Host: You ever listen to Acquiring Minds and feel discouraged that you don't have an MBA or a background in finance? This episode is for you. Patrick Norris went from marine to garbage man to manager of a local trash company to buyer of his own trash business. He bought a small1, just 625,000 in revenue, a little family business with a burned out owner. Patrick bought it for a song, by the way, grew it and sold it for $4.4 million five years later. And oh, by the way, he'd also generated a million dollars cash for himself in the meantime. Now, despite not being a finance guy, Patrick did have a distinct advantage. He knew trash, but as you'll hear, that might have also been a bit of a disadvantage because it pulled him into the business when he may have been better served working on the business lesson Being just as important as the particular skill set you bring to a business is exactly how you leverage those skills as its new owner. See what you think and see what you think of the trash business. We spend a lot of time just learning the industry, which was a joy. I loved this interview and think you will too. Here's Patrick Norris, former owner of Mr. Trashman. Quick announcement everyone. An event you should know about In May, the M and A Launchpad conference is bringing together searchers, experienced business buyers, owners and private equity investors for one day to go deep on buying businesses. Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build is one of the keynotes, and 30 other experts will be on hand sharing their expertise. It's happening May 11th in Houston. The organizers are running a promotion just for us. $200. Off with the code acquiring minds. Go to malaunchpad.com and use the code acquiringminds. All one word or use the link in the show notes. 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. What do the following Acquiring Minds guests all have in common? Doug Johns, Morley Desai, Tim Erickson, Chirag Shah, Shane Ursam. 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's success stories. The number of deals across the lab's cohorts now stands at over 120, with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value. 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 in an active community of serious searchers. Check out acquisition lab.com link in the notes or email the lab's co founder, Chelsea wood. Chelsea buy then build.com Patrick Norris, welcome to Acquiring Minds.

[3:49] Guest: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Host: Patrick. I'd been eager to learn about the trash business and one day an email from you pops up just a few months ago and I'm going to read directly from it. Quote, in your interviews, will you always ask about needing an MBA or private equity experience to be successful? I had neither. I'm basically a blue collar worker. I bought a trash company, built it for 5ish years and sold it, end quote. And I wrote back to you Patrick and said you had me at trash. So. So I'm really looking forward to this. Let's get into it. Patrick, please start us off with some background on you.

Guest: Yes. So I went to college at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And after college I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I joined the Marine Corps. I spent four years in the Marine Corps between 2004 and 2008. When I got out of the Marine Corps, 2008 was around. So coming by jobs wasn't very easy. So I took the first job that I got offered, which was working on the back of a trash truck for Waste Management in Boston, Massachusetts. I did that for with Waste Management for about a year and then the contract that I worked under, they lost it. It went to a small company named Sunrise Scavenger I worked for and I went with the contract so to that new company, that different trash company. I worked on the truck for about a year and then the owner of the company asked me if I wanted to be his supervisor. So he was a startup, he had started that company to fulfill this contract. So he was the manager at that point. And then he was just asking me basically if I wanted to do the daily supervision of the company. So it took a little bit, but I did say yes, yes, eventually. So I went from driving the truck to being the daily supervisor.

[6:01] Host: I worked with him how the super supervisor? How many people did you have under you? And. And how big was the fleet?

Guest: Sure. When I first started at that company being the supervisor, we had about 15 trucks. We probably had 20 employees. We all worked in Dorchester, which is a section of Boston. So it was like really, really easy to control. It is a union environment which makes it a little bit different. Um, but yeah, it it was 15 trucks, 20 people, and then it was me as a supervisor, and then him as the owner, and then a couple people that worked in the office, but I didn't do too much with them. So it was just daily operation.

Host: Got it. And how was it that he won this contract if his business didn't even exist? Because you said it was a startup just to serve this one contractor. This was customer number one.

Guest: Correct. Joe, he's probably on his fourth or fifth company in his life at this point. So he had started as a younger person in the trash business, and he had bought multiple companies over the years, sold multiple companies over the years. He had ventured out into other businesses as well, but came back to trash. So he won the contract. The city contracts are bid out every five years. He wins the contract, and then he sets the company up after winning the contract.

Host: Okay, very interesting. Okay, carry on with your story, please.

Guest: Okay. So I work for him for. Well, so I'm in that position. The company's growing. He is essentially like a mentor to me at this point where, you know, I'm growing as his company grows. He's teaching me a lot as we go. The company eventually grows to, like, 45 trucks, 60 employees. And it's still. He's the owner, I'm the operations manager, one supervisor below me. And then. So I run basically the operation day to day. That was probably six years that I did that. And then I started to get frustrated with the situations, so I started looking for a company to buy because I thought that, you know, I. I saw what he had done, and I thought, well, I can do this. So I just started looking on, like, biz buy and sell at that point for a company to buy. I ultimately found one. So I left there to then pursue buying this company.

Host: I'll ask for more color on how you were frustrated, but just to set that up, there are a lot of operations managers out there in the world. I mean, every business has one, and they don't all set off to go buy a business, but you did. So that's. So you're making it sound like a natural progression, but it's actually not so elaborate on. On making this big decision and striking out on your own to. To buy a business.

[9:05] Guest: Yeah. So in my dealing with other people who. Joe had come in to do work for us, I talked to this one gentleman, and, you know, I. We were talking about the business and such, and I told him, like, kind of what I wanted to grow into in my career. And he said, you know, you should really Talk to Joe about how he got where he got. And he said, you know, you're not going to get where you want to go unless you go buy a business. So.

Host: And where was it that you wanted to go? Were you talking net worth? Were you taught what were you talking. What was your goal?

Guest: Yeah, I think what hit. What I was probably talking to him about is how eventually one day I would want. Do what Joe was doing, have municipal contracts and have a business. And his. His advice was like, well, you're not going to get there by doing what you're doing now, because you're going to have to strike out on your own and get some experience so that municipalities would be interested in working with you. Most of the contracts say you need, like, five years operating experience before they'll. They're going to give you a contract. So it was really that person's advice and just my talking with Joe, like, I had already known that Joe had owned multiple companies. And, you know, he started out in his probably late 20s by buying a small company in the Boston area and growing it to the point where he could sell it to a larger company. So I understand it's not like a natural progression, but I just thought, you know, if I was ever going to be that level of success as Joe, that this is what you had to do.

Host: Yeah. And the frustration that you felt was what you already explained that you. You wanted to get to a place where you weren't going to get to on this path, or was there was the frustration referring to something else again?

Guest: Yeah, it's a multitude of things. At one point, I wanted Joe to teach me the business side, so I understood how to get the trucks out on the street, how to operate with the gu. But I didn't understand, like, how to get the contracts. The business side. He didn't share any of that stuff with me. At one point, there was a conversation about how he would share all that information with me. And then at one point, we had a conversation where he said he would not share any of that information with me. So that ultimately, on second thought, maybe

Host: I won't share all that information with you.

Guest: Exactly so. And that was a similar time as a gentleman Jim, who explained to me, like, yeah, he's not gonna share that with you. If you want to do this, you're gonna have to go do it yourself.

Host: All right, so Jim kind of makes it plain that you're gonna go have to go do this yourself. You're open to that. You do it. You what? You quit and then get On Biz by sell or you're on biz by sell while still working at Joe's operation or what? What?

[12:01] Guest: Yeah, yeah, it started out just looking on Biz Buy Sell. I think really ultimately I wasn't even married to trash. I was just like, okay, maybe I'll find a business. And for a long time I just would look at the website and see what I saw. At one point, the company I actually ultimately bought, I actually showed it to Joe because Joe was looking for work to do with some trucks that we had sitting around the yard. And I said, hey, I saw this on this website if you want to take a look at it. He never told me what he did with it. But ultimately I quit there and then got serious about searching. I had a house, I sold my house. I made the money that I was gonna invest in this business by selling my house. So I had a multifamily house in Somerville, Massachusetts. I sell that. I actually moved to Philadelphia for probably nine months while I did the search because that's where I grew up. So I didn't have any family or anything in Boston. So I moved home, did the search from there, Was open to businesses in Philadelphia, was open to stuff in Massachusetts. I had a girlfriend that lived in Massachusetts who's now my wife. So it kind of just went like that. And the whole time I had this business like that I kept looking back at which was this trash company up here. I did look at two companies down in, in Philadelphia that I passed on. One was like a oil recycling vegetable oil, like food from. From like restaurants and such. And it was a one man show. Guy would go around, collect it in a van, take it back to some garage in northeast Philadelphia and turn it into a product that could then be sold to like a. To make biodiesel. And I wasn't a fan of that business. And then I looked at a carrier business, you know, like final mile type more type stuff like small packages. They had people like lo that drove around in their cars and stuff like that. And that was down in Philadelphia. And I talked to him and eventually passed on that as well. The problem with the oil company was I didn't like the fact that you're basically trading commodity. So you had to ride the price of the commodity. So that guy, he had a couple good years, he had a couple bad years, depending on the price of the substance that he was creating. And then the carrier business I was not a big fan of because there was a salesman there who basically had all the relationships. And I figured if I bought that company and I didn't get along with the salesman. He could take my business in a heartbeat. So that's why I pass on that one.

Host: Okay. And so tell us about the trash business back in back up in Massachusetts that you saw and liked.

