Buy vs. Build: The Agency Shortcut

Welcome to another episode of Bought the Biz. On today's episode, Carl Hughes, founder of Draft.dev and the owner of The Podcast Consultant, two digital service businesses he's building into a portfolio. We talked about the immediate leveling up that happens when you step into the owner's seat, the build versus buy decision and why he chose to acquire instead of starting from scratch, and then how AI is reshaping the acquisition world. So super fun conversation. Conversation near and dear to my heart because I also own digital agencies. Let's get into it.

Bought the Biz is a podcast for ETA entrepreneurs who've gone from searching for a business to actually running one. It tells the real story of what happens after the deal closes. The day-to-day operational, emotional, strategic, and leadership challenges that just don't show up in the highlight reels.

The show is story-driven and practical, sharing real experiences from operators along with clear actionable takeaways you can use in your own business today. I'm Garth Fossano, I'm Christi Loucks. Welcome to Bought the Biz. So welcome to another episode of Bought the Biz. Today I'm talking to Carl Hughes, who runs Draft.dev, which is a technical content marketing agency, and The Podcast Consultant, a podcast production company. So, you know, I don't have like my fancy my fancy camera with me today, so don't judge me here. But he acquired one, he built the other. He's building a portfolio of digital service businesses, and we're really just diving in today on what that looks like, the operations, you know, the AI disruption, all of it. So digital agency ownership is near and dear to my heart. So I'm just really looking forward to this conversation. Carl, thanks for joining.

Yeah. And I feel like a lot of searchers don't go into, don't look for them or don't buy them. And so it is kind of a unique place that both of us are in. And yeah, I'm sure there's plenty we could get into there.

Yeah. So, okay, let's just start with high level what you're running and which one you did buy and why.

Yeah.

Simple.

So I started Draft.dev about 6 years ago during the pandemic. I was a CTO at a small startup before this. I had been an early stage engineer Uh, so I kind of knew what it was like to run a business, but I'd never, you know, I'd seen it from the founders that I was sitting next to, but I'd never really done it. And it was a big, um, you know, learning curve to jump in and have to do sales. I'd never done that and, and really build, build up that business. But it leaned a lot on my personal expertise in software engineering and my personal network. And so there was kind of a natural advantage I had there. Um, about 3 years in, I had worked myself out of the day-to-day. One of my big KPIs for myself was always to be able to take a month off at a time from the business. And, um, it took me a couple years to get there, but once I got there, I was like, okay, so I did that and the thing is still working. What do I do next? And I got together with a friend of mine and we started talking about this idea of maybe we could put together a portfolio of these niche specialized service businesses that are fairly— again, they're a little easier to run because they're so specialized and so specific, but they have a small market cap. Each because it's again, very specific with Draft.dev. We maybe have 300 or 400 clients we'd ever wanna work with. And that's like the whole total addressable market.

Mm-hmm.

So when you have a market that small, you know, it's never gonna be a $100 million business. Um, but we, we just figured, you know, maybe there's a way to buy other companies like that and just run them better than they have been. So we went out to buy a podcast production company. We just, we both liked podcasting. We liked video and audio. We thought it was a really simple, uh, metric was, uh, what service do we think there's gonna be more of or more need for in 10 years than there is today. Just that's it. We don't have to worry about like, you know, how big the market is, how many of these companies are. Let's just go find something we, we kind of personally believe will be around. Um, and this was of course before, um, AI was creating videos and audio for people. So maybe there was a little bit of like, we didn't know how that was gonna turn out. But even so, I think that the advantage of this medium that you and I are on today is that we're building a bit of a personal relationship while we're recording content that's then gonna be part of your distribution and my distribution to talk about who we are. So it has this dual benefit that I think is still really powerful. Fulfill in B2B context. Um, so we bought that business 3 years ago now, almost 3 years ago, and we've been running it since, and we still run both. And, um, yeah, we can go from there.

That's awesome. Um, it's— I, I've never talked to a podcast business owner on a podcast, so this is, you know, like meta coming together. Yeah, exactly. Um, okay, so one thing you just mentioned though, right, is like a lot of searchers are not necessarily looking in the agency world, or, you know, sometimes like that specifically, like digital agency world. So two-part question: why were you comfortable with that, and why don't you think people look there? Personal opinion, but just curious.

