ot every story in our world sorts neatly into win or loss. Some of the most instructive ones land somewhere in between, and today's is one of those.

Jesse Sunquist is back for his third appearance.

‍You may recall Jesse's first interview came before he'd acquired anything, and his second after he bought a Mosquito Joe franchise outside Trenton, New Jersey.

It was an existing territory, with plans to buy more and build within the Mosquito Joe system.

Three years on, Jesse's report is an honest and nuanced one.

The business is roughly flat against where he started, which of course isn't the growth he had projected or hoped for.

On the other hand, it now runs largely without him: he hired a terrific GM, has only about $80,000 of his own money in the project, and today draws a mid-5-figures distribution for just a handful of hours a week.

So as an investment, that looks like a good result. Against his original ambitions, it's still a work in progress.

Much of our conversation is Jesse thinking out loud about why the business hasn't grown the way others in the same system have — a question he sits with candidly and without excuses. Listen for that, because success and failure in a small business are often harder to pin down than we'd like.

One thread is his friend and another previous Acquiring Minds guest, Neil Finneran, who started smaller than Jesse three years ago and is now one of the largest owners in the whole Mosquito Joe system. We get into what set their paths apart.

(Neil came back for his own Acquiring Minds update, which will air in our very next episode — so listen for that on Thursday.)

What comes through most today is that Jesse has no regrets.

‍He got in the game, learned an enormous amount, and built experience that will serve him well for the rest of his business life. Indeed, his operational chops already demonstrated their value at the W-2 he took earlier this year:

Jesse ran operations for a startup that just had a 9-figure exit.

‍Here he is, Jesse Sunquist, owner of a Mosquito Joe franchise outside Trenton, New Jersey.