Fixing Broken Companies Through Smart Deals with Marc Bell Part 2

This episode is sponsored by dealroom, the only M and A platform designed for.

Buyer led M and A.

Most M and A tools were built for sellers or bankers, but if you're in corporate development doing two or more deals a year, you need something built.

For how you work.

Dealroom is purpose built for the buy side from pipeline through diligence. It gives you centralized control over every deal, clear visibility into tasks, timelines and ownership, and reduces manual work with bulk updates and templated rooms.

And when your process lives in one.

Place, you're not reacting to the seller, you're driving the deal. And that's buyer led M and A. Whether you're looking to speed up diligence, keep integration on track, or just cut down on chaotic email threads, Dealroom gives you the structure to scale.

Go to dealroom.net or hit the link.

In the episode description and check it out. Here's to the deal. I'm Kisan Patel and you're listening to M and 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 MA Deals Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the M and A Science Podcast. This podcast is part of a mission to rethink how M and A is done. The old school seller led approach, it's dead fire led. M and A is all about strategy, alignment and efficiency, putting value creation at the center of every deal. We uncover what truly works at M and A by learning directly from the best. I'm your host Kisam Patel, Founder and CEO at Deal Room and Chief Scientist at M and A Science. I'm joined by Mark Bell, a self described deal junkie whose career spans everything from newspapers and watches to satellites and data centers. He's taken 17 companies public, executed countless acquisitions and built businesses across the globe. Mark brings a mix of grit, strategy and creativity to M and A. He's not afraid to get his hands dirty in a turnaround. Today we're going to dive into what it really takes to fix broken companies, how to structure deals using leverage and seller financing, and the principles that guide leadership and success.

This episode is part two of our conversation from last episode.

If you missed part one, I recommend.

Giving that a listen first. Otherwise let's pick it up right where we left off. Due diligence. I think it's like an important part and just the examples you gave of investing across so many diversified industries. How do you approach due diligence? Do you have this sort of adaptive framework for doing diligence on these different types of investments or how do you do it?

So when we do due diligence, we have a checklist. Basically we start at the top, down we go with, start with revenues, quality of earnings, make sure that cash coming in, ticket ties to the bank statements, to the tax returns. We look at cost of goods sold, are they buying things, are they spending too much? Or where we could save money. So we try to figure out that we may know ways or places that we could acquire things at a cost savings. Because at the end of the day we want to add value, don't want to just buy a business, we want to be able to buy it and on day one, immediately add value. To increase the bottom line without harming the business. We look at expenses. What are they spending money on? Are they spending money smartly or foolishly? And you'd be surprised. Are they spending tons and tons of money on very expensive offices? Is everyone flying first class instead of coach? And expenses grow and as the company grows, the fat grows along with it in terms of things that they seem like a good idea. When you're a small business, hey, let's bring in pizzas every day for lunch. And the next thing you know is you have a caterer and a kitchen and all of a sudden it's costing you millions of dollars a year to bring to feed everybody. So you want to try to balance off where it makes sense to feed people on site. This scenario we go through all the time because we want people to always not leave the office of time value money because most people eat their lunch in 15 minutes, but if they go to lunch it takes an hour plus and that's lost time during the day, lost productivity.

So almost like the first view is the overall business case why we're doing this deal. Does it financially make sense? Does the financial picture look good? And do the numbers pack into things that are validatable?

First we look at do we want to be in that business? So there's lots of things we don't do, lots of things we don't want to do. We either stick to things we know or things we easily can understand. And we also want to invest in businesses that we like. Do we like what we're doing? Do we like this? Will it be fun to do? Or can what we can do to the business be fun? How do we change how they do things and do it in a way that's much more effective with all the tariffs going on. Right now we're seeing all these overseas companies trying to come to the US and because there's such Cheap labor. In a lot of China and other countries, they don't take advantage of automation. They don't take advantage of things because labor is so cheap. But in the US we don't take advantage of a lot of automation either. So there's an immense opportunity to onshore. All these products and goods from overseas may go back to Made in usa. Remember that from years and ago. Yeah. Bring Made in USA back. Made in America. And people say, well, you know, cost of labor here is too expensive. But when you're doing assembly lines with robotics, you don't have that much labor. Your capex is very high, but your cost per year. But then the robots work 24 7, 365. They don't need health insurance, they don't need unions, they don't unionize. We hope it's a huge opportunity.

