[00:00:00 - 00:04:56]

Will Smith: Most of the interviews on Acquiring Minds are with entrepreneurs recently into their acquisitions, but occasionally we'll have guests who've been doing this for much longer and we get to see how a career as an acquisition entrepreneur unfolds over decades. Today is one such example. At 58 years old, Paul Lajoie today takes home a million dollars per year and tallies his net worth at almost $20 million. And it all started about 25 years ago when he and his brother bought a flooring business doing $300,000 of SDE. We hear that story and how it set up Paul to continue buying businesses right up until today.

Given his track record, it's no surprise that Paul has conviction about this path of buying businesses, including versus the alternative of starting them. He's bought 12 over the years. Only one of those acquisitions has failed. Meanwhile, he started four businesses and three.

Of those have failed.

That's a 92% success rate versus 25%. What a testament to to the power of ETA. All that said, Paul does not oversell the dream. When he bought that first flooring business, he moved his family to a more affordable home and traded his Lexus for a beater sacrifice. Long hours, sleepless nights were all features in the early days of his journey.

You should expect the same, he says. Here he is Paul Lajoie, owner of Heritage Hardwood Floors, Maxwell Pipeline Services and BizBuyPro. Most buyers assume that the hardest part of buying a business is finding one. More listings, more brokers, more introductions. But having access to endless opportunities still leaves many buyers stuck second guessing themselves or even passing on the right deal.

Well, tomorrow Tuesday, Chelsea Wood of Acquisition Lab will host a webinar on why Mindset quietly shapes what you notice, what you dismiss, and what you talk yourself out of before you even realize it. Topics to include why not enough deal flow is often a symptom rather than the real problem. How fear, overthinking and mental shortcuts cause buyers to misread good opportunities. What experienced buyers do differently to evaluate deals with confidence even when information is imperfect. This will be a discussion based session grounded in real patterns that Chelsea has seen firsthand while supporting over a thousand acquisition entrepreneurs through their searches and to closing the webinar is tomorrow Tuesday, February 10th noon Eastern Register at the link right at the top of this episode's show Notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage.

Acquiring Minds co.

Welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith. Acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs and on this podcast I talk to the people who do it? 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 lap, the accelerator and community for people serious.

About buying a business.

But they represent just a sliver of.

The Lab success stories.

The number of deals across the Lab's.

Cohorts now stands at over 120, with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value. The Acquisition Lab was founded by Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build, the book that introduced so many of you.

To the very idea of buying a business. The Lab offers a month long, intensive.

Almost daily Q and A sessions with advisors, live deal reviews with Walker, Deal team introductions and an active community of serious searchers. Check out acquisitionlab.com, link in the notes or email. The Lab's co founder, Chelsea Wood. Chelsea@buythenbuild.com.

Paul Lajoie, welcome to Acquiring Minds.

[00:04:56 - 00:04:58]

Paul Lajoie: Thanks Will. Glad to be here.

[00:04:59 - 00:05:35]

Will Smith: Paul, Yours is an entrepreneurial career that.

Started with an acquisition years ago. So a bit different than my typical.

Guests whose acquisitions are more recent. So the theme of today's interview will.

Be how that foray into flooring in the 90s started you along the successful path you remain on today and how buying businesses has been a feature the entire time. So let's begin with the decision to buy that first business, the flooring business.

[00:05:35 - 00:06:41]

Paul Lajoie: Tell us that story, please.

Paul. Man, it's, it's a, it's an interesting story. So a little bit of background on me. I'm a CPA from an education standpoint and came out of school, worked in big six accounting back then in audit department and then worked in corporate world for about another eight to 10 years in various roles of accounting and financial management and things like that. And I kind of felt like I always had the bug of wanting to do something for myself and probably life events steered me that direction.

So got married, had one kid. Both me and the spouse were working and we were getting ready to have kid number two. And we wanted her to stay home with the kid or with both kids at that point, but we needed to replace her income in some form or fashion. Not all of it, but some of it. So didn't know anything about buying a small business other than I thought that's the avenue we needed to go down to replace her income.

Something maybe part time.

[00:06:41 - 00:06:42]

Will Smith: Right.

[00:06:42 - 00:07:39]

Paul Lajoie: Like buy buy a Hallmark Gifts gift card store. Right. I don't even know if those exist anymore.

But you know something that she could work 10 or 20 hours to week maybe make 50 to $100,000 a year, something like that. So we kind of just had gotten into that space. It's starting to look. And my brother Bob, I'm the youngest of, youngest of eight. So my brother Bob's number two in the pecking order.

He had lost his job. He had got a laid off in a big corporate buyout where they came in and just let go of all of upper management. He got a large severance. About the same time I was looking for a business for me and the wife to buy and I went to him, said, hey, what do you think about pulling our money and going, buying a business, maybe something bigger than what we originally were looking at. And that kind of got me into that space of, of, of acquiring that first company.

[00:07:40 - 00:08:10]

Will Smith: And Paul, when your brother entered the picture, was the plan still that your wife would, this would be kind of an operator gig for your wife or had because it didn't end up there. So at what point did it shift from let's find my wife a income producing thing to do part time or you know, part full time while raising the kids at home to brother and I are basically becoming entrepreneurial partners together.

[00:08:11 - 00:08:56]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah, I guess when, when we kind of pulled our thoughts and pulled our money, it kind of went from now maybe Paul's going to quit his job too. So it was all very fluid because we didn't know exactly what we were getting ourselves into our first venture. Um, we kind of had an idea with me being kind of a, a CPA money numbers guy.

And my brother Bob worked at a company called Fast Tax, which is a software company for taxation and, and tax returns. And so he kind of knew numbers a little bit as well. Um, so it was definitely very fluid. Um, thoughts were for me to leave my job eventually. Um, so yeah, we definitely transitioned that way.

[00:08:57 - 00:08:59]

Will Smith: And what year is this now?

[00:09:01 - 00:09:04]

Paul Lajoie: Right at 2000. Oh, right at 2000.

[00:09:04 - 00:09:06]

Will Smith: I thought this was earlier than that.

[00:09:06 - 00:09:15]

Paul Lajoie: Now I graduated in College in 90 and I had about a nine to ten year career. So right at the end of the 90s, 99, probably when we started looking and probably closed on a deal in 20.

[00:09:16 - 00:09:26]

Will Smith: Okay, okay, great. And do you recall what your size, you mentioned size of business, how large you were looking for, how, what size criteria were.

[00:09:28 - 00:09:47]

Paul Lajoie: We were looking at maybe a million dollar purchase that spit out between 250, $350,000. And we thought that again, this is 25 years ago. So if we, if we each made $100,000 after debt service, I think that would probably do us well.

[00:09:49 - 00:10:00]

Will Smith: And so you were thinking about that as you would basically become a small business owner operator, you didn't have necessarily grand plans of becoming a multimillionaire.

[00:10:00 - 00:10:34]

Paul Lajoie: No, that's the way it worked out. But no, I mean it's like, golly. I mean I look back at how young and stupid we were. Of course we don't know we're young and stupid.

We think we're super smart until another 10 years goes by and then we look back like, oh my God, how do we make it this far? Because we were such idiots back then. It's amazing the stuff that you don't know, right. You think you know everything. You think the 10 things is all you need to know, but you really need to know 90 but you don't know about those other 80.

[00:10:36 - 00:10:42]

Will Smith: Well, it's one of those, Paul, where if, if we knew how little we knew, we'd never begin. It'd just be too daunting the prospect.

[00:10:42 - 00:10:49]

Paul Lajoie: That is true. It, it's actually ignorance is in getting into this is actually kind of good.

[00:10:49 - 00:10:50]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:10:50 - 00:11:08]

Paul Lajoie: Because it is. If you knew everything you were getting yourself into, you probably wouldn't do it because it's super scary. Even though I highly recommend it to anybody. But yeah, it's just, man, it's go with what you got and just, and just jump off. Jump off the bridge.

I say that a lot. Just jump off the bridge and move forward.

[00:11:09 - 00:11:49]

Will Smith: Well, Paul, one of the themes from our pre call that struck me was you are a big advocate, as we just heard, a big advocate of this path of kind of burning the boats and jumping off. But you're, you're not somebody who's overselling that. This is the path to riches, as we're about to hear.

Your years in that first business were, your early years were very difficult. You would say to anybody that this path is very difficult, requires sacrifice. So you are both a full throated advocate of the path, but also somebody who doesn't shy away from saying just how hard it is. Usually it's kind of one or the other. I hear from people.

[00:11:50 - 00:12:44]

Paul Lajoie: It, it is definitely without a doubt. I think it's, it's a path to generational wealth. But you've got to know what you're doing. It's not easy. And this is your baby.

You take it home at night. There's a lot of sleepless nights and, and pinching pennies and wanting to know where the money's going to come from for the, for the next payroll in the first couple years. And yeah, it's super Scary without a doubt. And highly recommend seeking out mentors and people that have done it before. Get around the right people, right, because I think that's super important.

Something that I didn't do for probably about 15 years and it slowed my learning curve down drastically. I think I finally got myself around like minded individuals probably in my early 40s and that just changed my trajectory of everything.

Great.

[00:12:44 - 00:12:51]

Will Smith: Well, we'll return to that theme. So let's hear now about the, this, this business. What did you find that you bought?

[00:12:52 - 00:15:25]

Paul Lajoie: Okay.

