[00:00:00 - 00:04:51]

Will Smith: The success of today's guest is not measured in revenue, not in ebitda, nor growth. The success is having emerged from a very difficult transition to a place where finally, Jeremy Hunka can own the business he bought on his terms. For many months that was not the case, and Jeremy's life was bleak, his doubts crippling. But today he has a CEO, he has boundaries, and he's once again optimistic about the future. There's a long way to go financially for Jeremy and his business, but he and I agreed that achieving this stabilization is a key milestone in his ownership journey and that the story to this point deserved telling.

You will hear about Jeremy's growth as a leader, which resonated deeply with me. It's curious that we don't talk more about leadership on Acquiring Minds. We know that the classic challenge of running and owning a business you bought is people problems. Well, another way of saying people problems is being a leader. Today you will feel how those two things are really one in the same.

Here is Jeremy Hunka, owner of Summit Cabinet Coatings. It is competitive out there and many business buyers can't get traction with brokers or owners because they don't stand out in any way. Brokers dismiss them as just another inexperienced searcher, sellers don't feel a connection to them and lenders hesitate to back them. Well, this Thursday, Athena Simpson, founder of AquaMatch, is returning to host a webinar on how to build a personal buyer brand that makes you memorable, credible, compelling on behalf of their buyer clients. The team at AquaMatch is in Daily conversations with brokers and owners and lenders so they see up close why certain buyers get traction while many others go ignored.

So come learn from Athena how to get noticed, get backed, and ultimately get chosen as the buyer of your target business. That webinar is this Thursday, September 11th noon Eastern. Register at the link in today's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage. Acquiringminds co welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith.

Acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs, and on this podcast I talk to the people who do it. The team at Aspen HR recently published a short white paper targeted at searchers Entitled A New CEO's Guide to Human Resources. It lays out the key items you should be thinking about as you transition into CEO and owner of the business you bought. The link to download it is in the show notes. Aspen is a professional employer organization, or peo, run by a searcher for searchers.

Search fund veteran Mark Sinatra runs The company which provides HR compliance, flawless payroll, Fortune 500 caliber benefits and HR due diligence support for your acquisition, all for a fraction of the cost. Go to aspenhr.com or contact Mark directly@markspenhr.com Jeremy Hunka welcome to Acquiring Minds. Thank you Will. Jeremy, I was struck by our pre call. There were a lot of themes that will be familiar to regular Acquiring Minds listeners, but you talked about your growth as a leader more directly in more detail than we typically do here.

Which I now realize is kind of strange because I suspect that leading effectively, learning how to lead effectively is actually what is so hard often about this journey of buying an existing business and stepping into it. So Jeremy, I'm eager to share your experience with the audience. Let's begin with some background. How was it that you decided to buy a business and go down this journey? Thank you Will.

[00:04:51 - 00:07:20]

Jeremy Hunka: And I should have said this earlier but I told you this in the pre call but you are a probably the main source of content and learning in my business buying journey and truly thank you. And thank you to all of the previous guests who helped on that. The question was how did I get to buying the business? Yeah, yeah. Give us a little bit of background and how and how things started pointing you in this direction.

Yeah, I always say I was never the lemonade stand kind of kid. I was never an entrepreneur from a young age. I didn't start a lawn mowing company college. I was a chemistry major that I thought would either go into research or teaching or ministry of some sort and never thought I'd even be in business of any kind. And soon after college I ended up getting a job at a property management group.

We did commercial real estate and started to see where business and the people on the receiving end of business can be aligned. I got to see as we were managing and leasing medical office buildings, I got to see our local owners dairy from Glen Ellen, Illinois and our tenants and see how when we lease well, we manage well. Gary wins, the tenants win, the people going to the doctor's appointments all win. And I think that entirely changed my mind on business. And Jeremy, what had your your notion been before that?

Yeah, I think I just, I often use the word slimy. I think I was just a little wary that it was hard to do business successfully without it being sort of a not win win scenario, some sort of win lose where either someone's making a bunch of money and someone is on the unfortunate receiving end of that or it's not working out. So I think seeing a scenario in which a real local person had an investment, we managed it well and people got to receive benefit from that investment. Was it sort of sounds silly but eye opening to me of okay. The business world can.

Can be win win. Commercial real estate specifically can get hard when you get into less elastic worlds. Low income housing can be really tricky to manage well to in a way that sort of benefits both parties. It's a great problem to be solved. But when these were sort of nicer suburban medical office buildings it was great.

It was. It was. People don't need to be here. Tenants don't need to pay a bunch of money to be here. So we need to do it well in order for them to want to be here.

[00:07:20 - 00:07:26]

Will Smith: Okay. So you soften with respect to the. To. To business general in general. My eyes.

[00:07:26 - 00:07:35]

Jeremy Hunka: TO yeah. It being a potential career path for me. And prior to that it was never sort of really an option again. It was chemistry ministry or teaching. And those were sort of the three options.

[00:07:36 - 00:07:53]

Will Smith: And so connect the dots from commercial real estate to buying a business. Yeah. I then ended up moving up to Colorado. I was from Chicagoland originally and did two other jobs in the commercial real estate space. One was a little bit more on the debt side of things and then one was more I wanted to.

[00:07:53 - 00:13:57]

Jeremy Hunka: I still liked the tangible nature which sort of everyone says in the real estate and the small business space. But I did really like the tangible nature of a real estate asset and wanted to be with a group that was a little bit more hands on there and spent my last few years prior to buying the business at a Denver based commercial real estate group. And they were a wonderful place to work. They gave me way too much responsibility and I got to oversee our operating portfolio which sort of ultimately did end up leading me to the business. I loved a few things about that.

Once again, I love seeing we had high end class A apartments throughout Colorado that did not need to be occupied. No one needed to rent them. They weren't a place. People had to live at three to four to five grand a month. And it was a really cool process to see how do we build these well how do we buy these?

Well how do we manage these? Well in a way that people want to be here and our investors can make money and sort of everybody can win. People will renew and stay and have to move every few years because no one loves that. So I love that role and I probably could have been there for a while. But two things.

One, we were a small entrepreneurial company started by two serial entrepreneurs and I Think seeing them and their journey was maybe to their dismay, a little bit desirable for me to get to see what they've done, the excitement of the businesses they've built, the lifestyles they built from there. And I just had developed at this point a lot more skills of really a lot more on the deal, spreadsheet underwriting side of things was where my skill set was starting to grow out to the few different commercial real estate experiences. So somewhere along the way decided I was young at this point. I think I was 26, was married, we had a mortgage, but otherwise didn't have too much else riding on it and really wanted to find something. We were hoping to have kids someday.

That would allow me to be the phrase I use, above average on the present scale. So. So again, I've never been above average. On the present scale. Meaning to your family.

Present to your family, yes. And again, it was never a deep desire to be my own boss. Some days I actually still wish I had a boss that could tell me what to do because I miss that at times. But they might be two sides of the same coin. Being able to control my time and being my own boss.

But I was much more concerned about that. I wanted to be able to still work full 40 plus hour weeks, but be able to do it on a schedule that could be dropping, I don't know, picking the kids up for lunch at 11:30 someday and working at 10pm that night and being able to control that time. And that was really sort of what led me to begin looking for an entrepreneurial endeavor. Real estate would have been the logical option. It was sort of what I do best.

I loved it. I do still love it. I still wonder if I'll go back to it someday. There are a lot of things I miss about it, such as having some tangible land value and improvement value that's not solely based on cash flow. But it was 2020, summer of 22 at time.

Interest rates were going up. We didn't have the cash to take down some commercial deal on our own. And it just didn't seem like the time to raise money to try to find a deal. I feel like at that point everyone was getting into multifamily and rates were just making that all the harder. So somewhere along the way I discovered Cody Sanchez.

Um, and I think it had like a lot of guests. Never occurred to me that these small businesses buy and sell and transact and it. I remember my first time scrolling through biz by sell and it blew my mind. And I remember seeing businesses some of them which had names like I know that literal business or just that starting to drive down the street and thinking of oh, this business has a business model that may or may not be working, but has a business model that I had never thought about before. And that process became very fun to me.

Actually, as I've been preparing for this, I've been reflecting on how much I'd sort of loved that what became a year ish of diving into these small businesses and how they work and business models I had never heard of or imagined. Just getting to see how they work, why they work, why they don't work. Now Jeremy, is that to say that you liked the process of searching or was it more like the process of cruising biz by sell and being curious about them? Because searching lightly is fun. Searching seriously is maybe less a good question.

I don't want to have rose colored glasses with that either. I think I did and maybe we'll get here. I think part of my journey has been realizing that when I was operating a real estate portfolio at the spreadsheet level, I was not necessarily operating the businesses in a way that maybe I thought I was. You thought you were an operator? I thought I was an operator.

So I actually, I think some of the search phrase actually aligned with a lot of that. I did like scrolling by sell before bed at night, but I also did love building out little models and talking to the brokers, talking to the sellers and really sort of, I mean it was at the most sort of non numbers level talking to a seller who had built a business up over 30 years and it supported their family and employees over decades and their community. I think that part was really cool and exciting beyond just the scrolling and. And I really did. The numbers were super interesting and super fun to build on a model that in some ways was the same every time and in some ways different than real estate was entirely different.

Like the expenses just might be super different from one to another. So I did like the searching phase. I do vividly remember getting to a point in the searching phase where I was like, okay, if I get to a year, which I know is a very normal timeline and I was part time doing evenings and weekends. If I get to a year, I might take a pause on this because it's getting tiring. I'm working a full time job and then I call your other guests.

I'm also working in the evenings and the weekends and the lunch breaks and all of those things. So I did like it. And it is also tiring and often feels Fruitless for a while, yeah. And Jeremy, did you consider quitting and doing a full time search or was it. Was that never really something you.

[00:13:57 - 00:14:16]

Will Smith: You were going to do? I honestly never really considered it at the time. My wife's a therapist, a counselor, and at the time she was still in grad school, so I was our only source of income. We had fine savings, but I don't think we were eager to live on our savings for any longer than we needed to at that point in time. So I honestly never really even considered it too much.

[00:14:16 - 00:16:15]

Jeremy Hunka: I do think if I got to the year and put it on pause, it might have been a whole, okay, do I do this full time? Do I do the search fund route? I. I don't know if I had that much strategy when I first went into it. It was, I've got evenings, I got weekends, she's in grad school, I got time, let's just start looking and see what we can do. And I never had to get to the point where I had to consider, this is full time.

Is this quitting my job? What is this? Okay, Jeremy, tell us about anything more to say about the search or your criteria or how you found the business that you did? Yeah, I mean, I, I think similar to a lot of your guests, it was pretty open. Um, I mean, some guests have, obviously have very specific targets, but it was ideally 300 rand and SD minimum.

