Host: The traditional search fund world has the Stanford Study, which is a mature and widely cited data set in search. But self funded search, which actually represents the vast majority of entrepreneurs who acquire businesses, has had no such study or data set. A big reason for this is that self funded searchers are not a very well defined group of people, making them hard to access and survey. They're also fluid people dip in and out of their searches over months and sometimes years. Well, the investment firm SIG has set out to address this lack of data. They developed a method of identifying self funded searchers and then surveyed them, hundreds of them. And in today's interview with Robert Graham and Jordan Carter of sig, we learn what they found out about self funded search in aggregate. This is an ambitious undertaking which Robert and Jordan readily acknowledge, and we spent some time at the beginning scrutinizing their methodology. But bringing any visibility to the world of self funded search should ultimately help you, the Acquisition Entrepreneur, by arming you with some data to help you cross check the many decisions you make along your journey to buying a business. I found this data from SIG both just interesting and practical and I think you will too. Here are Robert and Jordan of sig. 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. I want to share an update on the Acquisition Lab. As you know, the Lab is a highly vetted cohort based accelerator and community for people serious about buying a business. After going through the Lab's month long intensive, you have ongoing access to almost daily Q and A sessions with advisors, regular live deal reviews with Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build Potential Deal team introductions, and a very active Slack group with other searchers on the path. Well, the update is that the Lab recently passed 60 businesses acquired and for well over $100 million in aggregate transaction value. Also, all members now enjoy lifetime access to the Lab because when you buy a business it's often just the first of many and the Lab wants to support you in every deal, not just your first. Lastly, check out my recent interview with Shane Ursum, episode 105. Shane acquired a business with over $1 million in EBITDA in just six months and he attributes a lot of his deal success to what he learned in the Lab. Check out acquisitionlab.com or email the lab's director, Chelsea Wood chelseieve.com Robert Graham and Jordan Carter thank you for joining me today on Acquiring Minds.

[3:01] Guest 2: Glad to Be here. Will, excited to talk to you.

Guest 3: Thanks for having us.

Guest 2: Will.

Host: You guys are both acquisition entrepreneurs. You both bought businesses. Robert, I believe you have acquired multiple businesses in the home healthcare space. And Jordan, you were a guest this past summer and we covered your acquisition story then. But today you are both here in a different capacity as partners in search investment group sig. That's a name that will be familiar to a lot of the audience. SIG is a firm that invests in and advises self funded searchers. You both are proponents of the self funded model of search. And SIG is a, is, is a firm's really devoted to that path. And one of the the, the points of contrast is with traditional search funds. So self funded versus traditional search funds. Robert, you participated in a debate here on Acquiring Minds with Greg Geronimus oh earlier this early part of this year, while this will be airing in 2023, so early part of 2022 and you were arguing for the merits of self funded over traditional. And one of the things that came up in that debate multiple times was the fact that the self funded search world lacks the data and visibility that traditional search funds have. Thanks largely to the Stanford study that people cite all the time. It comes out, I think biannually and it's been published now for some number of years. Self funded is more of a black box. And and so we were all kind of flying blind in terms of being able to actually put numbers behind the merits or lack thereof of self funded search. Sig, the two of you and the rest of the folks at SIG have now tried to rectify that. You have been conducting a, what I think is the most comprehensive study of its kind of self funded searchers over the last six or so months to try to bring visibility to this whole space. And so that report is being dropped today, is being published today and it is what we are going to spend our time on in this conversation. So with that, before we dive into all of that, let's let me have you just give quick intros of yourselves and sig, in your own words. Robert, if you want to start us off, absolutely.

Guest 2: Thank you Will. Thanks for having us on. So my background, I was, I'm from Texas originally. I was an engineer for several years, went back to school, got my MBA at Harvard Business School, worked in private equity on a couple of roll ups and then went out with a business partner and started acquiring home health, home care and hospice companies. So we started our first acquisitions were in 19. We acquired three companies, total EBITDA of about Close to a million. And since then we've made a total of 6 acquisitions and current group total EBITDA is just over 8 million of EBITDA should be on track to be at 10 run rate wise shortly. And you know, I've done all of those acquisitions utilizing the self funded search methodology. And so I, together with Jordan and another business partner, started SIG to help other searchers find and acquire businesses, you know, and go down the same path we did because we saw it as a, you know, a great path to entrepreneurship, owning your own business and creating intergenerational wealth that not everyone knew how to approach. So that's kind of what I've been up to and who I am.

[6:36] Host: Ed Jordan, before you go, tell me how, like give me a sense of the deals and transactions now that SIG has been involved in. How many? Some parameters?

Guest 2: Yeah, great question. So I think in total sig, I don't know the total number, but it's, it's well over 10 transactions we've done with self funded searchers over the last two years. In 2021 we helped six searchers close deals, and in 2022 we helped six searchers close deals as well. So we close a deal about every other month of the searcher. In 2022, average EBITDA was 2.5 million and searchers kept close to 71% ownership in the companies that they were acquiring. So every one of the deals we're doing with a searcher, generally speaking, is a life changing event. You know, most people, if you own 71% of a company generating 2.5 million of EBITDA, that changes your life. And that's a super rewarding thing that we get to be a part of and excited to do it in 2023.

Host: Thank you, Jordan. Please.

Guest 3: Yeah, Will. So just to add to that too, you know, all of the, all of the deals we talk about, transactions or acquisitions, these are the other entrepreneurs, it's their deals. Right? We are in a support role. We're here to help them, enable them to get the lion's share of their, of the upside, the lion's share of the common equity. I mean, this is like, this is what it's about. Since all three of us founding SIG Partners pursued this path, we did self funded, we funded our own search, we watched our checking accounts go down month over month. As we devoted to this path, we felt a calling to help other people come behind us and be successful and hopefully improve the overall success rate. So we do have a, what we call a full Time support program where we are in the trenches directly with live full time self funded searchers, we're partners together. They're going to win the most of that, right? They're getting, you know, all that upside but we're here to support them, make sure they get all that funding, make sure they're credible out there in the marketplace, make the right decisions, save themselves time and hopefully close. So far right now most of our searchers that have worked with us in that program, that full time support have closed within 12 months. So in fact nobody is, nobody has lasted longer than 12 months. They keep closing their deals with us. So I think that's helpful. My background. So I did investment banking as an analyst in New York and then I went into private equity as an associate, did that for a couple years and went to Wharton Business School and really thought about pursuing a search and I didn't know exactly what type of search. So traditional self funded accelerator. I ended up feeling that self funded was going to be that give me the most things that I was looking for which was autonomy, longevity. I wanted to be able to control the company hopefully for my whole life, right. And maybe even pass it to my children, have that flexibility and also just benefit from the upside, right? Have majority equity control. So I did a self funded search. I bought a company in July 2020 that does professional services and software for cities across the country and two months later started Search Investment Group with Robert and our other business partner Aaron.

