Cultural Fit Over EBITDA: How Salas O'Brien Built a 30-Merger Program Without a Single Failure

Here's what one of our members values most. The M&A Science Intelligence Hub doesn't just give you an answer, it shows you where it came from. Every insight is backed by practitioner interviews so you can trust what you're acting on. When you're trying to assess culture fit, not just a checkbox, but really understand if this team can integrate with yours, the Intelligence Hub helps you ask better questions, How do operators evaluate leadership capability? What do they look for in management meetings? Where do cultural issues typically surface post-close? It's AI with receipts grounded in real operator experience because the best deal financially can still be the worst deal culturally. Check it out at mascience.com. Again, that's mascience.com. This episode is sponsored by Dealroom. And if you're on the buy side, you know the pain. Most M&A tools, especially those clunky data rooms, aren't built for you. They're made for sellers and it shows. Dealroom is the number one platform built specifically for buyer-led M&A. It's designed to help you lead the deal from pipeline to diligence to integration. With the structure and visibility you actually need. You get features like built-in project management, templated deal rooms, real-time collaboration, and AI contract review, all built to support how buy-side teams really work. No jumping between tools, no messy workarounds, and no hidden fees. Check it out at dealroom.net or click the link in the description to see how it makes buy-side M&A a whole lot easier. Lead the deal, own the outcome. Here's to the deal. I'm Kisan Patel, and you're listening to M&A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies, and what actually happened during M&A deals.

Hello, M&A scientists. Welcome to the M&A Science Podcast. This show is part of our mission to rethink how M&A is done and build the operating standard for buy-side M&A. That old-school seller-led approach? Dead. Buyer-led M&A is about strategy, alignment, and execution, putting value creation at the center of every deal. It's not about closing the deal, it's about making it successful., and that comes from learning directly from the best. You want to go deeper? We've got you covered. There's tons of free resources on our website, frameworks, guides, tools, all built from real operator experience. We also have the M&A Science membership, which gives you the full system, exclusive frameworks, templates, expert Q&A sessions, direct access to me and the AI-powered intelligence hub. It's the home of Buy or Let M&A. And if you do want to keep up and just stay sharp, we have a free newsletter on the website. You can check that out. It's all at mascience.com. Let's jump in. I'm your host, Keith San Patel, founder and CEO at M&A Science. Today, I'm joined by Nathan Rust, senior vice president of corporate development at Salus O'Brien, an employee-owned engineering and technical services firm that's rewriting the rules on M&A success. They've completed over 55 deals in the last 15 years, with 30 of those just happening in Nathan's 3 years there. In an industry where most M&A deals fail, Salas O'Brien has cracked the code on treating mergers like true partnerships rather than transactions. Nathan oversees everything from sourcing to deal execution for a firm that's become a buyer of choice in their space, so much so that companies actively seek them out. But today we're going to talk about how they source deals at volume and what do the critical first calls look like. And have they built an M&A machine that puts people before spreadsheets? Nathan, how you doing today?

I'm great. Thanks for having me, Kisan.

Thanks for taking the time from doing deals to have a conversation with me.

You bet. It's my pleasure. Yeah, I don't get a lot of free time, but I appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about myself and about Solusobrain.

Hey, just so you guys listening, I'm getting over a bad whatever kind of throat virus I've had, so I sound a little crappy. But I'll punch through. I'm sitting on a bunch of green tea and honey and some cough drops here. So, hey, Nathan, can we kick things off with a little bit about your background?

First off, thanks for having me on this, and thanks for all your efforts for advancing our industry and our expertise. If it's okay with you, I'll probably spend a little bit more time about my background than probably what is normal, but I think that's important just to build a foundation for this conversation, to get an understanding of my life experiences and my philosophy. Going way back, I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in a small town on the border of Virginia and Tennessee. We were kind of on the border of the Rust Belt, so we had a lot of manufacturing growing up. My dad worked in a factory at one of those manufacturers, and over time he was able to kind of work his way up into a sales type of role. He still works at that company today on a consulting basis. He's been there for about 50 years now, which is crazy in this day and age. He's been through multiple LBOs. He's been through bankruptcies, offshoring, and everything in between. He's seen a lot in his time, and he's at a conference in Las Vegas I guess for that company right now. My mom's job was probably a lot harder than my dad's. She was a stay-at-home mother for 6 children while my dad was on the road almost every single week, often acting like a single parent in a crazy household of 6 kids in a 2,200-square-foot house. It was bedlam and she managed it well. Once we were all in school, she was able to go back, get a degree in nursing, became a school nurse in our school program. Anyways, my parents made a lot of sacrifices for myself and my siblings. Extremely grateful for them and the opportunities that they opened for us that might not have been available for them. But yeah, going back to my dad, although he was able to retain his role at the company for over 50 years, a lot of other people weren't so lucky. There was a lot of offshoring. A lot of the manufacturing jobs kind of left our small town. It caused me to be exposed to a lot of people who struggled to make ends meet at no fault of their own for something that impacted them. So, At a young age, I really wanted to find a career that would help me avoid being negatively impacted by something outside of my control. So I had a very narrow frame of reference. All I thought was if I want to make a good income, I should look around and see who's driving nice cars in my city, or I guess town. So I saw that doctors drove nice cars and car dealers drove nice cars. So that was like, all right, I'm going to do one of those two things. First year in college, I kind of went down the doctor path and realized very quickly that wasn't the path for me. So I quickly shifted to a business management type role. And after graduating, since that's the only way I thought that I could make a good living, running a dealership, I ran a Harley-Davidson dealership for about 5 years. It was really cool and really fun. I learned a lot about sales and customer service and really just the life cycle of a client. That was a good basis for me. Ended up going back to school and getting an MBA from Virginia Tech, where thankfully I was able to learn that there are more opportunities than being a doctor than a car dealer. I pivoted from there and I got into corporate finance. So I moved to Denver after Virginia Tech, worked for a couple of large firms there. The organization that I was working with was merging with another firm in London. It was communicated to our team that some would lose their jobs. We didn't know who. However, if we stayed for some indefinite period of time, we might be eligible for some severance if we were impacted. I decided I didn't want to wait to see if I was going to be impacted or not. So I started looking for opportunities and I was lucky to find an acquisitions role that had me move down to the Phoenix area. So I live here with my wife. We're a blended family. We've got 5 kids, 4 from our first marriage and 1 together. We've been here for almost 9 years. My youngest just turned 10 last week. We're out of the single digits and I got a couple out of the house. Been here for 9 years. I've been working in M&A roles since I've moved here. When I joined Sullivans O'Brien a little over 3 years ago, it was me and our CFO doing M&A. We were doing the best we could and we were doing pretty good, but we had an opportunity to grow our team and we're now up to 3 full-time team members in our corporate development group, including myself. We've accomplished a lot over 3 years. We've done over 30 mergers now. We've got 100% success with those 30. We've Done a recapitalization during that time period. Blackstone's a minority investor for us and refinanced our debt a couple times as well. So we've definitely stayed busy in the past 3 years.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] It's a great story. I think the part that piqued my interest was when you're on the other side of M&A and it sounded like they had some poor comms communication that you were like, "I'm not going to wait to see what happens. Screw this." And you went and left and found the next thing, which I could imagine gave you a little bit of a not so positive sentiment about M&A. Now I know in your last role, because we had conversations before, you definitely don't have that same sentiment. Can you maybe walk me through a little bit of that shift and what that looked like?