I knew I could, I knew my wife and I could probably take down something that maxed around 5 to 700 with our own money before we would need investors. But I was looking somewhere between 300 and a million, avoiding all the basics, retail, restaurants, et cetera, um, wanting recurring revenue that I never found. And it really was just a brokerage search. I mean, I talked to bankers, lawyers, accountants, et cetera. But I really was on biz by sell most of the time and ended up getting this deal sent to me by a broker, which was fun, but he had just seen it come up online and knew it was something that I wanted.

But it felt like I had like a secret proprietary search flow there. But yeah, it was biz by sell and, and it, it felt similar to the real estate world of again, the group I was with had done a great job over the years, and almost all of our best deals were deals that were listed by broker somewhere. Obviously you can get the home run deals off market and I'm so impressed by people that do. But I think it was just, yeah, I could get a double or triple on market and probably save a lot of time and that was sort of my thought there. I did a very minimal like a few dozen proprietary emails early on and quickly realized it wasn't rewarding any efforts.

[00:16:16 - 00:18:03]

Will Smith: Yeah, well proprietary is indeed very difficult and I think there's a strong argument to make that it's not worth the time. Now we could have a argument about that all day, I'm sure, and building. A team on the full time search would be a very different scenario. But for my scenario, doing a part time being our sole source of income, the sooner we got it done via brokerage search probably the better. Running payroll, paying your bills, closing your books and producing financials.

These are critical tasks every business owner must do or oversee. But spending time on them distracts you from the leadership in growth work you want to do. So let system 6 do it for you. Owned and led by a former Searcher, Chris Williams, System 6 is a leading outsourced finance team for hundreds of SMBs, including over 50 searcher acquired businesses. Chris, Tim and the System 6 team understand firsthand the challenges, the opportunities of jumping into a business as its new owner.

So whether you own your business already or have one under LOI, talk to System 6 about how they can give you time back and improve your financial operations. Mention acquiring minds and they'll provide a free review of your books and financial ops, a $500 value. Check out system6.com link in the show notes or email helloystem6.com and so what did you find? What was this business? We are I own Summit Cabinet Coatings and we are a cabinet refinishing company.

[00:18:06 - 00:20:58]

Jeremy Hunka: My team will be mad at me if I said this. We're effectively fancy painters but in that we are really refinishing the wood. So we repair we kitchen cabinets are mainly so B2C. We go into people's homes, we take their doors to our shop and in our shop we repair the dents and dings from years of wear and tear and pots and pans and kids and pets and all of those things. So that when we put on this final coat of basically a very fancy catalyzed paint, our goal is to make it look like new again as opposed to I think we've all been go to your friend's house, they DIY their cabinets and they look great.

They look like they should look as painted cabinets, but they don't look like factory finished cabinets. So that's where we come in. Refacing is a little bit more of a common term. That means putting on brand new doors. That's about a quarter of what we do.

So we do that as well. And on that side of things, we're actually a relatively affordable option compared to the refacing options you'll find at Home Depot or Costco. On the painting side, resurfacing we call it, we're typically about 20 to 30% more than a painter with a truck. And we're usually about a quarter to a third of the price of new cabinets. So it really is a sweet spot where you can get things that look like brand new for a quarter of the price.

But that's what we're all. And it's just the face of the cabinets. It's not. Sorry, I skipped that part. Half of our work is taking the doors to our shop.

The other half, we hang up a curtain in the house. We do that exact same process of repairing the wood with the frames in the home. We're very thorough. All of our guys, W2, we have air scrubbers and ventilation where we'd really try to be the best contractor you'll ever work with. We're in and out of someone's house in a week.

We clean up our dust, we ventilate it out. It really is an impressive process the guys have going there. And Jeremy, is this a home service that is common? I mean, do these businesses exist in every market? Because this was the first time I'd heard of such a service.

It's not super common. Again, refacing is something you can find at Costco or Home Depot and that's a little bit bigger. And then a ton of painters who will paint your cabinets. We're a weird in between where we are effectively providing the same service as those painters, but with an entirely different product. So groups like us at the labor quality level we do with W2 employees are a lot less common.

The market in which I actually live, which we can get to talking, is not the market where I buy the business. I'm really familiar with one group that does similar work here in Denver and they have, I think two employees. So being in Fort Collins, we've got I think 13 full time guys doing this is a relatively unique concept. Yeah, yeah. And do you know anything about the origin story, the.

[00:20:58 - 00:21:17]

Will Smith: The founder sellers and how they got into this? Actually, I'm glad you asked that because we had not talked about that before that. I bought it from the sellers who were husband and wife couple. And the wife's background was in the service industry. She was a manager at Starbucks, which is where a lot of our like trying to actually be a good contractor to work with.

[00:21:17 - 00:22:11]

Jeremy Hunka: Comes from. The husband was like a mad scientist for sort of refinishing like what we do. There's a beautiful old hotel down in Colorado Springs called the Broadmoor. It's very famous. And he was one of their go to guys for touching up any random thing in this beautiful hotel that might need to be touched up from baseboards at beautiful bathtubs, whatever it might be.

So he was sort of a mad scientist for making old things beautiful again. And somewhere along the way they actually connected. They wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I think he was semi self employed but they wanted to do something together and they connected with a guy who trained them up in this. I think they made the process their own over the years.

That was about 15 years ago now. But they had sort of someone take them under their wings down in Colorado Springs and send them off to go to Fort Collins and serve a new market with effectively his process.

[00:22:13 - 00:22:21]

Will Smith: Great. And what can you say about the size of the business? Give us the bullet points. Yeah, we were about. We were right in the sweet spot of what I was looking for between three and seven.

[00:22:21 - 00:25:18]

Jeremy Hunka: I think we were just under 500 SD at the time I took over. Very asset light. Just some spray guns in some paint and price was I think 1.68. So just a little bit above three times in revenue. Revenue was just about 2 million.

I think we ended out the trailing twelve a little bit higher 2.1 ish. But somewhere right around two when I was really underwriting it. And then one interesting note on that that I was hearing and I think a recent podcast but I was not the highest offer. I it was an interesting scenario. I think this is common.

But they talked to a few of their best offers and I actually I gave them a two prong offer which somewhere along the way I thought would be helpful. I said here's sort of near what you're asking, exactly what you want and here's a slightly higher offer and you give me some seller carry on standby to help me put less money in. Yeah. And I don't remember exactly how I structured. I wish I knew this but there was something where I had made the other one a little bit too complicated.

I think spreadsheetme wanted to make something fancy and they were like how about we make it less complicated and give you the seller carry? And I was like it's great. But I talked to them. They talked to a few of their best offers and they just. We really hit it off.

They I'm a Christian, they're Christians. I think it became very clear that they had cared deeply about their employees and their customers over the years and they really wanted to find someone that they felt would do the same thing. And I hope I have. And I think that was important to them. I was also, I think, young and eager and I think that caught their eye.

I think their other main offer was from a sort of mid career exec type and something in that process made them choose me, which I'm very thankful for. And by the way, even though you were down in Denver and they're up in Fort Collins, that distance is how long? It's about 70 miles. I'm south Denver. So depends on the time of day.

It could be, I typically assume somewhere around three hours round trip. They knew I was far, they knew I wasn't necessarily planning on moving there and that was okay with them. They were, by the time I had bought it, it had been around for 13 years. And the husband was sort of loosely involved as again still the mad scientist that knew the things and he could come in and help if someone had a technical issue. But it was not his full time thing.

And the wife, it was her full time job, but she was probably in the office less than 20 hours a week. She had young kids so she was running around taking calls from who knows where. So I think they saw their lives and thought, you can probably figure this out from afar. Yeah, easier said than done. But I think that, yeah, it wasn't a hold up for them.

Right. Well, so Jeremy, just to go back to the numbers, so about $2 million of revenue. So $2 million of revenue for this. Very niche service in a relatively small market, just northern Colorado. It's really so interesting.

[00:25:18 - 00:25:37]

Will Smith: It's just one of those where if somebody pitched you on this business idea, Shark tank this, like we're going to grow this business and there's millions of dollars in, in this, in this service. Yeah. You would just raise your eyebrow. But yeah, here you are. $2 million of revenue in Fort Collins, Colorado for people refinishing their cabinets.

[00:25:37 - 00:27:57]

Jeremy Hunka: Yeah. Great. And say more about what, what you liked about the business. Why did, why was this the one? Yeah, it's, it was one of those.

And I imagine you've scrolled biz by sell at some point over your time. Well, but it was one of those where as soon as you hit it. You could say that. Yeah. As soon as you see it hit the market, it just, it had enough boxes checked that you could tell it was going to be interesting to multiple people.

So the big thing, it didn't have going is obvious. They were not a necessity of any sort. Yeah. And we're not recurring revenue of any sort. We have repeat customers, but rarely less than three to five years apart.

But it was sort of right in this sweet spot of 500 SD. It wasn't too tiny. It was big enough my wife and I could take it down without needing to get more investors. Something like that. It had been around for 13 years at this point which I really liked.

It had also 13 employees, which I also really liked. I got really close on closing out a much smaller business. I was under loi. All of these things that I ended up bailing on mainly for financial reasons. It kept new monthly financials, kept getting a little bit smaller than it should have been.

But it only had a team of three. And that was something that was really making me nervous of. Yeah, transitions people, you never know what'll Happen. And losing one person, there could be three a third of the company. So it had 13 plus people.

It had been around for a while and the last two, maybe more intangible things were well, one more before then was again, we're not necessity of any sort, but we are a lot cheaper than new cabinets. And we have a weird moat. That is when the economy is going well historically more people start spending with us. Discretionary spending's up. It's great.

And assuming there's some fine line between the economy slowing down a little bit without hitting full on recession, we also become an interesting option for people at that point in time who could rip out their cabinets for 30 grand or could come to us for 8 grand and get the same thing. So there's a nice economic moat there. Despite not being a necessity and not having recurring revenue. I've heard a similar dynamic in other businesses. I can't remember which, but there should be a name for such a business where it surges alongside everybody else when times are good.

[00:27:58 - 00:28:06]

Will Smith: But it also has this weird, this weird dynamic when times are bad. It also becomes a good solution. I've seen this pattern before. It's. It's an interesting one.

[00:28:06 - 00:29:27]

Jeremy Hunka: It would be nice about a name because I always try to explain it and I fumble over my words as I do it. But similarly, when rates are high, people stay in place and update their own home. When rates are low, they move. They might buy a house that needs more updating. So again, it would be nice if we were a necessity.

But we had all these unique, unique dynamics working in our favor that were really attractive for it being effectively a contractor. And then finally the sellers were good people. Again, they treated employees well. We had shockingly high tenure. Again, Our guys are W2.