So first thing I did was once I got into agreement with my brother that we were going to go forward together, I just kind of started talking to my network of what I was looking for and what I wanted to do. And, and I played some college soccer and played rec soccer after college and continued to do so. And one of the guys I played soccer with was actually a business broker. So I was talking to him and like we don't know what we're doing. We don't even know what we're looking for.

We, we weren't looking for a specific industry. We were open to anything. We did want to stay local in, in Dallas, what Worth area. But other than that I'm, I'm open to, to manufacturers, to home services, to software companies. We're looking at anything.

Right? Because at that point we really don't know anything. So I didn't want to be close and printed and, and let a, let a good deal go by. So he presented the first company that he presented to me, we bought. So I don't know if that was ignorance or just luck of the draw of hey, this is a good one.

But the numbers looked good, right? So it, it had been around 20 years. So great reputation, a lot of repeat business. They do a lot of new construction and those guys, we, we're not even bidding on a lot of that new construction. It's just our work, right.

And a lot of, lot of repeat and referral business, et cetera. So it looked good and it generated $300,000 a year and offer price was 900. So right. At a three times multiple, which is, which is great. And it cash flowed and we put, I don't remember the exact numbers down.

It was a 10% seller note and we brought in another 15 or 20% and I got a 10 year SBA note for the remaining 75 or 70%. And my brother Bob, because he had gotten laid off, went directly into running that back office. All the, all the accounting, inventory management and scheduling of the crews and accounts payable and all that sort of stuff. So he ran all that. And I kept my W2 job for about six months.

And then once we kind of figured it out and we were cash flowing, that we would start paying each other $10,000 a month, which was enough money for us to. To pay all of our bills, that I would quit my job and. And move over and act as a salesperson. And that took about six months.

[00:15:27 - 00:15:34]

Will Smith: So you kept your, you kept your W2. He went in as I guess we'd call it operator.

[00:15:34 - 00:15:35]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah.

[00:15:36 - 00:15:43]

Will Smith: And within six months, you got it to the point where you. It was.

It could pay you both 120 grand a year.

[00:15:43 - 00:15:43]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah.

[00:15:43 - 00:15:46]

Will Smith: At which point you quit. Yeah. You're quit your W2.

[00:15:46 - 00:15:47]

Paul Lajoie: So that was after debt service.

[00:15:48 - 00:15:49]

Will Smith: After an. After debt service.

[00:15:49 - 00:15:50]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah. Okay, exactly.

[00:15:51 - 00:16:00]

Will Smith: And give us a picture of the business. Thank you for the numbers. But give us a, you know, it's a store, it's a flooring store, and it's how many employees. And paint a picture, please.

[00:16:00 - 00:16:41]

Paul Lajoie: Retail storefront.

We offered carpet, tile, engineered hardwoods, glue down hardwoods, nail down hardwoods, where we site, site, finished that, that work. Most of it was all of our installers were 1099. They worked for other people and mostly worked for us. So. So all the installers, there's probably 15 of them that were installed in all sorts of different things.

And then we had three salespeople that were employees. So it was me and my brother Bob and then three other salespeople that were employees. And then all the installers were 1099, which is very typical in the industry.

[00:16:43 - 00:16:46]

Will Smith: Okay, and what was the revenue mix.

[00:16:47 - 00:17:23]

Paul Lajoie: From a commercial, residential sp perspective or product?

We were probably 90% what I considered residential, 10% commercial. Commercial would be like an interior build out of a strip mall or something like that, or daycare center or something like that. So that was probably about 10%. The other 90% was residential. And of that residential, probably 50% of it was new construction.

So single family houses. We did some apartment complexes every once in a while, but it was mostly single family houses. And they were expensive.

[00:17:23 - 00:17:24]

Will Smith: They were.

[00:17:24 - 00:17:42]

Paul Lajoie: They were minimum $800,000 and probably went to about 5 million on purchase price.

So these were real high, high end residential, new construction. And then the other 50% was, hey, I live in a house, I just want to replace my carpet or I want to install hardwoods in an existing house, which was probably 50% of that.

[00:17:43 - 00:18:01]

Will Smith: Okay, so 50% of the 90% of retail, so 45% is kind of people walking in off the street. Consumer direct to selling consumers who walked into the store. Gotcha.

And the rest is some version of business to business, B2B kind of commercial sales.

[00:18:01 - 00:18:02]

Paul Lajoie: Exactly.

[00:18:02 - 00:18:13]

Will Smith: What did your lifestyle look like? Quitting be as a CPA white collar guy into a small business owner operator where you're, where you're driving to a flooring store every day, working with your brother.

[00:18:14 - 00:18:21]

Paul Lajoie: Well, it's interesting when you, when you ask that question, the first thing that popped into my mind, what.

What's my lifestyle?

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

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:18:22 - 00:19:29]

Paul Lajoie: Well, let's. Can we backtrack a little bit and talk about the sacrifices I made to buy this business. Yeah.

Both monetarily, financially, etc. So I mean me and the wife were making decent amount of money back then, but you know, we got kid one, kid two. Obviously super expensive to have kids is in getting ready to buy this business. So we're living in a $450,000 house back in 2000, which is a really nice house back then. Yeah.

And I'm driving around Alexis, which again back then is, you know, everybody drives around Lexus now. But back then that was kind of. You had to make money to do that sort of stuff. And I'm like, yeah, we got to come up with this down payment. We got to cut back on our lifestyle just to prepare ourselves for the bad times.

Maybe we have a bad month and I don't get my ten thousand dollar paycheck. Right. So we sold our house. And I think this is very important because everybody out there paints that this is easy. Now you got to make sacrifices.

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

Will Smith: Right.

[00:19:30 - 00:19:59]

Paul Lajoie: So we downsize from a $450,000 house to a $220,000 house. Okay. So now my taxes are lower, insurance, my payments, all that sort of stuff. I sold my Lexus and I paid cash for a $5,000 plunker.

It was a green Ford Ranger. It was pretty ugly looking. That's what those are. The. So now I've reset my basis of expenses.

[00:20:00 - 00:20:00]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:20:00 - 00:21:19]

Paul Lajoie: And I use that cash to help for our down payment. Right. So. And then we just kind of cut back on stuff.

Right. So if you want to get into this space again, which is a highly recommended. We'll get into this in a little bit. Is there's sacrifices you got to make. Right.

I mean, you have to prepare for bad times. What if, what if we went into a housing recession right after we bought this and I'm stuck with a $450,000 house and, and country club dues and eating out all the time and you know, lavish lifestyles and stuff like that we would have gone bankrupt. Right. So yeah, I, I prepared for the bad times before I made that purchase and two years later we're making good money. And now I upgraded my house, bought another $450,000 house and I didn't.

Now that I'm in the construction industry, I didn't buy a Lexus. I went the other way and I bought a new truck. Right. A nice truck, right. So I'm on truck number five now.

So I made those sacrifices for a couple years and then two years later I'm back to where I was. Right? And then fast forward 20 years and it's a different year. Different perspective altogether.

[00:21:21 - 00:22:36]

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Which makes Oberle a specialty insurance brokerage for searchers by a former searcher.

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To know August and the team at.

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Paul, how did your wife react to all of this? Usually downsizing right when you're starting to multiply as a family is not how it is not is the least opportune moment to be downsizing.

[00:22:36 - 00:22:57]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah. Wow, that's a great question. I wish he was here to answer it because I know I'm gonna butcher.

I'm gonna butcher what she was thinking. I mean, she was all in. I mean, we have a great partnership. I mean, I was super lucky. Definitely married up on, on that perspective.

She was all in. And. And we weren't destitute in any form or fashion.

[00:22:57 - 00:22:58]

Will Smith: Yeah, right.

[00:22:58 - 00:23:04]

Paul Lajoie: I mean, we were still living in a 3,100 square foot house with a pool, so we were still fine.

[00:23:05 - 00:23:08]

Will Smith: Man, what $225,000 could buy back then.

[00:23:09 - 00:23:12]

Paul Lajoie: I know, exactly. And it's a great location.

[00:23:12 - 00:23:13]

Will Smith: I think that house is probably worth.

[00:23:13 - 00:23:48]

Paul Lajoie: At least a million million too now, so.

Yeah, exactly. That is funny. But no, she was all in, without a doubt and very supportive. She actually works in the business now, kind of part time. So we did that when I brought my brother Bob out about eight years ago and all our kids were kind of growing up.

Now we've got the one in high school now and, and she was kind of bored. I was like, why don't you just go work? She worked four or five hours a day at the flooring store now. So.

[00:23:48 - 00:23:55]

Will Smith: Well, and she finally.

I thought the whole reason that you did this in the first place was to give me somewhere to work 20 years later.

[00:23:55 - 00:24:52]

Paul Lajoie: Exactly. So it's good. It's. I, I love her working there.

And I mean, I can go all sorts of different tangents here. One of the scary things of a small business, and a small business is, let's say 15 people or less, man. If you're not involved or you don't know somebody that you trust with running and running the business and, and or op handling your money, it's going to come back to bite you in the, in the rear end. If, if you're not involved with it or you don't have a family member there, people will steal money from you. So go in with this with your eyes wide open.

There's a lot of people out there presenting that, hey, buy business. Absentee owner. Semi absentee owner.

I've. I've been involved in a lot of companies. I've had a couple people steal money from me and I'm a cpa.

[00:24:53 - 00:24:53]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:24:53 - 00:25:10]

Paul Lajoie: And those were, were not absentee.

Absentee run. So super scary. So that gives me a level of comfort that she's there and she's the money person that, that nobody is stealing from me. So, yeah. Yeah, that is, that is a good, good takeaway from this.