[15:02] Guest: Yeah, so the trash business, it was a family operation, like a true family operation, where the gentleman who started it, the business, it was him, his son, his son's wife worked in the company, his other son worked in the company and his wife, and that was it. So a true family business and they were all gonna like, once the transaction took place, all of them were gone except for the, the daughter in law. She stayed around for a little bit, but it was a small company. The advice that Joe had given me, I, you know, I told Joe what I was going to do and ultimately he was like, I don't, I didn't recognize it till later. But he was excited for me to leave him to go buy something. He didn't care at all that I was leaving to go buy a company. I think that he thought it was like a great opportunity. His advice to me was, go buy something that you can handle. Don't buy something that you can't handle. Don't buy something that's too big. So he had told me, like, don't go buy something bigger than a million dollars in revenue. It could be too big for you to handle. So that's kind of like where I was looking this business. The revenue when I bought it was $624,000, $625,000 a year. It did have like an SDE of about 190, so I thought that was pretty good. It was asset heavy in that it had like $300,000 worth of trucks. The benefit, the trucks were actually fairly new, which, when you buy a trash company, you're not going to find that because most people are going to use those trucks right to the end of their life, get the most out of them, and then try to sell the business. But the father was like so fed up with the trash business that I think that he was just done mentally. And he didn't care that he was selling his trucks. I mean, one of the trucks was only a year old and he was selling it.

Host: Most business buyers acquire their target company using an asset purchase, which means that you've got a brand new legal entity that needs to be ready on day one to properly employ your new team. Payroll, HR documents, tax accounts, workers comp, benefit plans like medical and 401. You need to make sure all of that is transferred or set up on day one. Aspen HR understands this challenge and the delicate timing that searchers have to juggle. Led by a successful former searcher, Mark Sinatra, Aspen HR can assist searchers to ensure a seamless transition for the employees. If you are structuring an asset purchase, contact Aspen HR for a free consultation. They'll walk you through their proprietary checklist for asset purchases that assesses your readiness for HR, payroll and benefits. Check out aspenhr.com or contact Mark directly at mark aspenhr.com I want to just circle back on Joe for a minute. So, yeah, I had thought that Joe would be bitter that you were leaving because he offers to teach you the business side of things and then he reneges on that, presumably because he doesn't want you to go out there and compete or doesn't want to lose you or whatever. But in fact, when you say, joe, I'm out. I'm going to go do this on my own. Turns out he's excited for you, but he doesn't share that at the time. Just curious.

[18:41] Guest: He. No, he did share it at the time. And I was so frustrated. I couldn't see through the forest. That would be the way that I would put it. He was very, like, excited. And I mean, I gave him like three months notice that, hey, I'm gonna leave in three months. And he multiple times asked me, hey, how's, how's the search for the business going? How's this going? He. So he was not upset at all that I was leaving because maybe he understood that, like, I, I had to leave to go do what I wanted to do. He knew I wasn't gonna get there by working as his operations manager. So, no, he was. But I didn't see it at the time. I was just kind of so frustrated with the situation that, you know, I kind of just brushed it all off. I kind of regret that now, looking back and being, you know, eight years older.

Host: Well, I hope you sent him a bottle of wine when, you know, when you sold this business, which the audience will have to wait to for another 45 minutes to get there. But worked out, worked out pretty well for you. Thank you, Joe.

Guest: Yeah. Yeah.

Host: And then a little bit more on the. Joe's advice, don't buy over a million in revenue. So as a listener to the pod, you have heard no doubt that buy as big as you can within reason. But generally it's hard to find a business of 750 or million or 1.25 million in SDE. In SDE. Not even revenue in SDE. So if you find those, you know, they're great and they're better than ones that are doing 200, 300, 400, 500 in Ste. So. But. But many searchers kind of are intimidated. They kind of are in line with what Joe would say. They're intimidated by too big a business. You know, wrapping their arms around that. The advice is to buy that big because a bigger business is more sturdy, is. Is. Is less risky, harder to screw up, probably has management. You know, it's just a more robust thing that it's going to be harder to screw up in theory. So interesting that Joe, for a guy who is so experienced doing a bunch of these businesses, looking at you, who had a lot of experience yourself now in the trash business, you're a star guy, that his advice was so counter to what we hear in our. In our little world that, you know, bigger is better. Do you. So I guess the. The question would be, do you think in retrospect, that it was a good. That it was good advice, or do you think that you could have handled 2 million revenue revenue trash business?

[21:20] Guest: No, I think it was. It was good advice. He. He and I are both, like, I would say command and control people. So, like, on a larger business, I don't. In a larger business that has, you know, $2 million of SDE, you're not going to have the time to, like, really dive down into what the problems are. And I don't think he wanted me to get in over my head of, like, this company has problems. Most trash companies have problems with routing and they have problems with people. And a big company becomes harder to control, all that. And a small company, I mean, I bought a company that had two trucks running around every day. It was pretty simple to control what was going to take place. So. And there's also, like, the economics of trash. You get involved in that. At that point, I didn't understand disposal, which is like the name of the game. And if you bought a $2 million trash company, I mean, a 2 million. If you bought like a $1 million SD trash company, you're going to have problems with disposal, and you better understand that going in. And I don't think he would have verbalized that to me. But now, knowing my experience, that's what I didn't understand going into this. So having a small company and learning those lessons was actually probably the best thing.

Host: Mm. Well, we're going to. We're going to revisit this concept of disposal because it's such a An important strategic consideration in this whole industry. So that, that's great, but what about, you know, just pushing back a little bit on that. Patrick, you got. You bought a business with two trucks running around. You know, one driver calls in sick and your whole route is killed for the day. So why didn't that. Why didn't that concern you?

Guest: Well, I mean, I can drive the truck and that. I mean, the whole. My whole thought process, when I took that company over, like I said, they had five people working there and it was going to be me and one other driver. And then I had a controller who worked for eight hours a week. So we're going to take their payroll and bring it way down right off the bat. Because I just had the. I knew that I can just step in and do the work that isn't like if someone doesn't come to work, I just run the route for the day. And that's pretty normal on a small trash company. Whoever your supervisor is, or if you're the owner, like, you're going to be out there, you're going to be picking up trash. And I mean, I worked at that company for five and a half years and probably spent more days on the back of it or driving a truck than I did not over the course of the five years.

[24:06] Host: Great. Well, then, returning now to the business, a couple more bullet points about the business that you bought. So you said two trucks. You gave us the number of employees. How many, like, routes is that? Or is it like in. In trash world? How many, like, give us a sense of. Yeah, what is that?

Guest: So a full truck would be five routes, Monday through Friday, one route a day. Right. So what they really had was seven routes. There was one truck that worked five days a week, and then they had a route on, I believe it was Monday and Thursday for a second truck. So I hired someone to do the full five routes. And then I was the guy who did the Monday and the Thursday when we first started. And then. So then a route is a good route from what I was doing is like 300 stops a day, maybe 400, depending on the size of your truck and how close together all your stops are. So what we were doing, which you haven't gone over yet, is strictly subscription based residential service. And in the trash business, there's like different types of service. You know, there's municipal service, commercial service. This was strictly in towns that don't offer trash service, so the municipality doesn't pay for it. So each household needs to go out and find a contractor to Pick up their trash. And so 90, I would say 95% of our business was that there's 5% of like little bit of commercial work, but it was subscription based, prepaid. So the, it, it was a very focused piece of the trash business. You know, there's many lines of the trash business. This was just one little factor of it.

Host: And did you like that about it? Did. Do you prefer. Of all the many choices of, of where, where. What niche you want to serve in the trash business? Do you like residential subscription?

Guest: Yeah. So I mean coming from my background, which was municipal sub. Was municipal residential work. It. My background played the best here. But now looking for like a small trash company, this is the perfect place to get started because everything's prepaid, so you don't have any kind of cash flow situations taking place. You, you know, they're all paying three months. Some people are paying up to 12 months in advance of the service. So you're never really worrying about money. So as a small company, it's a great place to try to play where if you do like, let's say, roll off containers, you're doing all the work before anyone ever pays you. And you may not see the money for 60 days before, you know, after you've already performed all the work. So this is like the perfect business in my opinion, for someone who's starting, doesn't have the operating experience to kind of go out and buy a small business that already does this. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a great business to start because I don't know if you remember your septic guy from Philadelphia.

[27:31] Host: Yeah.

Guest: And he was like, oh, that's a. Wow.

Host: It's an early episode. Man, you really went to the archives.

Guest: Well, he was like, oh, you don't want to start a septic company because you got to buy this expensive truck and then you don't have any customers to put material in. And the trash business is like the same way. If you're the guy who starts it, you're gonna make it to a million dollars of revenue. It's gonna take you a couple years to get there, and you're gonna be kind of beat up before you ever, you ever really get going, if that makes sense. And by beat up, what I mean is trash company. It's like it's 24 7, right. Because the trash never stops. It's the blessing and the curse. The blessing is it's always there. The money's always there. And the curse is, is that it's always there. And you better show up to pick it up. Because the second that you don't show up is when people start calling someone to get somebody else because nobody wants their trash barrels at the end of their driveway completely full. So the, that's the. Like, the saying in the trash business is a blessing and a curse. But to start that business. What I'm making the point is, is like, you bought this $300,000 truck and you don't have any trash to put in it. It's going to take you, you know, a year or two to. Even when you start making money with that truck.

Host: Fascinating. And. And on this point about getting beat. Beat up and, and tying it to something you said earlier about the seller of the business that you bought, that he was so fed up, and we're still going to get into the terms of that in just a second, but he was so fed up, he didn't really care that he gave you a great deal. Is that, Is that kind of what you're saying? He was just. There's a lot of burnout, even from owners. Not just, not just the guys humping trash, but the owners themselves.

Guest: Yeah, there's a ton of burnout, I think, because you either have to get.

Host: The trash never stops.

Guest: Because the trash never stops. You either have to get to that point where you can get in your first layer of management, or eventually you'll get burned out. Because, you know, not only does the trash never stop, but the phone calls never stop. And it's just like a constant. Unless you just stop growing the company. Right. Like, if you just say, hey, I'm at a point where I don't want any more customers and stuff, it just doesn't stop. So if you try to run a lean operation, it will kind of work at you over the years. And especially when you. If you're going to start from zero, it's definitely going to work on you over the course of five to ten years. Um, you know, I know like another guy who started his own business, but he got to that point where he finally put in a layer of management and then his life got much easier.

