Host: John Schuler was a guest last year shortly after buying an appliance repair business in South Carolina. In that interview, we covered all the details of his acquisition, including the many attractive features of the business he bought. It was a need to have service. It had contracts with home warranty providers and appliance manufacturers that supplied a steady stream of business. The owner worked probably less than 10 hours per week. There was a strong culture in the little company. Well, John and I spoke during what he now reflects back on as the honeymoon. Sometime later he hit choppy waters, including losing a customer that accounted for 20% of his revenue. It got dark. It was hard. And one of my favorite parts of this catch up with John is where we discuss what this hard really feels like. It can be trite to say small business is hard. John himself had heard that a hundred times before he bought his business, but it was only once he experienced the crucible himself that he really understood the special merciless species of hard that small business can be. He did survive and the business is stronger for it. So there is both darkness and light in this episode. In fact, John is quite optimistic for the future and he remains as confident in his decision to go down this path as ever. Please enjoy my conversation with John Schuler, owner of Appliance Professional. 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. Top of the list for most acquisition entrepreneurs after they close on the business is digital marketing. Is the business doing it properly or at all? Has the website been touched since 2005? In many cases that website is going to need an overhaul. Eversight is a firm that works with searchers to do custom redesigns of their websites for a flat monthly fee so you don't need to spend down your precious working capital for a custom redesign of the website. That and all ongoing support is baked into their monthly fee. So your website cost is simple and predictable month after month with the assurance of knowing that you can ping the folks at Eversight for any changes you might need and you will talk to a human. Call or email your Eversight rep, make a request and expect your changes live in hours, sometimes minutes. There is so much going on when you transition that business you buy. Make the website management easy by putting it in the capable hands of Eversight. Check out Eversight.com searchers E V E R S I T E.com searchers John Schuller welcome back to Acquiring Minds.

[3:12] Guest: Thanks so much, Will. So glad to be here, John.

Host: Your original episode aired in January 2022, so just over a year ago, you had closed on your business the previous October. So October 2021, and we were talking then, you'd only been in the seat a couple of months. It has been 14ish months now. And you're older and wiser and in a position to reflect back on some of those ideas and impressions that you had shared with us the first time around. So we're eager to hear some of these reflections. But first things first, John, please just give us a quick refresher on the business that you bought.

Guest: Sure. So I bought an appliance repair company in, I would call a midsize city in South Carolina where we had seven technicians, three office staff, and a part timer, plus the owner who left, left the business when. When he sold. And so we just focus on residential appliance repair.

Host: Excellent. And give us a sense of, like, size of revenue, ballpark, if you could.

Guest: Yeah, they were doing about 1.2 million. It had increased by 15% every year for three years prior. So. So it appeared to be growing at a pretty steady clip and was somewhere between 202 and 50 SDE, depending on how you count it.

Host: And you had moved from Virginia, you'd moved your whole family to kind of settle down where you ultimately bought. There was a lot of uprooting your family to do this. And also. But kind of you wanted to lay roots down in the city where you ultimately settled. Right. That was kind of the personal backstory.

Guest: Yeah. So my wife and I are actually both from here and had moved away five years prior. So this was, for us, it was coming back home, back to our parents, you know, our kids, grandparents, a lot of friends we had. So it was great to relay a lot of those roots, but it was, you know, disruptive as any move with. With kids can be.

Host: Yeah, for sure. Great. John. Well, just give us the headline. 14 months into this, how do you feel?

Guest: I feel great.

Host: Simple question, right?

Guest: Yeah, it's easy. It's easy. I feel great today, right now, at this moment, I've learned to ride the roller coaster. I mean, hourly ups and downs some days, but I've been. I think the best way to describe the feeling is that I have paid a great deal of tuition to this point and have learned enough that I. I actually feel really good right now. Like, we've. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel and. And so I'm really excited about the future of this company, and we're. And feel like we're kind of on that threshold of being where. Where I'd really like to be.

[6:09] Host: Excellent. Well, that's. That's certainly positive. You refer to a roller coaster ride. So it's. There's been some down. Been some down moments, some. Some white knuckled moments. Has it been dark at times?

