Ep 381: What Investment Bankers Know About Buying Businesses That Regular Buyers Will Never Figure Out Exists with Kyle Brown

When you're an investment banker, you're dealing with the C-suite, like the CEO, CFO, like maybe the sales manager; you're dealing with a very small set of people that run these businesses. When you're running a business, you're dealing with everybody. I just had no experience working with employees and compensation discussions, having performance reviews, like setting up structures for people to do their jobs and keep them accountable. Like all of that was totally new to me.

I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today we're speaking with Carl Brown. He is a Michigan State graduate who spent over five years in investment banking and private equity before leaping to becoming a private operator. And he then ran an e-commerce HVAC distribution business portfolio company for a family office.

And that's where he discovered his passion for business and acquiring businesses. And then he went on to acquire his own business in the distribution parts space. And he's now the CEO of 1877forparts.com, which is a niche HVAC parts e-commerce brand.

And we talk about his story in this podcast on how he went from graduate investment banking, working in private equity and for a family office, to becoming an operator of e-commerce brands to acquiring his own e-commerce brand. We talk about the acquisition, how he funded it, how it was a failing business, and why he still bought it, even with his education and his background, and how he's turned this business around, what he's done to build a board, what he's done to build a team, and what he's done to turn that business around and scale it.

It's such a great podcast episode to listen to. If you're looking at a business where you're thinking, Is this failing? Is this good, or is it flat, knowing that you can go away and buy something and turn it around. Not that I not to say that I'm a turnaround guy. It is easy to buy a business that's already scaling or growing or is flat, but there are some great deals out there if you come across them that are ripe for you if you've got the experience to turn them around as well. So it's such a valuable podcast.

Now before we get into this podcast, I know that you're listening to this because you're probably thinking about acquiring a business. And if that's the case, do yourself a massive favor and decrease your risk, sorry, of buying a lemon by getting my J Dolden framework. It's what I use; it's what my clients use. And it's not only made people millions of dollars, but it's also saved people millions of dollars from mistakes in buying the wrong business. It's free.

There's a link to that in the description. I would also love to be able to give you some money as well. I pay finders' fees of up to two grand and far more for anyone who refers me to a deal that we go away and acquire. So if you own or know anyone that owns a business, online business, doing $250K in S.D.E or more per year, let me know. Hit me up, introduce me, we can have a chat. No pressure, no stress. But I do offer generous finder's fees. Enjoy the pod.

Kyle, welcome to the pod. Yeah, of course. So you've got so much experience in like analyzing deals, and that's what did you go did you go to college for that? Like what did you study in college?

Good to be on. Thanks for having me, Jaryd.

I did, yeah. I went to Michigan State, and I studied finance. So I was like set on the path of kind of high finance, investment banking, that type of thing, kind of right from the get-go.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay. And how long did you work as an investment banker for before you decided, Okay, I'm gonna do my own thing? 'Cause everybody's motivation here, most people listening are like, I wanna have a bit of flexibility in my life. A bit more income and a bit more flexibility, but you know, your story might be different. You know, there might be a different reason that you wanted to pivot.

Yeah, so I went to Michigan State. It's a huge university, and I'm living in Grand Rapids now. I I lived in Chicago for about a decade, but I'm from Grand Rapids. I'm from a fairly small, like farming community.

So like my high school wasn't tiny but wasn't huge and definitely wasn't suburban or urban or anything like that. Like I had eight hundred kids in my graduating class. Went to Michigan State. I've always been kind of like a numbers guy, so interested in, you know, engineering initially, like when I was in high school, or potentially business. When I got to college, I realized that like I like math, but I don't like math that much.

You know, I didn't want to be an engineer or do anything that's like super hard math. But I do like numbers. So I wanted to go the finance route. And growing up, I didn't know what investment banking was. I didn't know what anything in that kind of realm was. When I went to college, being a finance major, I thought I would work at the bank back home or potentially be like a wealth manager helping people with their retirement.

I didn't know what investment banking or mergers and acquisitions or anything like that was. I was fortunate enough when I was in college; I joined this program that was designed for people who wanted to get on Wall Street and have investment banking-type careers, just because Michigan State isn't a target school. The program really helped people get careers on Wall Street and jobs like that.