[30:17] Host: Yeah, I mean, I hear you about the trash, but I could probably identify a lot of businesses that have a relentlessness to them, but that's why you hire employees. I mean, the idea is that you're spreading. I don't mean that you're dumping it on your. But I mean, you're spreading it out across a team and there are shifts and, you know, I mean, at some point you want your. I would think the Solution wouldn't be sell the business, but to grow to the point where you're big enough that you have management, they have infrastructure that you can afford enough people that there are shifts and that everybody has a normal life rather than feeling like they're holding on by their fingernails to go pick up trash all the time. Yeah, but you know, it's, it's probably one of those valleys where you got to, you got to get across that valley and it's really hard to get to that next level of size, to really get there.

Guest: And that was probably, that's probably my biggest lesson in the five and a half years that I did it. Right. So if I had to sit back and say, what's the number one thing that you learn? Number one thing that I probably learned was it would have been a whole lot better to spend extra a hundred thousand dollars a year and put a manager in place. Right. And if I had done that, would I have felt how I felt at the end of the business? No. But when I'm, when I was in the business, it's like, oh, I think you, I, I was taught to run a business on the razor's edge because that's how Joe was. Like, we ran it every day. So that's what I thought was the right way to do it. Now looking back, I, I think I would say to myself, well, I could have spent a little bit more money and had a little bit better of like a work life balance.

Host: Okay, well, speaking of that, you also. So you said one truck, one guy for the five day routes, for the five day truck, and then the other truck was just Monday, Thursday, you were going to do those routes. But when I see trash guys outside, there's two guys in a truck or three, one guy's driving, one guy's one guy labor, you know, dump. Yeah. So what's that about?

Guest: Well, so it depends. If you're running like a municipal contract where you have every single house for the whole community, you're probably going to have a driver and a labor. Like when we worked in Boston, we had a driver and a labor on every single truck. And that was because just the number of stops you're going to complete in a day. When you do the subscription service, if you, if you can do one guy on the truck, obviously your margins are way better. And there's a little bit more drive time. So it's a little bit more acceptable to not put two guys on the truck eventually, like towards that. When my last year we had trucks with two guys on them. Because our roots were so big that we could put two guys on it, still make money. And also with two guys on the truck, you get more productivity so you do more stops in one day. So like when I bought the business, we had routes that had like 100 stops on it. And as I said earlier, a good route has 3, 400 stops. So 100 stops in the course of a day, one guy can do it. Your break point is probably once you get over 300, you probably need to put somebody else on there.

[33:32] Host: And so 300 or below, or like the 100 when you got in there. So you're, you drive, stop, get out of the truck, dump the trash out of the canister, out of the barrel, whatever can get back in, keep driving. So. Wow. That, that's. That. That seems like a lot harder work than just being. Yeah. In and out of the truck. And, and like what's the distance between stops? Obviously it varies, but is it every block, one a block, or is it every 10 minutes? That probably doesn't work out. It's less than that.

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. The math. If you're doing the stop every 10 minutes, you might as well park the truck and go home. No. So it really you. Would you. I mean, at the end we were in towns where like we had half the town. Yeah. So when, as you densify the business, everything becomes greater and that's when you can do 400 stops. I would say if what I used to think in my mind that if I couldn't do a stop every two minutes, then we were not making good money. So you're talking 30 stops an hour and that strictly. This is strictly subscription based business. If you go into the other lines, it's completely different. But for what we were doing, I didn't think that we were making enough money unless we could do 30 stops an hour. Now we had routes at the end we were doing 80 stops an hour, which was great.

Host: But. But when it's. When you have that density, you got two guys in the truck and the driver's not getting down and getting up, he's just pulling.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: A lot of that is 10ft or 30ft and pulling forward 30ft and pulling forward 30ft. Like the guys on my block hitting every house.

Guest: Yeah, exactly.

Host: Even though, even though mine is municipal, mine is not private.

Guest: Yeah. And your guys, if it's a municipal contract, they're probably doing over a thousand stops a day. They're like loading their truck, going to the dump, come back, loading it again.

Host: Wow. Okay. And then Patrick, tell us A little bit. So this is my own big city or big city suburbs, background showing. I thought everywhere just had the city, the city or the municipality or the town offered trash and that's what your taxes are for. Everywhere maybe. Except, you know, if you had pressed me, I would have been like, well, yeah, I guess in rural places probably not. You drive your stuff to the dump. But I, I think I really underestimated how many places in the US don't have municipal trash. So anyway, give us a lay of the land there. Like what, what size cities or towns often don't have their own coverage and, and they have private businesses doing it.

[36:27] Guest: To be honest with you, I would have to make up numbers to answer that question. But I could tell you this. I'm 45 minutes outside of Boston and they don't allow for trash service. So I'm not that far outside of the city of Boston. I would say we're maybe 15 minutes from the closest town that does offer the service. So basically, if you had a, if you had a town of, let's say 20,000 residents, you're probably going to be on that like, break even point or like, because one of the towns that we serviced was Hudson. And when at the end, after I'd sold my business, they actually switched to a quasi town service and they were the big, the most dense town that we serviced. So when you start getting to that point, then the towns start to think, okay, there's too many people here, we need to start to think about offering a service. It's basically, I think it's in line with that towns don't want to raise taxes, but they want to have better schools and they want to provide a couple other things. And also when we talk about disposal, eventually disposal gets so expensive for the town that the town is like, you know, we can't just take everything from residents like in Boston. They take whatever you put out because they don't want people throwing trash in the streets. But what other towns do is they start to limit what you can put out because they don't want to pay for all the trash that we create. And then when you get out to kind of where I live, which is 45 minutes outside the city, they're kind of just like, you know, you can deal with it by yourself.

Host: Okay, okay, well. And so maybe now would be a good time to learn about disposal and transfer stations and how that works and that strategic nuance that's at play there as well. So, so give us a little tutorial.

Guest: Sure. So a company like Waste Management, largest trash company in the country. They control their trash from top to bottom. So they pick it up, they put it in the truck. They own the transfer stations that the collection trucks go to. Then they own what's called, what I would refer to as, like, end site disposals. That's like your landfills or your incinerators. And they. So they own. Once they get the trash in the truck, they control it from top to bottom and on. In my case, you know, I just owned it once I put it in the truck, and now I have to figure out how to get rid of it. When you do, like, a municipal contract, sometimes the town, the city is paying for that. So you're strictly just paid to collect it. The town tells you where to take it, and then they're paying the bill. But on my end, once it's in the truck, I own it. I can take it, you know, to any site that I want to take it to. And I have to go out and negotiate a price for every ton that I take to that site. So if I take it to, like, a transfer station, when I bought this business, we were paying 75 a ton to get rid of trash. When I sold the business, we're paying 105 right now. That same transfer station is charging $160 a ton. So I bought that business in 2016. You know, we're only seven, eight years later. And they basically doubled the price of disposal, which pushes the little guys out, because since they control it from top to bottom, what happens is now they have a cheaper price of disposal. So the stuff that they're picking up at the curb, they can get rid of, obviously much cheaper than I can. And the interesting part about it is, a lot of times you are in competition with the company that you're taking the trash to. So they probably run a collection route in the same town that you do. They own the transfer station. You're taking it to them. So now you're in competition. Your competition can control your price to get rid of the material that you pick up. And obviously, there's only so many disposal sites that you can go to because you don't want.

[40:42] Host: Patrick, I just got to interject. When you say disposal site, when you say transfer station, we're talking dumps. Is there a reason you're not using that word? But I just. I'm taking stuff to the dump. Just. Just want to make sure. Abundantly clear to people. Go ahead.

Guest: That is exactly what we're talking about, is the dump. Transfer station is like our Collection trucks are dumping it in one spot, and then on the back side, they're putting it into, like, a tractor trailer. And then they're. That tractor trailer is taking it to what you would call a landfill. When you go to a landfill, traditional, like most landfills that I've been to, you don't see too many collection trucks in them because the. The collection companies, they don't want to sit in the line and go to the landfill where it takes more time. So they want to go to a transfer station, get the material off the truck a little bit quicker. Yeah. But, yeah, it's all basically a dump.

Host: Yeah. And the transfer stations, the dumps are smaller, so, you know, they're. They're intermediate spots for trash. And then all. Then. Then all of these transfer stations, these dumps, feed into an enormous landfill. That's, you know, regional sort of thing, right?

Guest: Exactly. Yes.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: And then if it's not a landfill, it's an incinerator. But same idea. All the different transfer stations are feeding into incinerators.

[42:03] Host: Well, let. Let's just reiterate. Allow me to reiterate this dynamic, because it sure makes it seem like as a small trash operator, you are at a significant strategic disadvantage. You have to pay to take your tr. To take your trash to the dump. Think of it like a toll. And the toll is set by your direct competitor.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: Who's also using their own dump and will just not charge themselves the toll, therefore, have far less of their own costs and therefore charge less fees to the very customers you're competing with them for. So how is it. How is this viable at all? Like, why is it not. Why are you not immediately just shut up, down and out of the business?

Guest: Well, once you. If you're not bothering them and you're not stealing too many of their customers, then they are making money off of you. Right. So if you're their customer at the dump and you're bringing all this material to them, they're making money off you at the dump. So, like, I had the company that. That ultimately purchased my company, we took all our material to them, and they said to me at one point, well, we would just rather have you do the collection. We'll make the money off you when you bring it to our transfer station. So it's kind of them realizing a little bit like, they can't pick it all up. Two would be the big companies like Waste Management, Republic Waste Connections. Their service is horrible, and there's a way for us to exist in the world of we're Going to go out there and we're going to provide good service. Maybe people would pay a little bit more for it, but yeah, so we can, we can compete because we can provide a much better service than the big companies can.