[00:25:12 - 00:26:24]

Will Smith: And the other thing that strikes me here, Paul, is you went from. Again, I, I kind of already said this, but you. The original idea was you buy something for your wife to work at in and then in it. It evolves relatively quickly, it seems, into this entire career pivot where you leave your W2, you, you be. You buy this business and it becomes an entrepreneurial path and partnership for you and your brother.

And you're so committed to it. You, you, you down, you downsize, you move. Your family, granted, probably would, you know, not too far but into a smaller house. So it seems like, you know, it. There was a big.

You got really excited and turned on by becoming an entrepreneur. Maybe talk about that and, and on in, in talking about that.

We was there a prestige cost to this.

I heard you say Lexus. I heard you say country club.

You're selling your house. You're giving up the country club to go run a flooring store. Was there any kind of. Did you have to deal with people scratching their heads and being like, what's Paul doing? Sort of thing, or did you care?

[00:26:24 - 00:26:44]

Paul Lajoie: I definitely doesn't care. I don't care today. It's just I'm, I'm driving around in my pickup truck and I wear hoodies all the time. I, I really don't care what people think about me. Which I think is a great mindset to have.

Right. There's a lot of people that, the, the, the people that look rich and then the people that are rich.

[00:26:44 - 00:26:44]

Will Smith: Right.

[00:26:44 - 00:29:17]

Paul Lajoie: There's, there's a lot of problems with that in society right now. There's people making $100,000, driving around three or $400,000 worth of vehicles in their family versus the exact opposite here.

I make a, I make a ton of money and I got five clunkers outside between for me and my kids. So I think that I'm more of a long term planner. I'm more worried about what my financial situation is going to look like when I'm 70, 80, 90 years old and creating generational wealth for my family versus having toys and trinkets. Right. So I think that mindset has helped me over the last 25 years.

And going into that first partnership with my brother Bob that had the same mindset. So what it allowed us to do is. And he cut back on his, his, his lifestyle as well. Not as much as me, but we'd lived off of that $10,000 a month each for a long time time. And we started making more money within two or three years, the flooring business was up 75 to 100%.

So we're making more money, but I mean, did we do a year end bonus of $20,000? Yeah, we did stuff like that. But it's not like we doubled our income and then all of a sudden we doubled our payroll or our paychecks to ourselves. We didn't do that. So we started accumulating savings very quickly inside that business.

And that afforded us to do other things and buy business number two and buy business number three and buy business number four. And because we, we had that long term outlook, I didn't want necessarily, I didn't want to buy something. I want to buy a boat or do this or buy a bigger house. I'm already living in a, in a, in a big enough house. What do I need another one for?

Right. So the partnership thing is really important to talk about for a minute. So I was super lucky and I would think equally my brother Would say that he was equally lucky that we found the right partnership. One that we trusted each other, we had the same mindset and we had the same long term goals of what we wanted to do. So I think that is super, super important.

When you go into, if you do this by yourself, great. But if you bring in a partner, man, you, you better vet that person until you're blue in the face because that, that could end your situation very quickly. If you got into bed with the wrong person.

[00:29:18 - 00:29:24]

Will Smith: It sounds like you generally then would advise, don't partner. If pressed, don't partner.

[00:29:24 - 00:31:06]

Paul Lajoie: It's kind of a double edged sword. Right. Because two people are smarter than one. Right. I mean I was a risk lover where my brother Bob was risk adverse.

So that kind of worked on each other where I would maybe go out and do crazy stuff and you're like, whoa, wait a second. But he's at the same point ultra conservative. And I'm like, well, come on, let's, we've got to spend a little bit of money. Let's try to get some new customers and things like that. So we worked well together.

Right.

So I like the partnership thing, but you just got to be really, really, really careful once I want a wise person. I wish I kind of came up with this, this, this thought process is another business partner way, way into the future that I had on another deal. And his dad told him there's two types of partnerships. Ones that are failing and ones that will fail. Right.

So you gotta be really careful who you get in yourself into bed with. And then two, just don't, don't forget that people's. When you do have a partner and you got to remember this is spend the money on their partnership agreement. Because it only comes into play during bad times. Yeah.

When there's black bad times, you better have a well written document or it's going to hit you hard. It'll punch you in the face. Right. So don't try to do a partnership agreement yourself. Um, man, if it's, if it's less than 40 pages, it's not big enough.

I mean, you need to think about every life scenario in the entire world and then life events happen, right? Your partner gets divorced and gets depressed, right? What happens?

[00:31:06 - 00:31:06]

Will Smith: Y.

[00:31:07 - 00:31:37]

Paul Lajoie: Man, they get depressed and they start doing drugs and all of a sudden they start stealing from you.

And well, you need to get a situation where you need to buy that partner out. And that should already be written in your partnership agreement. Right? So if you, if you write the correct partnership agreement, I'm Fine. With partnerships, you got to spend the money on thinking about every single scenario that you could ever think of that would potentially happen over the next 20 years.

And if you do that, your partnership's going to be fine. Great.

[00:31:38 - 00:31:55]

Will Smith: And Paul, this point about you and Bob, brother partner Bob, having a similar long term outlook or trying to build the same thing long term. So by the time you guys got into the business, you had started developing a long term vision. What was that?

[00:31:56 - 00:32:27]

Paul Lajoie: I would love to say that, that we did long term planning back then. No, we didn't. I, it was, I think it was luck of the draw. I mean obviously I knew him and he knew me as, as growing up as, as brothers. But I don't think we sat down and like, hey, where do you see this in 12 months or 18 months?

Or do you want to buy business number two in three or four years? No, I don't think we did that. I think that process just evolved and.

[00:32:27 - 00:32:46]

Will Smith: But what was the. So if you guys didn't, if you didn't articulate it or you didn't even necessarily know it at the time, but when you reflect back, what, what was the long term thing that you were aligned on?

Just being frugal, reinvesting and growing this thing according to that as far as you can sort of thing.

[00:32:47 - 00:33:02]

Paul Lajoie: Being frugal, I think was, was very, very important. I don't think we knew where we were going or even what we got ourselves into.

We bought a outstanding business, so we were lucky there.

[00:33:03 - 00:33:03]

Will Smith: Super important.

[00:33:03 - 00:33:32]

Paul Lajoie: Don't, don't try to get into something or fix something because it's not going to work. Fix something on business number five on the first one. It needs to be as clean as possible.

Right. The numbers are good, the tax returns are there. There's not a gazillion of add backs. You trust the seller. Oh my God, I could talk about that for five hours.

How important it is trusting the seller. I'm friends with that seller 25 years later.

[00:33:32 - 00:33:33]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:33:33 - 00:33:59]

Paul Lajoie: And you never know when you will need help and you better become friends with that seller. And I remember, I mean he, we got him for a 90 day consulting agreement post acquisition and I think for five or six years I called him all the time, Hey, I got a weird situation here.

I've never been presented with what do you think here? And he, he would help me walk through this stuff because he had been in that space for, for 25 years.

[00:34:00 - 00:34:14]

Will Smith: Going back to lifestyle, we, we've talked about how you downsized frugal. You haven't mentioned how hard you were working. You were also giving this every waking hour talk, talk, talk about that.

[00:34:15 - 00:35:43]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah, we, we did.

After I left my job at, after six months and at first I was doing what we call quiet quitting today. Right. So on in the evenings for that first six months, I would come home and I had blueprints in front of me and do take off and blueprints for a new construction house and I would put that bid together. So I'd come home at 6 or 7 o' clock and work till 10 o' clock every night and work on the weekends and then I'd take long lunches to go supervise a crew on an install, see how they're doing and things like that. So that first six months I'm obviously working 70 hours a week because I have a full time job plus I'm working 20, 30 hours a week on, on the flooring, on, on the nights and weekends.

So it was tough, right? I mean, I've got two kids now and it was tough, right? I mean the wife wants me to help with the kids and I tried to run this business at the same time and things like that. So it's definitely tough. So you definitely have to have that conversation with the wife or, or the partner to make sure you're on the same page.

But even you have those conversations, it's still, it's still tough, right? So obviously hanging out with, with the friends and having a beer or going playing golf on Saturdays or Sundays and no, that's, that's, that's not in the equation anymore. At least not at the very beginning until we get this thing up and running. Right? So a lot of, lot of lifestyle changes, a lot of sacrifices.

[00:35:45 - 00:35:49]

Will Smith: And do you remember being particularly hard emotionally?

[00:35:49 - 00:35:58]

Paul Lajoie: I don't think so. Again, as I mentioned already, I definitely married up. So my wife is extremely supportive of what I do back then.

[00:35:58 - 00:35:59]

Will Smith: And it was going well.

[00:35:59 - 00:37:13]

Paul Lajoie: It was going well, exactly. So except for the first three months where we didn't ask for enough working capital at the very beginning, you would think that maybe me and my brother being in the CPA numbers, financial statements, that we would know how much money we need at the very beginning post acquisition and we got down to like 20 bucks in the checking account. Oh, and we're 90 days in because I think we all asked for like $20,000 of working capital and we need, we need to triple that. And so we're like, hey, we got 20 bucks and we got a $4,000 payroll Friday. So we had to inject money into, into the company.

Right. But we got that money back very quickly in the next 90 days. But yeah, sleepless nights, you, you take this thing home at night, right? You're tossing and turning, you're not sleeping well. We can imagine like 90 days in, what did we just get ourselves into that we don't have enough money for payroll.