They get insurance, they get retirement. And I think I just liked the idea that they had that was treating our people and our customers well will also be good for our business and I wanted to continue that. And then lastly, they just had a surprising amount of. My team might laugh at me for this, but like systems and SOPs in place that I didn't often see at businesses this size. And it was nice to at least be coming into something even if it was just a Google Doc or a bunch of Google Docs.

It was nice to have some of that in place knowing that I was a complete outsider. Well. And when you saw how the husband and wife were kind of running it. Husband, wife, less involved. Wife involved, but kind of in between.

Yeah. Taking care of her kids. Good. Good indication that the business isn't running itself. I wouldn't go that far.

[00:29:27 - 00:29:38]

Will Smith: But you know, that was the infrastructure in place. Totally. They had built out a great team underneath them. I mean, yeah. As you know, again, looking at a ton of businesses where the owner is just deeply entrenched in it.

[00:29:38 - 00:29:51]

Jeremy Hunka: And again, it was still harder to get myself out as we can talk about. But that was a huge plus. Knowing that this is far away but the owners are not the ones doing the cabinet work day in, day out, that kind of thing. Yep. Yep.

[00:29:52 - 00:30:12]

Will Smith: The call it half a million ish. Mid six figures of SDE on about 2 million in revenue. Seems like better margins than I would expect from a contracting business. Should I read into that? And is the reason because it's this kind of specialized work that is not so common to find.

[00:30:12 - 00:30:55]

Jeremy Hunka: Yeah, I. I think that's probably fair. That's actually funny. I should probably do better research on other contractors because we are unique, that I've sort of just stayed in our lane, which is. I've always felt our margins are a little low partially because we're again, full W2, insurance, retirement, that kind of thing. But yes, I think our price is a little higher and that's sort of where we stand is this in between of a premium product that's still cheaper than full replacement.

So yeah, 20 to 25% margins is historically where we've been. Great. Jeremy, you said you presented two options to the sellers and that they basically took the best elements of both. Best elements for you of both, which is great. Yep.

[00:30:55 - 00:31:14]

Will Smith: So where did you land? Can you give us the deal terms? Yeah, and I wish I remember what the actual other option was. But we ended at again one point on about 500 in SDE, about 2 million in revenue. And I just confirmed on the settlement statement I put in about 90 grand of that.

[00:31:14 - 00:33:17]

Jeremy Hunka: So Will, we were talking about this before, but that is just about 5% there that came and I'm always half embarrassed to say this and half almost proud of my 0% down. That came almost entirely from home equity. We just, we had a HELOC open for years and use that there, which I think meant the lender didn't even take out an additional lien against the house because the equity and it was so limited at that point. And then the remaining 150 was from the seller note on two year standby. So you bought this at a time when the SBA still allowed that for the, for the, for the seller standby could be counted as part of your equity injection, at least for the purposes of what the SBA, the lender would require.

So they did 150, I did 90 and the SBA did the other 1.54. Yeah. And. And so your, your contribution with theirs is about 10%. Yeah, I'm not doing the math.

I think actually a little above they were more than 5% which the SBA liked. Okay. And the say more about the heloc. So you just had that open anyway. It was, it wasn't something that you scrambled to do because of the acquisition?

No, we had already had it open and just sort of unused when rates on it were super low. I thought it couldn't hurt to have and had done the whole. I think it had to be drawn a few months ahead of time to be seasoned in the account kind of thing. But as far as the bank knew, it was like, I think my banker knew it was from our house, but they saw it seasoned in an account and at the time I think we had a HELOC that allowed us to borrow on nearly 100% of value. Thankfully we didn't actually have to do that to get the 90 grand, which was great.

But we basically tapped in as much as we possibly could in case we needed it and used all of that for our down payment. The thought being we had some cash we could have used, but it's nice to keep some cash on hand. So there's additional interest on it obviously, but I think it's 7% interest only. That didn't feel too, it wasn't going to sink the ship. Yeah.

[00:33:17 - 00:33:29]

Will Smith: And that 7% you said did, did I hear you say that's when you took out the heloc. Because the interest rates were low and. You were going to be able to lock that in. I think originally it was like a 2% intro rate or something. I wish I had had it at that point.

[00:33:29 - 00:33:39]

Jeremy Hunka: But it's basically stabilized at 7ish percent right now. Maybe 7.9. Maybe it's 8. Great. And anything to say about the.

[00:33:41 - 00:34:18]

Will Smith: Anything to say about the vulnerability of your house to the personal guarantee and to the lean. Anything more to say about that given that you now you kind of brought your equity in your home down to a lower level? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think part of the entire process and when I talk to many a would be business buyer these days, I think part of what made the decision really easy for us was what I alluded to earlier was you're young, we had a mortgage, but we didn't have much else riding on us yet. And honestly our balance sheet wasn't crazy yet.

[00:34:18 - 00:34:48]

Jeremy Hunka: I think we were already taking a personal guarantee for much more than we were worth anyway that the additional leverage of the house didn't seem to move the needle too much in my mind. I think Colorado has some homestead exemptions that help on house stuff. I should probably know that more confidently. But again, the personal guarantee was basically already getting everything we had that the additional 90 grand of line of credit was somewhat meaningless there. Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:48 - 00:35:42]

Will Smith: And to underline what you just said about your age, much less risky to be subject to a personal guarantee when you're young and don't have a family to support. Even if it clears and you have the time, if it worse came to worse and it cleared you out, you have many more years to rebuild versus somebody halfway through their career. The effect of age on personal guarantee or the weight of age is one that everyone should consider. It's. It really matters.

And personal guarantee is a personal guarantee is a personal guarantee, but it lands on people very differently depending on age. Exactly. Yeah. We had saved well, we had invested well. But it was still just a very different math than someone that might be mid-40s, mid career and their balance sheet might be different.

Okay. Anything else to say about the, the discovery and then negotiation and acquisition of the business? I don't think so, honestly. We closed in nearly 45 days. It was a quick process.

[00:35:44 - 00:37:19]

Jeremy Hunka: Sellers, part of their thing was they, they actually weren't that old, which was always a big well, why aren't they retiring? But they were moving out of state legit, just needed better weather, seasonal depression, all those things. And their kids were going to be starting school soon and they really wanted to get it done before the summer ended and it allowed for a quick process, which was great. And at what point did you. How did you time leaving your W2?

That part was hard. Um, I effectively just gave them a normal two weeks notice right before we got a little bit closer to closing. I think I closed nearly a week before I actually started in the business. So it gave me sort of a three week Runway there. I think I told the business when I was becoming very clear that closing was actually going to happen.

I told my bosses and they were very kind and encouraging and honestly gave me advice. Some of them come from this world in the past and then had a few weeks of notice and then quickly transitioned. I think I continued actually working for them for a little while longer as a contractor to help ease the transition as well because we weren't a big group. But that part was nerve wracking. It was how I want to give these people as much notice as I can.

And I also don't want to do a weird tell them three months in advance and the deal falls through and now they're wondering if I still want to work here or any of that kind of thing. So it felt weird and fragile. It went totally fine, but it felt weird for a while. Yeah. Well, of course you can't be absolutely sure you're going to take ownership of it until you literally go to closing and then if you give your notice, they'll feel blindsided that you didn't tell them earlier.

[00:37:19 - 00:37:30]

Will Smith: So I'm not sure there's a right way to thread that needle. Yeah. So I wanted to do it well, but it felt difficult to do it as well as I would have liked. Yeah, yeah. I stay in touch with them, so I think that's good.

[00:37:31 - 00:37:42]

Jeremy Hunka: They don't seem to dislike me. Well, you seem like an honest guy, Jeremy, and we're probably going to hear a little bit more of that. So they probably gave you the benefit of the doubt. Transition. What.

[00:37:42 - 00:37:45]

Will Smith: What can you say about that? Transition was a challenge.

[00:37:48 - 00:40:32]

Jeremy Hunka: I. Throughout due diligence. Well, there was two big things during due diligence. We have one salesperson who had done an amazing job growing alongside the owners the last few years. And during due diligence, entirely unrelated to the sale, he announced he was getting married and moving out of state.

So we. He left during due diligence. And I probably looking back, should have killed the deal at that point, but it was so close to the finish line. The sellers, we renegotiated some things. They were going to hire someone pre close.

We weren't going to close until they hired someone. They were going to stay on for a year and help train and they actually upheld all of those promises, but it was just still unnecessary transitional risk. But the bigger thing was they knew I lived out of state or out of town and also new to the business and was going to be relying on a lot of people. And I think the seller's dream herself was always to sort of get a general manager in place. So she wasn't foreign to the idea that that was sort of a dream of mine as well.

And they had a woman on the team that had been amazing employee over the years. She had been in corporate America for a while, all these amazingly impressive roles, stayed at home for a while with the kids and then got back to work effectively as an office manager and had continued to grow her role with the company and she had been telling them she wanted to do more. They had told me she'd be a great gm, but as in many of these businesses, I never got the opportunity to talk with her. So 6:30, we usually have a company meeting or team meetings start at 7. We're in contractor, we're early.

So 6:30am the day, a few days after I closed, the day I was getting introduced, the sellers and me and this woman all met for coffee right across the street and they said, this is Jeremy, we've gotten to know him, we love him, he's amazing, we're excited what he's going to do and we love you and you're amazing. And we've told him we think he'd be an amazing general manager. And it all just felt so lovely and also a lot of shock and overwhelm thrown at somebody all at once. And she just started crying and my heart sunk. I was like, oh, I was putting a lot of stock on a person that I'd never met and had been told and I think honestly, so I think they genuinely believed this was something that would be exciting for her.

But it was a lot of change all at once and it was very overwhelming for her. It became clear, I think immediately to me that this was not going to be great. Jeremy's in the office every day for a few months. Then Jeremy's in the office every day for a few weeks while he works from home or a few days a week for a while. It became clear to me that the transition was going to take a lot more hands on effort than I had probably anticipated.

[00:40:32 - 00:40:39]

Will Smith: Because you, you were going to be. The gm because I was going to. Because clearly this person was not going to be the gm. There would be no gm. It would be Jeremy.

[00:40:39 - 00:41:32]

Jeremy Hunka: Thank you for connecting those dots. Yep. So that was it. And just realizing that the transition itself was not. Might not go as smoothly.

Everyone might not be as excited for their new young, exciting odor than I thought they might be. And I said it half jokingly. I always say I knew, like everyone says, it's harder than you can imagine. And I think I knew it was going to be harder than I could imagine. And eventually it was harder than I imagined it could be unimagined.

So I think I knew things would be a challenge, but right away it was like, oh, things are going to be more than a challenge than expected. So we immediately went over to our shop, did a big company meeting, said he was a new guy. And one of our lovely, outspoken employees immediately goes, do you have any experience with this? And I was like, so. I mean, again, I have real estate development, construction experience, but no, I've never run that.