Guest: Yes. Yeah. So when. When we talked for. For an interview last year, I think that was about halfway through. You know, what I kind of now think of as a honeymoon period where I came in on day one. I explained that I wanted to keep everything the way it was, that I, you know, bought what I thought was just a really great company, and I wanted it to continue being that way. Nobody quit on day one. We kind of made it through that first week of jitters, and then I think there was just a couple months where we were all kind of holding our breath and waiting and seeing. And through various things that were mostly out of my hands, we ended up losing almost all of our volume from a really big customer that paid us really well, and that essentially wiped away 20% of our revenue overnight. So that created a ton of problems, having to take on more work that was less profitable. Technicians commissions weren't as high as they had gotten used to, you know, were harder to cover overhead and all that. And so that kind of was the. A big. The end of the honeymoon period, which began the period of kind of falling off in a lot of ways, is that the effects of that big loss rippled through the process and the personnel. And then we've been slowly building back up since that. And so, you know, that's why I say right now I feel really good. But it's been a real process. A lot of the, you know, stuff you see on Twitter, in particular from. I think Reg Zeller has the best one about being in the fetal position in your bathroom at 2am I haven't gone fetal, but I've. I've shed tears. It's been pretty dark at times, and you don't see the. The end in those days. But yeah, where. Where we are, you know, a year removed from that now, we're. We're feeling a lot better.

Host: Wow, John, that's. That's powerful. And. And to just add a little bit of color to this particular detail of your journey. In the appliance repair business, you can get customers just calling you direct from the Internet or whatever, or you can also get customers from the appliance companies. Them, the manufacturer who feeds you leads or feeds you more than leads, custom true customers, I guess. And it was one of those relationships that went, went away, correct? Yeah.

[9:05] Guest: So there's, there's manufacturers, there's also home warranty companies and we contract with a good many of those. When I bought the business, I was really excited about the high percentage of the revenue that came from these companies because they just send you work orders and you don't have to advertise and that's great. What I did not realize was that you have administrative expenses associated with communication back and forth, accounts receivable, they don't pay you right away and then they, the more business you do with them, the more, the bigger of a dot, you get on their radar and the more likely they are to go find another low cost provider in your area and cut your volume. So there's a lot of risk there, there's a lot of benefits as well. So I don't, I'm not targeting going to 100%, you know, cash on delivery COD jobs but I have, I have swayed much more so towards a healthier mix which may be anywhere from 50, 50 to more, much more COD than, than warranty. So we're, we're definitely at a healthier place now and targeting that healthier mix. But those, those warranty and manufacturer contracts can, can be, you know, a double edged sword.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. And so is this one of those where a year later, as painful as it was, your, you know, your foundation is stronger now because you have kind of, your sources of revenue are, are sturdier and more profitable than they were a year ago?

Guest: Yeah, well, I think I mentioned at some point this past year that, you know, if I had some things to do over again, one is that I would focus on de risking. Right from the beginning I was, I was really excited about having processes in place, about working myself out of the day to day as quickly as possible and building for a, you know, long term future. And what I think I should have been focused on was recognizing that with only a handful of technicians, any one of them leaving is a huge hit to your bottom line or your, your top line. And that is, you know, the same on the jobs coming in side of things. Any, any major customer that stops giving you the volume they always have is a big risk. And so de risking those things by learning how to hire and train better, doing better job of marketing, getting all that stuff in place earlier, that's the, you know, I would say the core of your business is something I definitely would have done better and sooner.

Host: Do you feel like it found that the revenue is kind of more robust, the foundation of the business. More robust.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: You didn't choose, you didn't choose for it to go this way, but maybe ultimately it's for the healthier.

[12:02] Guest: Right. Yeah. So I guess I kind of got on that train to say, so eventually we figured a lot of that out. So right now I'm far more confident that I can find and hire and train technicians in a shorter amount of time. Our revenue mix is a lot healthier, and I'm still working on that. It's so tough to just learn all that from scratch, but it's better than it was. And so we've really done a lot for those two primary categories, but then so many other pieces of our business that I probably shouldn't have focused on right away, but at some point you do need to do so. A lot of operational improvements and just the small things like which tech products are you using and what are your, what, what SOPs are you going to take time to write down and refine? We've improved so much of that that it's just, it's a far simpler, easier business to run now than it was when I first came on.