[10:00] Host: And that's Aaron Blick, correct?

Guest 3: It is.

Host: Great. I'll have to meet Aaron one of these days. That's great. Thank you for that guys. So I touched on it already about historically there's been this lack of data around self funded search, but expand a little bit on that for me. What motivated you to want to do this study? What problem are you solving and how can the searchers in the audience who are looking for a business to buy, how can they benefit from this data? Is this an academic exercise or is there applicable data here?

Guest 3: The whole goal of this is to be informative. When I say, you know, self funded search has been the wild west because there's no data, that's not helping anybody. It's not helping investors understand what is possible and what they should expect in investing in these deals. But more importantly, it's not helping the searcher. I've, I've had lots of calls with prospective searchers who are considering different paths and they're like, I, I read the Stanford study, I kind of know what I'm getting into. There. But when I go to self funded, it's just a black box and it's a, it's a big opaque unknown and hopefully this is very practical. You know, we're not here as representing a university. We want it to be usable advice, support that can, that can help someone go, you know what, I should probably structure my search like that or you know what, I'm thinking about doing something maybe that's not so good of idea based on the data. Right. And so we're going to continue to get better with this over time. We're going to do this annually, but as a first run I think it's, I'll let people decide for themselves, but I hope it's incredibly useful in practice.

Guest 2: I think there's really two types of people that we're trying to help by releasing a study like this. The first one is groups of people deciding if they want to even do eta, if they even want to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition and go out and buy their own business. This study provides comprehensive data to show that, that this is a viable path to creating intergenerational wealth. Owning your own business, controlling your own destiny. You know, and the second piece of it is we're trying to help folks once they have decided to make that, that jump and pursue this path. You know, what is, what does a successful search look like? Right? What do successful searchers look like? How much even, even tactical things, right? So like how much should you be paying for, you know, legal fees and how much should you be paying for a qv? You know, how long should your search likely be running? Things like that, right. What kind of terms do you need to offer to investors? So we're really, I think, helping at two points for, for folks, the decision point as to when they want to pursue this path and, and also once they've decided, you know, how to actually navigate, you know, this, this river which a lot of people don't understand fully and you know, for almost everyone who's doing a search, it's their first time doing it. I will say I think that the data in this study is going to be a bit controversial for certain people. A lot of people aren't going to like that we compiled this data and are releasing it to the public. And there's a lot of, I'd call them almost special interests within the traditional search investing space and within the third party advisory space that are not going to like that this data is being released. And you know, we may, you know, earn some enemies. I hope we don't, but we decided to do it anyway. There's searchers out there that are paying $200,000 in legal fees who don't need to be doing that. There's also searchers out there taking horrendous terms from investors and they don't need to be doing that. And that's, that's our philosophy at sig, helping the searcher. And that's the purpose of releasing this study.

[13:53] Host: Well, you just touched on them and I'm going to push harder on you for the particularly controversial bits in the data, Robert, as we get into it. Just the last step before we do exactly that is let's hear the methodology. Where did this data come from?

Guest 2: This methodology that we used? We had to really come up with our own methodology because the methodology that the Stanford study uses has a relatively well defined set of traditional searchers because those are folks who have taken capital from a certain subset of investors on certain terms and with certain stipulations. So that is a pretty well defined cohort of people. Self funded search is not well defined at all. People start searching for a business to buy and stop searching and pause their search and search part time. And you know, it's not well defined at all. So we had to come up with a novel way to collect this data. And what we did was we decided the best way to find a good selection and also randomly select participants was to leverage social media. And so we utilized three social media platforms, LinkedIn, searchfunder.com and Twitter, to find people who self identified on those platforms as self funded searchers or who could pretty readily be identified as self funded searchers. And we sent over, well, we hired a third party firm to help us randomly select participants from those social media platforms. And then we sent close to 1,000 invitations, a little more than 1,000 invitations to folks to participate once they agree to participate. Number one, we filtered out more than one submission from an IP address. So an IP address could only submit one time. And then in addition, we also filtered out anyone who didn't self identify in the survey as a self funded searcher from the results. So we think that was a relatively good way to get the responses we did and to focus on the responses that we decided to focus on. So we ended up getting close to just over 250, 270something responses to the survey that were usable responses, which we believe is a pretty robust data set.

[16:14] Host: Great. And as you said, it is, it is challenging to identify people who are part of, you know, who are in this, this black box of self funded search and how fluid it is. They're in, they're out, they're searching, they're not searching and so on. So there, there, there is at the, at the end, to your credit, at the end of the report, which I'm looking at here, a little bit of an appendix on shortcomings that you guys recognize that are just kind of inherent to the process and inherent to the, the very opaque and messy nature of self funded search. Why don't you just highlight those a little bit first? Jordan, you want to, you want to take that one?

Guest 3: Yeah, sure, sure will. So you know, Robert described a little bit of the methodology which inherently is different. It's going to be different than the traditional search fund study that's out there that everybody's used to. And I think it is the fact that it is a sample has inherent, you know, questions of where does the sample come from? How did you assemble the sample? One of the things to follow up what was just discussed is that surveys were not pulled out for any reason other than those reasons like technical issues or some kind of a duplicate or something just to clean the data. We never looked at answers and said, huh, this doesn't support our approach or something like that. It was, we pulled it all in and just looked at the data and, and we're releasing it and honestly, you know, we're going to use this going forward this next year, right. To look at things and kind of kind of read some things out, read the tea leaves a little bit. So if it's useful for us, we clearly took that approach. The, so the fact that it is participative I think is one of the first ones that could potentially have an issue. Right. So you, you might argue that someone would only participate in this study if they had kind of a good experience, right. Why would someone even respond? In fact people do this all the time, particularly with self funded search. They put on their linkedins that they are doing a search, they get their search fund name, their website, little. I've seen this a couple times now. I go back, I check in with someone, hey, how's the search going? I look at their LinkedIn, it's gone. It just says they were an independent consultant. So I think there's a natural human drive to kind of dust that under the rug and kind of move on. And that person's probably not going to also participate in the survey itself.