Host: And they basically determine that you're either too small to care about or that they actually, that you actually serve their interests in some way. You help absorb some of the demand that maybe they don't want to deal with. And like you said, they're still, they're also profiting from your existence because they're charging you a toll to use their dumps.

Guest: Exactly. And so like you're just fitting in this little world of you can make good money just like playing the game and fitting into this spot where they can't pick it all up. The thing is, is once you do become big enough and once you do become a problem for them, they control your disposal. So you do have to play nice, right? Like you can't go and try to take all their work because then you're going to be looking for another disposal site,

[45:02] Host: man. Okay, and, and now you mentioned the three biggies. And Waste Management will be a name that most people recognize, that is a giant company. People will recognize the name just because it's a giant company. We see their trucks, we recognize their logo. But it's also a, one of the most well known kind of case studies of a roll up. I can't remember the founder or buyer, the CEO, whatever guy built Waste Management, what his name is. If you said it, I'd know it. I don't know, I recognize, I don't, I'd recognize it. Okay. And he basically saw fragmented industry and rolled up all of these small trash operators around the country and it became what is today Waste Management. And it was big success. And so, you know, I would say to myself, you know, this in. It's kind of like the classic. It's kind of like in our world we, we look at an industry, one of the questions we ask ourselves is how fragmented is it? If it's still fragmented, is private equity or is there somebody there or is there capital there rolling it up? So if I think about the trash business, I'm like, well, Waste Management long ago rolled up this business. How can there still be opportunity there? So what would be the answer to that question?

Guest: In my opinion it would be like a never ending cycle. So in my example would be this is that I sold my business and within a year there were two smaller companies that popped up in all those towns to try to take from the larger company that I sold to. So I sold. And actually in this, a couple of the same towns, another company sold. We both sold to the same time. So the weight, the waste connections is who ultimately bought us. They were rolling up this little region. They had bought their platform company in the New England region and then they were just buying up the some of the little players in that area. And immediately two companies show up startups. You know, random guys in a pickup truck was one of the companies and now another one actually bought a trash truck. But they started taking customers. So in my opinion, it's probably like a five year cycle where, you know, they buy, then the service isn't good. So then people start to come back into that area and again, they can build a good customer base just on the fact that these big companies don't provide good service.

Host: And why do you think that the big companies can't figure out how to provide good service? Is it that, is it an economic thing where it just doesn't make sense for them to, or is it just kind of the classic service tends to decline as a company gets big, Sort of dynamic?

[48:01] Guest: Yeah, I think it's probably the second one service declines we talked about earlier. Like me and Joe are like control people, command and control. And at a larger company, you can't control everything. Right. So the management doesn't know the roots, the drivers know the routes. And you know, if that guy goes on vacation and the person they stick in the seat misses 10% of the route, we got a problem. Or just in like the culture of COVID you know, where you can't find truck drivers. So if a guy goes on vacation, waste management will legit leave his route for the whole week. They just say, okay, well we don't have anyone to do this, so we're just not coming. We'll see you next week. I mean, there were multiple times where waste management would leave a whole town on for a month and they just, they don't have the people. Yeah. Wow. Now in that situation, our phone rings.

Host: It's unbelievable.

Guest: Yeah, no, it's so that. And our business was built on that. So like in the summertime when waste management stops picking up, our phone rings like crazy and then all we have to do is show up. And like Joe used to say, this business is easy. You have a good price, you show up when you're supposed to be there. And if you do that, you'll have a good business. But it totally runs in a cycle. In what I believe, I think the hardest part now Compared to before is that the big companies really do control the disposal sites. So you have to understand the disposal piece. When I bought Mr. Trash Fan, the name of the company, I didn't think too much about disposal. And now going through the process, that would be my number one question. If I went to buy a company, a trash company tomorrow. The first question I'm asking is where are we disposing of this trash and what's it going to cost us? Because if the answer is, you know, we go to a waste management site, I'm gonna pay a whole lot less for that month for that business than if they say like oh, we have a good deal over at this regional company because you're going to get a much better price at a regional player than a national player. Does that make sense?

Host: Yeah, it makes sense, but you need to be really sure because even if the, the cost is some X today, the price of dumping is X today. Of course it could, can and likely will go up. So I assume there are multi year contracts that a trash company negotiates with a transfer station to, to lock in that pricing for some amount of time.

Guest: For, for certainty's sake, once you beget, once you become big enough, you can negotiate a price. If you are one truck operation, they're not going to negotiate with you. They're going to say like here's your rate and they'll probably going to keep it for like a year or so. A bigger player, you know, once you probably have let's say 10 trucks or so. I mean I had like, I had six trucks when with four full routes and like I would get a 12 month price out of our. But it was a regional company, it was not a national player who can, who had the transfer station. They would give me a price for 12 months and I had a really good deal with them and they again, we like played nice with each other. We like would, we would trade routes. At one point like I was in a town that they wanted all my customers and they said hey, we'll give you all of our customers over here in this town if you give us all of our, of your customers over here. And then we'll stay out of each other's way and then you have this nice disposal price over here. Does that make sense?

[51:55] Host: Mm.

Guest: So there is a lot of working together. I think when you can find like a nice regional larger company in your area that controls some stuff. I don't think there's any playing nice when you're running up against like a national company.

Host: Okay, good Tip. So first thing you'd want to diligence. Me? Well, one of the first things you'd want to diligence is the transfer station situation, the disposal piece of the business.

Guest: Correct? Yeah.

Host: Yeah. This is just fantastic, Patrick. All right, so let's return to your story, your deal. Tell us. So reminder everyone. It was doing 625 in revenue, about 190sde. Two trucks in good condition with a value at about 300,000.

Guest: Yeah, so it was actually three trucks. They had a, you know, a spare.

Host: And then.

Guest: Yeah, so the two main trucks, one was two years old. One was one year old. The other one was at that point, probably 8 years old. And then obviously the other asset is the carts. So what, not only do you have to pay for the trucks, but you pay for the carts that you put at all the customers houses. Right. So each. I was going to get a trash barrel and a recycling barrel. Some smaller companies do it. We're like, hey, you go get your own barrels and we'll empty them. But that really kills the economics of what you're doing. The real reason you're giving them the barrels is so that you can say, we're not taking anything outside of the barrels, which means that you can estimate how much trash you're picking up every week. So when you start saying, like, oh, go get your own barrels and we'll just empty them now, you can't estimate what your disposal is going to be. You can't control that anymore. So that's the real reason that the trash company is giving them out to you. And then all your rates are based on, like, what we. How much trash we think can fit inside that barrel. And if you wanted to know, 40 pounds household of trash and like 20, 25 pounds of recycling each week coming out of the house. It's pretty, you know, different communities depending on socioeconomics that kind of varies, but if you use those numbers, you'd be pretty accurate.

[54:21] Host: 40 pounds. Interesting that this week when I take my trash to the curb, I'll wonder it's more or less than 40 pounds.

Guest: Typical family of four, probably.

Host: Okay. Okay. We might be. Might be a little light then.

Guest: All right. Yeah, yeah.

Host: So. So tell us about the terms of the deal.

Guest: Yeah, so the deal, I bought this company for 624,000. So basically I kind of like went back and looked after our initial call and looked at some things. I paid like 1.8 of SDE, which is very low. So like I said, this guy who I bought it from, he was kind of Done. I, you know, said that the assets of the company were worth 300,000. And then on the SD, I was only then paying 325. So it was a good deal, in my opinion. And it kind of ruined me for being able to buy a couple other companies. Because when I looked at my first couple companies to like, add on to this, I was thinking, like, whoa, why am I not getting the same. Why am I not getting this great deal that I got last time? And these, you know, the two individuals who I first spoke with about buying their companies, they were like, no way. Like that. This is not going to happen. And so it was a little bit of education there. And that's when I kind of realized that I had gotten this good deal. But so, Yeah, I paid 624. Conventional loan. A local bank, you know, they gave me the, the loan on the assets, and then I had to come up with the rest of the money. So I had like over 50% of equity in it. I put in, you know, the 325 of my own money, and then I had that loan for 300,000 from the bank.

Host: Right. But wait, when. When you say 1.8 of SD, I thought you said the SD was 190

Guest: on day one, after I buy the business, I have $300,000 worth of assets. So what I. He had to pay all these loans off. So he is walking with. I'm basically his SDE of 190. I'm only paying him 325 on that because I have 300. I walk out of the deal with $300,000 worth of assets. Does that make sense? So if I liquidate company on day one, I'm sticking 300. I have 300,000 of my money back right away.

Host: Exactly. So. So it was. They used bought it for 624, but there was $300,000 of assets in there.

Guest: Yes.

Host: So. So, so really. So in terms of just the revenue that you bought, it was 300. 624 minus 300 is 324 is the way you're thinking about it. And 324 is about 1.8x of the 190. Of the 190 ste. Okay.

[57:19] Guest: Yeah. Does that make sense?

Host: It does make sense. Yes. Thank you. And so as you learned, this was a sweet deal and all because he was just burned out.

Guest: Yes. And he knew that, like, his kids wanted nothing to do with the business. And I, I think his kids probably weren't capable of carrying the business on. He was a very smart individual in my opinion, but he knew that they were not going to carry this business on. So I think he was done. He had moved over an hour away from where he parked his truck. So for him to go to work, it now became a hassle and he was just kind of done with the trash business.

Host: Okay, fair enough. Sorry. Circling back to the price again. It was 624, but you also said the revenue was 625. So is that a coincidence or did he. Was he thinking, basically, I'll sell it for 1x revenue? I mean, that's a really.