Host: Well, I just, you, you've just now kind of touched on it, but I, I, I want to bring it up explicitly. You tweeted, you know, what would you have done differently? Somebody asked you what would you have done differently. Right. During the transition? And you just put it so well. You said, you, I would have focused less on how do I get upside and more on how do I prevent downside. And in all of my interviews, I don't think anyone has ever kind of said that as concisely. It's, you know, people are so focused on change and improvement and growth, which is great. We all are. But, you know, part of what makes this such a compelling path is, you know, you're buying a golden goose. And, you know, your job is to protect the golden goose for your first job should be to do that. And maybe people don't, don't. Their, their instinct is not to do that. So, so maybe can, can you elaborate even though you've really kind of, you've already said it, but maybe just emphasize that point.

Guest: Sure. So, and it can be a very nuanced discussion. I mean, you know, upside, downside, those can be terms that are super nebulous and mean different things to every person. In our case, when I look at our mix of revenue, recognizing that I didn't run an analysis to see which of our customers were more profitable than others until we lost our major customer. So once I did that, I realized very many of these contracts we had in place were at rates that lost money on every job. And that's too late to find out. You know, that's a, that's a downside risk, is that if you have a large customer and they leave you, you need to do that analysis for what happens. And it's not just a simple spreadsheet, okay, we're going to reduce this by 30% across the board. Your overhead doesn't go down. You know, I think that's fairly simple. But what the mix that you're left with needs to be analyzed and seen if you can do that, remain profitable. And then the, the solution to that should have been recognizing these unprofitable customers and how to either make them profitable or how to get off of doing jobs for them so that we're not. We're. We're freed up to do higher revenue things or higher profitability things. On the other side with the technicians, I would have spent more time building deeper relationships with them. I was, I think I certainly tried to do that. I did spend time with them. I wasn't, you know, oblivious or ignoring or anything like that. But recognizing that oftentimes their perception of their value is more important than what their actual value is. So, so I felt like we were providing a huge value as a company, But I didn't always do a good job of helping them understand and see what they had at our company. And so it made it easy for them to hear different number, not even necessarily higher, just a different number at a different company. And look at switching when I felt like they really genuinely would have been better off staying with us. So I would have spent a lot more time doing that. And instead of thinking about how can we grow more so that I can hire more technicians and hopefully I can just spend just enough time on these existing technicians to make sure they don't leave. And in the end, if I had been focused on that downside of what happens if they leave, I think it would have led to me spending a lot more time and effort ensuring that, you know, they, they felt successful and happy at our company.

[16:55] Host: And, and so when you, when you talk about wishing that you would have spent more time and attention on the existing technicians or all your employees, is that specifically kind of just positive reinforcement or. Because, because one of the things that you often hear is like, acquisition entrepreneurs, when they buy the business, they should really trust that the existing team knows what they're doing and, and get out of their way. What is the, the good attention that you should have been giving them more of versus the getting in their way attention that you were probably right not to do?

Guest: That's a great question. I think, I think the good intention for me is more positive and affirmative words. I tend to forget about that too easily.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: And then the, the practical side as well of when you know, they had a complaint about the brakes in their van or not having a tool they needed, it was easy for that to get pushed to the bottom of my to do list. And I think that just showed them that that's where they were. They were at the bottom of the list. And I certainly didn't mean that. I certainly didn't want that. I didn't think that way. But looking back, it's a lot easier to see now. Yeah, you've got to show very visibly that they're at the top of the list.

[18:17] Host: Yeah, that's great. What a powerful lesson to have learned. August Felker is a two time successful searcher. First with a traditional search fund. The second time around he did a self funded search. Today August runs Oberle Risk Strategies, an insurance firm with a dedicated practice group for searchers and acquisition entrepreneurs like you. If you've got a business under loi, Oberle will provide complimentary due diligence on that business's insurance and benefits program. A great no risk way to get to know August and team. They love helping searchers. They've worked with hundreds. Oberle is a specialty insurance brokerage for searchers by a former searcher. Check out oberle-risk.com O B E R L E D risk.com link in the show notes. And John, I just want to ask because so often in this world people are buying businesses that they don't frankly know much about the trade or anything about the trade itself. I don't think that you knew much about appliances or how to repair them when you bought your business, but you have learned, you had to learn quick how to hire and train techs, how to just give that. I know this is a, that's probably a very long answer to this question, but try to give a condensed version of like how do you learn how to do that when you, when you yourself don't even know the trade? Is it just building processes within the organization where the senior guys and gals are. Some part of their day is available to train the new guys and gals. What does that. Is that playbook?

