And you know, every six months we'd stayed in touch, I flew out there and met him and a lot of their values aligned with ours. The other nice thing about this business is they had no equipment, so they're contracting everything out. So we're able to bring all those orders back in-house, fill some capacity here in our production facility, and continue to work with those counts. They also have a nice customer base of some national accounts. Their average order size was very nice and, you know, a nice long-term stable business that's been around for 40 plus years. So we're super excited about that. And, over the last five years, that just continued nurturing, you know, making it happen. And in this year, of course, 2020 -- with everything that's going on with the pandemic, it was... “is this the right time or is this the wrong time?” And, you know, I said, this was the time from the get-go in 2015. So no matter what's happening in the economy right now, we're pushing forward and we're going to make this happen and we're going to make it work. It's been amazing so far. Marshall Atkinson
Well, this is why you're putting the pedal on the gas, right? “The pandemic's going to end. I'm deciding the future, let's go.” Tom Rauen
Yes. And we made this decision in 2015. So even though the circumstances have changed right now, what's going on right now, this decision today is going to impact us on what the business is going to look like in 2025 and beyond that. <<COMMERCIAL>> Marshall Atkinson So, when you're talking with another business owner about buying their business, what's the downside of that? I mean, do people kind of overinflate it because they're so personally attached? What do you do with their employees? Like there's gotta be some things attached to that where it's just super difficult and rocky to navigate? Tom Rauen Yeah. So the first part is the smaller the business, more personal attachment that they have, you know, it's their baby that we've all, you know, birth and grew from the ground up. So there's a lot more, you know, "I've got sweat equity in this and I built this. I put all this time at work all these nights and weekends and everything. It's worth X amount". Cause they've got all this personal attachment to it, but as the business gets larger, they realize that it's not so much them or their personal attachment to the business. It's concrete the actual numbers are what it's worth. It's you know, what is the customer list? What is the annual revenue? What is the profit? That's really, you know what it's based on. Then you had in some equipment inventory, you can factor that in, but you know, the true valuations, you know, after business gets to a certain size. And I think then the owners are able to separate their emotions from it a little bit more. And realize that all dollars and cents and the numbers tell the story. Marshall Atkinson Yeah. So are you buying the real estate as well?
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