[00:41:32 - 00:41:43]

Will Smith: I didn't say, you're standing on stage as it were, addressing the whole company. And this person kind of barks out, do you have any experience, kid? Sort of thing. Yes. Pretty quickly.

[00:41:43 - 00:43:45]

Jeremy Hunka: Yeah. And he's one of our older employees too. And again, he's amazing. He's still with us. But it was a quick interrupt the seller and her speech and look Jeremy in the eye and ask her if he knows what he's doing here.

And again, I quickly was like, oh, I knew it's going to be hard, and I think it's going to be harder than I thought.

And I think part of that for me is a.

And I hope this doesn't sound bad, but a confidence. I think throughout my career, coming from chemistry to property management to debt to asset management, was a confidence and a track record that I could figure things out. Yeah. And I think I've just always felt very comfortable with that. But also realizing that people might look at me and be like, our jobs rely on this.

Like, I hope this guy can figure it out. And I think realizing that my confidence, which I still stand by, that I can figure it out, is not something people know about me, is not something people trust in me immediately from day one. I'm also a very maybe overly trusting person. So I think I just still, it all sort of caught me off guard of what? I'm a nice guy.

Like, I'm a smart guy. I'm here to. I care about you guys. Thought we all are going to care about me from day one and it was a challenging day. One I think I immediately I still hadn't fully transitioned out of work.

So after all of that I then drove back to Denver to finish my workday and it was a long day. What do the following Acquiring Minds guests all have in common? Doug Johns, Morley Desai, Tim Erickson, Chirag Shah, Shane Ursum they all went through the Acquisition Lab, the accelerator in community for people serious about buying a business. But they represent just a sliver of the Lab success stories. The number of deals across the lab's cohorts now stands at over 120, with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value.

[00:43:46 - 00:44:39]

Will Smith: The Acquisition Lab was founded by Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build, the book that introduced so many of you to the very idea of buying a business. The Lab offers a month long, intensive, almost daily Q and A sessions with advisors, live Deal reviews with Walker, Deal team introductions, and an active community of serious searchers. Check out acquisitionlab.com link in the notes or email the lab's co founder, Chelsea Wood Chelsea buythenbuild.com just reflecting back again, say what you think it why do you think you were met with hostility? Do you think it's something about you or do you think it's something intrinsic to buying a business in these environments that people listening should also need to be prepared for? I think a little bit of both.

[00:44:39 - 00:45:52]

Jeremy Hunka: I think the about me part was probably again missed expectations of just because I'm super trusting and confident in my skill set doesn't mean other people are going to be trusting and confident in my skill set. And the other part is at the time I had not even yet turned 28. Yeah and I was just young. I mean a lot of our guys are mid 20s to mid 30s so they're not that much older than me. But the sellers were 40 and it just, it was a transition I think genuinely to realize that their careers and family lives and paychecks were now in the hands of this young guy.

And I think that was probably a real thing that was specific to me. I think the other part absolutely probably more broad to blue collar world and honestly probably just transitions as a whole is it just is a stressful thing for everyone. I mean it's the classic private equity is buying you all. Everyone thinks they're going to lose their job kind of. That's just the default assumption.

And Even in our S.C. i think I thought clearly that's not me. But no one knows that yet and I think there's just an inherent stress in Realizing that their paychecks are now in somebody else's hands. Yeah, yeah. No, the. The age factor has got to.

[00:45:52 - 00:46:24]

Will Smith: To play a role as well. It's not, you know, us, we listeners, as your, you know, supporters and champions. Jeremy, think it's cool that you're young. The recipients of this news. Whose.

Whose careers you hold in the palm of your hand do not. And. And so. And. And.

And you can't blame them for that. I mean, nobody's in the wrong here, But. But you can totally understand that being, um, Sensitive. Yeah, yeah. And I think partially there was.

[00:46:25 - 00:47:04]

Jeremy Hunka: And again, I'm sure we'll touch on this more later, but I am young. I am confident in my skill sets. I'm not necessarily a guy who gives off a strong bravado in any way. So I think I. I'm not only young, but I'm also not this. Well, at least he's outspoken and confident kind of guy.

It was. Here's a smiley young guy that might be talented, but he's not giving off this air of, I know what I'm doing all the time. So I think that probably came alongside not only the age thing, but it's just not an error that I give off whether or not I do know what I'm doing. It's not the impression I'm usually giving off. Well, that's.

[00:47:04 - 00:47:29]

Will Smith: That's such a. Kind of a foreshadowing that. Of. Of what's to come and. Yes.

And how. Maybe today. Maybe today you do give off that air. I might. A little bit more, Jeremy.

All right, so day one. What about day two? Day two? Three. Day one was tough.

So how do things progress? Yeah, day one was tough. I think I went home. I think I cried. My wife will hate that.

[00:47:29 - 00:52:34]

Jeremy Hunka: I'm saying this on this podcast. How many listeners does this have? I came home. My childhood birthday meal growing up was Outback Steakhouse. And I came home and had a very bad day.

And my wife hates Outback Steakhouse. And she said, do you need to go to Outback Outback Steakhouse? And I said, yes, I do. So day one was really tough. Um, weirdly enough, it was therapy.

Yeah, the blue and onion, it'll. It'll. It'll solve your woes. Um, it was a weird thing where I actually didn't. They introduced me, and then my two weeks wasn't done for, like, another few days at the other company.

So then I came back Monday, the following week, this was Wednesday, and started off. And honestly, the transition for a while went better than day One went, the sellers were amazing. I only got, I think it was really like six weeks with them.

But they were super hands on for the first while. The husband would take me from job site to job site. He was like teaching me how to do some of the work. The afternoons I'd spend with the work wife, she was teaching the business and they were amazing. Part of it might be that they were still running a lot of the business and I was just sort of like in the back classroom effectively with them.

But it was really invigorating to start meeting people. There was definitely some continued challenges to work through of people's fear in the transition. But I think it was at a point in time where it was sweet to start to get to know the people. They were excited to start to get to know me. Um, I think I was spending a lot of time working through the relational aspect of the fear and trust, that lack of trust that I saw the week before.

Um, so honestly, all of the transitions sort of went well for a while. I did quickly realize I didn't have a general manager, so that was just going to be me. Um, but again, the sellers had been amazing. Even certain things of. Right before they left, we did reviews jointly with everyone.

They talked about how they think through raises and how they. It just. They were wonderful. Even strategy of, okay, I want to build a little bit more of a technical leadership team because I don't have the skill set as much as I can do some of it with them, but hire sort of supervisors and managers and they strategize through all of that with me and said this guy will be great at this. And they were great.

And it was probably soon after they left it actually. Yeah, I think it was better than I often remember for a while. But it was still me realizing that I think I just hadn't gotten tired yet. I knew I was realizing that I was going to be driving up every day and it was going to be a lot of work, but I just. It hadn't burnt me out yet.

But as we transition through the fall, I acquired in the summer of 23. That's outgoing salesman before he left had sold amazingly well. I think he was working on the last few commissions before he went and left. He got a new sales job, started from scratch and sold so well that it carried us to the fall again. That's where I say 23 actually I think was even higher revenue than I was underwriting and it was sort of cruising.

But the transition to the new salesperson just wasn't quite Going as we had hoped. And quickly we are seeing the winters already are slow season.

The new employee just had a lot less of a background in sales. She was a wonderful person. She's beloved by money and the team, but we were just seeing sales start to slow down. So I think other than the first day, I didn't cry again about the business until basically the holidays. We did our first ever holiday party.

It went wonderfully well. I told everyone how appreciative I am for them. And it was finally that moment of, wow, like, these people really like me and they really like working here. And I didn't know we were going to get here, but I immediately go back to the hotel and just start looking at our sales pipeline and our schedule ahead and realize that we're about to enter the holidays where we sort of close down. And for the first time, and as far as I know in the company's history, we would.

Did not have January filled up already in the schedule. And I. I had a deep feeling of panic that my W. Two guys who have come to expect pretty much 40 hours were not going to get their hours, and I was going to have retention issues and I was going to have their livelihoods at stake and all of these things. And I went on a silent prayer retreat the next day. And one was taking sales calls from the little dormitory silent prayer retreat room. But two just like broke down and cried on the floor.

And it was like, okay, so the high has the terrible part wore off and broke into a high of, this is fun. I'm having a great time. And then slowly the reality started setting in that we're just living off the fumes of previous sales and we're not getting anywhere. Gotta ask, Jeremy, because the way you characterized it was that you kind of looked at the January pipeline kind of for the first time that night after the Christmas party. Could this have been averted if.

[00:52:34 - 00:52:47]

Will Smith: If were you not keeping your eye on the pipeline? Was that a kind of put part of the rookie mistake here or not. Really, I think yes. In some ways, I think I phrased that slightly wrong. I knew what we were staring down.

[00:52:47 - 00:53:52]

Jeremy Hunka: So even I think I used the holiday party anecdote as a strange moment where I knew what we were staring down. I was there finally just like trying to celebrate everyone what had already probably for about a month, become evident that sales are slowing down dramatically. Gotcha. So it just. It felt like a point where all of that finally came to a head of.

I'm throwing this party, I'm spending money for all this morale boost and all this stuff and it's going great. And I know deep down, and so does some of my front office team that like sales actually aren't going well. So it was a little. It was more that I do think we've learned that we need to plan ahead for our slow season a lot better. The seller probably warned me of that a million times, but I did.

We learned something strategy wise of when to start potentially doing increased marketing or time sensitive discounts, that kind of thing. But no, it was more just all of that finally coming to a head of. We've been trying our darnest. I've been, I've been jumping in and making sales calls for the last while. And we're still entering the holidays and still might not have enough hours for our guys throughout the entire next month.

[00:53:52 - 00:54:11]

Will Smith: So what is the next move? You have a salesperson, but sales aren't materializing. Do we connect those dots? Yes. I think I had definitely connected those dots and started feeling some friction probably on both of our ends there for a while.

[00:54:12 - 00:58:11]

Jeremy Hunka: I think I was probably demonstrated on the fact that at this point we're six months in and I'm still driving three and a half hours every day for that entire time. I was starting to realize that I was very. Since day one, since the reaction I got on day one, I was very concerned about retention.

I was very concerned about doing anything brash, anything that would honestly upset people, for lack of a more broad word.

And I think I hadn't. I wasn't quite ready to say this person's gotta go. So they had come in right as I was coming in. So they're a relatively new employee as well. I wanted to give them the Runway they needed.

To my not credit my ownership. I'm not a sales guy. I don't have a sales background. I was not, I was not an. I'm not a great like sales manager.