So I had an internship, a couple of internships in college in investment banking. I really like the work. I think it's very stimulating. You learn a ton about a diff a bunch of different industries, different businesses. You really get to do a ton of research on industries and businesses, like learn how businesses operate.

So I was in investment banking for about a year and a half. It really wasn't that long in investment banking. I was on the sell side, so I was helping businesses sell to people that wanted to buy the business.

I knew that I wanted to move on to the buy side and be more involved in actually buying businesses, growing businesses, less of like a broker or like a real estate agent is kind of an analogy that I use where, you know, real estate agents are helping people buy homes, investment bankers are helping people sell businesses.

Yeah, I wanted to be more on the investing side. So making those decisions, looking at businesses, saying, hey, I think this is a business that we should buy.

I think that this is a business we should avoid for these reasons. So I moved over to the buy side. I work for a family office in the private equity field. And that is actually how I got involved with e-commerce.

What size family office are we looking at? And then did you buy a couple of like traditional businesses and then start to look at e-commerce brands for their family office as well?

That's exactly what happened. Yeah. So it was businesses anywhere from like one to three million of EBITDA that we were looking at. The family office that I worked at was very involved in, like, home building was kind of the family where how the family made a lot of their money.

So they were looking for non-cyclical type businesses, like HVAC businesses, plumbing businesses, like businesses that do really well in recessions because home builders do very, very poorly in recessions.

So the family was trying to kind of diversify away from that cyclicality. So we were looking at mostly HVAC businesses kind of up and down the east coast of the United States. Had some really good outcomes within HVAC residential home services about a decade ago or so. And we were looking at businesses kind of expanding away from that. And one of the deals that I found was in a building materials distributor.

So a distributor with a website selling on Amazon, selling on eBay, selling on their own website. It was on Magento back in the day, selling building materials. So like flashing tape, spray foam insulation, HVAC parts, like things like that. And we were looking at that acquisition.

The seller was an older gentleman. I think he was like in his early 60s. He was from Lebanon, and his parents were still around. And he had been living in the US for like 20 or 30 years and had run this business for maybe ten years.

And he was looking to go back home overseas to be with his parents while they're still around, spend some time with them. So he was looking to exit that business very quickly. So like as soon as we were going to buy the business, he wanted to be gone within like 30 days.

And I was like 25 at the time, like had only been out of college for three, four years, did like a year and a half of investment banking, was at this private equity family office for a little bit.

And then at that point, we're gonna run an executive search and find somebody that actually knew what they were doing to run this business once we closed. And I basically raised my hand and said, like, I'll run this business, you know, if this guy's leaving in 30 days, we can find somebody that actually has experience, like has done this before and knows what they're doing. and you know, luckily the the family said, Okay, like you can, you know, you can do this, you can run it. We'll find somebody that's, you know, more experienced that knows what they're doing.

We'll hire them, and then you can go back to finding other businesses to buy and being more of like an investment professional. So I was running that business like right after we closed.

The owner was gone after a couple of weeks. And a couple months later, kinda went to the Yeah, I kinda went to the investment people within the family offices and said, I actually do really like running this business. I think It's a lot different than what I have been doing with and A and whatnot.

I, you know, if you guys will let me, I'd like to see where we can take this thing with kind of me at the helm. So I did that, and that's kind of my intro to e-commerce and operations as opposed to like the finance side of things.

Nice, nice. So coming, I guess, like coming a bit further back, going from, you know, investment banking and PE, what, you know, what was the biggest shock or the biggest change going from maybe like larger sell-side investments to buy smaller buy-side investments in a family office? Like what was different and what did you carry over? What sort of s what sort of skills, mindset, and mental models did you carry over?

Yeah, I guess like to answer what I carried over was just like an analytical approach, right? Like investment banking, you are cutting numbers in all different ways, like using data to really understand businesses, which, you know, luckily I had that background and was able to, especially in e-commerce and in distribution, there's a lot of SKUs, there's a lot of sales data. There's like it's a very data-driven business, which was super helpful. Things that were new to me and that I was less prepared for were like dealing with employees.

Like when you're an investment banker, you're dealing with the C-suite, like the CEO, CFO, like maybe the sales manager, like you're dealing with a very small set of people that run these businesses. When you're running a business, you're dealing with everybody.