[18:36] Host: August Felker is a two time successful searcher, first with a traditional search fund. The second time around he did a self funded search. Today August runs Oberle Risk Strategies, an insurance firm with a dedicated practice group for searchers and acquisition entrepreneurs like you. If you've got a business under loi, Oberle will provide complimentary due diligence on that business's insurance and benefits program. A great no risk way to get to know August and team. They love helping searchers. They've worked with hundreds. Oberly is a specialty insurance brokerage for searchers by a former searcher. Check out oberly-risk.com O B E R L E- risk.com link in the show

Guest 3: notes the other thing is, yes, we had IP addresses that were pulled as part of it, but they were scrambled in terms of knowing which which responses did which.

Guest 2: Right.

Guest 3: We can't, we don't know who said what. We just know that this many people responded and here's the data. So I think from that perspective we're going to get as honest of a response as we can get. But yeah, that's what I saw. Robert, do you want to share any other shortcomings?

Guest 2: Yeah, I think, you know, you already kind of touched on it Jordan, but the fact that the self funded space is not as well defined as the traditional space. You've got people starting and starting searches all the time and so there's really no data in here or conclusions that can be drawn related to the success rates of folks during the search phase. Right. That data is. So far we have not figured out a way to reliably pull that data and infer from it. So that's obviously one big piece that's missing here. And then the method we even use to send the invitations, you could argue there are shortcomings with that. Right. So going through social media. Well, number one, the subset of searchers who are on social media is probably different than the total population. In addition to that, if you think about the people that would have been sent invitations by the third party we hired, that contracting firm would have received would have seen other profiles of self funded searchers that were in our own network or in networks that were closely tied to ours, our second and third level order networks at a higher rate than they would see people that were completely out of our network. That in itself would have in some ways probably biased the the group of people who were invited to participate in the study. There's also some signs even of some bias. For example, something you mentioned will in our email, there's a relatively high percentage of respondents with MBAs that could be reflective of a few different things. Another thing to notice is a high percentage of post Closed entrepreneurs that were respondents had been only operating their business for a short time, so close to 80% less than three years. Three years or less. And that could be caused by a lot of things. For example, our own networks could be relatively early in the ETA space, which could have led to that. There could have been rapid growth in popularity in the self funded search path. And so because of that, the folks who are responding are relatively early in the process at a higher rate than really the overall population. And then it could be that older or operating or exited searchers are not as present on social media and are not publicly identifying themselves as searchers on social media. So there's all kinds of biases and shortcomings this survey could have had. We try to do our very best to eliminate as much of that as possible and use reasonably, you know, statistically kosher methods to collect this data. And I think we overall did a really good job at a really difficult problem.

[22:47] Host: Yeah, thank you for that, that's great. And yeah, I think it's great that you guys acknowledge so transparently these potential shortcomings because obviously data is only as good as kind of the collection method. But with all of that understood, it is still the only thing like it out there. And it is a lot of data. And so how I want to proceed with this is I want to give the audience just kind of a high level, kind of chapter by chapter, what's included. But there are so many data points here. We would spend hours in this conversation going through each one. So we have each of us all three kind of come up with a few findings that were particularly interesting to us individually. And we'll go through those. But before I ask you for each of yours, let me just paint a picture for the audience here. So it's how many Pages is a 70 page report? And the way you guys have laid it out is kind of in the sort of chronology of an actual search. So you start with what kind of the demographics and background of searchers looks like. So that's kind of interesting. What does a self funded searcher look like? Then you go into data about the search phase. So things like part time versus full time, how many hours a week are allocated to a search, the range, the EBITDA range, the revenue range of the acquired target, cost of living during the search phase, solo or partnered sourcing the acquisition, you know, what methods are people using, Intermediary versus cold outreach. So that's kind of a lot. There's a lot of data there just under the search. Then you move into the actual acquisition phase. Lots of, you know, more data around the acquisition phase. We're only halfway through. I mean this thing is really robust. Then funding how, how searchers, self funded searchers use debt, use, use equity, work with investors, what the parameters that have emerged, what kind of, what that looks like. And then the operating phase, that's a, that's a slightly shorter section. And then finally the returns both for investors and for searchers themselves. So it really, you know, as searchers are out there and perhaps using this as a resource, they can kind of, you know, drill into wherever they are in their search. They can kind of map that to that part of the report and really, and really, you know, quickly cross reference like what they're experiencing with what the data shows. So it's, it's laid out really nicely and intuitively that way. That said, I actually want to start with the last page, the last finding which is the, on the, in the return section, the, the net equity proceeds to the searcher. And that's really like what did a self funded search do for the net worth of searchers? And the reason I want to start there is because there are many reasons that people get into search, but obviously financial benefit is probably the top or certainly top two or three reasons how much real wealth can be generated by this path. And I think we all believe that it's significant and that's why so many of us are interested in it. And this puts some numbers around that. Robert, why don't you tell me what you guys found in terms of the net equity proceeds that self funded searchers enjoy in aggregate.

[26:09] Guest 2: So sure will happy to talk about that. And before I say, you know, mention my highlights here, I think it's really important to view these all within the context of who the respondents are. And that gets into a really important point that I made earlier in this conversation. 81% of respondents had operated their company less than three years. Three years or less. So that's really important here. Right? And within three years or less, 53% of searchers would have had proceeds of over a million. Okay, 29% would have had proceeds of 3 million or more. That's pretty incredible. So I think the, the big takeaway here for me is this. You know, clearly looking at this data, it appears that self funded search is a reliable path to making several million dollars and creating true intergenerational wealth. It's probably not a reliable path to earning several hundred millions of dollars, but it's definitely one where you can create intergenerational wealth. With relatively high probability compared to other forms of entrepreneurship. So I think that was a great takeaway from this report and one hopefully that's encouraging to a lot of people considering this path.

[27:40] Host: Yeah, excellent. Thank you for that, Robert. Jordan, why don't you share with us one of your one, a finding that struck you.

Guest 3: Yeah. And Will, on that point, you know, 86% of searchers in the study that people will see retain greater than 60% common equity ownership. So not only are they generating the, the, the returns that Robert just, just shared that, you know, if we basically ask the question, if the business were sold today, what would be your net equity proceeds? Right. And Robert just shared those numbers. Well, you know, you look at kind of the average size of the deals that people are doing and they're retaining, you know, substantial majority equity control. They're actually going to govern if and when they sell. So that's not including the cap distributions that, that you know, CEO and majority owner is keeping throughout the life of the hold period. That was just looking at the exit actually.