So that's super scary. But that's, that's. Our poor planning had nothing to do with the company we bought. We just needed to ask for more working capital. So that was poor planning on our front.

Up, up front. Right. So super, super important on working capital.

[00:37:13 - 00:37:48]

Will Smith: Needs and, and the fact that you guys were CPAs in overlooked working capital is will just to regular listeners, will sound familiar. The point of how tricky working capital can be, even for a couple of professionals like you who understand deeply numbers come, how numbers flow through a business.

We hear often that that's one of the great pitfalls of first time buyers. But your background as a cpa, how relevant or helpful do you think it was then or has been this whole, this whole run?

[00:37:49 - 00:40:34]

Paul Lajoie: Super, super relevant. I've got five kids. Two have graduated from college, two are in college and one's in high school.

And I tell every one of them, I don't care what your career path is. If you're going to go be a nurse or a doctor, an attorney or whatever you do in life, you better have taken as many finance and accounting classes as possible. And I truly believe that is super important. And me being a cpa, just knowing when you get into the accounting, the taxation of small businesses, it's very confusing. And I'm still not an expert in that space.

Right. I do my own personal taxes. I don't do any of my corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are extremely difficult. Right.

I mean I've, I have, between all my companies now I think I have 10 corporate taxes, tax returns that are down on a yearly basis. And they all kind of talk to each other and they're all partnerships with each other and, and they're 70 pages long each. And I'm looking through them like what? I don't even know what's going on today, 25 years later. But me being a CPA, I know just enough knowledge to be dangerous to ask the relevant and the weird and outlier questions to my CPA that does my taxes.

Hey, what if we structured the company this way? How can we restructure this? And I pay myself a different salary so I get out of paying payroll taxes. How can we do that? Right?

So that's what I Preach to anybody that comes to me for advice. Some a friend knows that I've been in the space for a long time and I'm like, man, educate yourself in this. Just enough to ask intelligent questions of subject matter experts. So me being a cpa, I'm going to think for two seconds here on how much money I've saved on my taxes in the small business space over the last 25 years. And I bet you it's two or three million dollars.

So take as many of those classes as you possibly can. Come home and, and, and study. And I mean behind me I read the Kiplinger's newsletter. I just shout out to those guys. It's four pages of what's going on in Washington D.C. with taxes of last year and this year and what's going on with new legislation.

And I read that every two weeks. So that's just an example of the things that I do to prepare myself to save money on the tax front.

Great.

[00:40:35 - 00:40:48]

Will Smith: Paul, how did you guys then grow the business? You said you doubled it in two years, at which point you, you kind of were able to re upgrade your lifestyle. But what did you and your brother do to grow this business so quickly?

[00:40:49 - 00:42:19]

Paul Lajoie: A lot of it was luck if you ask me.

I mean we, we bought a great company to begin with. Right. And we couple organizations that we joined very quickly that the previous owner was not part of was the Home Builders association, which is the national organization but they have local chapters. So we joined the Dallas Fort Worth Home Builders Association. And then there's a, another association for remodelers called nari, national association of Remodel Remodelers Industry.

So we joined both of those and I don't know what it was a 500 $750 year monthly fee and it was super inexpensive and we advertised in their monthly publications and we got a lot of business from that and we just kind of did it as just like a, like a payback. I mean these guys are trying to do legislative help for us in the state or in the, at the federal level supporting what we did. So we just thought it was kind of a little bit of a, a payback on the things that they did for our industry. But we actually got a lot of business from it. And we actually one large company, home builder, Oakley Homes, and they built about a hundred homes a year in the 400 to $800,000 range.

We got their business from the Home Build association ad and that in essence bringing those guys on doubled our business immediately.

[00:42:20 - 00:42:21]

Will Smith: Yep.

[00:42:21 - 00:42:41]

Paul Lajoie: So I would like to Say that it was some type of special thing that we did. I don't think it was. I mean, other than just kind of reaching out to people in the industry and networking a little bit.

And again, I think goes back to we bought a great company with a great reputation. Everybody knew of us and that we did great work. And I think that's what helped us the most.

[00:42:42 - 00:43:08]

Will Smith: So to remind the audience, it was a $300,000 of earnings SDE business sold at 3x for 900,000. Yes, the purchase price.

So if it's $300,000 of SDE, I'll assume it was 1.7, 1.8 of revenue. Do you recall total revenue probably less than 20% margins. Right. But more closer to 15. Yeah.

[00:43:08 - 00:43:17]

Paul Lajoie: I was thinking we were doing, when we bought the company, we were doing 150amonth in revenue. So 1.8. Okay.

[00:43:17 - 00:43:18]

Will Smith: 1.8. Okay.

[00:43:19 - 00:43:19]

Paul Lajoie: Okay.

[00:43:19 - 00:43:29]

Will Smith: And so you double it over course of a couple of years, partly thanks to that ad. Where is this business today? What's its revenue today?

[00:43:30 - 00:44:07]

Paul Lajoie: We're probably doing probably around two and a half million in revenue.

So we've kind of had some ups and downs along the way. And then obviously I have a lot of other business, business ventures as well. And I bought my brother out, obviously. So it's, I mean, think about that. I mean, 25 years and it was in business 20, 25 years before it said that company's been around 50 years.

It's not going anywhere. It'd be hard to screw it up at this point. So it's just doing really well. I probably work at 10 hours a week now.

[00:44:08 - 00:46:17]

Will Smith: The team at Aspen HR recently published a short white paper targeted at searchers Entitled A New CEO's Guide to Human Resources.

It lays out the key items you should be thinking about as you transition into CEO and owner of the business you bought. The link to download that is in the show notes Aspen HR is a professional employer organization or peo, which provides HR compliance, flawless payroll, robust HR technology and Fortune 500 caliber benefits, all for a fraction of the cost compared to using multiple vendors. Reach out to Aspen HR for your complimentary HR diligence checklist and benchmarking analysis. Go to AspenHR.com or contact Jenny Theere directly at Jenny Aspen HR.com Paul One.

Thing this is really interesting because this is a business that hasn't grown much.

So to go from 1.8 to 2.5 today is not a lot of growth, but it's a, it's steady in and set you up to the career that we're going to now hear more about. But so much of my audience fueled by my own, where I take the conversation off often. So guilty here is very, very growth oriented. They want a business that's going to grow a lot. This one, well, it grew it, you doubled it in two years.

So there was a lot of growth there. But since then it's been, it's been very, very incremental, flat, probably little es and flows with the housing industry. How do you, how do you think about, you know, for first time buyers, how growthy or how what the growth potential of a business needs to be since this one has been so rewarding.

For you but hasn't, hasn't really grown.

Much in 20 years.

[00:46:18 - 00:46:21]

Paul Lajoie: Right. Well, I, I will, I'm going to throw back against you a little bit.

[00:46:21 - 00:46:23]

Will Smith: It. Yes, please.

[00:46:23 - 00:46:37]

Paul Lajoie: We've like Oakley Homes, we brought on and we did great with them for about four years and they mismanaged their business and they went bankrupt.

So a company that in essence we doubled with got us right back to the beginning.

[00:46:37 - 00:46:38]

Will Smith: Yeah, right.

[00:46:38 - 00:47:23]

Paul Lajoie: So we went from 1.5 to 3 million in revenue and four years later we're back to 1.5. Yeah, right. So then we grow it again.

Right. And then we have the 0708 housing crash which, which affected about 50% of my income. So that it's, it was kind of like two or three steps forward and then we're taking one or two back just from an economic standpoint or you lost a customer. So it's, it's, it's, it's like we're spinning a wheel. It seems like it at some points where we grow it and then there's a setback and then we grow it again and then have another setback.

So we, we've grown it multiple times. So if nothing ever happened, if we didn't have an 0708 housing crashes and we still had Oakley homes, we'd probably be at 7 or 8 million dollars right now.

[00:47:23 - 00:47:23]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:23 - 00:49:09]

Paul Lajoie: But because of those, those kicks in the rear end of, of losing a big customer or big economic downturn hurt. So we've, we've kind of grown it and I'm actually just the, the wife this morning.

I'm like, hey, we need to add two salespeople. I need to focus on the flooring company in 2026. So I've gotten, gotten in a, in a little bit of a growth mode now that I'm going to kind of focus on, on this company. But I never to, to come full circle I never buy a company intention that I'm going to grow this thing. Right.

I'm buying it on its own merits. If I get in there and grow it, that's great. But I never go in with the intention that I'm going to grow it. Right. Because a lot of people in my, in my thought process is they think they're smarter than the seller.

Yeah, well, the seller is an idiot. He, he didn't even graduate 10th grade and he hasn't been doing the marketing. His website's not up to date and he's overpaying his crews and he pays. He doesn't have enough salespeople. You're going to the thought process that you're smarter than the seller, you're going to get in a lot of trouble.

Right. I don't care if you graduated from Harvard with an MBA and the seller, you know, drop down in fourth grade. That seller is smarter than you in that space. And don't ever go with the intention of you're buying on hope or you're buying on the thought process is you're smarter than the seller. If you do that, you're going to go bankrupt really quick.

So if you want to implement things to grow it, post, but you don't buy on that expectation because you're going to overpay for the company.

[00:49:10 - 00:50:15]

Will Smith: Well, Paul, this is going, this is a total hot take of yours right here because so much of this podcast is devoted to talking about, thinking about and talking about the untapped potential in a business that an entrepreneur might buy. So a lot of this is in fact about how exciting it is that somebody's retiring. Maybe they've been resting on their laurels. Not that were smarter than them, but maybe they just new eyes, new energy, maybe more risk.