Guest: Yeah. I'll caveat by saying I Haven't figured it out yet, but I have made some big strides from where I started. And I don't think that not knowing a trade should stop somebody from acquiring a company. I just think that's a risk to understand. And if every single one of your technicians leaves on day one, there's not a whole lot of ways around the fact that, that that's a pretty bad outcome. What we have done is I have been, I check the technicians in every morning, so I've got my eyeballs on every single job that we do. And with the small size of the company, that's possible. It's not possible in a bigger company. So I have learned to pick up on patterns where there's a lack of knowledge for a particular appliance types or something like that, or how to deal with this particular customer situation and can provide a little bit of coaching on the customer service side. I can provide some resources for them to go to on the technical side, but for the most part, it's about focusing on or finding that, the training and helping the technicians to find it themselves. So in so many cases, it's just, it's, it's not that anybody that does plumbing or electrical or H vac or appliance repair, it's not that they can't be really good at it. It's that they don't know where to go to look or they're in too much of a rush to do it, or nobody's ever suggested they take a couple days off the road and go to a training course. So just pushing them towards those things and making the time in our schedule and making sure that their commission isn't going to take a big hit when they get training and take time off the road for something like that is the way that I'm tackling that so that we're, and I'm really even not trying to get one senior tech that all the other guys come to. I'm trying to elevate, you know, every single person to utilize their own resources and to learn to raise their hand when they don't know something and to learn how to do it for the next time. So it's a slow process. It's probably not the best. I'd love to hear what other folks are doing. That's, that's way better than that. But that's, that's kind of how I'm approaching it.

[22:20] Host: That's great. John. The now, one of the things that you thought seemed like a strong point to this business when you bought it was that the seller owner was only there a couple hours in the morning I think you said he was out by like 9:30 every day. He had other business interests I believe. I don't think he was on the golf course. I think he was doing other stuff as I recall. So it wasn't that you wanted to stop working at 9:30 but you just thought that it, that, that suggested there was a lot of slack for you to you know, not have to go in there and just be right up to your eyeballs and operations all day long because the previous owner had not been. What I'm hearing from you though now is that, that you, you really have been very deeply involved in the operations. You were forced to because this event happened. But maybe, but maybe you would have had to be more involved in the operations anyway even, even if that hadn't happened. And you said yourself like when you initially got there you were really eager to work yourself out of the day to day. So and, and yet you know you got your eyeballs in every job as you just said. So so where are you? What did you learn? What was the truth of this actual business and where are you in that progression?

Guest: Yeah, this is kind of a, a multifaceted answer probably. I would say that what I found was the, there, there really wasn't a ton of need for me in the day to day. So the, the check in process from start to finish is less than an hour and then we have a tremendous office manager that is quite capable of handling very many things. But kind of similar to the, the, the term code debt that I, I really love, there was a lot of kind of operational debt to the company. So yes, the owner hadn't really reviewed any contracts that the company had signed for the last year or so. But that meant there were a lot of bad contracts and that meant that I had somebody call us and say our contract with you and we didn't even have a copy of it. And so there, that's probably one of the simpler examples but just unraveling all of the organizational debt and the, I mean simple stuff like 25 different email addresses that were all used for different purposes over the last 12 years and Phantom Google business profile listings and just things like that that just take forever and then, and so that's kind of one facet of it was that operational debt that I've been trying to work our way out of the. And then another facet is the previous owner was a technician when he began. So what was easy for him to just see and know by feel was impossible for me to understand. And so I had to do a lot of learning. I still don't know how to fix an appliance, but I'm a little better at understanding where we are in different jobs and understanding which technicians are performing better than others in more than just a number sense. So I had to learn a lot about that. And then the last thing was that I think the company didn't have any sort of direction, no future goals or plans other than just we kind of, we'll try hard and hope we grow some and when we get busy, maybe it's time to hire a technician. So I came in and just personally, I don't operate very well in a system like that. So I've had to build. I've been using kind of the entrepreneurial operating system from Traction and I call it EOS Lite for our company because we don't really fit in the mold of that. But we are using that kind of meeting cadence and planning framework to ask ourselves where we want to be at the end of the year and at the end of three and 10 years and then work towards the major milestones to get there. And all of that is new. The, the process and the goals and the working on things other than just getting the jobs done every day. So it's been. It hasn't been that I have jumped in, I have started answering phones like the previous owner didn't. I have been an extra set of hands on some jobs, but for the most part it hasn't been that I have been that I've jumped into the day to day of fixing appliances so much as that. There's just been a lot to work through with the company to kind of keep it as a growing going concern and to grow it into a more sustainable company.