I'm not there being able to coach super well. I can try. I even jumped and did follow ups. But it's just I'm not the expert from whom someone can glean wisdom. So eventually after the holidays, we hired a sales coach to work with her again.

Just trying to give her the best chance. The other thing was it still was our sole source of sales. We have a great sort of incoming marketing machine, incoming lead marketing machine system where the leads just all come to us. We just need to close them. So that part's great and was great, but the closing part was hard and I was very hesitant to let go of someone before I had a replacement for that person either I was gonna sell.

And I had a few times when she had been out of the office. And honestly, my conversion rate was sort of low. I loved it, but I just. I think I was less good at it than I thought. We had a gal in the office who actually did a great job every time she did sales, but we had a full time other job for her to be doing that I was just really hesitant to make a change that would both rock the cultural boat because the team did really like her, at least our office team, and would leave me without a salesperson for who knows how long.

So soon enough, I guess, and this all overlaps of the period in which it starts getting darker outside, it starts getting more tiring for me to be leaving not only a few minutes before the sunrise, but maybe an hour or two before the sunrise. And honestly, life just started getting really hard. I think sort of January, February, March of 24. Now sales were down and I was sleeping up there, sleeping on a cot in my office a night or two a week. Because in my mind, that was less painful and exhausting than having to do the early morning drive multiple days a week.

If I could just do even one night out there. That basically meant I got one night off doing an early morning drive. And all the while, I think it might have been a little bit less painful. This maybe sounds bad had sales been through the roof. Yeah, great money's there, but my life's sort of hard.

Or my life sucks, but there's no money, or my life's great, but there's no money. So it was sort of just a bad combination of. I. I say it flippantly, but I did sort of like my life. I. I'd sort of jokingly flippantly say I hated my life. And it was really hard.

I was a shell of myself. I was getting really tired. I was feeling at a loss of what to do about the sales. And again, our office team, part of what I love about the business is there is a really close. One of our technicians one time said, we're a bunch of big burly men who love each other and there's like a very sweet environment within the company and the office team has their same thing.

So I, specifically the office team, I was really afraid to shake that boat. Even though she was a newcomer, this salesperson. Yeah, Honestly, they had really taken to her. I think she was there about two weeks before me. So she was still effectively part of the old guard.

[00:58:11 - 00:58:48]

Will Smith: I see. Because time was Set up before Jeremy and after Jeremy, and she was still before Jeremy and Jeremy. We can all see where this is building. Building too. But so often the fetal position moments, I think, are because people really don't know what to do, and they're at a loss.

I knew what to do exactly. Theme one, theme two, Theme two. From our world Is that fire slowly. Yeah. You know, they know they should, but they can't bring themselves to do it for whatever reason.

[00:58:48 - 00:59:16]

Jeremy Hunka: Yeah. Did you. Do you feel like in the back of your mind, or maybe even in the front of your mind, you knew that that was the path out here, or did you feel truly at a loss, you did not know what to do? Because actually, your reasons for not letting her go seemed sound like you didn't have somebody else to bring in revenue and, you know, you don't want to make these big, giant changes to the culture. Yeah.

[00:59:16 - 00:59:28]

Will Smith: And everyone loves her and so on, and you're not going to be able to step into sales. And so. So, you know, let's give yourself some credit here. That, that. That it wasn't such an obvious thing to do eventually becomes sort of inevitable.

[00:59:28 - 01:01:28]

Jeremy Hunka: Yeah. I think I jokingly say I knew what I had to do, but I do think maybe January, February, March, I didn't know what to do. I think I. Again, I'm trusting. I'm also optimistic.

I'm also hopeful that I just really was like, she's great. She's working really hard. That was part of the thing, too. She was working her butt off, and I just wanted to see that be rewarded. Like, I think I thought, she's working really hard.

She'll work with the sales coach. That will all come around. So I think there was a part of optimism for me, and there was a part that was just a. I think in my mind, I. I wish I was less afraid of retention for the first while, but I do think at the very least the time, it felt like a very legitimate concern. Retention and cultural change and how all of that feels like it goes hand in hand, especially being so far away. I think that just made every stressor a little more stressful because if I fire someone, I need to hop it in sales.

Great. It's fine If I live 10 minutes away, but I live far away. And if I'm going to have to help therapy employees through the next. The transition process, I still live far away. So I do think, to your point at the time, all of those things felt very real, and it did feel very uncertain.

I think there was a time soon enough the sellers again, were wonderful. They were actually doing weekly. They moved out of state, but they were doing weekly calls actually even with the sales employee sort of contractual. But they were also just doing it very willingly and helpfully. And there was a time, I think maybe before the seller got there, but I don't know what flip.

But I was like, okay, other people are going to lose their jobs if something doesn't change here. Yeah. And I think that empathetic me was able to get behind that a lot more easily than I was able to get behind this person's got to go. When I think I finally realized that this is actually going further and further downhill, that we're all going to lose our jobs if something doesn't change. Yeah.

[01:01:28 - 01:01:45]

Will Smith: Jeremy, how. How did the sellers, the former owners. Yeah. What did they say about the slipping performance of sales? They saw it all and if anything, they added sometimes more stress because they had come off a few years of really strong sales and a really strong employee.

[01:01:46 - 01:05:55]

Jeremy Hunka: Sales employee that they were very not used to not having. The next week or two or three or eight weeks is usually their minimum of a full calendar ahead of us. So they felt that pain and made that clear to me, like, hey, should be concerned about this and that.

But I think where it really got with the sales side of things was eventually there was just the seller was still sort of the why stage in all of this and had a few pieces of sort of homework for the employee to do, like, hey, try this your next time around and tell me back how it goes. And she didn't do it. And the seller called me right afterwards and was like, she's not doing the homework. Like, I'm not sure that. And it was an interesting moment of the person who hired this person effectively sorted to get the deal closed.

It was a major key of getting the deal closed, I think finally came back to me and was like, okay, I think you're right, Jeremy, we gotta make a change here.

So that was again easier said than done. It took me a long time, many months actually, of having a listing open to find someone that I felt so confident about, could do a great job relatively quickly that it was worth letting somebody go. How did you have the job description out there without the team seeing was on her seed? And indeed, you can make a company that is local specialty contractor or some sort of generic. You can't post anonymously, but you can like make an anonymous sounding company.

Yeah. So that was how I did that. Which again, I think all just felt a little hard for me. I Think I just felt I didn't want her to go. I didn't want her to know I was behind her back.

But it really became a matter of. We are saving everybody else's job. We're a unique place where we pay our guys well. Like, multiple of them have had kids since I've been there and gotten married. And, like, we need to save their jobs and their families.

And it was. I was able to get my head around it that way. Yeah. In the middle of all that, I guess, was my time of also realizing that I can't keep driving up there every day and my wife say something. About how the employees really wanted you there, which was kind of a counterintuitive reaction.

Yeah, I think there was. Again, I just. They never asked me to. As soon as I saw the transition was going to be really hard, I was like, I got to be here every day, and maybe there's a later conversation here about my thoughts on a buyer getting really in the weeds right away in a way that might actually be unhelpful if they're trying to eventually get out of them. But somewhere towards November, December, I started trying to pull back a little bit.

Um, honestly, I would just schedule all the meetings I had, which were legitimate meetings. I'd meet with my accountant, or I'd meet with, I don't know, a lawyer, my business coach, something. I'd schedule them one day a week in the Denver area in person. They're real meetings. But they were a good excuse for me to be like, hey, guys, today's my meeting day.

I'm in Denver. And quickly enough, it just became, I mean, explicitly clear. I think I was told that we don't like when you're in Denver. We like when you're here. We feel supported when you're here.

You're really responsive when you're gone. Like, I. I. Because I was nervous, people would be upset. So I would always respond to a text or call, like, really quickly. But there's just still something different from being able to look you in the face and ask you a random question.

Part of me was like, yeah, that's slightly the point. I'm trying to build a little different system there. But I had never been super explicit about it. For a while. I had felt that tension whenever I do a day, a week in Denver and field attention.

And I just. And let's just call out here, Jeremy, that this is kind of an unusual reaction, as I said, because, first of all, most people probably welcome the idea that the boss isn't there. Yeah, I think most people like it when, when they don't feel like they have to, you know, just the boss is right over their shoulder. So it's interesting that everybody wants you to come up and just be present all the time. Also, given that, you know, that first reaction from your day one speech where people are, you know, kind of like, who's this young whippersnapper who thinks that he's going to come in and tell us what to do, that they would then kind of want you to quote, support them by being present all the time.

[01:05:55 - 01:06:14]

Will Smith: Just, just kind of a counter, counter to what we would think would. No, I, I don't disagree at all and I think a few things there. One, I actually genuinely struggled throughout the process of feeling like had I had a boss who said, hey, I trust you, I'm not going to be here every day, I'm super available if you need me, I would have loved. That's like my ideal boss. So.

[01:06:14 - 01:09:34]

Jeremy Hunka: Right. I think I very much struggle with the idea that that was not other people's ideal boss. And I do think, and I say this hopefully humbly, we got to the point and maybe it's just because of my people pleasing or I think I did prove to be a better leader than they expected at times, that they really liked me and they liked having me around, they liked me as a resource. They knew I didn't know as much as the old owners. They knew I was raising up people and managers to sort of build more of a system that was less dependent on me as the expert.

And I think there was an extent to which like they genuinely liked me and wanted me around, which was both flattering and not the direction I was trying to move it for the sake of my wellbeing. Right. So, yeah, I mean, come January, February, so six, seven, eight months in, I'm like, yeah, sleeping up there. I'm going to bed really early because I'm getting up really early. My wife's a therapist with evening hours, so we're missing each other on the weekends.

I want to do nothing because I just. Every 10 hour day with a 3 hour drive turns into a 13 hour day and every 12 hour day turns into a 15. I was just really tired all while sales aren't going well. And somewhere along the way my wife was like, something needs to change. Like, you are not well.

We are not going to be well if things are continuing this way and something needs to change. And that was slightly hard to hear, but in some way I was like, she's totally right. I didn't. It wasn't a big argument. I wasn't like, no, you don't get it.

I'm like, no, you're totally right. For the sake of the business, even giving my best to the business, like, I would get there, I'd be angry that I drove up however long or just burnt out from driving. I could be as excited as I want as 5am and by the time I get there at 7am, I've just lost some of that excitement. I just honestly, like when it was getting really hard, I was just. I'd pray the whole way up there.

I got into like breath praying instead of meditative. The things I needed to do to try to just like what felt like truly needing some sort of sustaining power. That was something that I didn't possess at that point in time. So somewhere along the same time of realizing the sales, few months later, I decided I had to rip the Bandit off. I kept trying to do the one day a week thing.