So like I just had no experience working with employees, doing, you know, having compensation discussions, having performance reviews, like setting up structures for people to do their jobs and keep them accountable. Like all of that was totally new to me. And I was very, very green with, you know, dealing with employees, dealing with all the issues that come with businesses that have people.

Yeah. Yeah. And so how did your search change from traditional business to looking for e-commerce brands? What did you yeah, what did your search look like, and how many deals did you look at andpre-do DDD on, or actually go to L O Y and do full DDD on before you got to this business?

So my search is very atypical. It's very much not normal. So taking a step back, I was working at an industrial distributor of crowd control equipment, so like stanchions and barricades, from 2021 until 2024.

And that business was bought by private equity in 2022. So I went from being COO of a family-run operation to kind of being a smaller cog in a bigger machine. And I left that business in twenty twenty four after a couple of years post acquisition. And then I was doing consulting on my own.

So I was basically reaching out to people that I had worked with in the past and offering my services as far as, you know, I've scaled businesses in the e-commerce space. I know how Shopify works. I know how Google Ads work. I know how Amazon advertising works.

Like I know all these different facets of e-commerce. So I was building a book of business with clients, and one of the clients that I reached out to, I had tried to buy their business probably eight years ago or so. It was an HVAC parts distributor. Tried to buy their business back then.

They ended up selling that business in like 2020, but started this other business, 18774 Parts. And it was owned by two guys. One guy was more of a silent partner, and then one was more of the operator running the day-to-day of the business. And the operator was somewhat burnt out, looking to exit the business, looking to retire.

And I basically came to them with the mindset of, you know, I can help you with your operations. I can help you scale this business. The business was struggling at the time that I reached out to them and kind of rekindled that relationship in early to mid 2025. So I came to them with the idea of, you know, I will be a consultant for you.

I'll help you grow this business. It's, you know, you're saying it's not doing so well. I think I can help you turn it around. And after a few discussions with kind of that as the point of meeting with them. They said, you know, we want to sell this business. We're kind of, you know, burnt out from it.

We're not looking to keep growing this business or keep holding it. Like, would you want to buy it? And I hadn't really considered it all that much. But I dug into the business and, you know, saw that, okay, this is something I've done before. I think I'm pretty well equipped to run this business. I think it would be actually a really good opportunity. So I ended up buying the business from them.

Yeah, really cool.

Did not have a ton of search for the kind of you weren't searching really, were you? I wasn't. You know, you were just it seemed like you had so much experience with your investment banking, that you'd like a lot of experience with the private equity and the family office, helped acquire business a business there, operate it and then move into operating and correct me if I'm wrong in any part here, move into like consulting and op helping other people operate to then this comes along on that journey when you're consulting that they want to sell and it makes logical sense for you to buy. Is that how it sort of worked out?

Exactly. Yeah, I had been running a couple of different e-commerce businesses in some capacity for probably eight years by the time that I bought this business. So it was d very much, you know, going from operations within the e-commerce space to consulting for business owners to actually acquiring it on my own.

Yeah.

Cool, cool. And so when this came across that they wanted to sell this and you were like, Well, maybe I could buy it, how what what did the financial conversation look like? Did you look at getting a loan? Did you have, like, what was the s acquisition structure in terms of earnout, sell a note? Did you use finance? What did that look like? And are you open to talking numbers here as well?

Yeah, I'll talk kind of general numbers. I'm totally fine with that. So it was a struggling business when I acquired it. So it was a little bit tough to value it on more of like standard metrics, right? It wasn't a business that was doing just as well as it had been doing in previous years.

So it's hard to just take a look at, okay, what's the SDE or EBITDA of this business, throw a multiple on it. It was basically when I had bought it, it was basically break-even, where it's kind of more difficult to value a business like that. Right, of course. What I did, trying to come up with a value that I thought was fair that I could present to the seller and we could discuss it was take a look at, okay, how much did this business make in previous years when everything was going well? How much do I think we can get back to that point? And then I'm gonna discount it because there's a lot of risk. And the seller was very transparent with me.

It was great. It was two gentlemen, but one was more involved in the day-to-day. He thought that the business had something more critically wrong with it.

Whether that's more competitors coming in, something going on with their SEO, or their Google ads just not firing. And so he was very skeptical of the business. And, you know, with me coming in with the mindset of I'll help you turn things around, it was even a conversation of, you know, if you guys aren't doing that well right now, you don't need to pay me cash.