Bill Nygren: Yeah, you're right. That experience at my job in Denver made me a little bit, maybe jaded isn't the right word, but a little skeptical of M&A and just my experience growing up in a small town where I saw people losing their jobs because manufacturing was being offshored and they were never able to really financially recover. Saw a lot of people suffering from that. And I was like, I don't want to be a part of this. I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen in some cases, but I don't want to be a person who has that implication on another person. That was my goal. And yeah, prior roles before Solace O'Brien, I think it was always communicated that, look, we're not going to impact the team members. But then there was oftentimes a lot of team members who it was determined relatively quickly that they weren't a good bit. It wasn't in practice as much as it was discussed kind of upfront. Frankly, when I was interviewing with Solace O'Brien, I was a little bit skeptical. I'm like, yeah, I've heard this story before. Yeah, you don't lay anyone off. Heard that. Yeah, sure. Okay. We'll see. We'll prove it out with time. I've been thankful that during this time period, it's confirmed to me that's not the approach we take, that we are a people organization and should probably share a little bit more about Solace O'Brien, but we're an engineering firm. So our resources, our main asset is our people and they leave it every single day and go home. So that is our most important asset within our organization. And we've got to make sure that we take care of them and creating fear, creating a risk of losing your job. You're not just going to lose underperformers in that case, you're going to lose some of your top performers who, like me in my job, was like, look, I'm not going to wait around and see if this is going to impact me. I'm going to control my own destiny and find the right opportunity for me. That's a little bit of my experience and why I like working for a company who really makes sure that it's a win for all stakeholders and including employees, including clients before we do M&A.

The stats, 93% leadership retention across 55 deals and 30 deals in the 3 years. Walk through your core philosophy of M&A that makes that work that way.

Just to clarify that 93% statistic, that isn't an annual retention. That is cumulative for everyone who has joined us through a merger in the past 15 years. The shareholders of those organizations, 93% of them are still with us today. Most of the 7% who have left have left because of retirement, many much later than what they had originally planned. Like the first person who retired after a merger retired at the age of 83 years old. You typically don't see that after someone sells their business and then decides to stay on for another 10, 15 years. So we have team members and legacy shareholders who believe in our organization and want to see it grow. The core driver of that success is really we don't compromise. We look at over 200 opportunities a year. Less than a third of those probably make it past that first call. But in that first call, there's really, I would say, 3 things that we're really focused on to evaluate fit. We want to make sure that the leaders are committed, that they're looking to stay around for a long time, that they're not just looking for, you know, 100% all-cash deal and they leave the day after it closes. If that's what they're looking for, that's okay, but Solace O'Brien isn't the fit for them. We want to make sure that, number 2, that those leaders are passionate about the work they do. Going back to my dad again, that example, like he's in the HVAC world and he loves compressors. It's a little bit nerdy, but I remember over like family dinners and him taking me to business meetings, just hearing his passion about new technology for compressors, about scroll technology, about 2-speed compressors and things like that. And we've got the same thing at Solis or Bryant. I love sitting down with people and hearing how passionate they are about soybean processing or cheese manufacturing or data centers or university HVAC systems or whatever, geothermal systems. Like, it's refreshing to hear how excited people get about those things that guys like me who don't understand cheese manufacturing might think that's a little bit weird or a little bit nerdy. But I love hearing the passion, and it's important that people who want to join Solace or Bryan are passionate about the work they do. The third thing that we make sure is we want to work with people we like. At the end of the day, we're spending more time with people we work with than we're spending with our spouses and our families. So it's important that we enjoy working with those people. So I remember after one of the first calls that I had with an intro call with our CEO, Darren, he asked me like, hey, what'd you think of that call? And I wasn't really sure what he was looking for. So as a new guy on the team, you know, I kind of hedged a little bit and Talked a little bit about, hey, here are the positives and here are the negatives. And at the end, he is like, well, look, would you go out to dinner with him and his wife? Is that something you would enjoy? And the answer is no, it's probably not a good fit. Those are kind of our initial screening things that we're looking at.

Committed leader, passionate about the work they're doing, and they're likable. It's pretty simple. That's interesting. I was thinking about the likability the other day, actually. I had an initial diligence call on a deal and just hit it off so well and I was so excited about it, even though that could be not always a good thing. But it was so nice counter to the other deal I was working on where it's like I was cringing. I'm still working through that one, but it's like you sort of look at it very different. I got to ask though, based on that, when you think of this retention rate as a success metric and the outcome, is it really driven off of this, of this is the fact that we have this parameter and that we're really buying the right companies, or are there post-close drivers that set this up for success? Chicken or egg, which one?

Maybe both. They're not mutually exclusive. They're both. It's definitely important from a screening perspective.

You have to pick one. I should have said that. You have to pick one.