Host: And Jordan, let me, let me also add something to, to that. The, so you have 10% of, of searchers would say 10 million or more. 12%, 5 to 10 million, 2%, 4 to 5. So essentially 25% of searchers, $4 million and above and 10%, $10 million. So according to this data, which, which we've caveated but you know, 1 in 10 searchers, this has been a path to, to have $10 million in net worth and, and 1 in 4, almost 1 in 4, call it 1 in 5, $5 million and above. So that's really quite striking. Like when you look, you know, when you look at the top, the top 10% or the top 20%, it becomes really eye popping.

Guest 2: These numbers, those percentages are only reflective of searchers who have closed deals. So it's not like 10% of self funded searchers are going to end up with proceeds of over 10 million. That's only the subset who actually bought a business. I want to make that very clear.

Guest 3: Yeah.

Host: Yep. Thank you.

Guest 3: Yeah. So Will, on that point, you know, if you look throughout the study, you're going to find clues that kind of come out of the data. How does, how do you get there? Right. I think who would not pursue self funded search and try to go for that, right. Try to go for a 5 million net equity proceeds or 10 million net equity proceeds. And one of those things you can do is to buy larger. Right. Because you can still retain the same north of 60%, 60% plus common equity retention at a $1 million EBITDA or a $2 million EBITDA deal and you can put 80% plus debt on the business. This all helps you unlever and create those net equity proceeds over time. So to me, what's also striking about that is that a lot of these deals are being done with 80, 90% debt to value on the business. So when you buy a company at, let's say you know, four times or four and a half times ebitda now you've demonstrated to the entire world that that company can transition ownership successfully. Say you run it for two years. Because that's always a question. You buy a company that's been around for 20 years, can it survive? Will the employees leave you? Right, is some, are there, are there tons of skeletons in the closet? They're all going to come out. So by the fact that you demonstrated that that actually can, can transition ownership, it becomes sellable. Your company now can be transacted again and people don't have that question mark of I don't know, can it, can it sell? So that actually helps. Certainly growth helps increase your valuation multiple. But yeah, there's, there's all sorts of different inputs into that.

[31:23] Host: But let's drill in a little bit to the post close performance. So to the extent that searchers grow revenue and or grow ebitda, obviously now we're talking about searchers who have closed because we're talking about post close performance. So one of the things that struck me was how the number of successful searchers who close who saw revenue and EBITDA decline was reassuringly low. So for EBITDA performance, I think it was 9% saw EBITDA decline post closing. Reassuring of course, because the big risk here is that you buy business and then the business starts tanking or going down for whatever reason. Either you bought a lemon or you're mismanaging it. So nice to see that that happens less than one in 10 times. And I'm talking about EBITDA performance, not profit performance. Now what was interesting to me is actually a lot. It was a bigger number that maintained EBITDA performance. So it looks like about 54% of folks of searchers maintained. I actually would have thought that there'd be more who increased profit. Almost 45% grew their businesses from a profit perspective, but a large 54% maintained. Did you guys have a reaction to that? Yeah.

Guest 3: First of all, that's incredible given the short hold period that we're that on average the respondees indicated. So when you come in there. One of the things we don't know whether the respondent was comparing to EBITDA pre loading in kind of all the post close operational expenses they have to put in. I'll tell you for me I had to hire a controller, I hired a director of operations and operations analyst, a bookkeeper, you know, and added my own salary in there and still grew ebitda. So that's, it's tough to do. But I think the fact that there's people that have maintained EBITDA so far in such a short hold period is a good indication of things to come to get their feet under them.

[33:27] Guest 2: Well, I think there's two really important things to realize when you look at the maintenance percentages, the folks who have maintained EBITDA and, and compare that to the amount of folks who have had who would expect pretty high proceed exits from their business. And the first thing here is the great thing about self funded surge and utilizing a leverage structure to buy a small business at a low multiple is you don't have to knock it out of the park to make great returns. That's the truth of the matter. These businesses generate good cash flow, they pay down debt, they pay good distributions because people are buying them at three to four times EBITDA and putting on 80% LTV. The returns are just through the roof because of the nature of how these businesses are being acquired. And so maintaining EBITDA isn't a bad return situation actually for these entrepreneurs, which is an incredible takeaway here. This isn't vc. You don't have to knock it out of the park, you just have to not let it go off a cliff. And so yeah, there I've been a lot of people who haven't knocked it out of the park but are maintaining the business and they're doing just fine. So I think that's one thing. And the other thing here is again, let me point back to the fact that 80% of the folks that were responding to these questions were under three years of hold. Okay? So that's not a ton of time if you're holding a business for two years to have, you know, the chance to grow EBITDA a ton. And that's, that's usually what happens right when someone buys a new small business. There, there is oftentimes a slump at the beginning where you're learning the operation, you're turning things around, you're heavily investing in growth and then that turns around. So I think that it's not fair to assume that those businesses won't grow in the future, they probably will. It's just a relatively short hold period we're looking at. And they're generating great returns even while maintaining the current level of ebitda. Now, I think one thing about the performance that's a huge takeaway for me is revenue. And EBITDA is probably going to catch up. But look at revenue in those numbers. A very large percentage, I think it was 15%, had increased revenue by over 5 million. That's not that impressive when you think about a big business, but it is impressive when you consider that 75% of the acquisitions in the study had under 10 million of revenue. So you're talking about people growing revenue by 50% or more, 15% of them growing revenue by 15% or more in the first two to three years on average. That's pretty amazing.

[36:12] Host: Excellent. Robert, back to you and any finding that you want to pluck out and share.

Guest 2: Yeah, I think a big highlight for me that was really an important one here, was that searchers are overwhelmingly ending up with true pure controlling ownership of their business. Of the searchers we studied who had closed a business, 42% had boards. Of that 42%, 55% controlled the majority of the board. And so if you assume that the ones who didn't have boards controlled their businesses for the most part, you could draw the conclusion that north of 80% of the self funded searchers who close deals in this study effectively maintain control of the acquired company. That's incredible. And I think that really points to the fact that if you pursue this path, there's a very, very strong chance that you have the ability to acquire a business that you will control and effectively own and control fully, which I think is great, great to see and really proves out the path.