So yes, I mean, obviously I was comfortable with it because I was already running an agency, and I felt like some of the things that made me unique and uniquely good at running certain kinds of agencies at least, was that I was really strong in process and understanding how to like build constraints around what we could deliver to clients. Um, and I think a lot of agency owners tend to be bad at that. They tend to be more creatives who think in terms of, um, interesting projects and fun things to work on. Often they are practitioners, especially people in that $0 to $1 million in revenue range. They tend to be agency owners that kind of are stuck in the day-to-day and doing the production work for clients, doing more of the creative work. I was much more interested in the building a business side of agencies. And so, um, what I liked about them was that I kind of knew how to take something that was like traditionally thought of as creative and free-flowing and dependent on the owner and maybe make it a little more hands-off. And I thought that was a good opportunity for, um, for me. The other thing was I just understood what those businesses looked like. So when you go into diligence, and I can't imagine managing diligence for like a manufacturing business. Like I've never looked at the P&L of a manufacturing business. It's like, and they have like real accounts receivable and payables and they have inventory and they have like, yeah.

Yeah.

And I get that. Look, you can learn all that. Right. And plenty of people who are searchers actually do have experience in that stuff. And I think that makes perfect sense why you would go for a business then that uses those things. But the, I think for me, what I was looking for is where's my unfair advantage? And, and to me it was like, I know digital agencies. So again, most searchers probably avoid them because they are, uh, very asset light. And so you're, you're basically just buying reputation, customer lists, maybe contracts, but even those can be non-transferable in a lot of cases. And so it's kind of scary. And honestly, it's one of the reasons that, uh, it can be hard to get funding on them too, because, um, you know, banks are a little uncomfortable with those sorts of low asset businesses where there's no collateral in the business itself. But again, it comes down to like I've met several searchers who have bought agency businesses, usually because they had a background in client services or agencies and they kind of knew what they were getting into. So that's probably where it's more common, to be perfectly honest.

Yeah, I think too, at least what I've heard anecdotally is, you know, agencies just by nature, you have more client churn. Than, right, some of these other industries. And so that can be a huge factor is like, oh, I'm just constantly replacing clients and whether—

Yeah, that's scary.

Yeah, it's scary. And, you know, when I— so we acquired an agency in 2023. I was well-versed in lead generation, which is what the agency did. Like, I had a decade of sales and marketing. That part was not the problem, but I did lose um, it was like 40 to 50— I forget the exact number now— 40 to 50% of my clients in the first like 4 to 5 months. And it was for a couple reasons. Like, one, when you bring a new owner in, it is like a natural transition point for a lot of clients that maybe were on the fence. It's like, okay, now I'm for sure leaving. That happened to— with a few. The others were— they did just have a long-standing relationship with the former owner, and it wasn't anything negative. It was just like they kind of stuck it out for a couple months with me, but then they were like, yeah, you know, we're done.

Yeah.

So for various reasons, both relationship-based and, um, a few like performance-based things that I just inherited, uh, I lost a ton of clients. So then I had to go— I had to go make those up, and then I had to grow on top of that, right? Which is— that was the big effort. So I, I understand to a point, like having gone through that, why people are hesitant. But at the same time, you know, now I run my agencies at 70% margin. Like, it's such a good model if you can figure out how to package, how to price, how to retain, and then how to grow on top of that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Every— you know, we as entrepreneurs have this grass is always greener look at businesses. Like, you, you know the problems of your own business so intimately well that you always go, oh my God, I can't— why don't I just own a SaaS? That Wouldn't that be so easy? You know, or why don't I just own a restaurant with a storefront? That would be so easy. Yeah. And you know, when you go talk to somebody who owns a SaaS or a restaurant or anything, they go, holy shit, man, this is really hard. You know, like everything is hard. So I agree with you. And, you know, we were pretty uniquely lucky or fortunate, you know, or we did good diligence where the company we bought, the podcast consultant, had about 80 clients. Almost all of them had been around for 3+ years. Most had been for 5+. And when we bought it, lost almost none until year 1 when we raised prices. That was, you know, again, part of our, our transition plan was like, try to change nothing in the first year, just get the owner out. Second year was, let's start to move some levers and get rid of some of the clients that are just clearly like getting legacy pricing that was, you know, the friends of the owner type thing. And just, we got it, we can't do that forever. And then, um, now in year 3, we're really looking at shaking things up. We've kind of changed some of the whole pricing model and bigger bigger shifts around how we, how we position ourselves. So it's been a gradual approach and that was again, all very intentional because we were a little nervous to like go shake things up too quickly in a business we just bought and we don't really know. So yeah, but you're— the other thing I'll say too, because now we're looking at another acquisition in the space and I will say that like with service businesses, there's often a lot of ways to de-risk that client churn because very few owners of these small service businesses have really a lot of options to sell. So often, you know, you're one of 2 or 3 people making an offer and you might make a pretty good offer, but you say, but it's contingent on year 1, you having retained 70% of the clients or revenue or whatever. And you can often get deals like that. Not every time, but like in my experience, we've made some offers that were in that, that realm. And, you know, it can work.