What's more important? I can't. I can't do it. They're both equally important. Yeah. It's important to make sure that you have someone who's going to fit culturally. It's someone who you're going to like working with because it's going to get challenging. There are going to be hard days and If it's someone I don't like working with, it's going to be much harder when those hard days come than if it's someone who I consider a friend and a peer who, when something bad happens, like we rally together and we get it done and we figure out and we solve the problem. But the second part is we're buying firms that are often founder-owned and they're entrepreneurs and they're not used to having a boss. Post-integration is what really matters as equally as important as screening is making sure that they still have the autonomy that they had before that. They don't have a, you know, air quotes, corporate overlord telling them what they're doing wrong when they've been successful for the last 25 or 30 years. We don't buy fixer-uppers. We only buy well-run organizations and there's more than one way to skin a cat. So I don't need to go in and tell them that they need to do something drastically different than the way they have been before, because that's what everybody else is doing. And it's just a matter of if it works for you, keep doing it, keep doing what made you successful. Keep having the same autonomy you had before. Keep making the same decisions that you made before. And if there's ways that I can help you and help supplement your business and help you grow your business and help add resources to your business, come talk to me, but keep doing what you're doing and continue to grow your business. That's why you're part of our organization, not because there's something that needed to be fixed.

Okay. Buy criteria, make sure you're buying good, healthy companies. Now, what about the companies that are financially performing well, strong EBITDA, what makes them not a good fit?

The opposite of the 3 screening criteria. If the leaders are not looking to stay on.

What does that mean? Like long-term wise, like what's your timeframe that you're looking for a leader to stay on? Because if a guy comes to say, hey, I'm starting to think about exit, if the guy wants to retire next year, you don't want to do that deal.

Uh, 3 to 5 years too late at that point.

It's a good lesson here. And that's a whole thing when it comes to exit planning. People should know that. But the guy's like 70 years old or something like that. Where do you draw the line?

I don't know if there's a hard and fast line. I would say typically we're looking for at least 3 to 5 years of them staying on board. And oftentimes we see those people stay on for much longer. The founders of our organization, Carl Solis and Dan O'Brien, are still in the organization today. We were celebrating our 50-year anniversary last year. Neither of them need to work right now. They're doing just fine, but they're passionate about what they do. They love training the younger team members. They're not working 60 hours a week. They work what works for them, whether it's 30 hours or 20 hours. They're taking more vacations, but they're with the organization today. They're wanting to see it grow, and they're helping those next generation leaders continue to develop. 3 to 5 years is typically what we're looking for at a minimum. Sometimes if they've already gone through a transition and the next level or next generation of leadership has stepped in place and they're in the chairman role where they're not active in the day-to-day, there might be some flexibility there.

And would you use an earnout as like a means to commit to that timeframe?

We don't want anyone to be part of our organization that doesn't want to be part of our organization. Employment agreements, we don't view those as golden handcuffs, so we don't want someone to stay if they don't want to be here. So there is no one, back to that 93% retention, there is no one here because they have to be here. It's because they want to be here. It can really sour a culture and a relationship if someone is somewhere that they don't want to be there. So it's our job to make sure that they want to be part of our organization for long term. And if for some reason they were to leave, like, that would be a failure on my part and our leadership's part. Oftentimes there are earnouts, but I don't think it's used as a tool to make someone stay. Someone's gotta want to be in our organization.

Objectively, you're using earnout for bridging valuation gaps. Yeah. Do you primarily use earnouts? Do you roll over equity? Is it typically a full buyout?

Going back to kind of the criteria, one thing is that there needs to be a significant role in equity. That's different for everyone. There's no hard and fast rule of what percentage of total consideration that is, but that's typically in the 20 to 40% range of consideration is rolled into Solace O'Brien. And it's really to ensure that we have our interest aligned long-term.

You want them to retain 20, 40% ownership?

Oh, 100%. They want to retain 100%. That's good as well, but it ensures that our interests continue to be in line, how we've had great share growth in the past 15, 20 years, and we see a lot of great opportunities in the future, and we want to make sure that they see that vision as well. And that's a true put your money where your mouth is. If you're willing to invest in Solace O'Brien as a whole, it shows that you're committed and you see the vision just like we do.

What's the terms around that remaining minority stake? Do you eventually keep like a first right of refusal or an option to buy that out later?

We kind of act as a market maker, Solace O'Brien does, for employees who own shares. 95% of our employees own shares in Solace O'Brien, so we're broadly held within the organization. We have a minority investment from an external private equity, but we're super majority employee-owned. So employee ownership is a big tenet of what makes us successful, and it's something that we want to see not just with the senior leaders, for everyone across the organization, from the person who's just got hired after their internship are senior leaders.

So that minority stake is actually rolled over into equity at Solace O'Brien? That's correct.

Got it.

That makes sense then. So then that's why everybody owns stake.

That makes sense. That's right.

Yep. Do you roll out equity across all the employees? Is that part of the company in general or?

Yeah. Every year our employees have an opportunity to purchase shares in Solace O'Brien, and we always have active participants every year, several hundred people who invest in into our shares on an annual basis. There's also a match in our 401(k) component in Solace or BrianShares.

All right. Let's get into some fun stuff. Walk me through your whole sourcing model end to end. Let's start from the beginning.

Yeah. So there's really multiple different ways that we're going to source our opportunities. We cast a very broad net. As we mentioned before, we have over 200 introductory calls every single year. It really comes from multiple sources. I kind of bucket them into 4 different areas. The first is our team member referrals. Our team members have good experiences being part of Solace O'Brien. A lot of them have worked for other companies before they've joined Solace O'Brien, or they have subconsulted for other firms, or vice versa, those firms have subconsulted for Solace O'Brien, and they see, they're able to have those experiences and say, look, this company would be a good fit for Solace O'Brien. And so we get tons of employee referrals of, you should reach out to this firm or that firm. I've worked with them. So I've got a track record, like we're looking at more than just their financials. Like what we have true real-world experience of, are these people we want to work with? So we got a, we get a lot of those team member referrals and that's one of our biggest drivers of sourcing. We've got buy-side representatives who help us out as well. We'll identify the key things that we're looking for from a merger candidate. They'll go out and find opportunities for us. And a lot of those companies want to work with us just because of They've heard our experience in M&A. We've been very successful. We're no-nonsense approach to due diligence. We're not looking for reasons to retrade or not do the deal. Like, we want to get the deal done. So we're a preferred buyer in the space. So we get a lot of first looks at opportunities that often results in other firms not even getting a look at that. That's a good opportunity there. As we continue to grow, we're starting to participate in more call it competitive sale processes. I would say when I started, probably 90% or more of our mergers were done proprietary, on a proprietary basis, not through a sale process. But as we continue to grow and look at larger opportunities, we're starting to see more through a sale process. So we're still doing probably 70 or 75% of our mergers through a proprietary process, but starting to look at more opportunities brought to us through advisors and bankers and brokers as well. Then really the last of the four is direct outreach. We're in close contact with our operational leaders on a regular basis. And there's some times where they have needs either for a specific skill set or a specific geography or both, where we've got a software that we can find really quickly 20 or 30 firms that fit their needs and we can do outreach for them. And of course we don't get 100% response rate when we reach out to them, not even close to that, but Every time we're going to get a handful of people who respond and we can have some of those intro calls that make up that total of the 200, and we're able to whittle it down and find an opportunity that helps fit our operational needs and helps grow the business. We'll start typically on outreach and employee referrals. We'll start with an email directly from the CEO. So it's going to come right from him. If there's not a response, we'll connect through LinkedIn. And then again, I've got software. That will tell me the conferences they're attending. And if I can't get a response, I'll go attend a conference that I know they're attending and track them down there. We'll find opportunities to make those connections and do the outreach.

