oday's guest is a search investor, a thoughtful observer of ETA and SMB acquisitions, and himself a successful, exited self-funded searcher.

Andy Rougeot bought a blue collar business, gate service and maintenance for self storage facilities.

Andy's initial plan was to grow his business horizontally by offering similar services in adjacent markets.

When he saw that wouldn't work, he looked to geographic expansion as the answer, and he figured out a way to stand up remote territories of his business across 4 other states.

His formula for doing so is one of the key takeaways of this interview.

And Andy believes it's applicable to other blue collar businesses.

It's a playbook that enabled him to grow from $2.5 million in revenue to $9 million in revenue, at which point he exited to a private equity backed strategic so that he could run for mayor of Denver. (He came in fourth of 17.)

I mentioned that Andy's an investor, and he also generously brought data from his 26 primarily self-funded search investments, and he shares his takeaways from that portfolio.

It's a fascinating cross section of search investing.

We actually review his spreadsheet live. So if you're listening to this, consider watching the interview on YouTube, where you'll be able to see the spreadsheet as we talk about it.

It's a clean 26 rows, showing performance of each individual company in the portfolio.

We appreciate the transparency Andy brought to his story of buying, growing, and exiting a blue collar business, and to his track record as an investor.

For more Andy, watch his webinar from September entitled Liquidity Options for Search Investors.

Here he is, Andy Rougeot, former owner of RG Maintenance and current GP at Search Fund Secondaries Group.