Yeah, that's actually— that's a great point just in terms of structuring it upfront. Yeah. So, okay, I had a question actually on what you just said, you know, not shaking things up for the first year. But then making some changes year 2, year 3. Did you know ahead, like, did you know in year 1 what changes you wanted to make but were just selectively waiting and then executed on that in year 2? Or did you just sort of use the first year as like digest mode? What was your balance there?

Yeah, I think we had a gut feel of what needed to change. I mean, looking at the guy's P&L, he had, he had never spent money on sales and marketing. It had just been, you know, founder-driven sales and referrals and Um, that's how almost every small service business runs. Uh, so I've, I suspected that a big opportunity would be building and developing actual inbound from search engines, maybe doing some outbound, maybe doing some, um, intentional referral collection rather than just whatever comes in the door. And we did start to do some of that work before we even, you know, really started to shift things up from a client perspective. So year one was like kind of laying some of this basic groundwork for marketing, um, and then getting— making sure the team was in place to actually execute on everything. The, the former business owner had, you know, he had a just a— like a lot of small business owners do, had the habit of kind of answering any client email at any moment. And I remember at, I think, month 6 or so when his— we only kept him for 6 months, so at month 6 he took a vacation and he was like, this is the first time I've had 2 weeks off and just not answered an email in like ever since he had started his business, you know. And it was— I was like, that's a pretty cool like plus for him, you know, a good positive story for him to come out of it. But also it was just like, that was his, he was just live the business. And, um, yeah, I was going to mention this when you talk about the difference between starting a business versus buying one. When you start one, I get it. You have a lot more personal attachment to it and it feels like your baby. When you buy one, um, I was not that worried about losing clients. I was like, yeah, there's somebody else's clients. Like, I don't know. I don't know these people, you know, like, and again, I, I really, I built relationships with a lot of them and a lot of them are great. Great and I love working with them. But at the same time, it's kind of nice to not be super precious about all those early relationships that, you know, he looked at these guys who had started with him 5, 6 years ago, these shows he was managing, and was like, oh, I know, I don't want to lose them, so I won't raise prices even though they're kind of a crummy little podcast that doesn't have enough money and can never pay our rates. And like, you know, I was like, no, they gotta go. You know, I don't know them. Like, this is moving on.

It's fine. Yeah, there's no emotional attachment there. Yeah, not as much, right? Like, you obviously are emotionally attached to the health and performance of your business, but not necessarily to those relationships. Okay, let's— we're kind of going there anyway, so let's go, like, let's talk about build versus buy, because in the search world, it's very much pitched and sold as don't build, you should buy, because you're buying this, you know, cash-flowing fantastic business, you can step in, it's a lot, quote, easier to buy as opposed to build. But here's what I've, you know, looking at the entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, excuse me, that I know who have bought have eventually in some capacity built too. So I, like, my husband and I acquired and then we built another agency. My husband owns a small like property maintenance company, and he built a full new service line under a different brand to service hot tubs for these short-term rentals. You've got a story about that, Garth, our co-host who isn't here today, but he bought a call center for dog training companies, and then now he's building a SaaS AI company out of that same entity, right? So it's just interesting to me that like it's pitched right up front as you need to buy, you need to buy, don't build. But then there's so much building that still happens, right? So like, I don't know, it's just what's your experience been there, you know, building a company and buying a company and what's the overlap?

Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's— man, that's a big question. It's a good one. I agree with you that the line is a lot blurrier than people think. From the outside, it looks like you're going to buy this company and maybe there's an assumption that, oh, that means I can just let it keep doing its thing. I'll just, you know, make sure good managers are in place and let it go. But the truth is, when you're buying an entrepreneurial business, small business of any size, that business and the market it lives in are moving and changing all the time. So, you know, the dog center or the dog call center, right? Like that may have done really well during the, the midst of COVID and then maybe pet ownership starts to drop off a bit or there's a trend against dogs for some reason. You know, again, this is, I don't know that market, but like pretend like that happens. Now you've gotta pivot it and you, you're now building a new company off of the bones of the old one. And that happens all the time. One of our businesses, Draft.dev, went through this last year and AI and content is this like arms race right now, figuring out how to best use AI to generate content, but also keep your content relevant to LLMs and showing up there. And, and it's just changing super fast. So in my experience, you know, when I tried to step back too far as the entrepreneur who was trying to be more working at a very high level and working on the holding company, that business started to struggle because there was no sort of vision for what is it gonna become in this new age. And so, you know, at times I've had to step back back in and get much more involved and hands-on and talk to customers more, kind of do a rediscovery. So I think just keep yourself open-minded. There is no buy and it's just like free income forever. That's like not a case. If you want that, go buy like dividend stocks and just let them pay you forever. That's a different, totally different kind of investing. This is not passive investing. It's not— you get to like have a free pass on never coming up with a new idea. It's gonna— every business is gonna change and probably should change half a dozen times in its life. Of, you know, so I, yeah, I think that it's hard for me to draw the line. What I will say, when we made this calculus of like, do we start a podcast production company or buy one, that was an interesting conversation. The big X factor to me was I don't have customer relationships in this space that could buy this service. I, I knew people at my other agency, but not many of them were asking for podcasts. It just wasn't a, a venue that they cared about that much, versus this guy had built a business with 80 clients who wanted podcasts from him. And I was like, that would take me 5 years to build. Like, I don't know, first of all, I don't know anything about podcasting, so I'd have to at least hire somebody to learn from somebody who did. But second of all, to get 80 clients in a space, then they, they were very heavily concentrated in a good industry. And I was like, man, I would not be able to do that. I have no ends in this industry, no ends in finance, no ends in podcasting. So anyway, long story short, it comes down to like, are these customers, is this industry space worth getting a foot in. And if so, then buy instead of build every time to me.

Yeah, it's— and I think those decision points, they're very like dependent on the situation that you're in too, in terms of like where do you buy versus where do you build. For me, like we started with an acquisition specific to B2B lead generation just by nature because I'm in the search world. You know, itself and like talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and like people who want to acquire, I ended up getting, you know, one client, then two clients, and like, you know, all of a sudden we have four clients who are all coming to me saying, hey, I fried my email domains, I can't send any cold emails to small business owners, can you help me? And that's when I had to take a step back and go like, while the, the, the process isn't all that different from what I'm running currently for my B2B clients, like it's a totally different market than what I'm doing, and I can't effectively package these together and promote them together. It needs to be a separate business, and I have to build from ground zero on a new entity for these particular clients. Now fortunately, I had clients like that I could kind of carry over into that new entity and build from there, so I wasn't looking at like $0 day one within that entity. But it was, yeah, it's just like those decision points where I was like, okay, yes, I could roll all of this under my current company and make it look better, but it really needs to be a build motion over here. So anyway, it's just, it's like those are kind of deciding or decision points in your entrepreneurship journey, even when you buy, that you have to be like, wait, is this the right move? Moving forward. So it's, it's just like you said, it's not binary necessarily.

No, I think you bring up something else that I hear a lot. So I do, I run a podcast called Retained Trust. It's just about agency ownership. I talk to a lot of agency owners. But that, that point is that often when you're talking to customers, you hear these like burning needs, or you're talking to prospects because they're not quite customers yet. You hear those burning needs that aren't quite what you do and you go, Hmm, do I need to go pursue that? Like, is that a call from the universe? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is what's so interesting about entrepreneurship in any flavor, whether you start or buy. Once you get in here and you're in the game, so to speak, it becomes so much easier to spot the opportunities. I talk to a lot of, especially software engineers, my former career, who have all these big ideas for SaaS products that no one needs, you know, and there's no validation in the market and they're always like these unique, really cool ideas, but like not something anyone will actually have a budget line item for. And, um, I really try to coach them on like, look, if the market doesn't need it, just don't waste your time. Like, I know it's going to be fun to build, but that's not the point of running a business. But anyway, so you get out here and you get in here and you start getting customers, you start having calls, and eventually you will find opportunities you never even conceived of.

Very true.

To your point. Exactly. And they might be a separate business or it might just be something to keep in your back pocket.