That's a good point. So the industry that you want to be in, then you can build the actual business case. Make sure this is an area that either you know or you can learn quickly. And then the efficiency part was interesting because it's like, how do they operate their business? Where are these opportunities for us to be more efficient about running the business? Anything like you've learned in terms of really digging in to make sure there's no gotcha surprises? Because even some of these deals that you mentioned, buying things out of bankruptcy, I feel would be so hard to do diligence on. What have you learned to like, really dig in, to sort of avoid the big surprises?

With every business, there's gonna be surprises. With every business that's going to be graft and theft. Fortunately, it's very unfortunate, but you don't read about it every day, but it happens every day. We're always gonna find something that, oops, missed something. But we try to be thorough so we don't miss anything. As we get older, our checklist went from a very small checklist to a very large checklist. So it was one page, is now hundreds of pages. As we go through all the different checkboxes we have to do to make sure that we don't miss anything.

And hey, Mark, the big thing when.

I talk to people, you look at diligence, you look at the factors that drive success. It's always culture comes up big time. And I feel like there's such a wide view on the impact of culture. Some are like, you know what, once you buy the company, you're going to make the culture to what it is or what you want it to be. Where others are like, hey, I'll walk away from the deal if the culture doesn't line up. What's your sense on it?

We have a few different premises. Family first. We never want to see an employee miss their child's school play, miss a birthday, miss a baptism, any kid event. They have to be there for their family first. We don't want them to go home, go to the performance and come back, do what they have to do. But we don't want people missing out on their family. That's number one. Different age groups, we've noticed, have different needs, and we want to try to appeal to those needs. So we had a company, it was a technology company, and we were hiring people, and we had an older workforce that we was building. We decided, you know what, you were 60 or 70 years old. We still give you a job because. Because we see a lot of people discriminating against age. We've thought the exact opposite. They have all these decades of knowledge on what we were building. And it was very interesting because what happens is. And we learned is they would come in on the weekends, and we were trying to figure out why. As a group, out of 700 employees, we had 130 who were AARP members. And we saw a lot of them on the weekends. It turned out most of them were single, mostly men, mostly single. And they had no place else to go. So what we did is on the weekends, we made sure that they had environments that they could all sit together and have lunch. And they weren't getting paid overtime. They were just. They were doing it because they had no. They wanted to be around people. That became their social life. So we encouraged it and we did things for them that made it easier for them. We got them bigger monitors to make sure they could see everything. We got them all the ergonomic tools for their desk, different chairs for some people. We made sure we had ADA bathrooms everywhere, even if beyond what the code required to make sure that we were definitely meeting their needs. Then they started bringing their friends. It was amazing. They were very loyal. They never quit. It just was amazing thing. We also look at different religions. We built in our offices in California, we put a prayer room in for people who are Muslim, so for the five calls of prayer they could do. And we had a big prayer room and we had a place where they could wash their feet, hands and feet to keep their shoes outside. And we thought it's important to make everybody comfortable, regardless of who they are.

That's so interesting. That's like a really different lens than just going beyond just Understanding the culture. It's like you're. You're sort of catering and finding ways to create a better people experience.

Create a better people experience. We want people to feel comfortable regardless of their religion, regardless of the race, regardless of what they do. Zero tolerance policy for any discrimination in the company. You don't even get a warning. It's grounds for instant termination if you are violating our rules.

I like that. So we got doing diligence, understanding the cultural piece and that sort of lends to what are you going to do with the business afterwards? Find ways that you can improve operational efficiency, but also the people experience. I got a big topic I want to run by you. This is one I really want to take apart. If anybody's listening gotten this far, this is where you're going to earn your listening dollars over here. Capital allocation is something I didn't think very much about when you're running a really small business or just an early stage tech company. Now we are growing, we're about 50 people right at 10 million ARR. We're looking at options because there's M and A opportunities popping up and some are profitable. And you're like well I can do this deal with private credit, some are not profitable. And it's like well I probably need an equity partner to do this deal. And then you're looking at your own business. We grew 44% last year. We're strong. I'm pretty optimistic that we're going to grow as much, if not better this next year. Checking off trade offs there. It's like well if I raise equity, maybe I should just wait, keep doing the organic growth, then do some of these things later on. So it's trying to get me to wrap my head and understand capital allocation. And I feel like there's context of a private sense and then as you mature it changes because you obviously got more products out there and then you got the whole public market. Teach me capital allocation.