You know, a 35 year old buying a business is, is, is more risk on than a 65 year old who's, you know, starting to harvest rather than, what is it? Harvest rather than hunt or harvest, rather than plant seeds or whatever. They're in harvest mode. So, so we hope, we certainly hope. A big part of ETA is that they're is growth to be tapped in these businesses that the, that the seller, the previous owner wasn't taking advantage of for whatever reason.

Right, so it sounds like you disagree with that entire.

[00:50:15 - 00:51:04]

Paul Lajoie: I don't necessarily disagree with that. Thanks for making me clarify. This is there's a lot of people that were overpay on the purchase price because they think they can grow it, buy it and value it based off of what it's worth today. Right.

So this company is the flooring company I bought for 900 grand. Don't go in and pay $1.2 million because you think it has unpacked potential. Buy it for what it's worth today and then go in with, you're going to grow it. But there's a lot of people that think like, oh, well, I'm fine with overpaying for it because I think I'm smarter than the seller or I think there's untapped potential. No, buy it for what it's worth today is what I'm saying about that.

[00:51:04 - 00:51:05]

Will Smith: Right. Yes.

[00:51:05 - 00:51:08]

Paul Lajoie: So, yeah, I think we're on the same page, without a doubt.

[00:51:08 - 00:52:14]

Will Smith: Great. Great.

Yep. Before we move on to the rest of your career and everything that happened after, let's just hear a little bit about the flooring industry. This interview will have aired a couple episodes after another acquisition, entrepreneur Jacob Vas Winkle, who bought a flooring store. So we will have learned something, the audience will have learned something about flooring a few weeks prior to hearing this interview. But let's hear from you now too, Paul.

And I'll start with this, I'll start with this question to frame it. You just told us how, you know, three steps forward, two steps back. Oakley, your big customer, you had a customer concentration issue because they went out of business and your revenue, you know, all that revenue disappeared. Then the housing cry. Of course, the great financial recession, which was housing driven, hurt badly.

So one of the things that you might say is one of the things that we try to do here is select businesses that are, are insulated as, as well as possible from such macro events.

[00:52:14 - 00:52:15]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah.

[00:52:15 - 00:52:44]

Will Smith: And obviously, you know, it's not possible to fully insulate yourself, but you know, we try.

Is there something to be said about the fragility or the difficulty of the.

Flooring industry based on your own experience in it, that you know precisely.

This is an industry where it's three steps forward, two steps back. And so somebody who's looking to buy a business might and really grow it might not want to invest their energy in flooring. It's, it's too hard to get big.

[00:52:44 - 00:52:52]

Paul Lajoie: Wow, awesome questions. I like the flooring industry still.

I like doing it. I have fun when I do it.

[00:52:52 - 00:52:52]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:52:53 - 00:53:21]

Paul Lajoie: And it's a double edged sword. Right.

I love the repeat business of new construction, but yet if we get into a housing recession, that's not good. Right. But also, you know, if it was 50% of my company, I like not having to rebid that. And it's just I wake up in the morning already knowing that I'm going to do a million dollars a year just with my repeat customers. That's kind of nice, right?

[00:53:21 - 00:53:22]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:53:22 - 00:55:00]

Paul Lajoie: Versus waking up, I'm like, okay, well it's January 1st. Where's all my revenue coming from? That's kind of scary, right? But it seems like the flooring industry, every time there's an ebb and a flow, it seems like revenue comes, comes out of this bucket and goes into this bucket.

And what I mean by that is when the construction industry goes down, guess what goes up? Remodel industry. Because now I'm not buying a house, I'm gonna stay and fix. Okay? So it seems like we're just kind of revenue shifting from one bucket to the other.

So I like that aspect. Like, like example, I know right now we're two beginning 2026, that construction's been down for about a year. And yeah, I've got a big uptick on, on housing remodeling and fix and stay sort of situation. And I think that is the wave of the future, to tell you the truth, because housing prices have gotten so expensive that no, I'm not going to upgrade my house. My house is super expensive.

I can't afford to buy another house now. So let's just stay and fix it. Let's spend 50 grand and remodel our kitchen and put in new hardwoods, et cetera. So I see that is going on right now. So I think that's going to be actually create for the flooring company more stability because I'm not going to be as subject to the ebbs and flow of the construction industry, even though I love that space a lot.

[00:55:00 - 00:55:21]

Will Smith: And what about buying other flooring stores, Paul? So. So people who get into businesses via acquisition are acquisition minded and so inorganic growth. Buying other businesses, rolling up a geography or a whole industry is something that this audience will be thinking a lot about. What do you think about the flooring industry from that perspective?

[00:55:21 - 00:56:24]

Paul Lajoie: Without a doubt, that's one of the things that I've been thinking about for the last two months. Talked to the wife this morning about my getting the two new salespeople. But I've also thought and is on my radar for 2026 about acquiring another foreign business or two to grow that way. So I love the space, I love everything in home services right now. So along the same thought process of what I had for why we're doing well in flooring is think about all the other home service areas, you know, electrician, plumber roofing, painting, all that sort of stuff.

So I think, again, I think those are hot for the next four or five years. And I'm looking at acquiring some of those right now because I think it's a. It's a stay and fix versus let's look for a new. A new house. So I think it's a stay and fix.

People are going to be fixing stuff up. Right. So I've got a couple offers out right now in H vac companies. So I'm looking to kind of build a little bit of a portfolio in the home service space. Without a doubt.

I love that area. Without a doubt. Great.

[00:56:24 - 00:56:44]

Will Smith: Before we leave flooring altogether. And then we're going to bang through the rest of your career.

The you said how stupid you and your brother were when you got into this. What, what, what were one or two things that you guys were just so naive about as you reflect back? Working capital.

[00:56:45 - 00:58:07]

Paul Lajoie: About the working capital, which was a, which was a big miss. That's super important.

I mean, it's. Of the businesses that fail, 89% of them fail because of lack of cash flow. So not understanding your ins and outs of where cash is coming in and where cash is going out and projecting that out 12 to 18 months is super important. So that's a big miss from us. And it's super hard.

Me being in this in 25 years. I still kind of struggle with that. Looking at P Ls and balance sheets and how to reflect on how much money I need when I'm buying a new company. It's still really hard for me to do that.

Not understanding marketing. I still don't understand marketing, but it took me about 10 years to figure out that I need to hire somebody versus me wasting money on, hey, let's put an ad on TV or on a magazine or something like this and just throwing money at stuff that we had no idea what the return on it was. So that was a big miss. We wasted a lot of money for 10 years on advertising because we didn't know. We thought we were the subject matter expert.

And it took about 10 years to figure out like, okay, look at yourself in the mirror and figure out what you're good at and have a hard conversation with yourself and then those things you're not good at. We finally figured out we need to hire other people.

[00:58:08 - 00:58:10]

Will Smith: And what are you good at, Paul?

[00:58:12 - 00:58:44]

Paul Lajoie: I am good at operations. I am good at understanding money in and out on returns and understanding what's going on in the industry and understanding what's going on in my financial statements and insurance, kind of back office stuff, legal stuff I'm very good at.

So that's what I'm good at. And then I've hired other people to fill in those holes of areas where I'm not.

[00:58:45 - 00:58:46]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:58:47 - 00:58:49]

Paul Lajoie: And that's really important. Really important.

[00:58:49 - 00:59:01]

Will Smith: Well, it's kind of the. To your point about business buyers thinking they're going to be smarter than the seller. It's. It's easy to think that you can just do everything better than everybody.

[00:59:01 - 00:59:02]

Paul Lajoie: Yeah.

[00:59:04 - 00:59:09]

Will Smith: And so I think I like that. Anybody who's enterprising enough, I love that.

[00:59:09 - 00:59:15]

Paul Lajoie: Cockiness in a buyer. But very quickly, you need to understand that you got to know what you don't know.

[00:59:16 - 00:59:29]

Will Smith: Well, it's one of these too, where it's like you need a lot of self confidence to pull this off.

So it's the fine line between appropriate, healthy self confidence and cockiness that blinds you to everything else.

[00:59:29 - 00:59:29]

Paul Lajoie: Okay.

[00:59:30 - 00:59:45]

Will Smith: All right. But let's hear really quick, kind of the next few years of your career. The key, the key plot points in, you know, how you started really becoming an acquisition entrepreneur proper, not just a flooring store owner.

[00:59:45 - 01:03:00]

Paul Lajoie: As we said a little while ago, we both were very frugal and we saved money. So we started looking at acquisition number two. Four or five years into this, and we bought a lighting store. There were sconces and chandeliers and door hardware and all that sort of stuff. And it was local.

And we thought we would build a little empire in the new construction industry. Come to me and I'll do your flooring. I'll do your lighting. We're going to buy a, a Sheetrock company and we're going to buy all sorts of stuff. You come to me and get all.

Get five different things. I know you need 50 things to buy your house, but you can come to me and get all five of them. So it's going to be a cross sell. It's going to be easy sell. And we love the lighting store because we could sell two things in the same, same square footage.

Lights hung from the ceiling and floors were on the floor. So same square footage. And we're selling two products. So we bought an existing flooring company. We started selling flooring over there.

And then our thought process, we bought an existing lighting store. Excuse me. And we. And that was location number two for the flooring company. And then we had grand plans to start selling lighting out of the flooring company, number one.