Guest: That conversation. He had it, to be honest with you, he had it listed at like 750 and he had it listed for two years. And I actually, my wife was very good friends with a business broker. And so my, my then girlfriend, who's now my wife, said to me, hey, why don't you talk to Sarah about this business? And she said, oh, I had that listed for two years and this guy would not move on his price. So now it was two years later, he was with a different broker. And I guess now he had realized, like, well, I'm not going to sell this thing if I don't come off of this number.

Host: Yeah, well, and he was two years more into his burnout, an hour away. I mean, he was.

Guest: Exactly.

Host: And margins, what do margins look like in this business?

Guest: Yeah, you. I mean, from the day that I bought it until the end, we were 25 to 30%. That's like an EBITDA number. It's not like a net number at the bottom because there's obviously you're always carrying like a loan that you're going to be paying. Right. So. But your EBITDA, you're 25, 30% easy. Joe always told me, like, if you do a contract, you. You price the contract so that Your EBITDA numbers 30% and don't go below that. Or he said, you know, you'd be in trouble because when you do a contract, you got huge loans, usually for the first five years, because you have all the trucks and stuff like that.

Host: Mm. And. And yeah. So a truck. How much does a truck cost and how long does it last? I mean, how much do you, in your own mind, do you kind of factor in depreciation for the trucks?

[1:00:02] Guest: Yeah. So the nail. A truck is going to cost you. Like, I bought a truck towards the end of my business when we paid 325 for it. You're talking 400,000 for like a really nice truck. So a brand new truck, you're talking 350, $400,000. You want to get 10 years out of it. After 10 years, you're gonna start to like, the body's gonna be pretty beat up. So you're going to be putting a lot of work into the body. I mean, after five years, you're going to be putting work into it. A trash truck, you can count on like 20 to $30,000 in maintenance and repairs every single year. And that's after one year. So you run that truck for one year, you're like putting tires on it, just changing the oil and, and keeping up with filters and stuff like that. And then things are going to start to go wrong because, you know, you're pretty hard on the trucks. A lot of stopping and starting. And then there's the whole, the hydraulic system, which brings like a whole new level of expenses, right? Because if you're just running a dump truck, it's a lot cheaper because there's only one cylinder on it to make it go up and down where a trash truck has, you know, maybe I'm going to say 8 to 10 cylinders on it and all these hoses and sensors and all kinds of stuff. And it, it. The maintenance is pretty expensive over the years. But if you can get, like, if you bid a municipal contract, you're going to pay for the truck in the first five years and then you're going to try to get the contract for the second time, and then you're not going to have any loans. You're going to. So that's like where you make your money is that second five years when you're not paying off the trucks, but you can still run them.

Host: Okay, but those 25 to 30% margins. EBITDA. So not in. So that does not factor in, of course, the heavy expense of the maintenance expense of the trucks and loan expense.

Guest: Well, no maintenance expense would be above that. Right. It's just, sorry, paying off your. It would just be paying off your loans. Um, like when I had at my business, I mean, we had like three loans that we were paying because every time you bought a truck, you got. Now you got another loan. So it is like search. I think people, you know, they don't want a huge capex. Right, right. In this business, there's a lot of money in buying the barrels, buying the trucks. So there is a big capex here, but I think the margins are, are decent enough to explain it or like to justify it, you know. And then ultimately, if you're going to run the business for 10 years, hopefully there is some Time in there where you have trucks that you're not paying for anymore and then you will make good money on those routes.

[1:03:01] Host: Yeah, yeah. But you know, if you're growing, which you hope that you are, you're also always buying, getting new routes that you have to get new trucks for. So. Yeah, so I guess you think of things in terms of like the profitability cycle, life cycle of a particular route, so. Of a particular route. Yeah, for the first five years it's more expensive, you pay off the truck. The second five years, it's. It's pretty gravy, right? Something like that.

Guest: Yeah. Yes. That would be kind of one way to think of it. Definitely in like the municipal world and where things are contracted. It is definitely that way in the subscription world where nothing's contracted. It's I think, a little bit different of a mindset,

Host: of course, because your roots are always in flux because people, you got churn people new, new customers, other customers churn out.

Guest: Exactly, yes. So one thing about churn and this business, I think what you have to think about is real estate. I would say the majority of this of the subscription service turns over because of people coming and going in housing. So, you know, you move in, you got to find a trash company. If that trash company does a good job, you never change. So you could live there for 10 years and the whole time you have one company. So I was having a conversation with someone recently who wants to do what I did and I said, you know, I don't know what the current housing market is going to do to this business because, you know, in the summertime we would have months where we got 200, 300, 300 new customers in a month because of people coming and going out of their houses. Now if we got 250 customers, we may lose 100 too. So we're still positive. 150 for the month. But my point to this gentleman was last summer in the town I live in, there were five houses for sale. So that opportunity to grow the business in a cold real estate market is going to be less than in a hot real estate market because you're just not going to have that house changing hands, which is the open door for the business to grow.

Host: Okay, interesting. I find, I find that a little counterintuitive because I would have thought, I mean, I guess it all comes down to that ratio that you just gave where if there's people move coming and going in a neighborhood, you assume you're going to generate more new business than you are going to Lose business. But why. Why do you make that assumption? Why did you say, you know, we might get to. Why do you get 250 customers but only lose 100? I would think it would basically kind of net out. All things being equal, it basically be

Guest: a wash. Well, we were the best trash company in town. Yeah, so. So that's where our reputation was. The way that people found us mainly was our website. And our website was set up so that through basically them going on to our website, putting their information in, and two email exchanges, our service would be set up. No phone call. I could be out on a route and basically be signing people up at the same exact time. Because literally it was one email that I would just have to respond to acknowledge the fact that they were going to be set up. So the ease of how our website made it so that people could sign up, I think got us a lot of customers. And also, all these little towns have these Facebook pages. And someone goes on the Facebook page and says, hey, what trash. I just moved into town. What trash server should I use? And if 50 people go on there and say, Mr. Trashman, we're going to get it. And that's exactly what it was. My wife used to, like, monitor each town that we operated in their Facebook page. And she would say, hey, you know, 50 people in Hudson said today that you guys were the best company, so you're going to get some phone calls and that's exactly what would happen.

[1:07:08] Host: That's so cool, Mr. Trash Man. That's so cool. Okay, Patrick, have we learned everything we need to about the kind of the lay of the land of the trash business we talked about? Trash never stops. People don't cancel as long as you're providing good service or if they move. Was there anything more to say about municipal contracts versus the residential where you played? You had said earlier that you got into it, you know, your aspiration when you were still working for Joe is that you get these municipal contracts. Contrast those two types of businesses. For us, a municipal trash business, where you're basically contracted by the city and operating under the banner of the city versus private.

Guest: Yeah, I think municipal is still a great space to be in. Our. The business that I was in, it's obviously like a smaller business. It's more like a niche business. The municipal contract business is. I think it's a great business to be in once you have the operating experience. Like I said earlier, to get one of those contracts, you need some operating experience first. It's hard to do a startup with no experience in the background. But once you have this experience, you know, the, one of the municipal contracts we have for the city of Boston, and this was 10 years ago, was like $7 million. So it's a big chunk of work to grab all at once. It is. The positive of that is that you're not hamstring by disposal. So if I was going to start, if I was going to go back into the trash company today, where, where I live, disposal is very tough. So if I wanted to go back into the trash business right now, what I would do is take my five years that I have of operating experience and try to go get a municipal contract because now I don't need to play the disposal game because the town's going to pay for it on like a, on a small municipal contract. So like, let's say you have like a small town that has like two trucks. The town is not going to cover disposal. So what you, what you kind of need is like a mid sized town. So like not the city of Boston, but maybe a suburb of Boston. So maybe one or two towns outside the city, they're still going to cover their disposal, but they're not a huge contract. So that would be like a great spot to start. And you don't have to play the disposal game. There are, there's like a town that's close to me, but it's like a one truck town and you actually have to cover their disposal so you're responsible for getting their price. But the biggest difference between the subscription business and the municipal contract is that it's easier for a small player to get into the subscription business because you can start with like that one little truck, one guy doing it all and starting to grow that business out.

[1:10:21] Host: Yeah. Yeah.

Guest: Is that the answer that you, you were thinking of?

Host: That's great. No, that, that, that was great, Patrick. And now tell us what is labor like? Is it, is it an easy business to hire for some. Something tells me it's probably not.

Guest: In my experience, labor, labor is very hard. Next to disposal, it's probably your biggest turtle. Obviously everyone knows CDL. People with CDLs in this country just get smaller and smaller all the time. So it's a competitive market because there's not a lot of people out there with CDLs. And to drive a larger trash truck, you definitely need a cdl. The federal government a couple years ago made it even harder to get your CDL than it was before. So it's just a continued hurdle. And then we talked about earlier, you know, getting in and out of the truck, lifting up the barrels. It's a physically demanding job. And I would say that your success rate in the trash business is somewhere maybe 15% of people will make it a year. So, you know, 85% of people within the first year will not make it. And it's just because it's physically demanding now as we talk about like automated trucks. So like, I don't know where you live, but now they have trucks where like an arm comes out, grabs the barrel and the. Yeah, the driver never gets out. Yeah, I think that number is probably getting easier. So, you know, maybe now you're at 30% of people will last because now you don't have to get out of the truck, you just have to be successful in driving it. And again, I think, you know, we didn't have any of those trucks in my business. And if I was to go and do it again, one of the things is I would want to have those trucks because now my hiring is easier and I had the rear load style truck where the guys are getting out and they're working harder. So. But those trucks where the arm grabs, they cost $400,000. Right. Which is nothing for waste management. But for, you know, Mr. Trashman, that's a lot of money to be shelling out for a truck. So, you know, it's a hard business. Then you have unions when you get into the city. So then you have unions to deal with. Just when I bought Mr. Trashman, the guy I bought it from said you could hire a driver for 18 bucks an hour. Right. And when I first started posting jobs, I posted them for $20 an hour. And I used to get a lot of applications. This is in 2016. When I sold my business in 2021, I would post for 26, $27 an hour and no one would call. So in five years, we had increased the rate $7 an hour, and we're, you know, $9 higher than what this guy I bought the business from. And we couldn't get anyone to take the job.