Yeah. Could not agree more. I want to, a little, not too far a jump. Okay. Let's talk about like growth then in what you've done because you've been heavily impacted by AI with your technical writing content, right? I think that this is a really interesting topic for, you know, people looking to buy a business too because I hear. I see this so frequently in our clients with deal, like for DealBuff, you know, we're helping entrepreneurs go out and find off-market deal flow. And so many people say, I don't want to touch industries that are going to be impacted too heavily by AI because there's too much risk. It could tank. It could, you know, become completely irrelevant day 2 of ownership. Like there's a lot of fear around that. And to your point about like, kind of always like spotting opportunities and like figuring out how do we grow this thing and not just let it stagnate. What's been your experience and how have you managed some of those like AI-focused decision points? What's your outlook on that whole world as it relates to acquiring a company?

Yeah.

So just talk.

First of all, I think there's— yeah, first of all, I think there's this impression that AI is going to take companies that are successful and have have solid finances and good customer bases and turn them into dirt in 90 days. But that, that's not at all the pace that this will happen. I mean, it is moving fast and I'm a, I'm an early adopter. A lot of our clients are early adopters. It means we have to stay on top of this stuff. And I, by all means, the workforce and white collar jobs and agencies will look different in 3 and 5 years, very different from what it is today. I agree. But it doesn't shut down overnight because a lot of clients have longstanding legacy processes and teams and things in place that mean if the business has been there for them for the, you know, the last 5 years, it's likely to continue being there for them for the next year at least. So part of the way I would look at those sorts of challenges slash opportunities is what do I think the transition time realistically is for clients to say like, oh yeah, AI could do this and I don't need this agency anymore. Secondly, in reality, every time there's been a technological shift, there's a percentage of companies that don't want to learn how to do it themselves in-house. You know, let's take written content because this is a really good example. We work with some companies that are significantly larger with much larger budgets. I mean, publicly traded companies. We're a, you know, couple million dollar business doing work with hundreds of millions of dollar companies. And they could certainly build the kinds of workflows we have, but there's certain infrastructure and political and bureaucratic challenges and just a matter of like risk that they're not really comfortable taking that we are. So we can implement AI-powered workflows to create content for them. They would never do that in-house, or it'll take them several years to want to do that in-house. So we're getting this big margin on the ability to do something they're a little scared to do right now. So there's opportunity in the risk. And I think that's where a lot of searchers are kind of like maybe being a little conservative for my taste. But you do have to like level up to the amount of risk you're comfortable with. So that's fair. Yeah. And I talked to this, you know, a couple, few weeks ago I had Will Smith, who does Acquiring Minds podcast, on my podcast, and we were talking about this. And I think this is a really big factor in buying a company is you jump out and you're on the, you're in the deep end on day one. You don't get like this transition period of slowly growing over the course of 5 years to get to several million in revenue. You have it on day one and you have that $100,000 payroll on day one. You know, it's, it is, it's a lot and it's kind of scary. So anyway, um, I get why people are scared of AI and what it might impact in the industry, but I would, I would just say like, look for the opportunity and just think of what is my transition period got to be if it's, um, You know, if it's 2 to 3 years, you got plenty of time to come in there, implement AI workflows, improve things, improve margins, and suck a lot of cash out of that business in a good way before, you know, you have to worry about, is this industry going away or is it just going to be like different than it was?

Yeah, I think there's— yeah. So 2, 2 points that I just thought of as you were, you were talking. One, especially in the like digital agency world, I, to your point on working with really large companies, because we're in the same boat, right? We're a tiny little fish and we are working with a multi-billion dollar company right now because they don't want to do this in-house. For better or worse, they're also using us as like the guinea pig for the approach to say, does this work for my company? And or how does this work in general so that I could go replicate it internally? That's just the nature of being an agency. That's That's fine. And while, I mean, obviously I want like very long-standing clients and all of that, you know, of course it's like I will absolutely capitalize on people looking to me to be the expert, to be the front runner, to like have some of these new technologies figured out so that they can say, hey, we want to like try this out, we want to experiment, we want to learn from you as an expert, run it for us. And, you know, then there's decisions to follow from there. But I think there's a huge opportunity there, not just to provide the service, but to actually like help push people towards what's possible.

Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine who also has a service business that works with a lot of big companies. And, you know, again, like from the outside, you look at these agencies, you're like, why do big companies hire these tiny agencies? But there's a couple of big reasons that from the outside you might miss. One is budgets are weird. They can often be allocated to a single provider more easily than they can half a dozen freelancers or a couple full-time hires. And again, there's lots of reasons for that. Sometimes like bureaucratic and political, sometimes they are like legitimate financial reasons. So there's that. There's the spreading around of risk. And what I find is blame. A lot of big companies love to hire an agency that's already specialized because they can blame me if it goes wrong. They don't have to— like some middle manager, mid-level manager at a really big company they're— you have to realize how risk-averse these people are. Like, their boss is giving them a very, very small amount of rope to go play with, and now they've got to figure out, how do I not lose my job if this goes sideways? The best way is we go work with a really, like, a well-known agency in this space who specializes in this one thing, and then we blame them if it goes wrong. And it's not my fault, I picked the good agency, you know, they're, they're well known in the space, they had plenty of good case studies. Like, Carl was— Carl seemed like a great guy, you know, but like, no, they get to blame me. And that does occasionally happen. It's, and it's, again, there's always so many reasons projects can fail, but sometimes it is legitimately like something we couldn't do, or sometimes it's legitimately like a restriction the client had or just bad luck and timing. Anyway, so I think you gotta remember that, that like we as agencies are in this spot that there's always gonna be some demand to outsource the kinds of things we do. It may look very different in 3 or 5 years, but there's certainly gonna be companies that don't want to take that risk on internally.

Yeah, yeah, completely agree. The other thing too that I think is interesting is just when it comes to AI and applying it within searchy type businesses, right? Where even if you say, okay, I am lower risk tolerant, I don't want to touch anything that could be totally disrupted by AI. I would argue you still need to know, or at least be savvy enough as a business owner where to apply some of these very fast-moving technologies within your business. So even if you buy a manufacturing company, like, you need to know on the operational side, the back end, the back office— I don't care where it is— like, where you are going to pull some levers to make the business a lot more efficient. So to that end, like, you should be learning AI still, even if you don't necessarily want to acquire, like, an AI-powered business, or like, you know, touch anything technological, you, you today you have to know how to like optimize.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, either you need to do it or you have to have a business partner or very trusted person in your team that can do it because your average employee will not suggest that we start using AI to replace parts of their job. In my experience, I've never met a business owner who told me that's what happened. It's like there might be these outlier employees, your top 1 or 5% of employees who go, oh yeah, I could do a ton more with AI and this is really cool. And they'll show you these things and you're like, you know, that's the person to keep promoting, right? But the broad majority, 90% plus of your employees will be like really scared of new tech that possibly displaces them or makes them change what they do. I just, I think one thing that I've realized as an owner and manager over the last few years is like people in general are very afraid of change and uncertainty. And this is where this entrepreneurial gene has to kick in. Like you have to be okay embracing change and uncertainty because that's just the environment we're always gonna be in. Some industries are much higher change and uncertainty others, but it affects everybody. I mean, manufacturing in the last 30 years looks drastically different than it did in the '90s or the '70s. And to think that that won't happen again is like naive. I mean, you know, again, AI is going to affect it in some ways we can't even predict. Robots will come in in 5 years and, you know, it'll be a totally different ballgame, right? We don't know. So yeah, you just can't look at it like, oh, I'm scared there might be change in this industry in the next 1 to 5 years, so I'm not going to buy there. Every industry is going to change in 5 years.

Yeah, just factor it into your SWOT analysis.

Right, right. And this is part of like where, you know, you want to— you can try to de-risk deals, you can try to get the best deal you can, you can focus on the things you're already strong at. So if you're a sales and growth person, focus on that. If you're a margin and operations person, focus on that. Like, just lean into the powers you have and stay ready to change.

Yeah. How do you— well, so let me ask you this, and like, what do you feel like What powers have you developed then, both buying and building, or like how have you felt you personally had to change to—

Oh yeah, personally change. My biggest personal changes have been more on the, the ability to ride the waves in the calmest way possible. I think about it like this, like running a small business is often like it feels like you're driving a ship across the ocean and when you're in a tiny little ship You can change direction really quickly in calm waters and you can do things that other people are just amazed at. And, but you also feel the tsunamis really, really painfully. Uh, you feel the ups and downs. You can drive in the big cruise ship and it's like running a big enterprise. Like you're not gonna sink, you're not gonna like fall apart. You barely feel the, you know, the waves, but it, you can't move either. You're, you're like, you're on a path and that's it forever. So we have to use the advantage we have as small business owners and lean into the fact that Our life is going to be uncertainty, but that's also where the big opportunity is. Another thing that's helped me a lot is meeting other entrepreneurs who have been where I'm at, but for 10 or 15, 20 years, um, you know, through networking groups or just through people here in Chicago and getting to meet these guys who have been doing this for, for 10+ years. You see almost every one of them has been at or close to zero and has been up 100x from their, you know, where they are today. It's like, it's crazy to see the swells that people ride in, in reality. Cause I think We on the outside assume entrepreneurship is this nice straight line of 10 to 20% growth year over year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never looks like that. Never looks like that in truth.