Like, I'll take equity in the business to help you turn things around. And that's kind of when we got to the point where, okay, they wanted to exit the business. I'm a good buyer. So the business was doing, you know, it's a seven-figure sales business. But as I said, when I bought it, we were doing basically break-even. Okay.

And even now it's doing like low six figures of SDE or EBITDA, or however you want to look at that. So I've got it back to profitability. And looking back, the multiple that I paid on it has been exceptional. Yeah. But there was a lot of risk to it because, you know, I could have just bought the business, and things could have continued to deteriorate where that cash would have just basically evaporated.

As far as like financing, I did it all cash. I didn't do the SBA route or anything like that. Small enough acquisition where I could pull some money from savings from investments, things like that, and kind of do it on my own. I have brought on a few investors; like when we closed on the business, I brought on my brother, for instance, a guy that I was roommates with in Chicago for a couple of years.

The guy that was the CEO of the crowd control company that I worked at, like people that I've worked with cool in a professional capacity in the past that I think would be very helpful. And I more have done that to have, like, a sounding board and have a board of directors and really get, you know, a track record of buying and growing a business with investors.

So if I want to go out and buy a bigger business, I have that track record, and I have those reps with, you know, legal docs, with board meetings, with all of the things that come with having investors.

That's great.

Cool. And did you yeah, congrats on just like being in the right place at the right time and also having the right skills and the background and education to be able to execute a deal like this? It's really cool. And did you earn equity in the business as a wage or salary prior to them coming to you for acquiring it? Like, had you already owned a portion of it and then just took over the rest, or was there none of that?

Yeah. No, we started to have those discussions, and very quickly, before I could even like get my hands dirty, you know, understanding the business very quickly changed to you you know, would you want to actually buy this business? And from there it was, let me take a look, you know, what do you guys think it's worth?

Give me access; we're on BigCommerce, so give me access to the BigCommerce account, send me your tax returns, you know, if you have any financials as far as like year-to-date or anything like that.

Like just let me kind of sink my teeth into the business and see if it's something that I'm interested in. And we moved very quickly at that point. So no, I never really worked with them in a consulting capacity. Right.

And what so with this, you said you got it for a very good multiple. How did you value the business if it was at break-even, and what multiple did you pay?

Yeah, I didn't you you can't really base it on a multiple 'cause, you know, zero times anything, zero times ten is still like when you like it's pretty much break even, it's like if you look at the future trajectory of it, like how do you like know what to like how to value it or how did you value I of course I know that you can look at the the value in the assets that they're not they're underutilizing, maybe their email list and their ads or what they're not doing yet.

Like you can value it in those formats. But how did you go about the valuation? I think it's just it's it'd be good to have somebody with an investment banking career and also be in private equity and a family office here, how you went about the valuation of the business.

Yeah, so I mean most small businesses that are in the distribution space, e-commerce space, you know, sub a million of eBIT, sub five hundred K of EBITDA, they're trading anywhere from like two and a half to four times.

I mean, even four times, you'd have to have kind of a really nice business that's that small. Absolutely. So, you know, in my mind, like three X SDE is kind of a fair price for a lot of small businesses like that. I know that there's a lot of owners and sellers that don't really see it that way. But I think 3X, you know, give or take a little bit, is kind of a fair general range for a small business doing, you know, six figures of SDE.

So I basically use that as my guidepost and then gave a huge discount because the business was not doing that anymore. So it was kind of a function of, you know, some a little bit of art, a little bit of science, right?

The science piece is you take a look at what SDE was in previous years. Okay, what's the business valued if if we just look at that? Well, obviously that's not the business that I'm buying, and then I'm inheriting on day one. So I'm gonna discount that quite a bit.

But it helps set some guideposts where, you know, this business right now, if it's at break-even, you know, it's very difficult to say what that's worth. But if you know how much it could be worth, it helps you kind of decide what multiple, based on what it would be, would be fair.

I don't know if that makes sense. It's like I said, it's a little bit of an art of like what is a fair offer based on the trajectory of the business, which was down a lot. Yeah. But also, like you're not gonna pay a multiple based on last year's earnings if this year sales are down thirty, forty, fifty percent.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's just when you say it's a break-even, it's like then at that point, it's like you don't really have an SDE, but you look back at like one or two years, and you see, okay, this is where it was at. And let's just say, for example, it was two years before the acquisition; it was like five hundred SDE.