[1:13:36] Host: Yeah. And, and of course, that was before inflation. That was before inflation really kicked off. So this is not, this is not a. Because you weren't keeping up with inflation or something. You, you had really increased your prices a lot. Just the, the supply of, of drivers have gone way down.

Guest: Yes, exactly. And I think it's also a generational thing in that, you know, people don't want to work on a railload trash truck. You know, one of the things that I would get frustrated with with employees is they would Be there for a year, and then they'd have their experience, and then they'd go work at waste management, where waste management would put them in a truck with, like, the one arm. So now their day is a whole lot easier. And I would probably have made the same decision if I was them, if I could make, like, the same money. And now I just have to sit in the truck. Of course that's what you would do, right?

Host: Yeah. Huge difference. Getting up and down out of the truck and picking up. I mean, that is incredibly physically strenuous. 300 times a day, picking up trash and dumping it. I mean, you must get all kinds of, frankly, you know, back. You know, injuries. Injuries are probably not uncommon. Nature of this weird. You know, you're this weird movement of. Of kind of taking this big canister, both arms over your head sort of thing.

Guest: Yeah. I mean, workers comps. Huge.

Host: Yeah.

[1:15:00] Guest: So, yeah, there is the. People get hurt. It's actually top 10, at one point is the top five most dangerous jobs in the country. It was more dangerous than being a copper or firefighter because you're in traffic. People getting killed.

Host: Getting hit by a car. Hit by cars. Wow. Wow.

Guest: Yeah, that. And just like it. It's an industry. So you also talk about, like, people getting hurt at, like, the processing facilities and stuff like that. But, you know, people getting hit by cars, people getting hurt by, like, not knowing how to use the trash truck appropriately. Accidents. Think about truck accidents, how bad they always are if a truck gets in an accident. Nothing good ever comes of it. Right.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: So it is a very dangerous industry. A lot of training has to go into it to be successful. A lot of safety and such.

Host: And Patrick, what about the fact that you're dealing with trash? This is a dirty job. We haven't even addressed that directly. Is that an issue or is that really kind of a minor issue when. When you compare it to just how hard the work is, how just physically demanding the work is.

Guest: Yeah. I think there are some people who, you know, after a couple of days on the truck, they're like, hey, this job's not for me. I don't want to be. I don't want to be, you know, have fluid shot at me that I don't know what it is. Coming out of the back of the trash truck.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: Yeah. It's dirty. It's smelly. It's not fun. After a while, you just get used to it. Right. Like, you know, don't put your head there because things are going to come flying out. Yeah. So there's definite, definite people that in the job interview. In the job interview, I used to try to convince people not to take the job. Like, I'm going to tell you right now why you don't want to do this. And if they.

Host: And, and what were the things that you'd say?

Guest: Oh, just. It's hard in the summertime when it's 100 degrees and you're jumping in and out of the truck and you're sweating and you're tired and, you know, you're outside all day. In the wintertime, it's 10 degrees out and we're trying to pick up trash. The long hours, the. You know, a typical trash truck driver definitely works between 55 and 65 hours a week, right? So it's a lot of hours and a lot of physical activity. You're outside in the elements all the time. So I would try to explain to these people, this is what you're get. This is what you're signing up for. And there are plenty of people who in the interview be like, oh, I didn't think of it like that. You know, I thought I was going to be driving a bus, you know, and that we. You want to weed them out because of the expense to keep hiring people, right? When I first bought Mr. Trashman, I. It took me a month and a half to find a guy to stick. And literally, like, every day I was interviewing people and new people every other day showing up until I actually found someone who's, you know, I've had people work for one day and come back at the end of the day and be like, oh, this isn't for me.

[1:18:09] Host: Well, Patrick, the way you make it sound, it wouldn't be for me either. It's.

Guest: It's. It's actually enjoyable. Once you get used to it, you're out. You know, you spend most of the day out by yourself. Like, you know, no one's watching you. You just do your route. And usually, as long as nothing happens, you don't hear from anybody. It's really for a certain individual who likes some autonomy in their day that they can control what they're doing and their day in the trash business. One of the things I like about it is there's an end, right? Like, if you're an accountant, you can keep looking at numbers, right? Like, you can open up the next file and start working on that guy's taxes. If you're a trash truck driver, eventually you get to the last stop and you get to go home and you get to control a lot of that day of how long is this going to take me? Which again, when you talk about employees, one of the things as a business owner that you have to do is you have to control how long that day is going to be for that guy. And one of the struggles is if I say this takes, you know, if I say that your week should last 50 hours and you're making it last 60, you know, we, we have a problem and in today's environment, like there's a lot of people that want to take a 50 hour work week and turn it into a 60.

Host: Well Patrick, I'm just watching the clock and we still have a bunch of juicy topics to hit. So I'm going to move us along here. Tell us what you grew the business to. So, so we'll start at the end and then tell us how you did that. So recall 625 in revenue. What did you grow it to?

Guest: 2.9 million in revenue.

Host: So what is that? Four times? Four plus times?

Guest: Yeah.

Host: Great. How did you do that?

Guest: Well, mainly showing up when we were supposed to. So having that reputation, good service again. We talked about our website, how easy it was to sign up for the service and that the people literally could get it done in like 10 minutes and it would take two emails.

Host: So it was something that you implemented. The previous owner, it was not so seamless. You implemented this correct onboarding thing.

Guest: Yeah. So the prior owner had a website. My brother in law, he knows how to build websites. So he built me a website and we changed a couple things. Uh, we kept like the basic same layout but I mean we made it so that if you googled trash service in the towns that we operate in, we popped up first, we paid Google for that. Right. But you know, it was short money for the amount of customers that we got because of it. But if, if you googled trash service in such and such a town that we operated in, we were always the first one to show up. So that was a priority. The way that we built the website, he built it so that we were always showing up high in the Google searches. We were paying Google for Google Ads, which was, worked well. So the ease, the ease of our billing was everything was very straightforward. I'm kind of like a black and white person and I made it so that our service was black and white. So I don't think that the customer is always right, but I think that if they understand that this is what we're providing you, they can live with the fact that you tell them no. Right. So up front, just Be very clear with this is what we're agreeing to do with you, and then you'll have that reputation of fulfilling at least what you said you were going to do. And I think that while I think our customers appreciated that we communicated well. We had a reputation for communicating well. If things went wrong, we had a way of notifying everybody, like, this is what's going to happen today. And I think the big companies, they don't. They're not good at that stuff. They are not good at communicating. So when their truck does go down for the day, they're not good at communicating, like, we're not going to be there. And people are just left to wonder where we made sure that everybody knew, like, what was going to take place. I think we ran on a tight budget, and therefore it allowed us to have a money. Whenever we needed money so that we could grow the business. Right. So that was the. One of the benefits is that we. Whenever the opportunity was there and we wanted. And I wanted to do something to grow the business, I always had the money to do it. And it wasn't a problem to go buy a truck. It wasn't a problem to go buy barrels. And I think running on that in that tight environment, even though we talked about earlier, like, maybe I ran it too tight, allowed me to grow the business. How many trucks did you get to four full route? So 20 routes in the course of the week. So four full trucks. We had six. You know, you always have to have spare trucks in the trash business. You can't just run with four, because one's always going to be broken or there's going to be something wrong. So we had seven employees at the end. On the operational side, you know, we had three trucks that had two people on it. One truck with one guy on it. So, yeah, we had grown it significantly from the original seven routes to a full 20. I did have two employees who were extremely consistent that you could count on, like, without a doubt, two drivers. Who. One of them was there the whole time, basically. I hired him six weeks after I bought the business, and he was there the day we sold it. I actually had a phone conversation with him today. And so without him and the other. His name's Adelson. The other guy's name was Alonzo. Without these two people's commitment to, like, coming in every day, just like I came in every day, we wouldn't have grown the business. Because they knew these routes inside and out. They could provide great service. They never missed anything because they were there for so long that they knew what was going on. We didn't have this extremely high turnover rate. Finding the third guy like that was very hard. I think right before I sold the business, I hired a guy that could have developed into that. But, you know, having those two very consistent pieces really made the business.

[1:24:49] Host: You know, the observation I was going to make, Patrick, is that like what you did to make this a success and to grow this small business, in some ways it's, it's kind of what you always hear in our world, which is just kind of do everything in a pretty obvi. According to a pretty obvious best practice. Well, solve your people issues to the extent that you can, but then in terms of just providing, you know, like you've said now multiple times, providing good service, providing a seamless user experience and just, you know, and being responsive and being easy to communicate with and kind of not to minimize that because that all takes hard work and consistency. But there's no kind of secret sauce necessarily. And it's just, you know, the other kind of cliche, the cliche you hear is that, you know, just in small business land, you know, just pick, picking up the phone, like answering the phone, you know, puts you, puts you ahead of the competitors. And this start, start what you're describing starts to feel like that's a little bit true here as well.

Guest: Yeah, it's 100% true. I had a perfect example of that is I had a competitor, small business, family business, and I a couple times had tried to call this guy to reach out to, to talk business with him. He would never answer his phone. So every time you called him, it went to an answering machine where if you called our business, I answered the phone. I had a cell phone and that was our company line and I was the guy who answered it for five years. So when people called Mr. Trashman, they got the owner every single time. And people knew that like that's who. When you answered the phone, you were going to end up speaking to the owner, which is kind of difficult to transfer away from. Eventually if I had not sold it, we would have had to transfer away from that. But now I, I think it is totally about how you can make this easier for people to sign up for your service. There's a guy that I know who's trying to sell his business now. He still like charges for each single pickup that he does instead of just giving people a monthly rate. So like if there's five pickups in the month, he's giving them one price. If there's four, he's giving them another. And it's like he spends more time doing invoices because he has to go through how many pickups he did for each customer. Then where I just gave everybody a flat rate. And, you know, yeah, one month you get me, and the next month I get you. But it all works out in the end.