Okay. But we ended up buying at a really bad time. So we talked about the financial crisis, the, the housing crisis back in 07 and 08. We bought this in October of 2006 or 2007, I don't know which the year was. Um, it was literally one month before Lehman Brothers crashed.

And that lighting store was probably 80% new construction had a ton of customers, ton of builders, but it was heavily concentrated in new construction. Within 30 days after I bought that business, my revenue was down 50%.

So rather be lucky than smart all day long. So we threw a lot of cash at that company. And as you know, that was a, it took some, some cities three or four years to crawl out of that hole that the financial crisis was. So we threw money at that thing probably for about two years and then we ended up closing it up just because we didn't see it ever coming back. And then we kind of pivoted and we're like where we had this grand vision of becoming a, a major player in new construction industry.

We're like, okay, we gotta pivot. In essence, we had all of our eggs in one basket. Even though they, it was a big basket and maybe little tiny baskets in between. We wanted to pivot and get out of, keep the foreign company. But our next venture was something outside of home services or construction.

So lighting stores behind us. A bad number two, but it was just kind of unlucky. I think it was a good, good vision and a good plan. It just was bad timing.

[01:03:00 - 01:03:06]

Will Smith: And Paul, what did that do to your personal balance sheet?

I mean, how much of a financial setback was that?

[01:03:06 - 01:03:22]

Paul Lajoie: It wasn't bad because me and my brother, we're seven or eight years into this and we're still living very frugally. So yeah, we dropped three or four hundred thousand dollars into that thing and had, and had to walk away, but it was money that we had.

[01:03:23 - 01:03:23]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[01:03:23 - 01:06:20]

Paul Lajoie: So it was not a lifestyle change.

Or now I gotta sell my house again or sell my cars or anything like that. We, we still live the lifestyle we did, so we prepared very well for it.

So we weren't over leveraged or anything like that. So then, then we started pivoting. I'm like, let's look at something else. And being in Texas, we, we, we found a company. Not that we were looking for an oil and gas company, but we found one that we liked.

And there's a lot of ups and downs in oil and gas. It's a boomer bust, but we bought a company that was not focused solely on a boomer bust situation. On if the price of oil is 100 or it's 20. The work that we did, the company we bought, we did work all the time, no matter what the price of oil was. And if you backtrack, buck in 0708, the fracking industry that we know of very well now, it was started in the Barnett Shell right outside of Fort Worth, Texas.

And that's where all the fractional and directional drilling came into play was back then. And we bought in an existing industrial sandblasting and painting company. So it had three mobile crews. We worked for one company. So super scary because we talked about customer concentration before.

So I'm buying a company that has one customer. Oh, wow. So super scary. But the price was kind of commensurate with that risk. Right.

So I think we bought it at a two or two and a half X. So we had on a little bit better purchase price because of the inherent risk with one customer. Right. And it was xto and. And fast forward that.

XTO was bought out by Exxon. Okay. So we had three mobile crews where we sent out probably maybe a 200 mile radius of all the exposed piping at wellhead sites. And we went in and sandblasted all of that paint off and then repainted it. And what was great is this was heavily regulated industry, right.

That was inspected by what they call the railroad commission here. It's a weird name in the state of Texas or in other states is the Department of Transportation that they go out and they see rust on some exposed piping. That's an environmental issue and that could become a leak or an explosion. So they made a sandblast and paint. We sandblasted and painted the same piping every three years.

So regardless if oil was $10 or if it was a hundred dollars, we're doing our work. Right. And then we pivoted very quickly and I actually bought a shop because we started getting inquiries of, hey, can you sandblast and paint my horse trailer? Sure. Can we.

Can you sandblast and paint this manifold trailer which is a drilling rig inside the oil and. Oil and gas industry?

[01:06:20 - 01:06:21]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[01:06:21 - 01:07:25]

Paul Lajoie: So I actually bought an existing indoor batting cage. Kind of very weird.

So it was on some land in Mansfield, Texas, just kind of south of Fort Worth. The guy that owned this land had two really good daughters, really good softball players with daughters. And he had this indoor batting cage on his land and they had graduated college and so he didn't need it anymore. And I bought that and converted it to an indoor sandblasting painting facility. We had three paint booths and one sandblast booth.

And so now we had all this industrial equipment come in. And now I went from having one customer to having like 50.

And we quickly went from. And lucky that I did it. It's. It's hard to prepare for the future when you don't know what the future holds. That the one and a half million dollars a year that we were getting out of XTO three or four years after I purchased it was about $150,000 a year.

So they're in his.

[01:07:25 - 01:07:26]

Will Smith: Sorry, say that again.

[01:07:27 - 01:08:04]

Paul Lajoie: So when we bought this xto and XTO was natural gas. And natural gas way back then was $12 a British thermal unit, or however they, they measure that. Well, it went way down and a bunch of companies, it went, went from 12 down to around three.

And so there's a lot of turmoil in the industry. A lot of people were going bankrupt and things like that. So people just weren't drilling near as much as they were because it wasn't financially viable to do so. So we didn't have near as much work to do. So we pivoted.

We, of course we pivoted before this happened. Luckily that we did.

[01:08:04 - 01:08:05]

Will Smith: Lucky that you did.

[01:08:06 - 01:09:11]

Paul Lajoie: Right. So again, bad luck before, this was good luck this time, right where we pivoted now, about 70 or 80% of our revenue was inside our facility, sandblasting and painting exposed trailers and things like that.

So when that revenue went down 70 or 80 or 90%, we had kind of offset that with bringing in about the same amount of revenue for in house work.

So I ended up selling that company. But that building that I bought, so that was my first venture into owning real estate. Not that I had any grand vision of, hey, I want to be a real estate entrepreneur or anything like that. I just bought that first business, first building, because we needed it, right. And I didn't want to rent and I ended up selling that business a few years later.

But I still own that piece of real estate that is probably worth around three to three and a half million and I owe 200 grand on it. And I'm cash flowing. Cash flowing, about 150,000 a year on that.

[01:09:12 - 01:10:45]

Will Smith: Amazing. So how do you think about real estate broadly when it comes to business buying?

And let me just add a little bit more to my question. One thing that some business buyers like to see real estate because it's first of all you can get better terms on your SBA loan. But it also, so often business buyers are buying businesses that are so called air balls. There's nothing there but the people providing the service. And so real estate is something solid and has real liquidity value.

So it feels like you're, you're hedging some of the risk out of the acquisition by having some real estate attached to it. I'd say maybe arguably more sophisticated buyers or private equity buyers generally like to decouple real estate from businesses because real estate, as you kind of just said, real estate is a business. So if you have a piece of real estate that is inherently or, or implicitly a capital allocation decision and it's probably not the optimal use of the business's capital to have it tied up in real estate. You're, you're in the, whatever the business is, you're in the business of that and your resources should go to something more directly related to that rather than being tied up in real estate. And so they generally big generalization like to decouple real estate from businesses.

How do you react to all of that? What do you think about commercial real estate as. As far as business buying goes?

[01:10:45 - 01:11:50]

Paul Lajoie: If I'm looking at a business to buy and it comes with real estate, I'm all over it. I am all over it, without a doubt, just for, for numerous things.

Right. Because it's just another asset you are acquiring. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a use of capital. So maybe I can't buy that second business two years from now, but I've diversified my portfolio. Right.

So just what I did with the sandblasting and painting company, I sold the business and kept the real estate. Yeah, Right. And all of a sudden, you know that loans paid off in, in three years and I'm going to go from cash flow 150 now, $250,000. If I didn't keep that piece of real estate, I wouldn't have that in my asset portfolio. Right.

So I love diversification. I'd rather, instead of grow an existing business, I'd rather buy another. That's just my thought process from a diversification standpoint. Right. So that, that's how I kind of do.

I want to drop $250,000 and go crazy on marketing in 2026 or I want to take that 250 and buy another business. That' without a doubt, I'm buying another business.

[01:11:51 - 01:11:52]

Will Smith: Interesting. Without a doubt.

[01:11:52 - 01:12:19]

Paul Lajoie: So I may be the outlier there.

And growing a business is, is great too, but man, you just never know what the future holds. Right. I mean, you could, you could spend that money and grow it from 2.5 to 5 and all of a Sudden there's a big artificial intelligence comes in your space, right. I mean, you're some consulting company three years ago and you spent all that money trying to double that consulting business and you're out of business now because AI came into your life.

[01:12:19 - 01:12:20]

Will Smith: Sure.

[01:12:20 - 01:12:25]

Paul Lajoie: Right. Versus Keep, keep having that consulting company.

[01:12:25 - 01:12:25]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:12:25 - 01:13:18]

Paul Lajoie: But go buy a flooring company or go buy a light manufacturing company or go buy a, a med spa or, or Laundromat and diversify that portfolio. It's no different than do you put all your money into Nvidia or do you own 15 different stocks to diversify your portfolio?

Because if Nvidia goes to zero, you got 14 other stocks, you're still alive. Same thing here. If you invested all your money in this one thing and that one thing goes, goes to the trash can, then you're, you're done. Right. So it, it does hamstring me.

There's, there's a plus and minus, without a doubt. Right. So it does hamstring. You can't grow this thing. And now you're over here and maybe.

Okay, now my attention's in two different areas that necessarily not a good thing. Right. But if you have the right people and the right managers in place, you're going to be fine. But again, I know I may be the outlier there.

[01:13:18 - 01:13:54]

Will Smith: Well, I think the, the debate or the conversation about how much diversification or going all in, is one that people can have forever.