Host: My reaction to that, Robert, is that that is great news, but it does kind of just reaffirm what we all already understood about self funded search. That's one of the strong arguments for self funded search is that compared to traditional search funds, for example, is the level of control that you retain. And so now we see that borne out here in the numbers.

Guest 2: Yeah, I think it's important though. I think it's an important point for people considering this path who are questioning whether they really can control their own business because they're getting information from a bunch of other different sources, including investors on the traditional side, saying that it's just unrealistic for you to control your own, you know, control and own your own business. And you can see right here the data, it's that's not unrealistic, that's very real.

Host: Jordan, what, what other finding struck you?

Guest 3: Yeah, so Will, throughout the study. Again, if I were searching, if I were starting over and this existed, which I wish it had, it it's leaving clues, it's giving insight into how to set up a search and, or if you are considering doing a search in the future, what kind of experience you want to get to maximize your probability of success. Just like startup, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship through acquisition. I'm pretty sure everybody who does this and everybody who does a traditional search even they all want to be in the, in the bucket that not only successfully completes a deal before two years completes, but also is in the top tier and generates the most returns and wins the biggest. Right. At the end of the day it is a statistical game. You can influence the outcome and you should use some of these insights in order to do so. Do that. So out of the 279 respondents of which you know, some are still searching, so that is a caveat, but only 39% had successfully acquired a business. So to me it tells you that this is not an easy game. It's hyper competitive. Right. It's 2023. There's a lot of people doing this and there probably, probably will be more people doing this as the economy continues to, to degrade at a macroeconomic level. We saw this happen in 2008, 2009. It creates more searchers, so it's going to get more competitive. That being said, you know, there are a lot of part time searchers out there. I truly believe that going full time will enable you to devote the amount of time necessary to increase your odds of success and not let things creep in like oh my gosh, my checking account is now getting to a dangerous level or my spouse is it can't take this anymore or I can't mentally take it anymore kind of thing. Right. So there is advantages to moving fast. And how can you focus your search in such a way that maximizes your opportunity to get that one sell, that, that one sale, that's which is what you're going for. I think that's very insightful.

[40:22] Host: Yeah, no, that is interesting. And let's just also talk about that private equity observation. The, you know, I've heard searchers express intimidation by the fact that there are, it seems to be that there are a lot of former private equity people doing search for obvious reasons. They're basically doing, you know, search at a, at a professionalized level in private equity. And then they say to themselves, hey, why don't I do this individually? But it turns out that maybe those, those are overrepresented in our mind. The, the participation of former private equity folks is actually fewer than we think. And Jordan, you just had a kind of interesting anecdote about your own psychology when you did have it coming come from private equity. Obviously you are former private equity who did successfully acquire business, but it actually in some ways got, you got in your own way because of your private equity training. Elaborate on that. That was interesting.

Guest 3: Yeah, well I think that the interesting thing about private equity comes from the fact that when you are essentially trained and every day of your life as a, as an investment team associate is to really be selective. I mean you look at the pipeline of deals, let's say in the lower end of market where that's where I was anywhere from about $50 million in company value up to up to 750 million in total enterprise value of companies we were looking at. And we would go through thousands of companies, look at, you know, thousands of sims, right, talk to investment bankers, right, for those size of companies and we would turn away so many different companies and go to investment committee and people would find the one thing that made us not want to hold that in our portfolio. So it does make you very selective or picky. And now you're about to go down to companies that are, that are being bought for between, you know, my target was between like 5 to 15 million. I know a lot of self funded searchers are looking at total enterprise value, you know, two and a half million up to seven and a half million. But, but regardless it's a different, it's a different type of company. And when you come into these companies you're going to have to load in a lot of management team operational expenses, fix things, right? And not necessarily turnaround, but none of these companies that we look at and that we support in partnership with our full time support searchers, none of them would pass the criteria to be able to acquire as a private equity associate. You would be embarrassed to send that on to your partner. And yet these are fantastic opportunities. But you just have to re target your scope or re scope it if you will.

[43:11] Guest 2: I just wanted to add something to Jordan's answer really quickly. I spent some time at a PE firm also and the M and A market at the level of 25 million of EBITDA north of that is completely different than the M and a market at 1 million to 5 million of EBITDA. It is a different universe and I think folks with PE backgrounds come into self funded search with a bunch of pretty preconceived notions about how things should work in terms of sourcing deals and closing them. And that can be a real hindrance because they will go months before truly adjusting to the realities of the lower, lower middle market. Give you one example, you can look in the study and see 2.4 executed LOIS, for every closed deal. But if you thought about my experience at a PE firm, if you submitted an LOI and it got executed, there was probably north of a 75% chance of the deal closing. That's just not the case here. And you're not on the other end of the table from Goldman Sachs. You're on the other end of the table from a broker or no one and just dealing directly with the business owner. It's a very different environment.

Host: So just for the searchers out there who don't come from private equity backgrounds and feel that they're at some, that they have a disadvantage there, maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe the private equity folks get in their own way and you not coming from that background are maybe more clear headed about the opportunity than private equity folks. So, but talking about kind of credentials and backgrounds, let's, let's talk about this MBA number. So 63% of the searchers who responded to the survey had an mba. That number was very large to me. Obviously a lot of my guests indeed went through MBA programs. So I was expecting to see, you know, a lot, a lot. But 63% is almost like, wow, if I don't have an MBA, should I be playing in this game? How did you guys respond to that, to that number?

[45:13] Guest 2: Well, I'll say this, first of all, most of the top MBA programs now teach ETA or search as part of their curriculum and they churn out a ton of searchers every year. So it's not that surprising to us. I'll also caveat, the number that you cited will, you know, part of it is probably due to some of the shortcomings of our study. Right. So invitations were sent to folks through social media and there was bias likely there in terms of who would receive an invitation because of our own networks within social media. Even though those folks were randomly selected by the third party firm we contracted, there was still a higher likelihood that folks within our own network would receive an invitation. So that is, you know, a shortcoming that we need to acknowledge. If you don't have an mba, I don't discourage you from pursuing this path. We've had several SIG searchers without MBAs be incredibly successful at this and I don't think it's necessary.

Host: Yeah, I'll add to that just sort of anecdotally, I think you're right. I mean the three sources of your survey respondents, search funder, LinkedIn, Twitter, you know, the feel of the search communities, each of those, they have a feeling. And Search Funder is very kind of education.

Guest 2: Yes.