[1:27:27] Host: Yeah.

Guest: So. Yeah, yeah, you just try to streamline the best you can, try to make it easy, whether it's the customer experience or your experience. Like, the employees, they want their day to be easy, Figure out a way to make their day easier, and they'll stay right. So whether we're dealing with the customers, whether we're dealing with the employees, like, figure out the way that is the easiest for everybody. And I think you're going to be more successful.

Host: So let's hear now about your sale. Patrick. What. What did you. What the. So the business. You got the business of 2.9 million in revenue. So as we said, you more than quadrupled it.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: What did you sell it for? What. What can you share about numbers here?

Guest: Sure. I sold the business for 4.4 million. And on the day I sold the business, I had a million dollars in the bank. So the bank account for the business had a million dollars in it on the day I sold it, and I sold it for 4.4. So we had no debt. I'd paid all the debt.

Host: Congratulations, by the way, on behalf of everybody listening. That's a very impressive feat. Sorry, go ahead.

Guest: Yeah, yeah. So at the point I. I paid all the debt off. We had no debt going into sale. It just made it easier that there was no debt. What I ended up doing is I sold to the. The regional company that I worked with for the five years that I owned this business that gave me a good disposal rate, and we would trade routes. They sold to Waste Connections, third largest company in the country. And after they sold, they came to me and said, you know, waste Connections will buy your company. I figured that Waste Connections would beat me up on disposal rates over the years. So I, you know, I was interested in the deal right from the beginning. I figured that my disposal rate was going away. So, yeah, they offered me more money than I thought the business was worth. And frankly, you know, it was an easy, easy decision when they offered me what they offered me.

Host: And. And so to be clear, we're now hearing again about this. This strategic tension with the. With the transfer stations. You actually had grown to the point where you thought you were big enough that your transfer station provider, Waste Connections, Was, was actually going to, it was likely that event, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually was going to start squeezing you on the fee to use the dump there. And so yeah, they were, they were going to start caring. So you kind of, you kind of start to reach a ceiling sort of thing.

[1:30:11] Guest: Yeah, exactly. I think that unless you can figure out a way to control disposal, you start to reach a ceiling. And your ceiling is like either this business is going to cost a lot of money to keep reinvesting into or you can't afford the squeeze of whether it's, you know, the, the, the disposal or the fuel or the employees. But as you get bigger, that squeeze is coming from like all levels. And in this scenario, you know, waste connections did end up squeezing everybody. Part of it has to do with the fact that like disposal in Massachusetts is very hard. So their disposal rates are going up. So they're not necessarily doing it to get every, to take, to put people out of business. Their prices, their disposal is going up because the state of Massachusetts, they're not opening up any more landfills. So they're, they can't get rid of the trash any more than before. So that's why the price is going up. Just a little piece of that, the trash, a lot of the trash here ends up in Alabama and South Carolina. So that's how far it's going to get to a landfill. So think about how much it costs to get the trash from Massachusetts to South Carolina. And that's why the prices go just exponentially going up over time.

Host: Wow. So if I'm seeing a tractor trailers on the, on the interstate, some of those could be just filled with packed down trash.

Guest: Yeah, it's actually what I do now is I drive for a tractor trailer full of trash. Yes. So that's usually like a short haul, like two hours. But they put it on trains and they have whole trains that go from Massachusetts down south into these landfills.

Host: Well, we'll not think too hard about how much, how much garbage we are all producing. But exactly side note, that's just such a depressing reality. All right, so. And you bought it. Remind us when you bought it. 18, 2016.

Guest: 2016.

Host: 2016.

Guest: Oh, and you sold in 2021.

Host: Oh, you sold in 20. Yeah, there it is. Sold in 2021. Okay, so yeah, so five ish years to, to sell a business for four and a half million dollars and have a million dollars in cash in the bank, which you, which I assume they let you take home, you didn't need to leave any, anything in There for working capital.

Guest: No. So one of the things. The service is pre. Pre. Prepaid, pre build. So when I sold the business, you know, I. You do have to give them all the work that you didn't do. So, you know, if you sell in the middle of a quarter and there's still two months left, you've collected two months worth of work that you haven't done yet. So you do have to give that money to them at close. So, like, in this scenario, that was $400,000, roughly, that I had that they kept. So, you know, they bought the business for 4.4. They actually gave me 4 million because they. Of the $400,000 of unearned revenue that was still on the books.

[1:33:37] Host: So 4.4. They kept 400, gave you 4. And then you got to empty the bank account, which had a million into it. A million?

Guest: Yeah. Correct. Yeah, yeah.

Host: So five. So five million to you, it was all.

Guest: It's an asset sale. Right. So, you know, they're buying your trucks, they're buying your bins, they're buying your customer list.

Host: Exactly. That is just so cool, Patrick. I mean, really. I mean, seriously, congratulations. I mean, good for you.

Guest: I appreciate it. It's.

Host: What's. What's Joe say? What's Joe think?

Guest: Unfortunately, Joe passed away in 2019.

Host: Okay.

Guest: So, okay, again, when I look back and say I wish that I had handled that situation better, I see it. I don't. I never got the chance to fix that.

Host: Okay. Okay. We've touched on the fact that I just have in my notes here, I did want to talk about the hiring another driver, because for this whole time, your whole tenure in the business, you were driving a truck.

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. There was more times. Yeah. More times that I was driving than I probably wasn't.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: My wife. So here's a good one for you. My wife likes to tell everybody that when our two kids were born, I left the hospital within two hours to go back to work.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: So, like, once the kids were born and then our parents were there, and then I said, okay, we're good here. And I went back to work that day. We're good here.

Host: We're good here.

Guest: Newborn.

Host: Okay. But in retrospect, you. You do feel like that might have been a little too much command and control personality. I mean, you should have. You know, the. The business school textbook would tell you you should have been delegating. That shoulda and coulda.

Guest: Correct. Yeah. In. If I did it all again, I. That point where I layered in another layer of management. I Definitely would have done that sooner. I probably could have sold the business for more money had I done it, because I would have been able to spend a little more time evaluating my business rather than being on a trash truck. In the last year that I had that business, I made two attempts to partner up with some people because I had realized that it was too much for, like, one person. And honestly, if I did it again, I think I would seek out an interested party right off the bat. Right. Like, let. I need somebody else here who's just as invested as I am. And because if you have two people who are highly invested, it's going to be way easier than just one person.

[1:36:12] Host: Sure. Of course, you're splitting the pie. So there's always that calculation.

Guest: We just got to grow it bigger.

Host: Yeah, but then, of course. No, but. Yeah, but that really, really is it. Well, and so. So that. That's a great segue. And by the way, in case the audience is wondering, yes, we are going to get to the Mafia question, but we got to wait till the end. So, wrapping up here, Patrick. So for the listener who is interested in buying a business, you know, Joe had done this time and again, then you went off and did it. You explained earlier this dynamic of, you know, the big guys gobble up the little guys, and then the little guys are gone. There's green space and. And other, you know, upstarts pop up to. To start doing trash again. So it seems like there's perpetual space in this. In this industry, and a lot of remains, a lot of kind of fragmentation. So what would you tell your listener? You think you understand the audience? What would you tell them about this opportunity? Do you think it is an opportunity for somebody out there?

Guest: Yeah, I think it's. It's definitely an opportunity for people out there. I think you have to understand your local market and that there's probably some markets out there that this isn't going to work because of. You can't find the disposal, or it's just too dominated by the bigger players. But if you understand the market and you can find that, you know, smaller company that has just a couple trucks and maybe they're a little bit beat up, and you. And you could buy one or two of them. Like, if you could go. If you could find a market that had two of these companies at 600, go buy both of them, and then you, You. You walk in at a better situation on day one. So I think that's where it's the local. If you can understand the disposal and understand what's going on in your little environment. As I said, we worked in 10 different towns, right? That's not a big area. We didn't try to take over the state of Massachusetts. We didn't try to take over New England. We just wanted to compete in these 10 towns right around us. So I think that answers your question. There's definitely an opportunity there. I think something else is like we haven't touched on private equity loves trash. There's a lot of private equity in trash as you get bigger, because we talked about earlier, big capital expenditure. So you take a smaller company and as that company wants to grow, they're going to need private equity at some point to grow their company. You know, take a $10 million company to turn it into $100 million company. Like one guy normally can't do that by himself. So he's going to need private equity to push him over the level. And even I was thinking about it in like your guys framework or the search framework of self funded, traditional funded. If you're a self funded searcher and you buy a small business, your whole goal could be just to grow it so that a traditional search fund is interested in it, right? And you're going to make good money, right? So instead of saying oh I have to buy a company with a million dollars of sd, you can be a self funded searcher by this small company and just get it ready so that a traditional search fund would be interested in it. Because a traditional search fund is essentially a small private equity company anyway. Like you're just preparing it for that level and then you can sell it or bring them into the equation and stay involved in the business. So that's like kind of how I see this traditional and self funded search working out in the trash business. That's kind of how I would look at it.

[1:40:21] Host: That's awesome. That's great, Patrick. Well, and it also feels like I've never articulated this. Maybe it's true in every industry. But getting from level one to level two, level two to level three, level three, level four, it gets increasingly hard in the trash business for reasons that we've just been talking about. But getting from level one to level two, meaning 200 SDE to a million STE, that's probably the easiest in quotes, the easiest of the levels to get to move from between and yet highly, highly rewarding. I mean you can, you can make a huge amount of money as an individual if you can take it as you did. If you can take a trash business from 200 to a million in SDE.