[27:00] Host: If hypothetically you didn't want to grow it, you weren't. You didn't have big ambitions for the company and you invested a year, year and a half even of just the transition, truly, you know, working out the transition and kind of cleaning up the messy bits of the business. Do you think after all that would kind of like settle out, that you actually probably could just work a couple hours a day, a few hours a day and the thing would. And the business would carry. Carry forward, not grow necessarily, but be okay? Just curious, hypothetically, I think.

Guest: I think so. And I've had that thought earlier in the year when I felt like we were getting to a really good point. I have that thought every now and again. Could I just step back if this is running well, and we could keep it that way. And I think. I think the answer is yes, but I think it would be periods where stepping back would just cause a little bit more debt to accrue and our operations would cause things to get a little bit more stale. There's just some. Some functions like finance and marketing that are on my shoulders. I haven't asked anybody else to do much of anything with those. And so I think if I kind of strip myself down to just those functions, we could probably do. Okay. Certainly wouldn't. Wouldn't grow

Host: interesting. Okay. John, you. You did a Twitter thread about kind of the this is hard theme that we hear from small business buyers, and you were kind of like, it's a cliche to say that this is hard. I want to talk about how I have found this to be. Do. Do you. I have it in front of me here, but I want to just ask you, do you remember any. There were six things in particular you listed. Do any of those, like, immediately come to the top of your mind as. As. You know, I guess what would be the hardest? If it's what comes to mind first?

Guest: Yeah. I think the number seven there is that I'm a complainer sometimes, and I like to get online and complain. So that's. I'm not that way in person all the time. But I think what started that whole thread in my mind was how many times I've heard people say about small business that it's hard, it's tough, it's difficult. You know, it's. It's not easy. And every time I heard that before I got into it, I just. I thought, well, yeah, that's. That's fun. I love a challenge. I love those kinds of things. And what I didn't fully appreciate was just how specific that word hard is. It's. It's not like you come home at the end of the day and you're physically tired, but mentally, you're the same way you are as when you don't have the future of a company on your back. And I wanted to kind of get the point across that when you hear somebody say something is hard, that's an abbreviation. It's a summarization of 10 or 20 or 100 very specific circumstances where you don't know how that's going to turn out. So I may say, you know, dealing with an employee who isn't motivated to do the work is hard, and that's true, but the very specific part of it is that I don't know exactly how to Say things to them. I know it's affecting other members of the team, but I'm not sure what I should say to those members of the team. I know that it can't stay this way, but I'm not sure how long it should stay this way or what. My duty is to attempt to motivate before we, you know, head to the improvement plan and eventually the firing stage or something like that. And so it's, it's a very specific hard.

[30:58] Host: Yeah.

Guest: And I don't think that's captured well when we use words like hard or difficult or whatever. And I don't think that there's any way to capture any of that really well. It was just something that was really on my heart that day. And then I don't know if this was a part of that one or part of a different one, but I think the other part that I really remember thinking a lot about was the ability to make decisions under a different kind of pressure than you've ever been before with. The pressure of the fear of embarrassment is a big one for me, which is funny that I'm getting on here telling everybody about it, but I think it's helpful in a lot of ways. But just the idea that it's easy to see a bunch of people doing a bunch of really successful things and just feel like I would go bankrupt 10 times over if I didn't ever have to tell anybody about it. But the fact that people would know that about me is a worse fear in my mind. And it just makes it hard to make good decisions, to make good long term, future oriented decisions that are, that are for the best and, and rather it, it makes it really easy to make the short term decisions to kind of, you know, curl up and, and defend the, the little you've got left to the detriment of, of the, the overall goal.