Host: I mean you see a lot of MBAs on there and in fact Search Funder has kind of baked that into the user experience. I mean everybody's got like where they're at school or where they went to school like right next to their name. So naturally there's going to be a, you know, preponderance of MBA folks coming from that community. Meanwhile, on, on SMB Twitter, a lot of the big names there, so I don't know them, their educational bios aren't right there on their Twitter profiles. But I suspect a lot of those folks are not MBAs. And so it, this is just again to add to echo what you just said, Robert, this just kind of comes down to where that, where the data came from. But to, to amplify what you said at the very end there, Robert. People should not be discouraged if they don't have an mba, even though when they see this big number in the data.

Guest 3: So Will, you know, we even one of our full time support surgeries just successfully completed an acquisition and his background was Marine Corps officer, no mba. There's all sorts of ones out there that are successful doing this. I do think at a business school there's a little bit more of a bias to go bigger and to seek that a little bit more comfort in raising capital from investors. Because pretty much everybody who touches foot on campus at a business school where search is discussed has heard a presentation from a traditional search investment firm or an accelerator investment firm. And that is by definition investor capital. It's just coming up front before you even start searching. So there's a little bit more again to the shortcomings. There's a little more of that bias towards that kind of model. And you know, I recently did a poll on my Twitter where I asked just the people following me, I said hey, what, what size companies are you looking for? And overwhelmingly it was smaller, it was a smaller size of company. So I think you're right, Will, there's a little bit of a cohort kind of scoping effect.

[48:29] Host: Yeah. I just want to interject here with just an observation of kind of in the aggregate what these, the LOI numbers just piggybacking on the stat that you just pulled out. Robert, what do successful searches look like? According to this data, searchers that successfully acquired, I'm quoting now, acquired targets submitted an average of 6.9 Lois during the search phase with 2.4 of those Lois executed on average. So the average self funded searcher puts out seven and two and a half are executed.

Guest 2: Yep.

Host: Yeah. And, and then the median total time between discovering the target. So not necessarily setting the way. Definitely not setting the. I just discovering the target. The business that you want to go try to buy to actually closing the deal was between four and six months. So that was the median.

Guest 2: Within Pillar Health Group, we've had several deals that have taken unfortunately three months to close and I don't think that that's uncommon at this level. These deals have more hair on them and oftentimes you're dealing with the SBA which requires a ton of documentation before you can close. You know, and oftentimes the seller is involved in day to day operations of the business so they can't just drop everything and collect all the data you need. So it's not uncommon at all for the phase from finding the business to closing to taking several months, unfortunately. But that's just the reality of the space. Yeah, yeah.

Host: Jordan, did you want to add something?

Guest 3: Yeah. So Will, this is part of the make or break of your search. You know, if you're a self funded searcher and you're putting it all on your back and it takes you on average four to six months from discovering a target to successfully closing a deal. And with you combine that with the submitting seven letters of intent and only 2.4 of those essentially getting executed before successfully completing a deal. Time moves pretty fast. So you go after one or two deals that ends up dying at the fourth or fifth month, you've already exhausted over half of your search or close to it. And you know, I know some self funded searchers who actually are still searching and it's been like three or four years. It's rare but most people set a timeline to this. They say, you know what, I'm going to give it 24 months. And that's just what makes this all the more meaningful for you to find those things and make sure you're making the right decision when you're going after a company because the sell side, the broker and the seller will happily entertain your process and carry you all the way through because they want to sell their company. But what if you discover in that four month, 4.5 you're like, oh my gosh, I just discovered a deal killer. I cannot do this business purchase. This is my life, right? This is my career. Putting my personal guarantee on the SBA note. So again, just just goes back to making sure you're making the right calls. That's critical to success.

[51:44] Guest 2: Let me add one more thing to that. So we're talking about the time period from finding the business to closing it. But also in the study is the time period from deciding to start a search until closing on a deal. Right. And if you look at the searchers who successfully acquired companies, those are pretty encouraging numbers. 53% of searchers who acquired companies did so within 12 months and 83% within 24 months. Those are pretty good percentages, I think.

Host: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Guest 3: For the people who successfully acquired, they did it within two years, basically.

Host: Robert, at the top, you had given as an example a sense of costs, deal costs as one of the ways that this report can be really applicable to a searcher. So let's touch on that really quickly. The two big costs discussed in the report are your quality of earnings report costs and legal costs. What did you find there?

Guest 2: Well, Will, I think it's really important that we collected this data. I'm so glad we did. There are, unfortunately, there's a lot of advisors in this space who in some ways, I think almost take advantage of the fact that self funded searchers often have never closed a deal before and they don't really know what's necessary in terms of spending on legal and accounting due diligence and other forms of due diligence or when to do those diligences, when to turn on an advisor and start paying them. So I think important takeaways here. 85% of searchers in the study spent less than $30,000 on a Q of E, 68% spent less than $50,000 on legal due diligence and document prep combined. So you do not have to spend an arm and a leg here. You do not need to go to Deloitte and get a $150,000 Q of E done. I didn't do it. Jordan didn't do it. None of the searchers in SIG do. And really very few of the searchers in the study did that also. So you can really get the due diligence you need done for pretty reasonable costs. The other really good news about deal costs, 75% of searchers racked up less than 25k of dead deal expenses. So even though you know less than 50% of allies that get executed lead to an acquisition. Folks are mostly walking away with dead deal expenses that aren't terrible. Right. Almost everyone's walking away with less than 25k of dead deal expenses.

[54:27] Host: And Robert, just pull out. You had kind of gone through the number. But just so people have a, just a quick takeaway, what do you feel based on your experience and then based on what the data is here, what is the band, the range that a Q of E costs and then legal expenses per deal?

Guest 2: Well, Will, you can spend as much as you want on either one of those things, but you know, kind of the numbers I spoke to, almost everyone spends less than 30k on a Q of the most of you know, RSIG searchers are spending less than 30k. I would say a typical Q of E is probably going to cost you. And these are numbers outside of the study. Somewhere between 10 and 25k, you can get a really solid Q of E done. And on legal diligence, like I said, 68% spent less than 50k. You know, our searchers are typically spending somewhere around 30, 30k. 25, 30k on legal diligence and document prep. That's really all you need to spend unless it's a very complicated deal.

Host: Robert, these were a couple of the points that you thought might attract a little controversy. Were there any other points that were controversial in the data? Now's the time to stir it up.