So if you did a three multiple on that, you're looking at one point five mil. And then maybe you looked at a discount of, okay, well, it's obviously not doing five hundred, and it's decreased like by forty percent.

Whatever it is. And this is a pure example. I'm just throwing numbers out there if people can grab onto something here with an explanation. Say it's decreased to, you know, forty percent of that. I'll just say fifty percent.

So it's like two fifty K SDE or something. And you look like a traditional model is like a three multiple, and then you go, Okay, well it's gonna have to be heavily discounted because the decrease is significant. Did you go down to like a one and a half-ish, or like how heavily d did you discount the multiple of that would be ballpark. So in your example, let's say five hundred SD, five hundred thousand S.D.E down to zero, split that in half. Say, you know, if this business is really pumping, really running well, it's five hundred K of SDE times three; that's a million and a half dollar business.

Exactly. If it's zero, you can't really add any multiple to zero; it's still gonna be zero. Right. But if you say two hundred and fifty, that's kind of the middle area.

And then it's gonna be the multiple is going to be heavily discounted as well because the business is not performing well. So it's kind of, you know, it hurts the seller twice because it's a business that's not making as much.

So your, you know, numerator is lower, and then it's a business that is gonna be heavily discounted because it's a turnaround or distress type of business. So in that example, like one times is very, very fair ballpark.

Yeah, absolutely. I would I would that's that's how I was thinking about it in my head when you when you get the range of the SDE to a middle-path-ish if it's break-even, and then di discount the multiples well for a traditional e-com brand.

You say it's it's heavily it's it's discounted twice for the seller, but the thing is when the seller comes to this point, they know that if they kept it for another year, they're gonna get probably nothing for it, or it's gonna cost them money.

And they probably don't have the energy to run it anymore because it's not doing as well. So it's it makes sense for them to quote unquote cut their losses and get at least some money and then reinvest that into something they're more excited about and they do have energy for, and then allow someone like yourself who's got experience to be able to change things around, which doesn't sound like you have done, you know, you've you've gotten back to profitability.

So congrats on that. That's really cool.

Thanks. Yeah. And it and the thing with SDE too, luckily, it's a very lean business that I run. There's not a ton of overhead. But you can always go to negative SDE too, right? Like you know, it got to the point where the owners were, you know, they went from okay, we're paying ourselves, our bank account is going up at the end of every year, we're paying ourselves a bonus with excess cash in the bank account to okay, our bank balance is staying the same, we're still paying ourselves too. If we keep paying ourselves, our bank balance keeps going down to, you know.

To your point, it's like you gotta cut your losses at some point or turn around the ship. And I just don't think that they had the energy or the, you know, the mentality to turn around the ship at that point where they were better suited to cut their losses, you know, move on to something else.

Sure. I think it's a great exit for them. Honestly. I think the best exit is when you know that you don't want to be in the business, and what money you can get back, depending on how the business is performing, is like a massive bonus because then you just take that money to reinvest into something you are excited about and have better energy for.

Because then you're just gonna typically do better with that new investment versus, like, having it feel a little bit like it's starting to get stagnant, and know, that wealth is starting to get stagnant in something that you don't really want to have your energy on anymore. Even if it is profitable, you know.

Well, and even shutting down a business, even if you want to shut down a business, it's not as simple as just closing the doors. Exactly. There are things that you need to do where if somebody can come in and buy a s really struggling business and close within thirty, forty-five days, like sometimes that's the best outcome for everyone.

Sure, for sure. And there are people out there that are like the turnaround people, and they're great at it. So what are some of the things that you did, Kyle? What are like the two most valuable things you did to turn this around to make it profitable?

So it's a lot of it is just simple blocking and tackling. And by that I mean, you know, we're an industrial distribution business. We sell HVAC parts and equipment filters, a lot of B2B, a lot of HVAC contractors, plumbers, like people in the trades that are buying our parts, and it's picking up the phone, it's calling people back when they're calling, it's doing a lot of like the simple things like that.

So to help me with that, I've brought on some people to help in a customer service capacity, sales capacity, people that are going to be answering the phones, calling people back at, you know, right now we're probably getting phone calls that we're gonna call back in the morning.