Okay. So one is the team member referrals. Two is inbound. Just, you got a reputation and people come to you like, my buddy sold his company, he wants to talk to you. And then three is a competitive sale process. A banker brings you a book. Four is direct outreach, like true proprietary Those are the 4, right?

That is correct.

Yep. Give me the percentage. I want to know what channels are the best. How do you break down percentage-wise from the different channels?

I would say our employee referrals and those, I call them buy-side introductions, probably make up the majority of our introductions. It's probably 2/3 to 3/4 of our opportunities. Direct outreach is probably our smallest right now because we've been lucky. We've got an embarrassment of riches of great opportunities in front of us, and we're not making good versus bad decisions. We're making good, better, best decisions. I don't have a shortage of opportunities in front of me. We continue to see them, but I'd like to grow that segment. Direct outreach has been pretty successful with us, for us, and going back to my sales days at Harley-Davidson, I just, the thrill of going out and doing the direct outreach and seeing what I can get from that. So I'd like to see that grow over time.

What about the inbound people just coming to you directly? Is that a significant amount?

I'd say it's probably 10 or 15% of the intro calls we have. We've got a good story with— we merged with a firm and we call them mergers from a philosophy of partnership, although a lot of them from a legal perspective are structured as an acquisition. We're looking for partners. I'm not looking for someone who I have to tell what to do. So I call them mergers. But we had a merger right when I started called Plus Group that joined our organization. And not long after Plus Group joined, another firm who had a relationship with the leader of that PLUS group reached out to us and said, hey, I know Grant. I really like Grant. He's told me great things about your organization. Can we talk? And one thing led to another, and Wayne and his team joined our organization. And then another firm reached out and said, hey, I know Wayne and I know Grant, and they both had really good experiences. I'd like to talk to you about us joining your firm. And Ivan and his team joined our firm last fall. And another firm in Atlanta, same thing. So kind of a flywheel effect. I know that's a big private equity term. I don't typically like to use private equity buzzwords, but I've seen it in Solace O'Brien where success breeds success.

Competitive process. Is that a significant percentage?

Yeah, it's probably 10 or 15% of the opportunities we look at. There's certain opportunities where we know if they're private equity owned and they're looking for top dollar, it might not be the right fit for us going back to, are they going to roll equity into Solace O'Brien? Probably Maybe not in that case. Are the leaders committed?

Maybe not. Of all those competitive deals, like what percentage do you think you actually have a win rate on? That's what I'm curious about because I feel like it's such a pain in the ass to put all this work, not knowing if you're actually going to win the deal. So like what percentage of the competitive deals—

If we decide to participate, I would say our success rate is pretty high. It's probably close to 50%.

I don't want to be in a process against you.

Like, no. Thank you. I hope you're not. Goes back to those intro calls. We start out with those type of intro calls. A lot of these people are founder-owned hunts. They've got people who've worked in their organization for 20 or 30 years, and that's made them very successful. So they want to make sure that the lady in accounting or the guy in HR, that they're going to be taken care of after they sell their organization. So when we have that track record and we can show like, hey, here's our experience, it's pretty compelling. And it's something that people want to hear, and they want to make sure their team members are taken care of.

So most of this business development comes through team member referrals. What's your incentive? What's the model look like to get them to bring those deals to you?

They're all shareholders.

That's it. There's no kicker. There's no like you get some, get a new Benz or something that—

We like to win at the end of the day. Like that's the satisfaction. It's going to grow the business. It's going to give them more opportunities to continue to grow their practice.

No financial incentive. How do you activate it?

Are you on a monthly company call and telling everybody, hey, No, they're emailing me. Yeah.

What's the email?

Yeah, we have people who reach out to us almost daily of, hey, here's a firm that I've worked with, you should reach out to them. And then I'll have a call with them and say, hey, is it better for me to reach out cold or should you do a warm introduction based on your experience? What do you think will work better? And once we get that, yeah, we go from there.

And how are you activating the team to bring you these deals? What's the pitch?

They want to see us succeed at the end of the day.

That's it. Do you communicate that directly? Hey, if you want to see this company succeed, you should be out actively looking for companies you can acquire?

I don't think we communicate it in that way. We've got a page on our internal website of, hey, here's our mergers. People know that mergers are a big part of our business. And it's like, if there's a firm that, you know, that you think would be a good candidate for Solace or Bryan, share it here and let's talk. So that's really the crux of it.

Almost like in the culture then, people know, they see you announce about deals and they're like, obviously actively buying. Interesting. Okay. So the direct outreach. You mentioned that you got a few different things you're doing there. You're doing emails from your CEO. You probably found that converts better than reaching out to corp dev.

Definitely converts better for sure. I'd like to think people want to talk to me, but it's very important to see that in the signature line.

Do you have like another email of his that you set up or do you somehow have his EA push it through? How do you actually send emails out without bugging the CEO every time to send emails out?

Mergers is a big part of our business, so it's important to him. Darren is on every single one of those intro calls that we have. But he meets with every single person post-merger. So it is a big part of our business. So we will draft an email for him and we'll say, hey, here's how it looks. What do you think? And looks good. Let's send it. And we'll send it.

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Again, that's mascience.com. Are you on that first intro call? Yes. Okay. So the team's coming in, obviously they responded because they know the nature of the conversation's about. What does that email sound like? What does it say?