Guest 2: Yeah, well, you know, I like to do that, Will. I guess the other parts of controversy are things we already talked about, right? Where. Well, I'll say one that we haven't really touched on that much, but we kind of did is boards. Right. The, the whole mantra on the traditional search side is that, you know, these crazy self funded searchers are going out and buying companies and they, they, you know, they're cowboys. They just run them however they want and you know, the investors don't have any control at all. Well, you know, even though that is true oftentimes. Well, the wild part and the you know, cowboy part's not true, but the control part is true many times. There are a lot of self funded search deals that have formal boards. Right. So this whole idea that none of them have boards or any kind of oversight, that's, I don't think that that's very accurate. You look at the data, 42% of the, of the businesses had a formal board, which is, I think, you know, obviously counterintuitive to what has been the message out there. The other piece of it is that, you know, I think a bit of a Controversial one here is the ownership that searchers are able to keep. Right. I think that there's, there's obviously a lot of investors on the traditional side and even some on the self funded side that have their own self interest to watch out for. And that self interest includes trying to beat searchers down to give them the worst terms that searchers will take. Well, the fact of the matter is from this study you can see that searchers are getting great terms. If a searcher used a preferred equity structure 86% of the time, they kept over 60% common equity ownership. That's pretty incredible.

[57:36] Host: Jordan, what other findings do you do? Jumps out at you.

Guest 3: Yeah, so a big finding for me is everybody's always asking how do we set up a search? How do I, should I focus on one or two industries? Should I go broad? I think it's kind of clear in some of the charts here and the data that pursuing a industry opportunistic strategy, that's what I would call it, a generalist strategy, had a higher representation in the acquired searchers versus the 1 to 3 target. Now I think this gets really to, this doesn't mean you're just shooting a shotgun and just like having no discipline to your search and just taking anything that comes at you. What I'd like to know beyond that is how people set up that industry opportunistic strategy. In my own search I had a, I had a, essentially a selection of a few industries that I was pursuing pretty, pretty fully. And then as one or two of those kind of disqualifies themselves through some early primary research, I would funnel those out and I would replace them with more industries. So it's not like you're looking at 20 different industries all at once. That being said, you do have to have that component of your search that is devoted on a weekly basis to, to actually responding to and being open to industries that are outside of something you ever thought you'd consider. Personally I never knew I would buy a company that was going to serve cities with professional services and software as a, as a, you know, essentially a business process, outsourced service in grants. I never knew that. Right. And, but I was open to the opportunity that maybe there's something here. And most of these, a lot of self funded search industries of interest are niches. They are niches you've never heard of. And those are often some of the best businesses and best subsets of industries broadly in which to you can take territory easier. The competitive environment is lower even if the barrier to entry is Relatively high. Right. It doesn't necessarily have to be fragmented and easy to start a business in that space. But if the total addressable market is 150 or $200 million and your business is making $5 million in revenue, you have a lot to go. You can do pretty well. So I think that's a really good insight that people should feel confident about. But it does open up that question of how do you make sure you do it in the most efficient way possible and not burn time going after deals. You shouldn't, given the fact that you're going to look at industries you don't really know about.

[1:00:19] Host: Great, guys. Let's talk a little bit about structure of deals. So I was surprised that, do I have this right, that 45% used some form of seller debt financing or a seller note that struck me as low just because I, I have kind of assumed that some piece, 5, 10, 15%, at least for an SBA deal. I mean, almost all my guests have used seller notes. So I was surprised that actually it's, it's just a little bit less than half did in this data. So can you react to that, Robert?

Guest 2: Yeah, I think Will, you asked me to, to stir things up a little bit. So I'll inject a bit of a controversial opinion here or maybe counterintuitive opinion. The conventional wisdom I think out there within a lot of groups is that you should never buy a company without a seller note. I've heard a lot of people say that I would never buy a small company without a seller note. That's just not really a fair blanket statement to make. A lot of people, I think, don't know that seller notes aren't required by the sba and they may not always actually be the best option. You can look at the numbers in this study and see that for the most part the seller notes usually have shorter terms and amortization likely than SBA debt. Right. So 81% of the seller notes in the study had terms less than 10 years and a large percentage of those were within just less than five years. So that's not as attractive necessarily as, for example, SBA 7 ADA, where you've got a 10 year amortization and a 10 year term. I'll also mention that the interest rates are not as low as people may think. So 56% of the seller notes in the study charge an interest rate of 6% or more, which doesn't sound as bad today in the current interest rate environment. But keep in mind that a lot of these deals were closed in the last two to three years, the ones that are when we're looking at them in the study. And so an interest rate over 6% a year and a half ago wasn't nearly as attractive as it would be potentially today. So I think that folks who think that, you know, seller notes are this huge source of value, I don't think they're necessarily all they're cracked up to be. I personally would be comfortable closing a deal without a seller note if it was the right deal. And I'll say that I think they're nice to have, but I don't think they're a necessity. And the study proves that.

[1:03:12] Host: What about the sort of psychological alignment of incentives that, you know, you, you get your seller in there and onboard and incentivized to help you transition the business as successfully as possible. They're incentivized to see you be successful. So putting aside any financing, any rates, any of the kind of the numbers, just pure getting them on your team to make sure that they get paid out 100% of what they're due, don't you think that works pretty well as a technique?

Guest 2: There's definitely an argument there. Well, and you know, that's the conventional wisdom. So I don't think I'm adding anything by just agreeing to that. So I'll give you some, some a counter argument there. I think a lot of sellers immediately discount a, you know, a 5, 6, 7 year, 10 year seller note as being potentially lost capital anyway. I think that they, they kind of put it as a gamble and a lot of attorneys advise them of that. So, you know, how much value are they really putting on that anyway? And usually some seller notes are 10% or less of the total deal. So, you know, sellers usually walking away with several million dollars and, and I think they're putting a low probability of payback on that extra 10% anyway still. Hey, look, seller notes are nice to have. All I'm saying here, and clearly from the study, it's not necessary.

Guest 3: Yeah. So there are other ways. Why, why is the seller note useful? Is will what you said, which is that it adds a little bit of alignment, it adds incentive to the seller to want to make sure that not only you as the buyer are successful, but that they believe that the company is going to survive through the transaction. There's not something waiting to just explode. Well, in my deal, in the business that I purchased, there was no seller note. What did I do instead? I used an escrow. So there are other methods you can use. You can Set money aside. Mine was on an 18 month escrow. Everything I was going to find about that company, whether there were skeletons in the closet or issues that that would have been not disclosed properly, I would have figured out honestly probably within the first three months. So 18 months is sufficiently protective and that money sits in a neutral third party account that is managed by essentially a trust company that only releases it upon successful completion of that time period and having no outstanding claims against that escrow. So there's, you got to be creative. If a seller is, doesn't like, you know, want to do a seller note, it doesn't necessarily indicate that they don't believe in the company. They may be open to other options or they just want something a little bit shorter. So yeah, I just wanted to add that.