I kept feeling guilty about it and it wasn't going well. And I was like, I need to bring this down to two to three days a week. It just. That's an entirely different, better, more sustainable for a long time schedule. And it broke it to my team and it seemed like it went fine enough until I started doing it.

And then I'm trying to remember the specifics of all the conversations along the way, but I told my team one on one because it would just. It felt very sensitive.

And eventually we have what I still in my mind refer back to as the intervention. I don't know if they'd call it that way. I don't know if you've ever referred it to it that way. Where my main office team at a normal weekly meeting, we get through it. Hey, anybody else have anything to talk about?

Sort of looked me in the eye, got really quiet and were like, hey, this schedule is not what we want. I don't know if they said it's not okay or what they said, but it was like a, hey, you seem like a great guy these days. Like, you seem a lot more alive and full of life and leadership and all those things. But like, we need you here. And they.

[01:09:34 - 01:09:43]

Will Smith: And they kind of, they kind of all unanimously. Yes, it was clearly. Yes, it was. There was like three. How many people?

[01:09:43 - 01:12:40]

Jeremy Hunka: Yeah, three. Three versus yeah. But still. But it was a strange scenario with, oh, like people have talked about this and they're all on the same page. And I thought things were going great.

I thought I finally did the hard thing. And it just didn't go well, I think. I. I'm not sure. I actually really ended up saying we had more conversations after the fact. I said, great, thank you for sharing.

Let's talk again next time. And as well, maybe you alluded to at the beginning, but it was starting to be an opportunity of me growing my leadership where I didn't fully put my foot down and say, this is what needs to happen again. At this point, I've convinced myself that it is genuinely for not only my personal good, which is a real thing, but for the good of the business. Like, I just. When I was going up every day, I was a worse leader than I went when I was going up a few days.

And I think I acquiesced a little. I started going up more like three to four days a week, but I still never went back to five. I didn't really keep doing two. And there was just a weird period that felt uncomfortable. But it was like, this is what it is.

I think people are mad at me right now. I don't know if this is going to create retention issues, but this is what needs to be done. How do you reflect back on that?

I reflect back on it positively and I think ultimately it's become positive. I think, again, what I call the intervention was a stressful time. I think I felt genuinely confused where I'm like, I really feel like I've thought this through. I prayed this through. I talked to my business coach, I've talked to everyone.

I think this is a normal, not crazy thing of me to do or want or expect. I don't actually provide them that much other than being a quick, available guy for a question. Otherwise, I mainly do sort of my financy spreadsheet work that I'm doing on my computer in silence there. So I think I had thought it all through and didn't think it would be that crazy of a thing. And when it came back, I remember being very confused.

I'm like, am I just totally ignorant here? Am I totally off base that this is even a thing that I, as a guy, you couldn't figure out why. They wanted you up there so bad? Yeah. And there was a comment which I still understand of someone, compared it to when you walk into a locally owned restaurant and you see the owner there and you're like, great, the owner's here.

He's making sure everything's good and quality and all of that stuff, which I still honestly understand the premise of. And I'm not sure I actually have a good response to that except for the fact that none of my desire to not drive three and a half hours a day was out of a lack of like passion for the quality or the culture of our company. It was like, this is my full time thing. This is my blood, sweat and tears all day, every day, weekends, whatever. I just am going to do it a little more often from my home.

[01:12:41 - 01:13:13]

Will Smith: Yeah. So, yeah. And by the way, that, that comment about the owner being present is, is usually from the perspective of, of, of the customer, not from the employees. Yeah. And I, I, I, they, they were talking about.

But then this was an employee who said it to you. I actually, I, I'm not, I don't remember well enough if they were saying, well, our customers want to see that versus well, we want to see that. I don't remember that clearly enough. Okay, but do, did customers, would customers have had any awareness where you were anyway? No.

[01:13:13 - 01:13:52]

Jeremy Hunka: I mean, honestly, we sit on a showroom. I don't really have a office up there, so I would often just sort of set my laptop up in the showroom. But customers walk in and out all the time and not know who I was. Again, the previous owners are probably there half the hours a week I was there, so. So you're already giving more FaceTime than the previous owners did.

Yeah. Which again was a point of confusion for me. Again, partially they liked me. Partially I was smoothing a transition, but that part was genuinely confusing to me and hard. So you did, you kind of met them halfway and you started going up again a little bit more.

[01:13:52 - 01:14:03]

Will Smith: Not back to five days a week, but maybe three or four. But it's not going in the direction that you want. You want to be going up less. Yeah. And how does that then evolve?

[01:14:04 - 01:14:56]

Jeremy Hunka: And that, that sort of stays where it stays. And until relatively recently. So it was ended up being three to four days a week for a long time. But at the same time sales still just weren't getting there. And I had run, I think two different listings and just again, the gal we had like really worked very hard.

She was very lovely. I had no desire to make a big change until I really found that right person. But we make it to the summer about a year in, so this big anniversary of a year of having bought the business. And I remember feeling like, okay, it's not winter, I'm not driving up as much anymore. But I genuinely don't see like a light at the end of the tunnel.

I was, I started going to therapy for my first time ever during all of this. I remember that summer being like, am I depressed? And the guy was like, I wouldn't put a label on it. Which I think was sort of him saying, yes. What about your wife?

[01:14:56 - 01:15:10]

Will Smith: Did she notice a change after. After when she had pressed you to. To not go up as often and to say, there's gotta be a change? I think yes, but only mar. I think my, like, just physical exhaustion was a little better.

[01:15:10 - 01:17:46]

Jeremy Hunka: But, yeah, I think as sales continued to not rebound, my actual sort of mental, emotional hopelessness had gotten, like, worse. Like, I just. I remember truly getting to the point where I'm like, we couldn't sell again today for the load balance that I have. And that felt like the. Where is the end of the tunnel?

I'm not seeing it. Um, so that was just a hard period. But my schedule sort of stayed the same again. It had gotten a little better, so that part was better. But it was just emotionally very taxing.

Mentally very taxing. I'd gotten a lot more vulnerable with friends during this time. Like, I remember going to meet a friend for drinks and I'd, like, end up crying. And I've always sort of prided myself as a sensitive, emotional, thoughtful guy who can cry when other people cry and do that. But again, through all the therapy, through all the whatever, it was an interesting process of working through.

Oh, I'm the one that's unwell right now and not in control of my emotions. And I'm showing my feelings in a way that I is a little bit past the emotionally aware image I like to give off. So it was just like an interesting emotional journey here. I'm working through a lot of people pleasing with my therapist, as I, again, couldn't even tell my employees that I wasn't going to go up every day because that felt too scary to me. Because in the people pleasing to your point earlier of when did I know I need a fireheart?

There was still, it always felt very intertwined with legitimate concerns about retention and about employee satisfaction that I think brought up things about people pleasing that I'm not sure I realized I wrestled with until I had a bunch of people that didn't like me and I really relied on them. And it just brought up something that I didn't have to deal with the first 28 years of my life when people usually liked me and I was usually successful in whatever I was doing. Did it get to the point where you felt like people didn't like you. At the business that might be too strong? Again, I think, actually, in general, they really liked me.

I think there was Points of they're not always going to be happy with me, which is a very basic thing for a boss. But was a challenge for me at the time where I think throughout my life I just again, been a great, high achieving employee where people liked me, friends liked me, I'm engaging whatever. That was the first time where people weren't always happy with me and I wasn't always succeeding. And those things were just a lot heavier on me than I think I would have ever thought when I was running the numbers during my search a year earlier. And so did you eventually come to kind of accept that and now you're somebody who you can.

[01:17:46 - 01:17:58]

Will Smith: You, you care less about people liking you? Yeah. Or did you figure out a way to get them to like you? No, I figured out I did that way out right away. That was how I won them over the first few months.

[01:17:58 - 01:22:21]

Jeremy Hunka: Like I did everything they wanted. I was there all day, every day. I figured out how to get them to like me quickly. The harder part was getting comfortable on the times that they weren't always going to like me. And I, I think I've generally gotten there.

I think starting with the. Ripping the band aid off of my schedule is the first slight step.

Honestly, therapy and prayer were both huge. And then finally in the point where we did end up replacing this employee was probably one of the last big milestones in that of we found our current salesperson who is amazing. We're up skipping ahead here and spoiling it. Sales are up way oh year over year. It's amazing.

But I let that employee go on a Friday, actually, ironically before I went to another one of these. They keep coming at very necessary times in my life, which is good. Just throw it on the calendar and you'll need it more than you realize. Um, and I called the two other office employees and just let them know it was at the end of the day and they sort of took it finish enough. They, they see all the numbers, they see the sales numbers.

Um, but I got texts and calls from one of them later in the week that said, hey, this is not okay. We need to talk Monday morning. I was like, whoa, okay. And again, all these conflict, diverse things coming out of me of, okay, someone's mad at me. I'm basically signing up for a meeting where I think I'm just going to get yelled at by one of my own employees.

Which is an interesting concept in and of itself and I think was annoying to me even to think about in and of itself. And I show up and I got a lot Of I. It felt like I was being interviewed, interrogated of, why did this change happen? Why did this have to happen? Why did you do this?

How'd you even find this person? Job posting. And just a lot of like, how could you? Why would you? And it was a very.

What? It was a confusing interaction to me where I'm like, you guys have seen all the numbers. You guys see all the same things. I see the office staff. The guys don't necessarily.

We're getting better at that.

And like, we just. This had to happen. And I think I had finally gotten to the point where, like, this had to happen. And I tried my darndest to say that clearly and kindly and also sort of shut down. I try my best to sort of shut down.

They're like, this is blowing up, doing a thing. It honestly just should not be blowing up to. In this dynamic of the office place and shut it down and just say, like, nope, we had to do this. I'm very confident, and the new gal is coming in an hour, and I need everyone to be nice to her. And it was an interesting moment for me that I look back on maybe very differently than she sees that conversation.

But I see it at the time that I was really able to hear someone's, like, deep frustrations with me, like, she was hot. And try to hear them, listen to them, reflect them, but not internalize them any more than I need to. And to stand by. And again, be like, I don't know, was I wrong here? I think I knew that this was the right decision, so I didn't need to internalize that deeply.

But then to stand by, hey, this is what I did. This is why I did it. You might not see that. And then getting to the point of personal acceptance that I need it to be okay, that you might never see that you might never agree with this. You might even see sales up 40% year over year or whatever they are right now and still not think back on that decision and think, Jeremy made the right decision.

And that was a big moment for me to be able to sort of sit with that, say, yeah, she's super mad at me right now, and I think she's just not seeing it and she might not, and that's fine. So that was sort of probably one of the biggest things in that journey of just being a lot more comfortable with it, of not only trying to make people happy all the time and make them like me, but be okay when they don't like me. Well, I think one of the core features of Good leadership, of course that, you know, that's a word that it's so laden with definitions and stuff, but is the ability to use your judge, you know, have good judgment. I think a good leader has to have good judgment first. Assuming you.