And the business was very, very lean, where the owner was owned by a couple of guys. One guy was a very silent partner. He had his own career. The guy running the day-to-day never really brought on a team, never hired people to assist with answering the phones, processing orders.

Like we've automated some of that, but also, you know, I'm not gonna be the one answering the phones, dealing with customers all day. I've done that, and you know, right when I bought the business I was doing a lot of that, and I'm very happy that I did that because I understand the business very well. Sure. I understand the products, the credit, right.

So train people the right way to make sure that you're not letting sales slip through the cracks because you've got the experience and know-how to handle that part, and then you can rehire again if you need to. Yeah. It's so valuable to understand every part of the every party business.

Yeah, like I see people that buy businesses and have the same employees, same processes, and don't really go in the weeds. They're not answering the phone, talking to customers. They're not, you know, if it's a services business, hopping in the truck, going on the job site.

Like you need to understand those things so you can understand the levers that you need to pull to grow the business. And that's what I've done, and like he pointed out, like I've created our customer service department and sales department somewhat from scratch. And by doing that myself, I've been able to create the SOPs, create the systems, create the processes the way that I want them to be.

And then it's helped kind of architect how I want the business to be structured and how I want it to be run, which has been great. But yeah, that's just something that the old owners didn't really do.

They more ran it as a lifestyle business, which is fine. But if you can't go on a vacation and still have people answering the phones and still have the business run, you know, in the background. It's not really that much of a lifestyle business.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just work. It's a job. And you're far more of an, I mean, there's, there's like owner-operators, but then, you know, you're far more of an operator on that side versus having a lifestyle business.

So what about sale like so it sounds like you've just helped the ordering process and retaining, you know, what you've what the business has already built. Have you looked at adding things on, like through the experience that you've had with, say, ads and whatnot?

Yeah, I mean we've grown how much we're spending on ads. We just recently hired an agency to help out with our advertising and really revamp how our campaigns are structured. We're looking at doing a lot more with email marketing, because you touched on it kind of at the beginning of the podcast, but it's something that has been very much untouched. And I think there's a lot of potential there.

So those are a couple of things that we've looked at. We're we're on big commerce right now. That's something that I want to migrate to Shopify. I've worked with Magento Big Commerce Shopify before; I think that's kind of the future with Shopify. So that's an area that we are moving to at some point in the future.

Yeah, adding SKUs to the website, adding brands, adding different vendors, manufacturers, like all of that is important to grow our catalog and grow kind of our footprint of products that people are looking at and coming across our website.

Awesome man. Congrats. It's so cool to see what you've done, really. It's and and you're just it just seems like you're just sort of getting started as well with doing this yourself. Like what where to from here for you?

As you said, you've set up a group a a board of advisors and investors, and you've got the experience from your education, college education. Are you looking at raising funds and doing this with a group, or are you looking at just doing it yourself with the same group? Like, what's next from here? Or is it just keep this one going for another one or two years and reassess?

No, it's, you know, people have asked me like, okay, you bought this business, do you have plans to sell it? And not really. I mean, honestly, like my plan is to keep growing it, keep improving our earnings, you know, cash flow of the business. If I get a great offer in a couple of years after I've taken it from, you know, one to five, you know, in just terms of like zero got it from zero, took it to one, taking it up.

You know, would I entertain an offer? For sure. But I have no plans of like growing this business, exiting it, and then finding another business. I am in the market looking at additional, you know, small industrial distribution businesses that I could, you know, either add on to this business or buy it with a separate group of people or just buy it myself if it just does not fit very well with this business. But I also don't kid myself that, like, when I bought this business, you know, people say, you're buying yourself a job.

It's like, yeah, I totally did buy myself a job, but I'm growing it to the point where it is a real company where I can do other things with my time where, you know, it's getting to that point. If I wanted to acquire a different business, even if that other business is a job, I would have the capacity to do that and the, you know, the backing, and I could do it on my own or whatever I would want to do.

So no grand goal of like exiting this business, raising a fund, and then, you know, raising money and then going out and buying a bigger business. Just kind of taking it, you know, one month, one year at a time with, you know, focusing on growing this business, but also keeping my eyes peeled for anything else that might be a little bit similar where I could inject some of my know-how and expertise and whatever you want to call it to try to grow a different business.