[1:06:00] Host: Yeah, that's great. And just on the point about the kind of relationships with sellers, one of the things that jumped out at me was the overwhelming frequency of positive relationships with sellers post close. So I think the number was about 80% high 70s of acquisition. Entrepreneurs have what they would consider a really positive relationship with their seller. Maybe that's not surprising. I mean deals, you know, deals usually torpedo if the relationship gets sour. But it is a theme on acquiring minds over and over and over, building the rapport, the trust that's really often kind of the, the, the ingredient that doesn't show up on paper but the key ingredient that gets the deal across the finish line. And that I feel like that's kind of borne out in this, in this number. Did you guys have a reaction to it?

Guest 3: So I have a very positive, I would be in the extremely positive, you know, cohort in Figure 42 on this, on this question. And I'm not really that surprised that there's been, there is a positive relationship with the sellers given the way that the companies have performed. Based on the data that we've gathered in the study, it also indicates there is a correlation between people who successfully close business purchases with a seller. Very personal thing, they probably liked you. Yes, money is a component of what they're considering. But you know, in an environment where maybe there's five different self funded searchers who are all saying the same thing, I can take care of your legacy, I'll take care of your employees and your customers. They're going to go with the one that they feel the most akin to and they feel like they could actually be proud of introducing to their friends, to their family because it is a personal, you know, engagement, it's not just a transaction. So, so I think There's a little bit of correlation there between the people who are successful. They've developed good relationships, good rapport with the seller. And that just only continues post close.

Guest 2: Numbers were very surprising to me given my personal experience, because I'll just tell you, in our deal, the first deal we did within Pillar Health Group, the seller, we got a letter from the IRS within about three months of closing proposing several hundred thousand dollars of fines. We had to call the police on the seller and ended up in a several hundred thousand dollar lawsuit with them. So it was definitely counter to my experience. But we'll have to do a separate podcast on that experience because it was pretty colorful. But you know, it's awesome to see that 78% of searchers in the study had positive relationships, relationships with the seller. That's great to see and it's obviously another argument for this path.

[1:09:01] Host: Well, gentlemen, I want to start winding up here. Is there anything about the reporter, the data that we didn't touch on that you really want to make sure people hear before we close?

Guest 2: One thing I was going to mention really quickly is a lot of folks think that if you go the south, the self funded path, you really need to go buy a business and buy a small business. And the fact of the matter is a lot of self funded searchers are buying larger businesses. They're utilizing things really attractive debt structures like SBA debt and they're also bringing in outside equity. So one thing that was kind of surprising, I talked to a lot of self funded searchers who have no concept of the fact that you can go raise equity from investors, which is one thing that SIG does help searchers do all the time. And we do a really good job of helping searchers do that. But 62% of the searchers in this study had raised outside equity to help fund their acquisition while self funding their actual search phase. So don't limit yourself to buying a 200k EBITDA company. Searchers, you can get out there and look at larger companies and put in place pretty attractive debt structures and also raise equity on really attractive terms to buy a larger business.

Host: Jordan, you want to say anything to close out?

Guest 3: Yeah, I think it's related Will, which is that there is something quite special about focusing your search between roughly one million and kind of two, two and a half million of ebitda. If you look at the acquired EBITDA by acquisition multiple range. So looking at basically the, how much you're paying for that EBITDA all the way up to 2 million, the, the, the group that spent less than 4 times, 3 to 4 times EBITDA to buy the company was 46%. So between 1 and 2 million dollars of EBITDA. So you can buy at a really good valuation that is able to generate cash flow even at 90% debt to value and just maintain the EBITDA level of the company and watch your equity creation personally flourish. And I think that is part of a big upside of doing self funded searches because you are going to be the majority benefactor of that equity value creation. So focusing on that size range and you know working with investors to help you fund IT or fund 100% of the equity capital is just a fantastic opportunity to generate really over year over year cash flow to yourself and ultimately an asset that you can hold forever or sell at your discretion.

Host: Well Sig and the two of you are very vocal on this point of size of deal and, and it is something that probably as strong believers as you are in it, you need to be vocal about because so many folks when they decide they want to buy a business aim a little low. We were talking about this pre call probably because they're maybe they're intimidated by buying a business with a million dollars in cash flow. I mean that's going to be a larger business. There's more headcount there. It's a know it's a big scary number. It's a you know, a bigger personal guarantee and so on. And so they, they're the reflex of many is to buy something that's 200, 300, $400,000 of SDE. And I have to, I have to admit that that my own kind of reflex has, has continues to sometimes be that although I've. I've heard you loud and clear and I the argument for buying bigger if you can get it is, is, is, is basically pretty very clear. So anyway it's been kind of borne out in your data here but I know it's something that you're really really strong on if you can find that business. That is another reason people buy a little smaller is because finding that million dollar EBITDA business is no easy feat. So there's that guys I want to close out but tell people where they can find this. So we're talking now in just at the end of the year, late December. But this will air on the date of launch of it will be live for people to go and download. Where should they do that?

[1:13:29] Guest 2: So you need to go to the Search Invest Group website and go to the study tab. So we've got a 2023 study tab. And if you go to search investgroup.com study you can download a copy of the study completely for free.

Host: Okay. And there's just so as I said at the top, there's just this is a really big piece of, I mean a lot of data, a really sizable report. So much that we didn't even touch on. I mean Robert kind of started touching on, on it on the end there about working with investors and the structure of deals and the financing and the returns and the returns to investors, not just to searchers but to investors. We didn't get into really any of that. So there's, there's just really a lot there. A real education for people and a resource as they, as they continue doing their own searches. So I commend you guys on what's. It's a really neat project and much needed. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing it with the Acquiring Minds audience first. I really do appreciate that. Of course, the link, the URL that you just gave Robert will be in the show notes anyway, so people can just open that on their phones and click through and download it directly. And I guess we'll look forward to see how this study evolves over the years. There will be more to come and from. From SIG on this. So thank you guys very much and until. Till we meet again.

Guest 2: Thanks for having us. Will, really enjoyed it.

Guest 3: Thank you.

Host: Will.