Capital allocation. It's hard. You're making decisions that affect your future debt versus equity. I'm going through this now with a friend of mine. He's got a great amazing company. He's growing very fast. He was thinking of selling a third of his business to raise some capital. And I was like, why, instead of selling a third of your business, why don't you just put on some debt where you get the same amount of money but in the case. But you're giving on your upside of your equity. And I said if you're really confident you're going to keep Growing. And he is like, so put debt on the company. That's okay. You can pay the debt and then in three years when you want to sell the business, you'll own 100% of the equity versus only 70% of the equity. If you sell off equity today, that'll be worth much more tomorrow. But you have to have confidence. I ended up raising. Debt is a double edged sword. If things go bad all of a sudden, your creditors are going to take your company. You have to pick your creditors. You have to build relationships with your creditors, which is very important. They have a lot of power over your future. And some days will be good days, some days will be bad days. You want a partner who's really going to work with you.

The debt is cheaper capital in a sense.

Well, the debt is cheaper capital. If you have confidence, you're going to keep growing.

Okay, so this is like the venture model, right? If it's a high risk thing, nobody really knows the outcome or probability or uncertainty. Basically, then the equity is probably better.

When I had my first venture business called Globix Ventures, I would always go to people in a half joking way. I would ask them if they would personally guarantee the money I put in and let me put a lien on their house and their other condo and their car and their kids. And I just want to see the reaction. Then they'll be like, well, you know, I wouldn't let you put a lien on my house. But why not? You're asking me to lend you money. If you have so much confidence, why wouldn't you want that? Why won't you personally guarantee it? If you're so confident that I should put up my money, why aren't you confident? And you see the reactions. And then sometimes people say, absolutely, I'll totally do it. And we never made people do it, but we wanted to see the reaction of how they would answer the question to give me an idea of what's going on in their head.

So you look for that confidence.

I believe if you truly believe in what you're doing, you will be successful. But you have to be a true believer. People sense that when people see that you have the passion and you believe in it. I used to teach grad school at FIU in Florida and I would tell my students they should follow their dreams. Don't do something to make money. Do something because you love it and the money will follow. And most of the time it does.

I agree. You gotta have that interest that keeps you in the game long term and keeps you motivated?

Yeah. You have to really love what you do. You have to want to be at work every day. Like when I started my first company, I lived in the office there 120 hours a week, every week. I loved what I did and if I don't love it then I shouldn't do it. But if I love it, it's successful.

When I look at doing a minority recap for our business, one of the things I'm interested in is finding the right private equity partner that could potentially bring us two things. One is the ability to mature m and a muscle faster. Help us the strategy getting more sophisticated with the strategy build pipeline help us execute. Second is our product fits into the private equity ecosystem. We sell it to about 200 corp dev teams. Right now we have a handful of private equity. Can you accelerate or go to market in private equity? Because that's a whole learning curve I don't want to do all over again. That's like the incentives that we are beyond capital. Do you start looking at some of those factors and saying okay, maybe there are some reasons or is it just let's keep being. You know, I still got high confidence. I don't need them for a while. I can still continue that 40 plus percent growth rate. Then maybe the debt's cheaper with private equity.

Some private equity firms are amazing and they're great partners and they will really help you. Some are loan to own shops they're going to invest in the idea of finding a way to squeeze you out of the rest. When you're looking at private equity firms, you should Talk to the CEOs or the owners of other deals that they've done and see what their experience was with that firm. And that's the first thing I tell people. Just like interviewing a candidate you're going to hire, you're interviewing a private equity firm. You want to know about them and you want to know not only their track record but you want to know from the only the people who they did business with what they thought of them. Because the firm may have made money or they may have screwed the founder and the CEO of the company. The CEO of the company.

That's a good point. That's one I'm working on now. I'm just doing it backdoor. I just go to the port codes that are adjacent industries reach out to their CEO and said hey, talking to so and so. Would you mind give me a little bit about your experience with them?

Yeah, that's great.

And then that probably helps you get that it's Almost like your own personal justification of is there going to be more accretive value beyond the capital with this partner as opposed to. Otherwise, I'll just go get debt.

Yeah. KKR had a great model decades ago where they had a whole team that would help come into your business and help find ways for you to save money. Like a consulting firm. Some firms still do it today. They want. They literally will come in with a team and they'll help you figure it out. They'll help find ways for you to cut costs. They have bulk deals, whether it's with FedEx or whether it's for mobile services, what have you that they got to bet they can get you cheaper rates. But it all adds up. Pennies in turn into dollars.