Because of course, the biggest outliers of, you know, the billionaires, let's say, are usually completely concentrated in, in a single stock, the stock of the company they founded. So to have the most crazy outsized results, it's usually highly concentrated. But for the mere mortals among us, maybe that's not the soundest strategy in diversification. So anyway, it's a fascinating conversation and one.

[01:13:54 - 01:14:25]

Paul Lajoie: Right.

That has no end. And the billionaires are highly, highly leveraged in a lot of cases as well. Well, which I, which I, you know, to go from zero to a billion dollars. Yeah. You got to take massive risk.

Right. And maybe have just a single point of income and then be crazy, crazy way, way leveraged. Right. That's how, that's how you just get stupid, stupid money. Right.

But that's not my path. I want to be more even, kill slow growth diversification.

[01:14:25 - 01:14:50]

Will Smith: Yep. Well, Paul, what I would like to do is kind of wrap up the plot and, and, and kind of just get some bullet points on all the other stuff you've done because we just don't have time to go through it all here. I want to make sure we hear quickly about the fencing acquisition, which was a hard one for you.

And also you're, you've also done now some zero to one stuff.

[01:14:50 - 01:14:50]

Paul Lajoie: So.

[01:14:50 - 01:14:58]

Will Smith: So just quickly bang us through up to today and then we'll, we'll kind of close with some reflections on, on this whole journey.

[01:14:58 - 01:17:37]

Paul Lajoie: Right. So we've talked about a couple businesses.

The fencing company. Let's get on the fence company. So we bought a fencing company and it was a bad deal that turned into a good deal.

I let my emotions and my ego get involved in that purchase. It was a company that we were buying that was a combined company of a retail fencing company and the wholesale part of that fencing company. So in essence, they sold the lumber to themselves. Okay. But we were only buying the retail portion and they didn't have separate financials.

So I went in there kind of blind. I bought this thing. I was, I loved the company, I fell in love the company. I had my emotions get involved and I let my ego get involved that, oh, I'm smarter than this dude that we already talked about. Right.

And the numbers did not come out like we thought they were going to come out on the retail side, nor that we were told by the seller. Seller was like, oh well, it's making this much money and this is how many customers we have and this is the revenue generation. And those numbers did not come out. So that was. Ended up being a bad situation.

We ended up selling it, lost a little bit of money and we actually ended up buying it back like six months later at a lower price than what we sold it to this guy for and brought it back into place and ended up selling to somebody else. I did not like the industry. Oh, I did not like the industry. It was, it was a very commoditized industry that, okay, this, this fence install was 20 grand and they got five bids. And if somebody was $20 cheaper than me, they went with that guy.

Even though we did good work and we guaranteed it and we put in better product and all that sort of stuff, it was very commoditized and I did not like that. We couldn't sell on our reputation or our guarantees, our warranties or our quality work. It was just bottom line price and that's what everybody cared about. So I, I didn't feel like I could grow that business in a situation like that. So that's why I ended up selling it.

I didn't buy it back because I thought it was a great industry. I was a buy back more. How do I Re regain my initial capital infusion that I put in through this a long time ago and ended up even it's kind of a successful failure is what I call it. Is ended up walking away with more money than I put into it even though it was a bad three or four years.

[01:17:38 - 01:17:38]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[01:17:39 - 01:17:41]

Paul Lajoie: And then, and, and, and, and and what do you think?

[01:17:41 - 01:17:48]

Will Smith: What was the key lesson learned there? Thinking that you were smarter than the seller? What say more.

[01:17:48 - 01:18:37]

Paul Lajoie: Bought.

Bought a company that I didn't understand.

That's all there is to it. I didn't understand it once, once they separated that combined company and it didn't have separate financial statements. I bought a company I didn't understand. Okay so fast forward. So fencing company acquired.

Acquired several others. And I know this is talk about acquisition. I started some from scratch too along the way it's been 15 plus companies acquired and or started. But I will throw this out to you. So I've acquired 2012 companies and had one failure.

12 companies and one failure. So do do that. Is that 91% success rate? Yeah, I've started four from scratch and three of them have failed.

[01:18:39 - 01:18:42]

Will Smith: So you're a fan of buying businesses.

[01:18:42 - 01:20:00]

Paul Lajoie: I love the acquisition because a lot of times you know if you buy a business that's been around for five plus years, I normally like 10 just because if it's been for 10 years it's probably gone through an economic cycle and it survived a recession. Five plus years maybe not gone through a recession. So that's a little bit on edge there. So I like 10 systems are in place.

The customers are there, your workers are there. I mean everything is there. Right. And you have cash coming in. As long as you do working capital correctly, you have cash putting in your pocket on day one versus starting something from, from scratch.

Super sexy by the way. I mean the, the, the risk reward and, and the feeling of starting something from scratch and turning into a successful company, I mean that's your baby man. What, what a great feeling that is. But highly risky. And, and how much money do I need until I got money coming in?

I don't know. Did 12 months, 18 months, 24 months. I don't know. So the, the unknown there is super risky as well. But I will say is my success, my most successful company is that one victory.

It's an oil and gas company.

[01:20:00 - 01:20:07]

Will Smith: So and so do you think there's a correlation there that your biggest financial success is also your 0 to 1 year? 10 to 1 success.

[01:20:08 - 01:20:45]

Paul Lajoie: It comes down to risk and reward. Right.

So when you're Buying an existing company, you obviously have some, you're paying for it. Right. So that reward is not as high. Right. Buying, buying an IBM stock, you're going to get a 10% reward versus buying that penny stock.

Yeah, it may go to zero but it almost may go to a thousand. Right. So same situation here, your upside is, is, is massive. Right. Because I'm only putting 100 or $200,000 into that startup and it could turn into something massive.

But I will say that that oil and gas company exists because of my first oil and gas company that I bought.

[01:20:46 - 01:20:47]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:20:47 - 01:21:34]

Paul Lajoie: So that they brought me in as an investor owner in that company because of my four or five years experience in the oil and gas industry with the sandblasting painting company. So if I didn't acquire that first one I wouldn't have had the requisite knowledge or network to be involved in this one. So it kind of opened up a door for me and I still own that one.

It's a 5050 company and we do survey work and pig tracking or cleaning tools of transportation pipelines. We work for two companies. So high, high concentration work for Philip 66 and TransCanada. Those are my two customers and it's highly successful and my other partner on that one is the owner operator that works full time and I work about 10 hours a week on that one kind of doing back office stuff.

[01:21:36 - 01:21:58]

Will Smith: Well let's, we've heard you're still in the floor, you still got your flooring business and you work some hours a week in that and this business pipeline business we just heard about. So if you would share with us how what your week looks like, break all of that down and your earnings per year and your net worth if you'll share.

[01:21:58 - 01:22:26]

Paul Lajoie: Sure, sure. And, and I will mention I my first venture in that piece of real estate, the flooring company, I own the real estate for the flooring company now. And then I, I bought two small office buildings that were in the process of converting to the, that the We Work brand short term office rentals where you can just go in and work a few hours a day or actually as we works.

No. So we, no, it's, it's, it's Regis, their competitor.

[01:22:27 - 01:22:30]

Will Smith: I'm in a Regis right now here Paul. There we go.

[01:22:30 - 01:23:30]

Paul Lajoie: Regis is 50 times bigger than we work but everybody knows we work is why say we work.

So I've got two of those ones. We just finished construction one, we're in the middle of construction and converting it. So I own four pieces of real estate now. I own the two companies I'm on board of directors of three, four different startups diversified a lot of money into private placement deals. Things high risk, high reward.

You know, you need to put money into 10 of them, you're going to lose money in eight and maybe make your money back in one and then the other one's a 50 to 1 return. So I got a lot of money and a bunch of stuff like that too.

So what my day looks like now. So I'm still kind of running the back office for both the flooring company and the oil and gas. And that probably takes me about and, and a little bit of a part time salesperson for the flooring company because I really enjoy doing that still. Not as much as I used to, but maybe two customers a week where I'll go out and measure a job or still got four or five builders that I, that I do the work for.

[01:23:31 - 01:23:39]

Will Smith: And to be clear, it's because you enjoy it.

Because Paul, if somebody of your stature, I wouldn't expect to be the one doing measurements for a flooring install.

[01:23:39 - 01:23:40]

Paul Lajoie: Oh, I love it.

[01:23:40 - 01:23:41]

Will Smith: Okay.

[01:23:41 - 01:23:51]

Paul Lajoie: It's fun. It gets me out of the house.

I still drive a pickup truck. Gets me out of the house and interact with customers and, and it gives me a feel for what's going on in the world too.

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

Will Smith: Sure.

[01:23:52 - 01:24:36]

Paul Lajoie: How customers are thinking differently. So it gives me a little bit of a sense and a gauge on what's going on in the flooring industry that I own.

Right. So it helps me from that standpoint. So that's about 20 hours a week between those two companies. Maybe five hours a week on the four pieces of real estate. And I'm always looking for additional companies to acquire.

So that may be another five hours a week on talking to brokers or working my network or just looking on businesses for sale online, things like that. I am busy with my kids still, so I'm heavily involved with that. I love the flexibility that owning small businesses gives you from how your day looks.

[01:24:36 - 01:24:36]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:24:37 - 01:24:57]

Paul Lajoie: I could get up super early and work hard till 2 o' clock and then my kids got a basketball game at the high school that I go watch for three hours and then I come home and put some more hours in on the, on the evening of the work.

So I'm not punching in on a clock or anything like that. I make my, my own time up. Which probably the number one benefit.

