So if you have to have a service guy come in, and, you know, work on tuning up all your machines. It's going to be different. The same goes for embroidery. If you've got Tajima, or Barudan, or another brand, and the company that you're buying has all different ones. Maybe they take different file types as a DST file, you know, what is the file type? So that is a huge one. You want to make sure everything aligns with your business equipment, being a big one. The other things that you want to make sure aligning from the start are, you know, your core values and some things like that, just to make sure that the customer base usually is following. And, along with the former owner, it's going to be attracting the same type of people. So, you want that customer base to be able to get to know, and like, and trust you. The same as they did with the previous owner. There are a few other things along the way that you'd want to check, make sure that they have a good customer list with all the information. So are their customer lists in some sort of database? Do they have contact information? Mailing addresses? Email addresses? Phone numbers? What is missing? It's just one big mess. The same goes for art files. So there's a huge value in all the art files. You think how much time their graphic designers put into building these art files and everything else, especially when it comes to embroidery for digitizing. Do they have 500 digitized files or do they have 5,000 digitized files? That can be pretty expensive if you have to re-digitize it... and how are they saved? The one we acquired, after the fact, was an absolute mess with reorders because a logo was saved as “Logo 1”, “Logo 2”, “Final Logo 3”, “Revision 2, 3, 4 or 5” And there was no sort of way to look those up. So it was a complete mess. So you want to make sure that you see what kind of systems or processes they have in place, what kind of organization they have in place with their files, whether it's your customer database or their art files, and things like that. Cause that makes a huge difference post-acquisition. Marshall Atkinson Okay. And so when you buy these businesses, how do you do the valuation? Do you bring in an independent person? Do you just wing it and throw a number? I mean, is there a formula that you're using? What do you do? Tom Rauen So we've got kind of our little formula put together for that, and it depends on the size. Any business below, I would say below $500,000 in revenue is the single, one, two, three employee business. And there's not a whole lot of value there because you're not buying the systems and processes and everything else involved.
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