You got the general evaluation of equity versus debt. Big factor is your confidence in your future. So that's going to be one piece of it. And then debt. There's obviously a lot of different products. It depends where your business sits. You have asset light and then I guess your size because I've noticed that we're bootstrapped still. And you don't get as many options if you're private equity backed. So you got to play with certain private credit firms. You're paying really high interest when you're in that situation. I'm curious about as your business matures and you start thinking about these other levers that come into play. You mentioned bonds earlier, going public. You've taken a number of companies public. What's the rationale for doing that? Because now you're seeing all this private capital available. We've seen Stripe and these other companies just stay private forever.

Today, I believe if you take a company public, you have some sort of mental deficiency. Thirty years ago, it was a lot of fun. Now it is just you stay private. If you have any brains, you stay private. I will never do another public company again. It is just I will keep everything private. I'll sell to private equity firms, I'll sell to somebody, but I will not go public. It's just not worth the headache. It's the same reason why. Last one. People won't want to run for Congress, run for office. Just not worth the headache.

Okay, so let's say the headache in public.

Now I'm starting out public scrutiny. It's everything you do.

Yeah. Public security, investor relations.

Everything you do is wrong. You can grow the company through the roof and it's still wrong. And because you didn't do it there, you're growing 100% a year. And if you grow 99% one year. Oh my God, you're a failure with social media. You get a hold of these people, short sellers are out there all over social media just bashing on you. And I'm like it's just not worth it. It's not worth the headache. X is not your friend.

Anybody can be an activist now.

They can be. It's mind boggling how many people out there and they're probably 14 year old kids sitting there doing this and or people in China doing this. It's just mass rooms, it's just people who are just bashing. I don't need this. And I stopped looking at social media. I was like, you know what? It's just not as much fun as it used to be.

Okay, I'll rule out going public. Maybe it'll be like I could exit to a public company and call it a day. I could sit there and take a stock, hold a roll, hold a roll for a title for a year or two and then call it quits.

Exactly six months be done.

What are other levers? I mean there's obviously private equity runs the gamut. You got vc, you got different private equity from majority minority owners. You got just individuals. You have sovereign wealth funds and large institutional side.

Yeah, they are big, massive. And you have family offices now have become massive. So much wealth has been created in the past 20 years. It's phenomenal when you think about it. To give them the Forbes 425 years ago you needed $750 million of net worth. Today it's I don't even know how many billions it is to make the force 400. The number the wealth has been created in this country is just. And all over the world is just phenomenal. And these family home offices, they buy businesses and they invest and they put their money to work. Family offices have become a juggernaut in the investing world that just didn't exist 25 years ago.

We have this capital structure, there's all this different equity options and then debt as well. Private credit's opened up a bunch of different options and products as well. Is the math like something I want to understand again, go back to capital allocation broadly. How do you do the math in your head? Because I know you're got a strong investor lens. Is it, hey, I'm looking at five years out. I want to be at this target irr and working backwards because for me I'm still that bootstrap mentality. I'm just going to work my ass off day in, day out and at the end of the year. I'll sit with the tax accountant and look at the numbers and he'll tell me how I did. Kind of curious from your sense if you've got a different view of how you think about capital allocation from what you're targeting, returns working backwards or is there just a different way that you look at it?

When we look at capital allocation, where do we get the biggest bang for the buck? Risk adjusted? So what's the risk? If it's a sure thing and sure thing can be defined a million different ways we'll do it. Like right now, I've been buying up for the past year lots of bonds in banks and I'm getting paid 7, 8% coupons right now. So it was a good portfolio move and it's turned out to be a great portfolio move in this market right now. And equities have gotten pretty, you know, right now holding pretty flat. Market's down a lot and I'm pretty flat. If we made some good equity choices, we invest in private companies. It's all about risk, reward. What's the odds are going to succeed, what's the odds are going to be a winner? And you're betting on the, not just jockeying the horse, you're betting on the industry. Is industry going to be a goldmine? Like we spent a lot of time lately looking at small modular reactors. We spent a lot of brain cycles trying to figure out now how we can mass produce them, how can we do it cheaper, how ways we can do it. At the end of the day, we can't figure out a way to get it below 4 cents a kilowatt. It just doesn't. Math doesn't work. And no matter how hard we tried on paper, no matter how much we wanted to be able to do it, we couldn't figure out a scenario that it's cheaper than other, cheaper than natural gas.

So then you profile as a high risk. Like you just.

There's so much we profiled as a super high risk.