That's great. It sounds like lifestyle is important to you, and you don't want to jeopardize that by just raising funds and maybe always buying things too early and getting multiple jobs. I find that when you do have a business at the start, of course, it's a job; you're gonna be an operator, and there's a portion of time that it's gonna take to get it to a point where you can be a bit more hands-off, and then you can lean more into lifestyle and have more fun.

And then when you get to a point in your life where you're like, I've got some capacity to do more, you can add another one to the portfolio or sell one and then spend a bit more time and have a job for six months, which is far better than having a job for six years, because after six years it's pretty boring.

But you can have a job for six months to a year, but you're actually that job actually has no ceiling in salary because you own the asset, right? And you can build a great team that can take it and run with it and build it without you as well.

That's my favorite thing about it. And it seems like that's where you're going is you're starting to step back a little bit and let the team take it for you. Is that where you're at, sort of now?

A hundred percent. Yeah, that's that's very fair to say. Where you know my career's always been kind of ebbing and flowing and I've seen things in kind of sprints where like you talked about you you put your foot to the gas for six months and go really hard at something, and then you kinda pop up out of the clouds and and reassess what's going on where right now, you know, since acquisition I've gone really hard with the business, done a lot of things, you know, day to day management of the business where I'm starting to get a team together that can run the business in my absence.

So I can either go do something else that I want to, or the beauty is even if I'm not necessary for the day-to-day, instead of working in the business, I can work on the business. If there's any, you know, growth plans or like the migration to Shopify, for instance, and things like that, like I can spend my time growing the business as opposed to like just keeping the business running and maintaining and making sure things don't fall apart.

Which is where the best ROI is, is when you've got capacity to think about the business and stress test, okay, going to Shopify, what email software provider do we use, and building that in your head over and over multiple times to get it right. It it's it allows you a far better ROI than just running the running the wheels, you know, doing the maintenance, I guess I would call it, in the operational seat.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm coming back to like the seasons, I would say, is it's and I want to share this because a lot of people listening are like working a job and they want to get out of their job to get to a better time of life.

But where it's still a season, I still see people get to, and you might have experienced this in your life as well, Kyle, where in work you get to a point where you're sort of over the job, but you're making decent money, and you're kind of looking for like, all right, what's next?

That's a season where you get your head. I still feel that's a season where you get your head above the clouds because you have capacity to think, all right, what's next? And this is where most people listening are thinking, All right, well, I'm at that phase now. What's next is the acquisition.

And you put a bit more capacity into doing a sprint as an operator whilst having a job to then eventually get that business stable after six months of owning it to then dropping the job off. And then you can lean into having your head above the clouds again.

And then seeing, all right, what's next now again? And it's like these multiple steps on a staircase without having to try and jump like five steps up and not having, you know, like people that raise way too much finance, like or build a big board and like, you know, for yourself, it doesn't seem like you want to go buy a ten million dollar, twenty million dollar acquisition, which you could with your college experience and your experience as an operator and the board that you've you know, you know how to build. But what's the point, right? Just like one step at a time and enjoy the journey.

At some point you need to kind of take a step back, you know, you said pop above the clouds, but like take a step back and assess what you want. Like if you go out and build this big business, like there's a risk that it fails.

There's also the risk that it does great, but there's a risk that it deteriorates your lifestyle and, you know, is not actually beneficial to your life and what you want in your life. So I think that's a big part of it. Like understanding, okay, what do I want my day-to-day to look like is important.

And I feel like I'm kind of at a point where I have a better idea of like what I want my lifestyle to look like than I did when I was, you know, in my late teens or early thirties, where you kind of just understand like what kind of lifestyle you're looking for.

Yeah.

Absolutely. With the work thing and the lifestyle thing, they've done studies on people that are in palliative care, you know, close to close to the end of their life. And most people say, a big portion of people say that they wish they had worked less. And you can do work less in short sprints and then have a have a period where you're just you're just reassessing and enjoying the view, I guess.

And Kyle, congrats to you where you're at now with this biz and what you're gonna do one step at a time in the future, and thanks for coming on the pod. I'm really, really grateful you came on and shared your experience and your story.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me on. It's been fun.

Absolutely. Everybody who's listening, thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next one. Awesome.

Thanks again, Carl. I'll speak to all you guys again soon.

Bye. Thanks.