Host: Because it makes you kind of more risk averse or because you just, you feel like you need to demonstrate these little mini wins so that your audience, quote, unquote, sees that you're, you know, you're being successful.

Guest: Yeah, I mean for me it's, it's, yeah, that, that I've got to protect this little bit so it doesn't go away. That risk averse. The, the, your sense of the risk grows and grows and then feeling like I would, for me, I, I would feel like an imposter to share little wins along the way without also sharing the other losses. And so it can breed this sense of, kind of disconnect from the world that you See, that seems to be happy and doing well, and you start to feel like I can relate less and less and less. And it's, it's just easy to get yourself into this bad cycle that just spirals downward. So unfortunately, you know, to be fair, I've had tons and tons of support from family, friends and people in our company and everywhere in between. And so, you know, I have not had to deal with any of the worst, you know, effects of any of this kind of stuff in terms of the extremes. But it was just as I was writing, that was just something that I thought, like, you don't recognize if you've never been in this situation with this kind of pressure, how, how much it affects your, your mindset and your thinking.

[34:01] Host: Yeah, that's so good. And, and the other thing that you were just talking about, John, the, the it's hard thing, I think that's really, because I agree. I mean, I, I, I think it's a really subtle but powerful distinction, like what flavor of hard it is. I'm kind of as, as you spoke, I was, I was like, you know, know, running a marathon is hard. You know, that, that upper level class you took in college is hard, but there were parameters to that, to that. Like there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was a clear like end point or goal. Like you knew you were, it was going to be difficult, like work to get there. But so the, the distinction, I guess is like, like you said, I think you said, like, there's a lack of certainty. You're just, it's, it's hard and like, maybe this won't work out hard like this really. And it's also not, it's also not like a marathon like you choose to run. Like, if you fail at doing the marathon, nothing bad really happens other than your pride. If you fail that class in college, nothing bad really happens other than your pride, although hopefully you don't need it for your, your requirements for your major. But, but whereas this is like the stakes are extremely high. So there's also that level, the differentiator.

Guest: So anyway, that's exactly right. Without those boundaries, the, the negative results can be way worse than any other type of hard. And so it's, it's not like running a marathon where I know if I just do the training, I can do it, or if I've got a ton of work on my plate, even if I just stay up all night, I can do it. Yeah, it's, I might stay up all night and fail and just be exhausted and Failed the next day.

Host: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like a lot of things in life, like you kind of feel like if you just brute force it, you know, you can do it. But. But in this case, brute force isn't the answer. You can't brute force your way through like an employee who's causing all kinds of problems. There's no brute force answer to that. It's. Yeah, it's great. It's great. It's great. Great point that you made there, John. Okay. We are pushing up on time, so I want to. But I still have a couple things I want to ask you. This, this thread you did close, or maybe it was an answer to somebody's one of somebody who asked you a question on the thread and I quote, I strongly believe I acquired the best business available at the best terms available at the right time for me and my family. Best business ever. No way. Going to be a great investment eventually. Absolutely. Care to elaborate on that thought or does it speak for itself?

[36:48] Guest: I still agree with that and I had all those qualifiers in there. Timing for my family, the best available. But that's life. And I'm still extremely happy to be in the spot I'm in. I always, or at least often, you know, kind of sign off on my tweets with, this is fun. And it, it still is. I still, you know, in spite of all the kind of difficulty and darkness that, that I seem to some, for whatever reason feel is, Is helpful to others in some ways, I, I still can't imagine myself doing anything else. I still look 10 years in the future and, and I've got ambitious goals and where I want to be, where I want this company to be. And I'm not the least bit worried about whether we're going to make that happen or not, but that's where I am now. I wouldn't have said I was there six or eight months ago, but absolutely, I think this is going to be a great investment and that, that I'm really happy to be doing exactly what I'm doing.

Host: That's powerful, John. I mean, that's powerful. If you feel this, this, that level of confidence about 5, 10 years from now after a really hard year, I mean, I think that that really kind of says it all. And I actually, I noticed just to close this out here, John, I noticed that in your Twitter. Twitter bio, you say, I bought a business plans, repair business. Always searching for the next. Does that, does that mean, like, literally you'd be, you'd be in a position now to, to do a bolt on a second acquisition or, or what it does.

