad because then I learned that it's really hard when you're buying a falling knife; it can be very dangerous because you'd never know how much down it will fall.

So that was my second big learning experience. The third lesson I've learned from the third business we bought, which was initially a business that felt super stable, had super strong retention, and had slow growth. It was a business in the Zendesk marketplace that we're actually selling right now. And it was not a bad business, but that's a business for which we made two mistakes.

The basic idea was not to buy this business necessarily. The business was to pay a price for it. It was a bit high compared to the growth. And second, the second mistake was to have too much debt for a business with low growth. And when you're using very expensive debt, you need not only high margins, but you also need growth to pay for the debt burden.

Bad businesses didn't have a lot of debt. And frankly, we weren't very strong plan for how to grow this business. We had a fuzzy plan but not a clear-cut plan. That's also something that we've learned from the first three or four businesses: out of the first three, the first one was indeed the most successful, even though it was shut down. Because when we bought it, we knew exactly what we were going to do. And I think that a lot of people, when they buy a business, say, Okay, I'm going to come, I'm going to learn from a customer and then I'm going to make the fixes.

And I think it's a very dangerous strategy, actually. And the reason why it's a different dangerous strategy is because it's the same reason why you don't want to make construction in an apartment you bought after you moved in. Because when you've moved in, you're already inside, and you're already dealing with crap. You don't want to live and have construction at the same time. Right?

Whereas when you buy a house and if you're going to do construction, even sometimes for a long time, like six months a year, whatever, it never matters because you never really went inside. You already have a place so you can wait. And that's better because, in a way, your mind is not as much in a hurry and you're not as much dealing with day-to-day crap.

And you're, and you can be focused on your goal. Your goal is to have a nice house that looks like the one you want to live in next. X years, right? And it's the same thing for a business. When we came in, we had a plan. We executed that plan well, and we were rewarded with more growth, more margins or whatever. When we came in and had no clear plan instead, we'd do that better than them. Because we are, we care more.

It never worked. never worked. And so that's now one of my theses. When you buy an online business, you need to have, even though you don't know as much about the business as you would owning it, a plan. The plan could improve, evolve, or be refined, but you need to have a clear line between these two dimensions. I know for sure I can.

can move an eagle for his business. Absolutely. I love those lessons. Thank you for sharing. so obviously, you learned a lot through those businesses and now your acquisition strategy and your due diligence would have changed. What's the goal? Guess, how are you? You said you wanted to; when you first started, your goal was to buy five companies.

And was the goal to always buy five SaaS businesses or five online businesses and was it to acquire businesses that you could roll up or was it acquire businesses that are a little bit diversified in different, you know, playing in different markets with different products? So my goal was to buy five or 10 for the bigger businesses. For the small ones, it's to buy more. I mean, my goal, I mean, for that, to be honest with you, I have more of a revenue and profit goal than I have like a number of company goals. I like that.

Again, the revenue goal doesn't; I mean, it's more of a challenge or some kind of like, in a way, I feel that I'm playing a game and you have to set yourself a goal to reach. There's no way I could go further. I could go earlier. It doesn't really matter. Frankly, I don't have a number I need to hit financially. I don't want to buy a soccer team or something like that.

My goal is to say, Okay, I've done startup businesses. know how they work. I've seen it from the inside. It was exhilarating. It was great. I want to do something else. I'm doing a hold co. I'm doing that with SaaS businesses. I'm doing it with a mindset of owning and being a capital allocator. I want to get to a certain size so that it's more interesting and more fun.

I set myself like, okay, can we get a business to 50 million ARR and 25 million EBITDA in like 10 or 15 years. Maybe we'll get there. Maybe we won't. It doesn't really matter. It's kind of like moving the goalpost, right? It's almost like challenging myself. And if it takes more time, if I don't get there for various reasons, I won't. It doesn't mean that I don't want to, but I'm not trying my best at it.