Just, hey, we want to talk, get to know you? It depends on how we learned about the organization. If we learned about it from an employee referral, we'll ask that person, are you okay if we mention your name or not? And sometimes they say yes and sometimes no. But if they say they do, we'll say, "Hey, we were talking to Kisan and he mentioned that you would be a great candidate to partner with Solace or Brian. We'd love to have a conversation just to talk a little bit more about the ways that we could make each other stronger. Let me know if you're open to an intro call." It's about that simple.

General partner is like a pretty positive term. That's a lot of broad meaning to it. For sure. Let's just have a call, get to know each other. And then if that fails, you send a LinkedIn.

Yeah, we'll connect on LinkedIn.

Are you connecting or the CEO connecting?

Who's connecting on LinkedIn? I will do it. Darren does a lot of outreach himself. He is very active on LinkedIn and yes, he has a lot of connections on LinkedIn as well. We'll do outreach there. And again, it doesn't always work and that's okay. And sometimes I'll try and track them down at a conference, whether it's an M&A conference. I want to start going to more industry-type conferences. I just haven't had the bandwidth yet, but that's the next plan is okay. Like I know what conferences you're going to, so I can go there and just say hi to you.

LinkedIn has worked though. You've actually pinged them on LinkedIn, they actually responded on that.

It's low success rate for sure, but yes, it has worked.

Fair enough. Tell me about the conferences. You mentioned you use software to track which conferences. Can you tell me which software you're using?

Yeah, we use a— it's called Source Scrub, but it just got acquired by Grada, so I don't know if they still have that name or not. But yeah, one of the key aspects of their software is it shows conferences that people are attending. So we'll try and if I'm considering a conference, I'm able to go on there and see who's attending. Or if I know a firm that I'm interested in, if it's a large enough firm, I can go see what conferences they're attending. If it's small, it's harder to get that visibility. But yeah, that's what we'll use to identify conference attendance.

You're a real stalker.

I am. Yeah. It goes back to my Harley-Davidson sales.

It makes sense. I know Grada was rolling out a version of that. Is interesting because you'd have targets and it'd tell you, "Oh, they're going to this conference." Now when they put together SourceCup, I'm sure they're going to have more coverage of it. I can see that being pretty powerful or the other way around, just going to know who's at these conferences once you find one to go to. For sure. One thing I really love talking about is getting these deals actionable. And you mentioned that you never talk about numbers on the first call and it's all about the person and their story. Can you walk me through one of those conversations, what it's actually like?

My introduction was a little bit intentional. That is often how it starts out, as we will share our backgrounds of what made us who we are today. I want to get to know those leaders. I want to know what makes them tick, how they got to where they are today, how they've overcome adversity or challenges in their lives. I find out a lot about what's important to a person when there's an open-ended request to just tell me about yourself. So we always start out, kind of lead by example. Hey, here's me. Here's all the good, bad, and ugly about me. Here's how I got to where I am today. And then And we ask them to reciprocate and we learn a lot about those. Most of our calls are 60 to 90 minutes. And oftentimes after we get through introductions, we might have 10 minutes left where it's really just bouncing off some questions back and forth. Oh, what are they looking for? What are the key things for them as they're making a decision from a partnership perspective? But yeah, in that 60 or 90 minutes or whatever, I've generally heard enough to assess whether it makes sense to continue conversations, to call it more traditional diligence areas, like financial performance. The end of the day, like we view this as a marriage. If I can't enjoy getting to know someone in 60 minutes, or like I said before, enjoy having dinner with them and their spouse and my spouse, then it's probably not going to be a very successful marriage. So yeah, those intro calls are really just getting to know them, getting to know how they got to where they are today, hearing what they're grateful for and who helped them along the way to help make them the successful person that they are today.

So from that intro call, you get a sense of these three key areas, how committed they are as a leader, passion, and likability. Yeah, totally. It's interesting because it's very much around stories and introduction.

You typically go first. We do.

Yep. I feel like that's setting the tone because you'll come in and tell a story just like you did with this podcast, which made it personal. Now I feel like I really know you. I know your upbringings. We could talk about Harley, talk about a lot of things. That's right. Family, all this stuff. We have the same thing. It sounds like a lot of vulnerability is a part of that story. When you mentioned that here's things are good, some things that were not, you're being pretty open.

Yeah.

And does that set the tone for people to reciprocate and they're being a little bit more open with you given that you were a lot more open on that first intro?

For sure. Absolutely. I remember when I was looking for my next opportunity before Solace or Bryan, I don't have a traditional M&A background. I don't have an investment banking background. I don't have, call it a top 10 MBA background or anything like that. And some people that was important to, and other people it wasn't. And I remember I was thinking like, how should I tell about myself? And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna own it. This is who I am. If you don't like it, that's okay. I'm not the right fit for you, but somebody's going to like this about me and like my story. And yeah, and I remember that first interview with Grant and he started out telling about himself and telling about his family. And I was like, holy crap, like this company, it's like they speak me. So that's important to us. Work is hard and family's fun and talking about your accomplishments and the things you do outside of work and things like that. That's what gets people excited and enjoy talking to each other. So yeah, even my first interview with Salsa Bryan, a lot of it was just like talking background and what do you do outside of work and what makes you tick, kind of the approach we have.

The underdog story, I can relate because I don't have a college degree and I remember it was like the same dilemma. I remember winning some of these early deals. It was just a little small boutique practice I was building, but the founder, the CEO is like, "You know what? You remind me of me when I was your age. I'm not convinced you're going to do anything, but I'm going to give you a shot." It's like, "Okay." So you're right. It's getting relatable, building the relationship, building trust. You do it through the story sharing, letting people really know you beyond the business personally. And then you sort of get back at them in terms of understanding their view, their story about the business, which gives you that sense of how committed they are, what their outlook looks like, the passion, and then the likability part of it. After that, you'll dig into what are you looking for? It's not so much about me, but it's like, what are your goals? Where do you see yourself? I'm curious between any of that, is there some of that part where there's just this part of the story that grabs people or you really spending time and they realize that? I've had inbound inquiries with the last business I was running to acquire the business, and I could tell people would get it wrong. It would just be like, "Oh, we're just better together," this and that. Not once would they ask what I was looking for. Not once they asked, "Hey, do you have a timeline? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to bootstrap this till the day you die? Are you trying to..." And then to miss the mark completely. Of that, do you think there's some real strong parts that you really are the sort of key nuggets in this intro call that helps align it from the beginning? This is where it gets interesting. I want to figure out how do you get these deals actionable? There's that, and then there's the readiness because people always say, they always play on that first call. They're always like, "Oh yeah, it's nice to meet you." And you can't tell until they call you up later and they're like, "Hey, I want to talk to you again." And you know, like, okay, they're probably serious. People, they do that. They hold their cards to the chest here.