Yeah, it's funny. My— it's completely accurate. My father-in-law started and actually just sold his— he started it 30 years ago, just sold it like a couple of months ago, his soybean exporting processing business.

Business.

So middle of nowhere Indiana, literally. And, you know, he has been through all of it over the years. And he and I were just chatting about, I don't know, just like small business ownership. And he's like, oh yeah, I've been sued. Oh yeah, I've been like— like, it was no big deal, right? Just like water off his back. And I was like, what? Like, if that happened to me at this juncture in my career, I'd be like, you know, yeah, absolutely freak out. And, you know, one of the things he told me, and For me, it's like I care a lot about people. I care about what people think. I just do. I think we all do. Like, I carry a lot of those things like very closely and personally. And so he told me, he said, just don't ever let the assholes get you down. Yeah, it's like, that's actually great. Like, because I'm not— I don't tend to be like that resilient, maybe. So just having that like voice in the back of my head all the time has been been so helpful just to— and that's, for me, that's a leveling up because I think you have to have a little bit of that attitude. Like, I'm just— I have to keep my eyes on what I have to do. I can't get derailed by distractions, even if they're noisy distractions. I can't, I can't go there. Like, I have to just really focus.

It's so amazing how much, like, you, you realize you've leveled up when you look back, uh, for, like— so I'm 5, 6 years into this, like, being an entrepreneur, and I remember the first time I had to fire somebody at my own company and how bad that felt and how scary it was and how much it kept me up at night. Or the first time I got negative feedback from a client and I just, I thought about it till, you know, 2 in the morning, right? And now, like, that shit, I don't even think, it's just like, that's day to day. I'm like, yeah, I walk in one day, I'm like, I had to fire so-and-so today. But I was like, what? Isn't that a big deal? I'm like, I don't know. And not anymore. I guess it's just something I had to do sometimes. Yeah.

Your perspective just changes. And I think it doesn't make you any less human, right? But like, you have these decision points of like, okay, I am an entrepreneur because I also like, I want to own my life. I want autonomy. I am in charge of my destiny. And subsequently, I have to make really hard decisions. And it doesn't mean that I don't care about the person that I just fired, but I also have this thing that I have to keep going for my own personal livelihood. And And that's the reason that we're in it to begin with. So there's no like something like inherently wrong with being like, yep, well, had to make that decision. Sucked. But here we are.

Right. And you can like logically, I could have made that same argument in my head 5, 6 years ago, but now I don't even have to logic it. It's just like, it's innate. I'm like, yeah, this is just the way it is. Like I look at the numbers and you don't fit in the line item or you're not hitting the performance numbers we need and I gotta put you to put you out for somebody who does. And it's amazing how much shifts like that, or even buying a business, like, you know, again, we're making another offer on a business now. I feel much less like concerned about whichever way it goes. If it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, great. We'll go find something else in the future.

Figure it out.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So like, just, it feels like you kind of like, you're walking up these progressively higher cliffs and you're taking leaps off, you know, and you look down at the one way down there, you're like, yeah, I could jump off that one anytime. I wanna, you know, I wanna find the next big one up here where I can keep pushing my boundaries of what I'm comfortable with. That's, that's my personal mental model that I use a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that. That's awesome. Cool. Carl, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to touch on for—

No, I think this is really fun. Christi, thanks so much for, for doing this and setting it up. It's, I, you know, acquisition entrepreneurship, life-changing opportunity, entrepreneurship in general, life-changing opportunity. It is hard and scary. In 10 years, you're going to look back and be a totally different person. You're going to be like, I can't believe I just made made myself do that. So go do it.

Yeah, yeah. Don't use any of the hard stuff as a reason to not do it.

That's right.

Awesome. Cool. Well, thanks for joining today. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Christi.