Guest: I, we did what I would term a, technically a bolt on a couple months ago where it was more of an aqua hire. We got two technicians in the deal and the, that's been just phenomenal because of the two technicians that we got and the timing of the way that worked out. I don't know that there's been a ton of value in that business itself, but it also came with that commensurate price. And so that was. I'm happy that we did that, but I'm certainly looking at more deals locally or regionally and would love to be able to do that. And, you know, if there was a business that came up 600 miles away tomorrow, probably wouldn't be able to make that work. But, but that is, Acquisitions are part of our strategy. And so I'm ready to get on that today with any, any. I'll look at any deal that comes across the desk for sure.

[39:41] Host: John, I have one more question for you. Just back into the weeds a little bit. You know, my impression, I think from probably our first interview was that there's not a lot of competition in town. You have, I think, like a kind of a big competitor. Was there any sort of sense of vulnerability? I mean, I guess there was poaching of your, of your text, but I was going to say was there any vulnerability to your business that you, that A, there was a new buyer you and B, that this buyer was not from the industry and was kind of complete outsider to the trade? Did that. How did that play out with, with respect to your competition, your competitor?

Guest: Honestly, I don't really know.

Host: Okay.

Guest: I, I didn't, I, I haven't seen anything visible that I would consider any sort of like, direct attacks or anything like that. I think just the way it is in, in, in our particular market, there's not a lot of need for that. There's, it certainly tough to, to grow, but I don't think that either me or, I assume my, my larger competitor is looking at the other one, saying their customers are the ones that I need. So it, I, I don't, I, I was concerned at the beginning that there may be something that they could do, but I haven't seen that. I guess I won't share, but I could think of a couple ways that you could make it painful on a person new to the industry, but I, I don't know that I, I, I don't recall experiencing those. So I'm, I'm grateful for that we got a good break on that, I guess.

Host: John, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you want to share with. With people?

Guest: You know, one thing that I've been pretty bad at sharing is even. Even going through these tough times. There have been so many bright spots. I mean, I. I call it a roller coaster. Every day. Um, my wife asked me how the day was when I get home, and almost every day, you know, typical small business roller coaster today. And I think I've been a little remiss in sharing some of those. Those high moments. Um, there's just great people in our company that go above and beyond for each other and for customers. There's been times where we've been able to accomplish way more than I thought would be possible in a given day or week or something like that. There have been some big wins where we've implemented a new strategy, and it's worked. There have been just really sweet moments with employees and even customers on occasion that are going through something in their life, and we're able to be exactly what they need in that moment. And so. And then there's even these. These glimpses of business success, if you will, that. That we're seeing or a really bad thing I'm worried about that doesn't end up happening or we're able to prevent it. So there's just. It's a roller coaster that has these lows, for sure, but it's got highs, too. And it is just incredible to get to experience and be a part of that, and in some ways, have that pride of knowing that, you know, you're instrumental in something really good happening in a person's life. So I don't do a good enough job sharing those little things that I come across every day, but they're certainly there. And it's like I said, this is fun. This is exactly where I want to be. And it's for all. For all those reasons.

[43:28] Host: Well, that's a beautiful note to end on, John. Thank you for saying that. And I do just want you to know, lest you feel that you're. You know, your Twitter feed is, like, super negative or something. That's not my impression of it. And, you know, you're. You're the. This is Fun guy, after all. I mean, that's your. That's your trademark, so just keep putting that in there. And no matter what you say in between, we'll still get the impression that, you know, you're. You're having a good time.

Guest: Good, Good. I appreciate that, Will John.

Host: So how do you prefer? I'll, I'll have links to all your stuff in the show notes, but any, any preference in terms of how people reach out?

Guest: Yeah. On Twitter at fund of one with the number one is probably the best way. DMs are open. I do love connecting with people and, and having conversations and love to love to help out any way I can and provide any experience or realness or whatever it is that anybody's looking for help with.

Host: Great. All right, John, thank you very much for coming back on.

Guest: Thanks so much for having me. Will, this has been fun.