Buying Was Easy. Operating Was Earned.

Welcome back to another episode of Bought the Biz. I'm Garth Fossano, and I'm excited to dive in today and tell you all about Top Dog, the business I acquired. I'm going to do a quick hits episode with 3 of the biggest takeaways and my lessons as an early first-time operator of an ETA business. Hope you enjoy it. And if you are feeling the pressure of the operations, you're in the middle of it, it feels hard, you're not failing.

You are just becoming the operator 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.

All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bought the Biz. Today I'm going to dive into all about my acquisition and some of my biggest lessons learned and biggest mistakes from transitioning from a searcher to an operator. First is a little bit of background. I purchased a business called Top Dog Sales Center with about 30 employees $2 million in revenue and okay margins, it felt like a safe bet doing the classic search thesis, buying a boring business, stable revenue, consistent customers. And that's what I thought I was getting, something that was probably less upside than my corporate career and more predictable for my life. It's not exactly how it played out, but here are the 3 reasons why I bought the business. First, they owned their technology, which is incredibly unique for a business process outsourcer or an outsourced sales organization. We were supporting about 100 small businesses around the United States and Canada to manage their lead intake, outbound phone calls, text messages, inbound calls to sell and convert those leads into customers. The second part was that they were actually good at sales. And this might be hard to believe, but most outsourced sales organizations just aren't that good. It takes a lot of training, a lot of time, a lot of emphasis, and often the incentives aren't quite right. But that gets us to the third point. We had 100% outcome-based contracts, and so that aligned the incentives for this business model in a pretty magical way. And those were three things and three components of this business that all the big BPO players were trying to create, and I found them inside of this small little search team. So fast forward to becoming the operator of this business. And there are a couple of things that I want everyone to hear about because, you know, the responsibility of becoming an operator is huge. And I want to help share that mental realization that I had when each month my payroll was hundreds of thousands of dollars and I had 100% outcome-based contracts. So there was nothing sort of written guaranteeing making that revenue and those incoming dollars consistent. And that was was a very scary realization early on. I knew that going in, but actually having to click submit on those payrolls was a big growing experience of the responsibility to my employees, to my customers, and to the personal guarantee that I signed up for when I bought this business. So I think that's an important thing for people to think through. But also it was a successful business. It was working. The money did continue coming. We never missed a payroll. And so that is an important note. I think the second thing that I realized was that there was no safety net. Like, the buck stops with you as the operator. And, you know, I said I got into this because I was thinking that it would be more flexibility and more predictability in my life, and that wasn't true. Uh, well, I think there was more flexibility. It was definitely not as predictable. The first year I worked Thanksgiving Day, I worked Christmas Day. And it was fun though. I enjoyed every minute of it, but it was not the predictability that I had been looking for to exit the corporate career. So I think corporate might actually be more predictable, although I did not have to get onto a plane Monday through Thursday like my consulting career. And then the third thing is that everyone tells you to go slow, learn the business, don't make changes too fast. I think they're right. And, uh, but there's a balance to this. I, Started, I knew I needed to change the org structure and promote people into more leadership roles because everything was funneling through me despite the sim and the seller explaining that there was a management structure in place. There was, but they didn't have decision authority. Started working on a new org chart following the classic consulting model, socialized it, got some feedback. Well, one of those people just hung up on the Zoom call, dropped off. I had to drive to their house, bring flowers. Quite a moment of learning for me on the impact of rolling these kinds of things out in a small business and how different that is than if you're at a Fortune 500 company. So I think everyone needs to realize that. But what this caused me to do is not make changes for too long. And so I should have either elevated my team or brought in more of an operating partner to the business to help me grow something of that size and scale. So, you know, I think that this is, these are a couple lessons that I've had from running an ETA business. And I want everybody to understand that it is absolutely worth it. But the hard part is the operating, not the search. And if you're feeling some of these pain points as an operator, That is where your growth occurs, and so you're in exactly the right spot, and embrace it.