Guest: Exactly. I think it's because at those lower levels you don't have the good multiples, but then you get really good multiples. Once you've gotten to that, you know, kind of that level that we got to, or even better, you know, if you had revenue of 5 million, your multiples now are going to be really good because you're going to open that door to people who can actually pay good multiples and are interested in doing it. In our pre call we kind of talked about there's this space that we're living in where like these little companies, like less than a million dollars in revenue, like private equity doesn't want to deal with them and also Waste Management doesn't want to deal with them. If you call Waste Management, you're like, hey, I have this company of a million dollars of revenue. They're like, oh, you're too small. Like we don't want to deal with all that. Does that make sense? So you're kind of in this little niche here where there's a good sized company that you can take to the next level pretty easily.

[1:42:12] Host: Yeah. And just to zoom out, I mean a lot of, kind of what we talk about here and the dynamics at play here, even a self funded searcher is a version of private equity. And it's all, a lot of it is doing the hard work of taking a business from one level to the next and at that next level selling to the bigger fish above you. So self funded searchers are selling them to small. It might, you know, build up their business to sell to a small private equity shop. That small private equity shop might, you know, aggregate a few to sell it to a bigger private private equity.

Guest: Exactly.

Host: And on and on and on. I mean this is kind of the, this is kind of the game. It's just what strata do you play in? And my audience is playing at the kind of, at the, at the individual or partner strata. Down, down, at kind of, you know, not infinitesimally small, but kind of the smallest below private equity.

Guest: So and even those like big trash companies, I mean they're nothing more than a private equity company. I mean they're buying companies leveraged on debt. And like Waste Management isn't doing this but that like next level down, I mean waste connections model is that of private equity. So they're a huge trash company, but they're still in that same mindset of just buying these companies leveraged on debt.

Host: Great point. How does somebody do this and not have to drive the truck? How does somebody honest Question. I know it sounds like prissy and well, you know, you want to make $5 million, get your ass in the truck, dude. But, but, but is there, Is there? I mean, I guess the answer, of course is buy a big enough business, but not too big that you don't have to be the person going out in the truck. That's pretty simple answer, huh?

Guest: I think that, yeah, that, that is the answer. At a small level that I started at, you're gonna, you, you have to be able to get in that truck because I don't think that you would be able to unless you don't want to make money. Right. Like, you had a. The tree guy from Las Vegas who was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, I have my business over here that I really focus on. I bought this tree company. And he wasn't looking to make like a bunch of money out of it. He was looking to grow it. So if you weren't looking to make your living out of this and you could put an operator in and you just wanted to grow it for the final outcome, then, yeah, you just need to find the business and the operator. But I think the difficult part there is eventually your operator is going to be like, hey, man, I'm running your whole business here and you're going to have a problem on your hands. Right, Right. So he would have to be. He would have to have equity or he would have to have some kind of interest that's going to keep him there. But the other answer is buy two or three small ones. If you can buy two or three small ones in the same area, then it's already ready for that layer of management. I guess the hard part would be there is that you would have to be able to evaluate someone to put in that spot. Hopefully you would keep maybe one of the owners on. So a lot of times, like when private equity buys a trash company, they don't come and buy the whole thing. They buy 70, 80%. The original owner keeps buying 20%, and now he's interested to have the next outcome in five years. So you'd probably have to run the same model.

[1:45:36] Host: Patrick. What an education. Let's close out.

Guest: There's one more thing I wanted to talk about. Yeah, Is that all right?

Host: It sure is.

Guest: So we started this whole thing with, do you need an mba? Do you need private equity experience to do this? And I'm saying no. And a lot of times when I talk to people who come from my blue collar background and they say, like, you know, I have this idea, but I don't know, like, I don't have the experience to run a business. I kind of just, I have a sister who asked me about a business idea and she goes, well, you know, I don't know anything about accountant accounting. And I said, yeah, that's why they have accountants. I don't know anything about accounting either. Right. So I would say if you are someone who wants to go out and buy a business and you're an operator and you know you can operate the business, but you don't know the back side of the business, you don't know the business side of the business. That's what accountants are for. That's what insurance agents are for. You trust the accountant, you trust the insurance agent, you are the operator, and you quarterback all the other stuff so that you can be successful. You don't need to know all that other stuff. That's, you know, why people go to law school. So I think that's like a decent piece of advice that a lot of people don't ever think about.

Host: Amen. It's great advice. And is, is there something in there too about people who don't have an MBA listening to this podcast and maybe feeling intimidated because they see these other people who do have MBAs. Is that kind of where you were going with this as well?

Guest: Well, I think it's. Blue collar workers are going to think to themselves, like, oh, well, yeah, I know that I can actually run this landscaping company, but like, am I, do I understand how to get the financing or do I understand, like how to build the website? Like, and I think a lot of people think that because you own the business, like, you know how to do all that stuff and they don't just think about the fact that, no, you can pay people to do this stuff for you and you don't need to know everything. You just need to find people that you trust. And it's no different than a CEO who builds a team. The CEO doesn't know, like every single aspect that's going on in the finance department. That's what the CFO does. And as a small business owner, it's a small company, but still you need to build that team in the background that to be successful. Right. So in my, what I did is all the people that I met when I worked for Joe, his insurance guy, I called them all when I was gonna buy my business and I just said, hey, you know, we met when through Joe and I'm buying this trash company and can you help me do this? Every single one said yes, you know, like, there wasn't. Everyone was just like, yeah, sure, yeah, I did this for Joe, and now I'll do it for you. So I think that's a big thing for those of us who didn't, you know, go to get our. Didn't. Aren't highly educated that, you know, we don't have. We don't need to know it all.

[1:48:53] Host: Such a good point. Such a good point. Patrick. Thank you. Thank you for making that. What else? I see you glancing at notes. Was there something else that we wanted? Seriously?

Guest: No.

Host: Anything else?

Guest: No, that's it. That's all I got.

Host: All right, well, I want to hear about the Mafia. Is. Is this business. Is. Is there still the organized crime element in this industry that it has a reputation for?

Guest: Yeah. In my experience, I never openly ran into it, so I wouldn't like. Is it there? Yes. Can you avoid it? Yes, very easily. You can avoid it. I think that different areas of the country probably have, like, different issues with it. I think that in a small company, you can totally exist and not run into it. I never ran into it. Obviously, where I live, the Mafia is not around. So I don't think the Mafia's as interested in trash as they used to be because there's no cash in the business anymore. So it's not as easy to move money through the business. Everything's paid by credit cards and stuff like that. So in. In my experience, I never ran into it, but sometimes maybe I think my eyes were closed, if that makes sense. Like, if I maybe opened my eyes a little bit more, I could have seen it. But, no, I never presented with it. I was talking to someone a little bit ago, and they were like, yeah. I mean, if you ran into the mob, they would give you a warning. They would tell you somehow, like, you don't want to do this, and you would then heed to that warning. But I was talking to a guy one time, and he was stealing a bunch of customers off of this guy, and the guy just gave him a phone call and said, hey, you may want to look up my background before you steal another one of my customers. And he said he looked him up, found out who he was, and stopped taking his customers.

[1:51:05] Host: Whoa.

Guest: So, I mean. But, I mean, that was a very nice way of dealing with it.

Host: Yeah. I mean, it could have been way worse. I didn't. Not a single kneecap involved. Well, so. So the takeaway is probably in certain corners, there's a little bit of it. Nothing like it used to be. And probably also very Regionally confined to, to states or localities that people probably associate with the mafia and but for most people listening to this podcast and who might actually contemplate buying a trash business, probably not. Probably a non issue.

Guest: Yeah, I'd say, I mean if you just think about the large companies that are involved in this business and the fact that like private equity is running all over this business, the, the mob can exist. Right? So the fact that all these big businesses are in the industry, like it has to be legit, like because on the lower level. So again, if I was involved with the mafia, I would want my operation to be a couple trucks just fly under the radar, you know what I'm saying? You're not going to build this huge massive business up, in my opinion. But yeah, it's totally local and you could totally exist in this business and be extremely successful and never even know what was in the background.

Host: Patrick Norris, what a delight. I feel like I know a lot about the trash business and I love that you in five years made $5 million for yourself, starting as a guy who was on the back of a trash truck way back earlier in his career. Just very, very inspirational. I think the audience is going to love it. How can people reach out if they want to ask you a question?

Guest: LinkedIn Patrick Norris. I'm there. It's basically it. I appreciate the opportunity that you gave me here to speak and I really enjoyed the podcast. I, as a person who's not highly educated, I guess I would say I learn a lot from it constantly when I'm listening. So if this was like eye opening to me when I found your podcast at like, I didn't know what search was, never heard of it before until I started listening to your podcast. So, you know, I learn a lot every single time I listen.

Host: That's great. I appreciate that, Patrick. And by the way, why, why are you driving a truck when you got $5 million to go out and buy a lot of businesses? Seriously, something tells me you like this. You like the work? You like the work?

Guest: Oh, I love the work. I do enjoy trucks. I enjoy the, you know, the. I would love to be in business again and maybe I will. I think the reason I listen to your podcast is because I'd like to open my eyes to other opportunities that aren't the trash business. I obviously have a 5 year non compete in the trash business, so I can't go back into the trash business for a couple more years. And I think some of it is, you know, I had this pretty intense five and a half years and for a year now I've just been driving a truck for myself and it's a little bit of a break. Maybe recharge the battery so I can go do it again.

[1:54:30] Host: Cool. Well, keep listening to Acquiring Minds to get inspired about your next your next chapter. You'll probably get some inbound from this one. I just had a great time, so thank you very much. Patrick. Thanks for so much time. We're pretty long here, but just couldn't stop myself. So really appreciate it sir.

Guest: Thank you. You have a good.