But it's just that nobody's asking me for that. I know that If I pass five, 10 million in EBITDA, I will find buyers for what I built if I want to exit, but I don't want to exit. I mean, as long as I'm having fun doing it and I'm fulfilled, then it's fine. Yeah, absolutely. It's so refreshing to hear as well. To hear somebody acquiring businesses and growing them and scaling. Obviously, you're not setting the bar to something like a billion-dollar valuation or, you know, $200 million in revenue or whatever it is. It's achievable.

Right. It's very, very achievable. What I really like about it most is what I like to teach people who are just starting very much from scratch, like just buying their first company, typically to replace their income: don't give yourself. If you put a time or a date on it, you set an expectation, and that's where the stress comes from. And then, when you have stress, it makes it no fun.

Also, you know, when you're stressed, you don't make the best decisions. And so it's really refreshing to hear that you have something you want to get to but without the pressure that you're putting on yourself. And obviously, the only way you can do that is without investors holding you accountable for certain KPIs or ROI per year. So I wanted to ask you about the growth of these businesses because, like you said, you've got a bunch of experience in tech, but what you're really good at is marketing and business development, right?

Like you did with Cheka, you know, going from nine employees to 300 employees. What are some of the things that you've been doing after you've acquired one of these SaaS businesses? Maybe you've done it with just one or it's something you carry across all? What are some of the things you've been doing to get the most out of these SaaS businesses? I mean, there are dimensions that are, I mean, there are businesses, for example, that have a horrible UI or UX.

I like these businesses because if you're successful and people are using you despite that, that's something that we can easily improve. And so that's one thing that we tend to buy. We tend to buy; I mean, we like buying; that's a very easy lever to go back to my real estate analogy. If you're buying a house that looks horrible but is on a beautiful lot with a nice view, you don't need to be a genius to make it look more modern or up-to-date, right?

Yeah. Renovation is an easy strategy for house flippers. So that's something that we like. tend to, and the other thing that I like is that I like businesses that have some small businesses, customers, and more coming inbound, but also have large companies using them. Because for me, when a large company is using a piece of software, it's always a good sign. Valuable. There is value.

And so I want to understand what that value is. And I know from experience that large companies typically want different things from smaller companies. don't only buy. Like selling to a large company is not only selling the product; it's selling the product to meet the needs of a large company. Around procurement, around accounts, and around security, what do you have?

Right. And so I personally feel that way trucks of understanding that experience and building that experience allow you to charge for that experience. Because again, large companies, like if you're Walmart, don't care about paying 500 bucks a year, 1500 bucks a year, or even 15 ,000. What you care about is whether it does what I want at a scale that I want and that I need and by checking the boxes so that my procurement team doesn't say any bad things to and if that's the case, then you're golden.

And so I feel that understanding that and building the product and the features that correspond to these needs allow you to grow revenue pretty rapidly without doing a ton of super complicated work. It's a bit cumbersome and it requires good organization within the company, but it's not impossible to do.

So that's a second level that we try to pull off. And a third one is positioning. I mean, I think that people underestimate the power of positioning for software. People want to have more bland positioning, but if you want to be good at something, you need to. People need to say, Okay, this is for me specifically. You need to make trade-offs in the product, in how you market that product to your customers on the homepage, et cetera.

And that's something that we sometimes do; that's another level we can pull from sometimes to determine what is like using the old four P's: people, product placement and publicity. Yeah, we—that's something that we think a lot about. Yeah. I mean, the brand, like it's, its names sense. The first two things I really truly understand are that when you're doing the renovation, if you think about it, the nicer it is to live in that place, the longer you're going to want to stay.

And for a SaaS company that has monthly recurring revenue, people are paying annually, quarterly, monthly, or annually. It's just nicer to stay longer. Isn't it? It makes sense. The same as the renovation method. then for the branding to get them in the door, you said placement is being specific, I guess, being really specific about what you're good at and like not having too many features that some people.

From what I've learned, some people might say that I want to buy this product. And then there's like 10 other features that are in it and they go away and they purchase, they use it. And then sometimes they may feel like I'm doing something; I'm using this for one reason, but all these other things are part of its value.