[01:22:21 - 01:23:08]

Will Smith: You act with good judgment, be confident in that decision and move forward with that decision in the face. In the face of a lot of, you know, dissidents and even from people that you might respect. I mean, um, so. So it. That is the.

That is the. I think truly, like, one of the things that tests a leader is when people around you are. Are saying, no, no, you're doing this wrong. You're doing this wrong. Yeah.

And. And continuing to soldier on and not let that. Not be cowed by that. Not. Not cause that.

To doubt your own. Not cause. Cause that to doubt your own judgment and also be at peace with being unpopular with your. Your team. Yeah.

For a moment, at least. Yeah. Or maybe forever. Or maybe forever. And maybe forever.

[01:23:08 - 01:23:40]

Jeremy Hunka: And I think. Yeah. Finally getting okay with that. Like, again, this might not. This might not just be a moment was a hard thing.

And I think I do have a deep, I think, well intentioned, well intended concern to not just disregard criticism. Criticism either. Like, I don't want to hear people say they're disagreeing with it decision and just entirely write it off. I think I always want to be willing to say, okay, are they right? Without having, to your point, be cad by that and say, yes, they are always right.

[01:23:41 - 01:25:23]

Will Smith: Yeah. So that was a hard balance for me. Is now a time I can ask Will if you would tell your story or. No. I'll tell it and we'll see.

Yeah. My editor thinks it makes. It is good to make it in or worth keeping in. I had, as I told you, I had a similar life experience where. Not actually in that I needed to make a hard decision and push forward.

But anyway, it was one where I look back on my own leadership blossoming, my leadership ability kind of blossoming because I failed badly at leadership. Not saying that that's what you did, Jeremy, but you reflect back and. And you're like, oh, I was doing it wrong. And then I started doing it a little bit better. Yeah.

And that was at Nulls, which is National Outdoor Leadership School. It's kind of like Outward Bound where you as a young person, you go off for a month in the woods and you learn wilderness skills and. And there was like a group of 12 of us and two instructors who teach you how to teach you the skills, but also teach you leadership. National Outdoor leadership school and you take turns leading the, each the dozen people split into three groups of or two groups of six every day to get to their destination. You're hiking through the Wind river mountain range in Wyoming and every day somebody else takes turn, you take turns being the leader for that day.

And the very first day I was a leader, I was horrible. It's so bad. Misled us or I missed something on the map and I led us astray and so bad I quit. I actually, I actually by the end of the day I basically abdicated. It was so humiliate and I, you know, I knew that I felt it.

[01:25:23 - 01:25:52]

Jeremy Hunka: Or because people were mad at you or what made you quit. I, I felt it. I, I just, I got, I, I, I guess I was fragile of, of ego or of ability and I, I just became so easily discouraged. I think, you know, as somebody who, you know, usually I do pretty well at things and I was just like by 3pm on that long hike that day was so clearly not doing it well. I, I kind of, I mean I didn't literally say I quit guys and storm off like that but, but I all.

[01:25:52 - 01:27:40]

Will Smith: But yeah, you could feel that I just kind of like give, yeah. And, and kind of somebody, some, another couple of guys kind of stepped in to get us to camp and I just, I was so disgusted with myself for not only that night but for days. It was bracing and I was like, it was like I will never, I was so humiliated. I was like I will, I will never again be so weak. And from, from then it was just such a turning point.

And from then on, just if nothing else to, to, to, to avoid feeling such, such humiliation, such disappointment in myself. It was very motivating. And, and I, and I thereafter I had a couple more turns of being leader as we all did. We cycled through, took turns. Over the course of this 30 day period, I led much more firmly and not in, in some authoritarian way.

I was, I was collaborative and so good, but I wasn't just so fragile and weak. Yeah. And by the end, and then the way this month culminates is the, the group of the two instructors hike back into civilization on their own. The 12 split into groups of three and over the course of a four day period, each group hikes back in on their own and leaders are elected one to each of the three groups and I was elected one of one of the leaders. So it was this wonderful, you know, resurrection almost, if not to use such a heavy word but, but there's a better word but it Was, you know, it was.

I had, I had essentially that. No, I love that. Yeah. At least of my, of my, my self esteem and, and sense of self and. And so anyway, it was a just a transformative moment of leadership for me in a very young age.

[01:27:40 - 01:28:42]

Jeremy Hunka: I was 15. Yeah. I wish I had, but 12 years earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to say that, you know, I have it all figured out, but there are these maybe.

Yeah. For some of us who find ourselves in leadership positions here and there in life. Yeah. These moments where you stiffen the spine for whatever reason. Either maybe that motivation comes from within or from without, but you do it and, and you kind of learn what it, what it feels like to be a proper leader.

Yeah. And it is not about popularity. It never is. No. Thank you for sharing.

I sure. I always value when you share personal anecdotes on the show and it's fun to get to hear it right here with you because honestly, I relate deeply and I genuinely wish mine had come a lot earlier because I think a lot of my business buying journey had been harder than it probably would have been had I had some of these, I don't know, difficulties earlier in life. You know, Jeremy, your. Your success before buying this business. They say this is kind of an interesting thing.

[01:28:42 - 01:29:20]

Will Smith: They say about Harvard students that I'm gonna butcher this. But the gist is that certain high performing organizations don't want to hire Harvard students because Harvard students are used to success. Yeah. They've just gone through life excelling. Excelling.

Excelling, excelling. And so when they get into. They don't handle failure well at all. They're thin skinned because they've never experienced it. They have no, they have no experience with.

With failure. And it sounds like there was a little bit, you know, you were used to kind of winning in life. Yeah. And this was one of your kind of first confrontations with failure. Yeah.

[01:29:20 - 01:30:52]

Jeremy Hunka: And it, I. It wasn't like the first time in my entire life that I like felt pain deeply, but it was the first time where things just like, weren't going. Like I could force them to go easily. And that was. It was.

It's been a hugely beneficial process, but a hard one. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, congratulations. That letting go of that employee and replacement, I think feel still looking back, the first time I sort of looked back, it was soon after we crossed the year mark in the business of wait.

I think I'm doing something that I'm really proud of. Like, I closed on a business when I was 27. I'm a year in and it hasn't been easy but I've been growing a ton as a human in my fear of failure and my fear of being not liked and in all of these things I'm making the hard decisions to keep people employed and it was the first time I could look back and like wait, I'm and even the conversation letting go the employee I jokingly told you in the pre call but I ended up tearing up in that conversation like I was it was an interesting moment and I was able to stand firm with the follow up on Monday with the other employee of I'm able to grow and mature as a leader without losing some of those other parts of myself. Like I'm still deeply grieved if I have to let somebody go and I'm still deeply willing to listen to someone when they're mad at me. So is it yeah it felt like a meaningful moment of I'm proud of some things and I haven't like lost myself in the process.

I'm not this heartless yeah. Guy on the other end of it. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

[01:30:53 - 01:31:13]

Will Smith: Excellent Jeremy. Really, really good. And then to close us out, where are things today? It feels like a complete 180 both in the performance of the business and in honestly my enjoyment and livelihood. I the new salesperson came in last fall.

[01:31:13 - 01:33:06]

Jeremy Hunka: Since then again sales have more than rebounded. We're up above the 2 million we were when we bought it. I think we're still trying to figure out where we're pacing for this year but we're pacing well above probably the two that we originally where we bought it. So we're officially grown revenue which is great after a notable dip. And then maybe most importantly there was a time around and I might now explain this in too much depth so you could edit it but there was a time around the holidays this last year where we were sort of closed.

I was up in the mountains sitting at a Spanish wine bar and doing a VTO by myself because I don't really own a leadership team and for the non eos adept it was our 10 year vision basically and I finally sales were up. I was only going to the office max four days a week, often less at this point. And I finally said I had two weeks off and was letting myself dream and it was the first time in a year and a half that I like finally didn't feel so burdened by it all that I could dream about growing this thing and serving more customers and treating more employees well and paying more employees and all of the Things that I think I get excited about the business, which is the numbers working out. I think I realized in that moment that I thought I was an operator. I was portfolio operator before, but it was always a spreadsheet thing.

And I'm really excited about the numbers, and I'm really excited about the impact. And it was, how do we grow this? How do these numbers work? How do we impact more customers? How do we impact more employees?

Not that kitchens are this deeply philosophical thing, but, like, how do we make more old things beautiful again? And I think I started getting really excited about seeing my strengths and the things that I'm excited about. Like, I really was good at figuring out where cash flow was and making sure that over that entire time of sales, we never had a real cash flow issue, like where we were out in money kind of thing. We had lines. Like, I did it all well.

[01:33:06 - 01:33:38]

Will Smith: Yeah. And I came to realize that to get to that vision and where I wanted us to go, which was, I don't know, more than, I think it was 10 to 15 million in 10 years and maybe starting dozens, hundreds of franchises. It was like a big vision that I might not be the one in the right seat. I think I always had sort of been battling with this ops manager that I wanted to be a general manager and thinking, who's in the right seat here? And I think I realized I really am a numbers guy and who's passionate about when numbers meet reality.

[01:33:38 - 01:38:03]

Jeremy Hunka: And I'm less of the visionary leader that this business needs to get us to where it needs to get. So all of that prompted me to say, okay, now that sales are up, now would be the time to look for a gm. And I think what we need is like a real, what I started calling a CEO instead of a gm, like not even a coo, but someone that truly is taking this and they're. They're running vision, they are galvanizing the team, and they might even have a GM or something underneath them. I was willing to take that payroll hit because I thought it was what I had always dreamed of for this company to really be able to impact people, for me to not honestly, like, just hate my life.

And I always am afraid I sound too Gen Z when I say that I want this work life balance. But I think there was a real part of it that was not unhealthy for me for a while. And I think I realized that was the direction I needed to go. I started talking to recruiters, all sorts of stuff. And I'd been working with a business Coach for probably nearly a year at that point, who had sort of semi retired.

He owned one business at this point, but he had started businesses and built them and bought them and sold them and had a great career doing that stuff and was sort of advising me for free. I think he thought it might be his. I was his beta client for his new coaching business he was about to launch and was telling him about, hey, I think I've changed all this stuff we've been talking about gm. I think it needs to be something bigger and I need a step back and I need to do the stuff I'm good at and stop doing the stuff I'm not good at. And he was like, sounds right with everything you've told me so far.

So started talking with recruiter. But that night he emailed me and said, I think I can do it. And I said, I can't afford you again. He's 60s, he's a veteran at this kind of thing. He's just, he's great.