Yeah.

And I'm just kind of wondering, is there Are there certain elements that you know, or certain seeds you plant, or some clear indicators that you know that deal's actionable from that first intro call?

The more that they're willing to reciprocate and share about themselves, it shows that our approach resonates with them. If people are more open and share experiences, one thing, and I share this because our CEO shares it with everyone, but our CEO is adopted and he shares that in that first call. And that often brings up Oh, well, I'm adopted, or, oh, I have adopted children, or things like that. And those type of things kind of show that our values are somewhat aligned. If there's an appreciation of our story and the fact that, hey, we put our pants on the same way as everyone else, one leg at a time, we're just doing the best we can and we're trying to make something successful. And you could help us make it more successful because we don't have all the answers, but we're doing pretty good. But with you, we think we could do better. So. Yeah, it's having those discussions that really help us make sure that this is a good fit for us. And when there's a good reciprocation of sharing what's important to them, what are their values, what do they do outside of work, those type of things, that kind of increases the likelihood that first call is going to go beyond just a general discussion.

You got any key, like, cut-through-the-crap questions that you ask? Like a job interview, people always say the things you want to hear., but then you gotta dig in and I haven't even figured that out in the job interview yet. So if you got it from me, it would be great.

Yeah. I'm not great at job interviews. We take our job interview approach as the 3 months of diligence. We know that people can say crap in a quick 1-hour call. That's why we don't have behavioral interview questions in our intro calls. I'm gonna see that behavior over the next 3 months. If there's a mutual interest in moving forward, it is highly likely something is going to go wrong in the next 3 months because that's just the nature of M&A. And then I get to see how you respond to that. And I get to see if you step up and you're successful, or if you back off, or if you're confrontational. It's that 3-month time period of due diligence. It's like the best job interview you can have. I'm going to see experiences. I'm going to dig through your financials for the past 5 years, and I'm going to see when you had strong times and rough times. And I can talk specifically about what happened here, and I can see how you act as a leader. So yeah. Our job interview is basically a 3-month-long due diligence process in our view.

Fair enough. I was just trying to see if there's early red flags or something that you probe for in that, that first call.

I don't think we probe for anything, but if it comes off kind of selfishly of just how much money are you going to give me? Are you going to pay me top dollar? Not asking about teams and what happens to your team and things like that. That's a little bit of a red flag of, okay, maybe they're not focused on the right things, or maybe the only thing they care about is a big payday. Those are kind of— I wouldn't even call them red flags. They're somewhat yellow flags.

I've had that before where I couldn't even get the person to meet because they were just fixated on, "I want to know—" Yeah. "So what are you going to pay me?" "What are you going to pay you?" I'm like, "I don't know if this is going to even work. I don't know if this is going to make sense for us to do.

I want to learn more.

I want to learn, see if there's a management fee here." That's right. And then these inbound deals, you've obviously become a buyer of choice when companies reach out to you directly and they're skipping the whole auction process. Like, take it, reputation's a big part of it. How do you get that? That's a dream, is to get people to come to you and keep it simple.

For one thing, we know engineering. We're in the business of engineering. We've been doing it for 50 years. So I don't need to use due diligence to acquaint myself with engineering. Like, I know what diligence areas are important and I know which are less important, so I can focus my due diligence on the things that matter. I wouldn't say due diligence is ever easy. It's not. It's always challenging, but I can make it relatively smooth. Versus a, call it a very broad 500-question list where everything is marked as top priority. I can make it much more specific. Our initial due diligence is 10 questions. That's it. Here's the 10 items I'd like to have. If you have all 10, cool. If you only have 3 of them, that's all right. I'll make it work too. Just give me what you have. I don't want to make it hard for you. We'll work with the information you have. If there's any gaps, I'll call you and we'll try and figure out an easy way. To fill this gap. And the other thing we do is everyone we speak to, we give them a list of every single merger that's joined the organization with that person's email and phone number. And we say, call anyone you want, ask them about their experience, ask them about how it's gone for them, ask them about whether or not we've fulfilled our commitments, whether or not they've grown, things like that. And don't take my word for it, call people. Our team members, our legacy shareholders from merged entities are getting called all the time. And they answer the questions truthfully and honestly.

So you're making the diligence process pretty streamlined, straightforward, easy, which helps. And then you're encouraging reverse diligence where it's like, hey, here, go talk to other folks that have sold businesses to us.

That is a red flag. If they're not doing that reverse due diligence, it's a red flag to me for long-term alignment and their commitment to the organization. If they don't want to find out about how the experience has gone for others, if there's been layoffs or anything like that, like that's a bit of a concern to me. The more people that they call, the more it shows to me that, again, going back to, you can say anything you want in a 1-hour conversation, but it's like, show me your actions. And they're saying, my team members are important, but you don't call anyone. Yeah. Are you sure? So it really shows that it's important to them. Interesting.

You set the cards out and hope they pick them up. Yeah. On these outbound deals, what is the average time it takes to make a deal actionable? From first conversation to ready to sign NDA and move forward?

There is a long tail, huh?

That is hard to say. I know. I just want to get an average and just try to give some realistic perspectives because people ask me these kind of questions.

I keep thinking back to a firm we merged with in New York City that we had. It was a 12-year relationship with them before they were ready to share financials. And obviously that predated me because I've only been here 3 years, But I would say on average, if someone's willing to take a call and there's mutual interest in moving forward, it takes, I don't know, 6 to 9 months from kind of those initial conversations. If it's me just trying to say hi to someone at a conference and then trying to schedule follow-up calls and stuff like that, I would say it takes longer because anyone's willing to say hi at a conference. But once you send out an email of like, hey, let's reconnect, you don't always get 100% response rate. If we resort to those, and that's okay, it probably takes a little bit longer than that 6 to 9 months, probably 18 months plus.