And they may feel like they're missing out on not using the whole value to the extent that the product can be used. So they might leave and go to some other business or other software that is like, we're just perfect at this. That's it. If that's all you need, just use us. Is that the sort of positioning that you're talking about?

Yeah. It's about feeling online. There is lots of competition and you don't want to, and I think that the more time goes by, the less you want to be all things to all people. And you don't want to be the brand in the middle. If you think about clothing, for example, or like, what are the brands that you want to be?

You want to be the super high-end brands like Louis Vuitton or whatever; these are super profitable companies, or you want to be Zara or Timmou, right? Or Chien. You don't want to be the brand that is kind of stuck in the middle, that is not super expensive but not super pliable. Like Gap. Gap is a failed brand now, right? Yeah, yeah. Because nobody aspires to buy from Gap.

Gap, like the Gap company, had three brands and the brand that did the best was Old Navy because it had a clear positioning on the low end that some customers found value for. And so I think it's the same with software or online businesses. You need to know your positioning. We tend to like businesses that are high-value and low-priced. For example, I'd rather be high value, low price, because if I'm high value, low price, then it's a no-brainer for people to come.

And also, sometimes people will accept fewer services. I don't have a team of 50 customer support or customer success reps that they can call every minute. Right. And that's okay because I'm cheaper and that's a value prop that people are fine with. As long as they're getting what they want, what they came for, and what they don't need, like the little additional things and it's cheap, they're not going to complain because they know it's cheap.

Yeah. And I think that again, if you think about startups, oftentimes, startups, because they have money and they're building businesses according to a playbook, are trying to be all things to all people. And that's very expensive. And sometimes you can because can,'re building a super-entertainment product with all the enterprise features. But if you're not, if you're only selling to small businesses or startups, you mostly can't unless you're huge. so you need to build the product that the infrastructure supports.

It's a builder's enterprise product. You really need enterprise pockets to be able to pull off that. Absolutely. Very, very, very deep. Yeah. Yeah. It's so good to pick your brain about what you've learned and how you're building out your whole code. For parting advice outside of what we have mentioned and what I've asked you, is there any advice that you would give to somebody who is thinking about building their own whole code?

And what would that be? I think that the biggest, most important thing when you're building a holding company is making sure that you are not buying yourself like five jobs if you're buying five companies. and so you need to build a structure where people don't need you on a daily basis to operate the businesses.

That's the only way to go. I mean, I often say we have a company, not because I'm a king or whatever, but because I have a team and we wouldn't do anything if it weren't for the team. I'm not running the business day-to-day. And some people might say it's a better idea or a worse one, but I built my business knowing that I wouldn't be in charge of all these businesses every day. And so that's something that I think is crucial when you're building a hold-go. Like a lot of people, especially if you don't have a lot of outside capital.

They're going to buy businesses that are basically going to generate revenue, like the equivalent of one year of revenue for you or for you and your family. And that's great. Unless you're burning out, the only way to not burn out is to build a team that can run these businesses while you're focusing on what you're uniquely good at, which is maybe acquiring businesses or maybe putting up processes around different dimensions or being good at sales and marketing or whatever it is that you're good at, but you need managers for the businesses you buy.

Otherwise, you're not going to build a hold code, but you're going to buy yourself a job or two and be miserable at it. And like you said, being miserable is not what you want in anything you do and that's really a good way to focus in terms of operational tasks: what do you find more fulfillment in?

If you're really good at sales and marketing, but you just hate it, you don't have to do sales and marketing and take that piece of the puzzle, a piece of the operation. can get somebody who is really good at sales and marketing and absolutely loves it. Give that role to them in terms of operations and you can do the parts that you do find fulfillment in—those different roles or different businesses, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Pascal, thank you so much for coming on; I really appreciate it. Where can we send people to get in touch with you if you'd like?

Sure, they can follow me on LinkedIn or on Twitter at 2PASC. And they can send me an email at newslabs .com.

Love it. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you, Jared.

Yeah, thanks, Pascal. Thank you very much. Thank you very much everybody is listening and I look forward to seeing you on the next one.