And he said, give me to make me fractional. I still run my other business a day or two a week, give me three days a week, pay me 75 grand and if I can get you to a good enterprise value by the time I retire in three to five years, give me a little payout when I do it. So it was honestly almost a nearly immediate yes for me. And that's the season we are in now. I think actually one of the last big pieces of my people pleasing to sort of break was telling my employees, announcing this man to my employees when they all probably thought we had gotten sold again.

I meet them all one morning. There's another guy in the office. Jeremy says he's got a. Everyone's got to come to the office at a certain time. And I tried my darndest to sort of say everything I just said, which is hate.

I have like big dreams for all of you, for myself, for this business. I'm really good at some things. I loved the deal analysis. I'm still really good at spreadsheet stuff. I'm still really good at asking good questions, that kind of thing.

But I need to partner with this like real operator who's going to help take you and the team from like a team leadership perspective to the next level. And honestly, they received it all really well. I got just enough people who were sad to see me step back that it was great for the ego and just. And I communicated it just well enough that people were actually excited about sort of this next phase. It felt like we were entering into.

He jumped in, and he was like, guys, Jeremy made two really crazy decisions in the last few years, and one is buying this business, and one is realizing the things he's really good at and wanting the best for you guys and the things that he's not really good at. And it was like a sweet moment where he was sort of actually able to slightly pat me on the back. And, like, he did a crazy thing. And he's been doing a crazy thing for you all these last few years. Yeah, in a way that I never could.

And he's doing this because he wants the best for our customers and for you guys. And he's staying involved. He's still the owner. He's doing all the things that he wants to do, which is like an owner's dream. And it was sort of sweet for him to be able to communicate that, because it's weird telling your employees, like, I'm actually just doing the things now that I want to do, and you guys don't actually have that same control that I do.

So it's a weird thing to say yourself, but it was a really sweet thing to have somebody else communicate it to a team that at this point, had really grown to respect me so. Well, so is point one, I think, that he made, which is that it's a crazy thing to buy a business which. Which so often employees don't appreciate, like, the amount of risk and total. And just kind of the adventure that the business buyer is going on, which, of course, we celebrate here. But.

[01:38:03 - 01:38:20]

Will Smith: But. But the employees just kind of see it through the lens of. Sure. How it's going to affect them. And.

And they. They just assume that if you're buying the business that you're just, you know, some fat cat or somehow. Totally. This is easy for you. Yes.

[01:38:20 - 01:38:42]

Jeremy Hunka: And I think it was nice to have someone else say. I think he mentioned all the debt I took on, all the sleepless nights I took on, all the lack of paychecks that I took on while they took on bigger paychecks than me. I think he mentioned those things, and again, a way that I never could, but in a way that they all sort of nodded along, like, yeah, he did do that. That was pretty crazy of him. And still it is pretty crazy of him.

[01:38:42 - 01:38:51]

Will Smith: It's awesome. So it was. That was a very sweet moment. I was very nervous to tell them, and it went, praise God so well. And that's the season we're in now.

[01:38:51 - 01:41:29]

Jeremy Hunka: He was an answer to so many prayers. I could have never even thought to pray. I was like, just find me a 30 something with some experience that I can afford nonetheless of a guy who's done the things that he has done and already knew my business. He even knew like he hadn't met my employees but he knew a lot of them by name when I talked through whatever strategy thing we were talking through at the time. So that's just been amazing.

And we're about six months after that. I go to the office a day a week at this point for sort of half a day. I do our L10, I do a few other meetings on there. It still is my full time job.

I'm not sure it's really the 40 to 60 hour weeks I was putting in before, but it is the main focus of my attention at this point in time. Sales are still up. We're in thankfully reinvesting mode, which means we've hired I think four more people this year to date, which is nearly 50% more than our 13 person company before. I guess 30%. But we're in growing though, which is great.

Also means cash flow still isn't as quite as amazing as we're hoping for. But it's the good pain of reinvesting which even that I think bringing in the CEO who is less tied currently to the cash flow as me as still owner has been really nice. When he's like no, we need to hire this person to grow. And I'm like, or I could just save the 60 grand and keep it. So it's actually been very sweet to have a partner who has a different mindset than I do when I'm very.

The cash is an acute pain to me at times. And he's like no, I'm here to grow it. Revenue's up, we gotta hire, we're doing it. Wow. And maybe last tying a bow on that, the woman who cried the first day about the business.

I thought I was going to leave. We had our fair share of headbutting over the years, but I always desperately wanted to keep her around because she was so good at her job. She was probably the one I was most afraid to lose. She's so good at it and I wanted her to do more under him. And I don't know honestly what it is, if it was me having a vision that I was finally confident to communicate or if it's an older guy that's leading the group but under him she's like really stepped up into our sort of pseudo integrator COO role.

And it's been really cool to see she, like, sits in on some of the leadership discussions with me and him. She partakes in them. It's been, that's been a really amazing arc in that one. Well, Jeremy, when we first connected, you had said, you know, I'm not sure the time is right now, Will, because at least numbers wise, you know, there's not a ton. It's not like there's a ton of money coming out of it.

[01:41:30 - 01:42:57]

Will Smith: And you just explained why you're, you're reinvesting. We might call it a J curve. Really. You're just investing for growth. I wouldn't call that really a J curve.

You're just investing here for real. Yeah, but last year when sales were dipping. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think that we both agree that there you are at a moment of stability and plateau. And you do.

You have crossed a, a threshold. You have had a key success of sorts, if not, you know, some giant exit or tons of money coming out of the business just yet, which is of course, what you just spent the last few minutes describing, which is you have your life back. You're spending time in on the business, in and on the business in the way that you want to. You don't hate your life. The business is thriving.

You have a CEO, kind of fractionally CEO now, kind of a pseudo COO in that woman. So things are, you've. You've righted the ship and it, the light at the end of the tunnel that you talked about before, not seeing. Yes. You've gotten to, you're.

You're at that light. It is here. And I think the light is now even brighter where I'm trying to figure out, he's probably going to oversee our growth into the Denver market. And part of what I'm spending my time doing again, now that working on the business stuff that everyone dreams of, is looking to, if we're viable to franchise, and all sorts of like, much brighter lights that I struggled to even dream of a year ago. So I've already gotten to the point where the light end of the tunnel is here.

[01:42:57 - 01:43:56]

Jeremy Hunka: I love my life. We're on track for notable profitability and growth, and we have an even brighter outcome ahead of us. So, again, it's a weird. I feel like it's this weird, liminal time where I am in between not the depths of sorrow before and the beautiful exit or cash flow machine, but I truly love my life. I've grown a ton as a leader, and I do actually feel like I am a lot better a leader, whether it's leading this through a franchise or whether it's buying something else again someday.

I just I think I have grown a ton and have a. I think I'm a lot more confident in both my skill set and my actual ability and also what I'm good at. Like if I were to do it again someday I'm probably or even the franchise route. I still more the spreadsheet guy and I have to partner with someone that's more the team leader and all of those kinds of things. Jeremy, last question. So reflecting back on your leadership evolution.

[01:43:58 - 01:44:31]

Will Smith: Any, any advice that you you'd give and it's so. It's also personal. It all has, you know, our own. We all have our own leadership styles and are based very much on our personalities and the bowery to own idiosyncrasies. So there's not going to be good universal advice here.

So maybe speak specifically to the people please Listening. Yeah. Who might be have that same sort of kind of personality that you do. Yeah. Well I think broadly and maybe I feel a little differently now but I talk to people a lot who still find me somehow having bought a business and want to learn more about it.

[01:44:31 - 01:46:53]

Jeremy Hunka: And I think I often say it, it just really is not for everyone. But if you really want to do it and you also think you're a people pleaser or have just had by the grace of God a lot of success throughout life and not have to deal with failure and those things really practically. I actually would say I would not over encourage people to buy something really far away. I think a lot of the pains would have been a lot easier had the days been less long and the fires a lot easier to put out if they're a few minutes away. But.

I think specific to the people pleasing portion of it, it's a lot of alliteration.

I think the fear of retention is something I maybe talk about more broadly. It is a very real thing when you're buying a small business. Again, we had a team of 13 which felt great but it was three in the office and 10 technicians who had skills that I will never have.

The fear of retention is very real, but I think it's almost always overplayed and I think trying to get your mind around the fact that 1 people are always going to like you and 2 they might leave because truly they just don't like you. They're a fine employee, you might be a fine boss, they might leave and needing to either buy the right business where that's okay or do what you need to do to make sure, that's okay. Um, and then finally, I don't know, go to therapy, pray a lot. Try to truly find ways that get to the point where it's past the practicalities and just the broader. Am I okay if someone never sees my perspective?

Cuz they honestly never will. When you're the sole owner with the debt, like, you just. You need to. You talk. A lot of guests talk about the loneliness of it.

And I'm not sure I've actually always felt that. I feel like I have great community, my wife's amazing. But I think the loneliness only of the fact that like people will not see this the way that I see this was a hard challenge and I think something that I don't know if I'm having any good advice at all, but people need to get around to sooner rather than later. Jeremy, we will put a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. Great people can reach out if they have questions.

[01:46:54 - 01:47:29]

Will Smith: I think there's a lot, a lot in your story and in your personality and energy that will, that will draw people. So I really thank you for sharing it and for being vulnerable about this leadership trajectory that you're on. I relate to it and I'm sure there are other people out there who will. And as I said at the very top, I think that it's taken me kind of 380 episodes to crystallize, but be coming a small business owner. I think perhaps why this path is so hard is some flavor of.

[01:47:31 - 01:48:41]

Jeremy Hunka: Have. It learning to be a leader in this environment and few people, many people struggling with that and maybe there's no way around, but through there's not. There's not a way to do this other than just doing it. Yeah. And I think I feel that in a lot of ways.

I think there are times like last summer where I think I was willing to say, I think I regret this. And now on the other side of it, I'm like, no, I think I'm glad that I went through it. There are things I certainly would have done differently, but there are things I never would have learned had I not gone through it. Right. But yeah, would love for people to reach out.

Thank you also, Will, for everything and for making a space that I can talk about crying so frequently on one podcast. And if there are people who are. Have already bought a business, are in the middle of that, I'd love to talk with you and help you the best I can on that side of things as well. Right. And you are in Denver where there's a big eta community are you at the meetups from time to time.

I should go to them more than I do. I was going before I bought the business and then honestly, I have to even admit I stopped listening to you for a while. I just had to head down, stop talking to people who are too exciting and amazing for a while and just figure out my own stuff for a while. So I should start doing them now that I am figuring out what's next for myself. Great.

[01:48:42 - 01:49:30]

Will Smith: Great. Well, thanks for coming on. Jeremy Hunka thank you. Hope you enjoyed that interview. Don't forget to subscribe to the Acquiring Minds newsletter.

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