[01:24:57 - 01:24:58]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[01:24:58 - 01:29:04]

Paul Lajoie: Of owning a small business and getting into that space.

Without a doubt. And the lifestyle it, it creates later on the, the other time that I'm spending right now as a small business acquisition consultancy community that I've created over the last couple years. So I've gotten a lot of people that have come over, come to me the last 10 years to kind of see what I've built on buying these businesses and the lifestyle that it's generated for me. And I've kind of helped them, you know, without any type of compensation. And I've realized over that last five or ten years that people need me, they need my help because the amount of mistakes that they are making from just general things on setting up their legal entity correctly, they're doing it wrong.

It's, it's just fact out, it's just wrong. It takes five minutes to do. There's five boxes to choose when you're setting up your leg landed. If you, if you, if you pick the wrong boxes, you're, you've messed up on how much taxes you're going to pay in perpetuity and they don't even know it. Right.

So for example, you set up your LLC and you're a single member llc. Well, you're what they call a disregarded entity in the eyes of the IRS and you pay maximum taxation forever. And you don't even. The bad thing is you don't even know that you screwed up until somebody tells you, well, I'll just bring in my wife. No, that doesn't work either.

Right. So all of my companies, I either have a real partner or one of my kids own it a half percent. Don't bring your spouse in because if depending on what state you live in, if you're a community property state like Texas is, you're still a disregarded entity in the eyes of the irs. So I always say just a good friend, your sister, brother, or if you have any kids, bring in one of your kids for half percent and all of a sudden now your, your tax situation is much better. But I just bring that up as I saw these people making these mistakes or trying to buy a company for 1.5 that's worth 750 Garand because they don't know how to read a P L or they don't understand what is a valid add back versus what is not a valid add back on coming to an owner's discretionary income.

So I, I felt like I at this point in my life that to answer your question, before I get into why I'm doing this, I make, I make a little bit over $1 million a year in current income and my net worth is probably around 20 million. Okay. So I'm in a situation where I'm 58 years old, I'm never going to retire because I love doing this. And, and, and the small business acquisition community is called biz by pro. And that is what wakes me up in the morning now.

And I want to help as many people to follow the same path that I did over the last 25 years. Right. I feel like in 10 years, I think my, my wealth would be close to 50 million on some of the things that I've done and some of the investments I make and the real estate that I own. That's generational wealth. I've got five kids and I can hand off $10 million to each one of those kids upon my death.

That is generational wealth. And, and, and I've already shown them that this is the path that you need to take. And I feel like it's me paying it forward now that the amount of knowledge that I have and then acquired, I feel like I need to pay it forward and help people follow the same path that I've done. So that's the community that I've created and super, super, super passionate about it. And I feel like I, a thousand, two thousand, five thousand people over the next 10 years that I think I can help them see what I've done and teach them what I've done.

I can. I can. That first learning curve of 10 years was so flat that I can teach them what it took me 10 years to learn. I could teach them in three months.

[01:29:04 - 01:29:16]

Will Smith: And so is there a formal curriculum syllabus?

Is it weekly calls where, you know, somebody brings their questions or what it.

[01:29:16 - 01:30:06]

Paul Lajoie: Is, all of that. And it, and I built it. In a way, it's me that you get me. It's not some figurehead of me where I'm out there shooting the videos and I hand you off to Bill or to Sally behind the scenes that don't have the experience I have, because that's disingenuous.

Right. So it's been built away for it's me. Yes. We have weekly live deal reviews. So every single Monday for an hour, I throw up financial statements, PNL's, balance sheets, owners add backs, and the offering memorandum from the broker, if there is one, and I just throw it in there for an hour.

And it could be a current deal that I, that I'm looking at, that I have an loi on. It could be a deal that I've looked on and passed on at six months ago. So that's every Monday, every Wednesday for an Hour, it's Q A, it's me, you can ask me anything you want.

[01:30:07 - 01:30:08]

Will Smith: And what's the pricing model?

[01:30:08 - 01:31:19]

Paul Lajoie: The pricing model is they get a 14 day free trial, come in and test drive it if they like.

There's an acquisition community for 2,900 bucks where they come in self paced, they do everything they want, they still get access to those live deal reviews and the live Q&As and everything. So they get access to everything. And then there's two other deals that we have. Deal sourcing is a massive bottleneck right now on finding deals. And if you find deals, there's 50 other buyers.

So we're doing aggregation of about 2,000 brokers that have companies listed for sale. So we aggregate those and spit out all the junk. And we got four people behind the scenes doing cold calling of off market deals. So we list all that. So that's, that's 10 grand.

So these are all one time fees. The 2900 is a one time lifetime fee. The 10,000 is a one time lifetime fee. You get access to deals forever. So those are the, the offerings that we have.

And again, it's me, I'm running this entire thing all by myself. So again, we don't hand you off to anybody. I give everybody my cell phone number and my email address. They can call me anytime they want.

[01:31:20 - 01:31:50]

Will Smith: You had said offline to me, Paul, that this path is, is enthusiastic as you are about it.

You also had said never too late.

Say, say more about that because so many of my guests and probably listeners range in age from late 20s to early mid-40s, with the preponderance being in their solidly in their 30s. So say more about it never being too late to start down the path of buying a business.

[01:31:50 - 01:31:52]

Paul Lajoie: And it's never too early as well.

[01:31:52 - 01:31:54]

Will Smith: Well, certainly I'll throw that out there.

[01:31:54 - 01:33:31]

Paul Lajoie: I would, I would like somebody to come out of college or wherever they are and cut their teeth and make a bunch of mistakes on other people's nickels for two or three years before they acquire the first business.

But that isn't necessarily a need that you got to do that. The average millionaire age is 57 years old. That's the first time they acquired millionaire status, age 57. So if you're behind that eight ball, you think you're behind that eight ball, YOU'RE JUST NOT. I'm 58 and I'm going to be acquiring businesses to the day I die.

So, and I'll, I'll use this as an example about it's never Too late. So I'm in a Mastermind group called GoBundance. It's a thousand men inside the United States. Absolutely life altering. So if you don't like go bund, it's go find one, right?

So I talked about at age 40, I finally found the correct network, right? So if I found that network, I joined gobundance when I was 30 years old, I bet you I'd be worth $250 million right now. Because the people inside that community are all, not just millionaires. I think the average net worth is around $8.7 million of everybody inside that community. And it's just, man, it's life altering.

But there's a, there's a member in there that at age 50 was bankrupt. I mean, kicked out of his house and living in an apartment and having one car with him, his wife and three kids, completely bankrupt at age 50. He's 58. He's worth $16 million. Wow.

[01:33:31 - 01:33:34]

Will Smith: So it's from buying businesses.

[01:33:35 - 01:35:11]

Paul Lajoie: Buying businesses and buying real estate and doing consulting gigs and, and stuff like that. And, and it is, you know, equity for consulting sort of situations.

So if he can start over with zero at age 50 and accumulate to 16 million in eight years, I mean, what, what can anybody do, Right? I mean, it's just once you put your mind to it, and we started at the very beginning to burn the boats, jump, I'd like to say, jump off the bridge and set yourself free, right? And, and this is where I'd loved real estate and I still love real estate. And the real estate of the 2000s and 2010s and maybe early 2020s was definitely a way to accumulate a ton of wealth. That ship has sailed and I don't think it'll ever come back.

With that said, I will still invest in real estate for 8 or 10% per annum return. But those days of investing a million dollars in four years later turn into 5 million. Those are done forever. A lot of things don't even pencil anymore in real estate. If you think you just want to acquire an Airbnb for the first time, it doesn't even pencil right.

Or you want to buy a storage facility or something like, it doesn't work. So I think business acquisition now has replaced what real estate was the last 25 years and is really, truly one of the only ways to create generational wealth, in my opinion. And that's what I'm trying to tell everybody, and super passionate of, of teaching those people going forward.

[01:35:12 - 01:35:17]

Will Smith: Well, that's a perfect note to end on Paul, how can people find you, man?

[01:35:17 - 01:35:28]

Paul Lajoie: Reach out Paul.

Paul@bizbuypro.com I'm here to help anybody. Anybody got questions on anything going on in their life, reach out to me. Because I, I love this stuff. I love helping people out.

[01:35:28 - 01:35:37]

Will Smith: Very passionate about it.

Biz by pro is the name of the, of the education or consulting practice.

[01:35:37 - 01:35:54]

Paul Lajoie: There's my biz. Buy, pro, Find, acquire, succeed is our motto. I don't know if you can see that or not. Ah, yeah, got it.

Yep, exactly. So yeah, reach out to me Paul@bizbuypypro.com and cell phone number 214-207-8724. Reach out to me. Love to talk to you.

[01:35:54 - 01:36:01]

Will Smith: Paul Lajoie.

Thank you for sharing your prosperous and promising journey with the Acquiring Minds audience.

[01:36:01 - 01:36:04]

Paul Lajoie: Appreciate your time, man. Love being here. Will thank you.

[01:36:04 - 01:36:48]

Will Smith: Hope you enjoyed that interview.

Don't forget to subscribe to the Acquiring Minds News newsletter. We send an email for every episode.

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And soon, key takeaways, numbers and more.

Essentials from the interview.

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At acquiringminds Co. You'll also find all our webinars there on the website, both those we have come coming up and recordings of past webinars.

At this point, There are over 30 webinar recordings, a wealth of information on all the technical nitty gritty of buying a business.

Acquiringminds Co.