Then your expectation is like a much higher return.

We had this vision that we could make a lot of money doing it because there are all these data centers being built and they need power and there's not enough power in the US but at the end of the day it's not going to come from small modular reactors. We just. It doesn't work. The math doesn't work. And that was. We were all very disappointed because we spent months on this project and we just couldn't figure it out.

Looking at your investment thesis in a Certain timeframe or does it just completely vary?

It varies from day to day. Right now real estate has me all excited. I'm watching the real estate markets around the country start to soften or San Francisco just collapse over all in you're buying. People are buying things for 20 cents on the dollar. And office buildings in San Francisco, I.

Say in Chicago too.

Look out my window, my hotel here. I see vacant floors all over the place in all these office buildings. I don't know what the vacancy rate in New York City is, but it's dropping like a rock. There's so much empty space everywhere. Retail around New York City. There's tons of empty stores I'm seeing in Miami, where I live. Prices are coming down, people are getting. And what's going to happen is you're seeing the inventory of things for sale in Miami skyrocket. You're seeing the number of sales drop dramatically. Interest rates have gone up dramatically. No one's buying. That's going to start putting huge pressure on people who have to sell to really start lowering their prices. And we're seeing some great opportunities all around Miami now to buy real estate. And because people realize that a year from now it's going to be a lot cheaper.

Yeah, that varies on that strategy of what your whole period is going to look like and what the outlook is and your risk.

Some asset classes like real estate, I view them as long term holds. But you always want to buy the worst building on the block because you can make it the best. You never want to buy the best building on the block. What are you going to do with it?

Yeah, the opportunity to add value. What do you do when things go sideways? You've seen this before. You've seen it in the dot com bubble. Boom. You've just had investments, so you gave the watch example. Teach me how to handle it because I want to get a sense that I can be as optimistic about our business. But I feel like when things go sideways, you tend to be blindsided by it. I don't know. Can you coach me on how to mentally be ready to do that?

First, always make sure you're working on the first floor of the building and you can't jump. Second, keep Xanax far away from you because you're just gonna want to keep taking some.

Okay.

Third.

Third is to make sure you have a good closet to hide in, good desk to crawl under. I'm just joking. Obviously. Maybe not the first floor thing, but it's hard. You have to own what's wrong first, you have to realize the buck stops with you. If you're the CEO, the buck stops with you. You have nobody to blame but yourself. And once you own that, then you figure out how to. Then you work the problem and you have to work it, and it's easier said than done. And the whole idea is, you get the smartest people you can into a room. How did the problem happen? How did we fix the problem? And how do we prevent it from happening again? And we've seen lots of mistakes being made by people. But regardless of who made the mistake, at the end of the day, the buck stops with me. And I have to own it. I have to work it and I have to fix it, and I just have to push through. And as my old partner used to, you brute force it. You just figure it out and you don't go. You don't go home until you figure it out. Because all problems can be solved. It just requires sometimes some creative thinking, and sometimes it just requires some fresh air. And you go for a walk and you tune out the wheels and you think they come up with a solution. You have to own it, because people always want to blame everybody else. No. And I always tell people who work for me, if you make a mistake, own it. I said earlier, it's okay to make mistakes. I don't care if an employee makes a mistake. I care that they own it. They come to me right away, they say, yep, I messed something up. I said, that's fine. How are you going to fix it? And I want to teach them how to solve the problems, because I know at the end of the day, it does. The buck does stop with me, though.

So for you, it's a big part about ownership. There's no philosophy on how paranoid you should be about what's around the corner.

You should be paranoid because everyone's out to get you. Just read X.

That's true.

That's the downside of public companies, because everyone's out to get you.

Everyone is.

Despite how much money you've made, people over the years, they only care about what you're making them today. Everyone's about what you've done for me today. Forget about yesterday. That's why staying private's a great idea. You have to figure it out and you own it. The easy part is to get up there, get on stage, say, you know what? I made a mistake. This is the mistake I made, and this is how we're solving the problem, going to solve the problem together. Nobody wants to take ownership because if you don't take ownership, then no one can. It could be nobody's fault because they just point fingers at each other. Because it was a group decision. Yeah.

That's why it takes so long to get anything done. And had to fix the problem as well. You were in hospitality before.