Okay. Well, it depends on how it comes in, but those are helpful to get a sense of that. The responding call outreach, obviously there's something in the back of their head they're thinking about. The spread between what they want and what you want, the bid-ask spread, how do you bridge that? Teach me some negotiations here. I work in the software world. I spend the past year looking at a bunch of deals, People see these announcements, they have— and I feel like this is every industry, sellers just have high expectations. They see the publicly announced deal, which is obviously a great-favored deal because a big private equity firm did it, even though there's a big strategy behind why they did it. And now everybody, even though they're like a couple zeros smaller, still wants that same multiplier. Teach me, how do you negotiate that?

I haven't figured that out yet. [Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] I don't know if I have to either, to be honest, Keeson. [Speaker:KEESON_ROCHE] It's a challenge. [Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] We take an approach of we want to be fair and reasonable with people. So there's often not a large bid-ask spread. We're not trying to go in and quote unquote steal any deals, because that's not a good start to a marriage. If you feel like you've been taken advantage of, or you've taken advantage of someone, it's probably not a good indicator of success for your next 20 or 30 years together. So we try and be fair and reasonable. I wouldn't say that our first offer is our last offer, but we don't have 100% room. It's not like I can go out and double my offer if they're asking for that. We try and put our best foot forward. We want to be fair and reasonable. We want it to be where it's, again, a benefit for all stakeholders, including our Solis O'Brien shareholders and them as shareholders as well. And if they can't identify that as a win-win for everyone, then we just simply don't move forward.

Pretty fair. You standardized the process of how you value in on these businesses and reasonable wiggle room in there.

Yeah, we've got a good indication of market dynamics and firms go for in our space. We've done one or two deals in our past. We're connected with advisors in the space. We know what's reasonable and yeah, sometimes their expectations are unreasonable. If that's the case, sometimes the answer is, well, you might need to go test the market. If your expectation is this, we understand. We wish we could get there. We can't, but if anything changes, let us know.

I want to ask you something and see where it goes, but one thing that's really been irking me a lot is free trading. And I'm bringing this up because you made this comment specifically You have this philosophy culture of not retrading and just really sticking to it. I forgot the other analogy you had of treating deals like long-term marriage versus zero-sum game. I bring this up because I've talked to a lot of investors this past year and I feel like that's part baked in the model is retrading where they always come in with this pretty favorable valuation. They go through first pass due diligence and then they come back with this. I know we told you 8X or whatever we told you, 10X, but now it's 6X or 8X. They drop it down a couple of turns and I'm like, fuck, I feel like that's all these investors model here. And I know other folks that do that, just part of it, go through diligence and screen it and come up with all these things. And that's the thing that took me by surprise where you're like, we don't do that. I'm like, how don't you do that? Because you do the 10-question diligence stuff and of course people slap it together and they get it to you, but then you actually start digging in there. Do you do an external Q of E or do you do it all in-house?

We have an external provider to help us.

That comes back and then you're like, wait a minute, we need to adjust and walk me through some sanity on that.

That's a great question. I should caveat that like if they gave us financials that aren't accurate, that are just, if they say their EBITDA is $10 million and the QOE comes back and says, ah, it's actually $3 million, then yes, that warrants a discussion. So I wouldn't say we wouldn't move forward in a case like that. Our philosophy of we don't retrade is I'm not looking for the last penny. That is not my goal when it comes to a due diligence perspective. I want this to be fair and reasonable. I don't want to understate that it is certainly important that we perform at a high level and we want to see that performance from day one. Having said that, not every single one of our mergers have grown immediately following closing, because let's face it, like diligence is hard. It's distracting. And you've got one eye on your business and one eye on diligence, and there's a potential that it might dip a little bit, but I'm not buying a firm for the next 12 months of EBITDA. I'm buying it for the next 20 or 30 years. And if there is some slight change, okay, if I need to have a discussion, I will, but that is an exception to the rule. And I don't wake up every morning trying to find an opportunity to retrade. It is very rare that we have to have a discussion where economics need to change, and I'm going to do everything possible I can to hold to the deal that I submitted in the LOI. The fact of the matter is is we've built a brand. We're a buyer of choice, and part of being a buyer of choice is, you're right, the market, there's a lot of people who love to retrade. People know in our space that is not our goal, that if you get an LOI from us, unless something crazy happens, that's exactly what the deal's gonna close at. So we've built a brand. There's a lot of brand equity in that. And again, we're getting direct outreach because of that. Do I want to quote unquote win a million dollars in a discussion that's going to cost me 4 or 5 people doing direct outreach for the next 6 months? No, it's not worth it. It's making sure that you see the forest and you're not just focused on that one tree in front of you. You got to look at the bigger picture. Makes sense.

You just hold to it and sounds like you got a good tight process that you are able to stick through. And like I said, as long as they're not a big surprise. Let's do story time. I talked a lot about the model that you operate on, but walk me through a deal. Walk me through a deal that you're proud about, want to talk about, but don't give me the cleanest deal.

Give me one that's got some good and bad. There was a firm that we've got a lot of operations in Texas. We've got a client in Texas. We do a lot of work for them. They think very highly of us. One thing that is a requirement for them is they've got operations in different parts of the country, but if we want to do the engineering in that part of the country, we need to have an office in that area. So they had a big operation in their Charlotte, North Carolina. They had, for lack of better words, a campus there., and they love Solace O'Brien and they wanted to do work with us and they wanted us to do that work in Charlotte, North Carolina, but we didn't have an office in Charlotte, North Carolina. So our operational leaders reached out to us and they were like, hey, like we've got this client, they love us, they want to give us more work, but we need an office in Charlotte. I don't want to start one from the ground up. Are there any firms in Charlotte that you think would be a good fit for us? So dug into our CRM because I've, that was One thing I did when I started was tracking everything from a CRM perspective, looked and saw if there were any firms in Charlotte— there weren't— that were a good fit. Went to our software and found 10 or 15, reached out to probably 5 of them. And lo and behold, I reached out to one and the CEO like responded like almost immediately, which is shocking, but was awesome. And he's actually like, we were considering selling 5 or 6 years ago. So before my time, we met with your CEO. We really liked him. However, we decided at that time not to move forward, but we told ourselves if we were ever going to do a transaction, we're only going to do it with them and that's it. And thanks for reaching out. Now's the right time. That was the start of that conversation. They were in ESOP at that point, so it took a little bit longer to bring them into the organization, but they joined us last year. It's been a great experience for them. Uh, ESOPs are more complicated. They have fairness opinions, they have trustees. So it takes a little bit longer from a due diligence perspective. They're doing a fairness opinion on making sure that your stock is valued fairly and all of that as well. So you've got all of these multiple different parties. You're negotiating with management, you're negotiating with the board of the company, and then you're negotiating with the board of the ESOP, and you're negotiating with the fairness opinion firm. So you've got all of these different intricacies that you're working with. And it took a lot of work and it was quite complicated and challenging. But again, it was a win for everyone. Mike and the leadership team joined our company and they're loving it. And there's firms we're talking to today that are a result of Mike saying, hey, now you need to go talk to this firm and this firm. Yeah, we're working those conversations right now and we're getting close on those.