Yeah, so it was very funny. We started investing in restaurants and nightclubs. We invested in New York City and restaurants like Lavo, Arlo, Tropical, Soapiza, Catch. We invested in bongos in Miami, Philippe Chow. We invested in Lolita's tequila bar. We invested in, gosh, wide range of venues. And it was all about. At the end of the day, we had a piano bash, munch bar. It was all about solving a problem. And the problem was, is I hated waiting for a table. That's how it started. You want to eat, and it's a busy Saturday night. You can't get a table. A lot of places. So I decided I wanted. I wanted to visit an Italian restaurant, an Asian restaurant, a fish place, all the major food groups I would eat. The only thing I never did was a steakhouse. That was the only thing I never did. And then I loved going. I love music, so I love nightclubs. So we invested, investing in nightclubs. It was a passion play. But I had amazing partners across the board, and I was very profitable. I made money and I solved a problem. I could always get a reservation. So it worked.

I'm going to start using that. I'm going to drop your name and see if I can start getting in some of those places.

And it doesn't work anymore. We sold them all, unfortunately. Sold them all, unfortunately.

That's all right. It sounds like a familiar name.

Markdell. I know.

Mark Bell.

People do it. Still to this day, people call me up. Do you know, I'm like, seriously?

That's so funny. Looking back, which deal taught you the hardest lesson? How did that experience reshape how you evaluate or structure deals today?

I got a lot of those. It's picking your partners is probably the biggest lesson I learned. I've had some amazing, spectacular partners. I've had some amazing, spectacular lenders, amazing, spectacular equity investors. And I've had the exact opposite. I've had the world's worst lenders, the world's worst partners. I've had partners who've stolen. I've had lenders who broke every rule in the book. Some people are amazing, and some people can be real pricks. They don't at the end of the day. That's why I said, make sure you talk to people to see who you're getting bed with. That's the one mistake I didn't do, is talk to people to who I was getting in bed with.

That's really true. I feel like I learned that a lot, especially from doing this podcast. When you interview somebody, you get a really good sense of the character who they are. You get a sense of that network effect, too. You start seeing that it's like a bad character there. Usually all the associations tend to be in the similar vein. That makes sense for you to go back. Do the references like we used the example with the PE firm. Talk to those other owners, get a sense of.

It's by far my biggest mistake.

Okay. Number one. So that's number one thing I'm going to take away from this interview is then going deep into those references.

You need to know who your partners are going to be. It's just like relationships. You need to know. You want to know his wife. You don't get married right away. You want to make sure that person is the right person for you because it's a relationship and you want it to work.

That's great advice. What's the craziest thing you've seen in M and A?

Craziest thing I've seen in M and A? Yeah, I've seen a lot of crazy things in M and A. I'll give you a crazy story which isn't M and A, but it goes to the crazy things of bad investing. Friend of mine was buying a house in New York. They inspected the house day before closing. They closed. They went after the closing, back to the house. House was gone. House burnt down the night before. So the guy who owned the house got his money from selling the house and he got the insurance money for the house being burnt down. And my friend buying the house was left with nothing. What craziness? And they never could prove arson. Never could prove anything. And the guy got paid double. And my friend was left with a piece of dirt with the rubble. Craziest thing you asked for. Crazy. I can't make this shit up.

Because it burnt down before.

You're supposed to inspect the house an hour before closing, not the day before closing. That's the lesson learned.

Yeah. You do it right then.

Yeah.

Okay. We wait. The inspection's done continuously now.

Every time we buy something, we have somebody on site during the closing. We don't go. That's why we saw. I remember this site. I remember what happened. And my friend went through. So we literally have a person who sits there during the closing to make sure nothing happens to the building because.

Yeah, so the house burnt down. They closed the next day. They didn't look at the house.

The guy got paid his insurance money on the house burning down.

Detectively had ownership.

I got wired all the money for.

The house and they got next day.

Wow. Crazy. Crazy.

You went pretty extreme on that. Crazy.

I'm like, okay, it just came to.

Me going out for drinks. I want to get the other 99 stories below that. Mark, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time, helping me become a better M and A scientist here.

Listen, thank you so much for having me today. It's really been a blast. I really appreciate it.

Fellow M and A scientist, you've gotten this far. You're a true M and A scientist. Love to hear from you. I know we switched things up with this interview. Got Mark Casabi, investor, to teach me a few things, learn from his experience, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Love to hear feedback on this interview. You have other topic ideas, things I should be covering. If you just wanted to rip on me and criticize me and how I can do better at this, I'm open. I'll take it. That's how I get better. Till next time. Here's to the deal.

Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M and 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 and 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 Kisan K I S o n a science.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 and A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or 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.