So that's a good example. I like this. I pressed you for it. So on this one, The good was it was a great strategic win. It literally fulfilled the strategic objective. Post-close, it turned out to be a success. It sounds like integration and everything went really well. But the hard part was the structure of the deal, that it was an ESOP, that you had a lot of different parties, or the exponentially more complicated, you had the management team, not only management team, the board, and the board of the ESOP, then the fairness opinion firm. Was there anything else that drove you crazy in that deal?

I think that was about it. But yeah, we've done a couple of deals with ESOPs and it is a bit more complicated. Again, we have a reputation in the ESOP space. There's a lot of engineering firms that are ESOPs and we've got a reputation there of, hey, these guys are fair, they're reasonable. And if you're going to talk to them, they're probably going to put together a good strong offer for you. That's going to achieve your expectations from a fairness opinion.

Well, I'd hold that for a podcast, how to acquire an ESOP. I think it's a good one to do a technical dive on.

Yeah, it takes a long time.

That's a lot of work, but it's totally worth it. You mentioned earlier your CEO meets with every single employee post-close in small groups. They get to know them personally. Tell me a little bit about that. We kind of started with the company culture that drew you in, why you're pretty happy working there. Yeah. And I wanted to get a little bit more of that part of it. And then I'm curious about that too, because there's usually a point, like you hear about founders doing that, all these things, do they meet the employees— and you're doing the same thing with all these incoming employees, but then there's got to be some point where that doesn't scale.

That's a great question. When I started, we were around 1,500 employees and we're around 5,000 now. So we've grown a lot in the last 3 years. But I remember when I started, I had these discussions on, okay, how does the announcement look? And they were telling me like, oh, the CEO goes there and he meets with every single person. And I was new to the company and honestly, I was thinking to myself, I was like, this is a waste of time. This is the CEO. He's got so many important things. Like, how can he do this? And it really only took one of those meetings for me to realize how important those meetings are. Like, our organization is a people organization. It's built on our people. Without it, we have nothing. And what could be more important than our CEO getting to know these people, to helping them realize that they're important, we see them, we want to see them grow, we want to see them succeed. We're committed to helping them achieve that success. I've been a part of a lot of those meetings now, and I love them. It's one of my favorite parts of my job. They kind of run the gamut, and there's a lot of laughing in those. People will share vulnerable things. There's some crying, I would say, sometimes. But the mutual thing is there's a growing respect amongst peers for the people that they work with every single day. We always get feedback from the leaders of those organizations of how grateful they are that we do those because they learn things about their team members that they didn't know. They're like, "Ihsaan has worked for me for 15 years and I had no idea. He's never told me this." And it comes out in those meetings and it just helps people realize how human everyone is. And we're all in the struggle and in the race and we're just trying to be successful. And we all have things at home that's not always ideal, but we're all in this together and we want to see each other succeed and we just see those teams getting closer after those calls. I don't know what it'll look like in the future. You're right. I don't know if there's some breaking point of, can we continue to do it the way that we're doing it? We will always have those meetings. I don't know how they will always look. It might evolve over time, but it's been one of the most important things that we've done as part of our kind of onboarding and integration.

So they're awesome. I'm impressed. You got me sold. Now I'm going to stalk Darren to get him into our CEO series over here.

You should.

Yeah, he's great. I got to ask you, Nathan, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M&A?

Oh man. We see a lot of crazy things. It's not that crazy, but going back to those intro calls, I love them. And one of the icebreakers that we ask is, hey, like, what's your favorite band? What do you like to listen to outside of work? And the ranges are just crazy. And that's what is crazy is just you hear these people, like one time we were in Canada and there were 7 or 8 people in the room. I was a lot of accounting personnel and they're all like, oh, my favorite band is some boy band, 98 Degrees or NSYNC or Backstreet Boys. And it's what in the world is going on here? Like Canadians love NSYNC. And then we were in Idaho and there was another group of team members who like mumble rap. I don't even know what mumble rap is, but apparently it's a genre and you should look it up. But they were extremely passionate about that. And of course they all think it's weird when I say my favorite's Taylor Swift, but I have no shame in it. I've got a 10-year-old daughter, so I do what I'm told, but she's definitely caught on for me.

Oh, that's too funny. That's too funny. I get my 15-year-old daughter listens to a lot of mumble rap, so I get it. Oh, there you go. I like it. That's a great one. Hey Nathan, I really appreciate you taking time from doing deals, having a conversation, helping me become a better M&A scientist. You bet. I want to thank you, my fellow M&A scientists out there. Send me feedback. I dropped my privacy stuff on LinkedIn, so if we're not connected, send me some feedback. I also want to know the audio quality too. You're listening to on Zoom, but if you listen to a car or something, when we finally publish this, let me know. I want to know the difference between these live ones we do versus when we do them in person. This is great. I like the feedback here in the chat. Appreciate it. I mean, like I said, we're kind of doing livestreams. We're beefing up the content since now MA Science is a separate company and encourage you, we are building a membership model. I'm really making it really cheap right now. It's only $1,000 a year, but check out on the website. We have a whole AI platform we license that makes all this content dynamic. And it's more on it. We haven't officially launched it. We're already selling it, but later this month we'll have all these announcement demos and stuff. This has been great. Reach out to me. Let me know if there's topics we haven't covered yet that you would like to see, and criticism, I'll take it. Got some tips on how I can do these interviews better. I welcome it as well.

Till next time, here's to the deal. Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M&A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an M&A function or optimizing one that you already have, we're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email, Kison, K-I-S-O-N, content@mascience.com, or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal. Views and opinions expressed on M&A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.