Episode 15 - Saumil Jariwala, Feta Fund

So the big question is this. How are entrepreneurs who aren't scaling tech startups or building lifestyle businesses from scratch doing it? How do acquisition entrepreneurs find businesses, buy them, and then create generational wealth while taking on less risk?

Welcome to Search Funded, the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition podcast. I'm your host, Nick Law. I'm here today with Somil Jerry Wallace. Somil is the founder of Feda Fund. FETA Fund is a search fund investor. And what's really interesting about SOMO is he graduated from undergrad at Wharton just back in 2014. Then in 2022, just eight years later, he launched fed funds. So clearly a very precocious guy getting started on the search fund investing game a lot sooner than others. He did spend three years at Trilogy, one of the largest search fund investors, but would love to hear more about your story and maybe a good place to start would just be where you got the inspiration to start your own search fund investment firm.

Yeah, absolutely. And hey, thanks so much for having me. There's a kind of longer story I'm pleased to share at some point today about how I first heard about search funds and first got into this world. But the inspiration for the FETA Fund, which stands for Founder Focused Entrepreneurship through Acquisition, is all the way back in 2016. And our space has changed so much from then when I first started search fund investing. And yet the challenges and frustrations that searchers tell me about today, so many of them are literally the same ones that I used to hear in 2016. And so in 2022 or end of 21, I was given the opportunity to launch the feta fund, which I can talk about. And for me it just felt like an interesting opportunity to try and launch a fund that served searchers in a slightly different way than a lot of the other funds out there. And that was pretty exciting to play a small role in helping to address some of those frustrations and challenges that searchers have been telling me about for almost a decade.

Yeah, I would love to dig deeper there. How did that opportunity materialize?

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe it makes sense for me to start the narrative all the way back at the beginning and then I can get into that. Does that work, Nick?

Definitely.

Sure. So as you said, graduated from an undergrad in 2014. But funnily enough, my journey to the world of small businesses started well before that. When I was at Wharton, I found myself to working with something called the Wharton Small Business Development center. And that work was pro bono consulting work for Philly area small businesses that needed the help Almost most of the clients were sub 1 million of revenue. All the clients were sub 10 million of revenue. And what I found about myself at that time was that working with companies that size and working with entrepreneurs and you know, critically, this last one I think is the most important. Working with businesses with mature operating models was deeply, not only kind of deeply interesting for me, but really personally meaningful and kind of knew that about myself. Started my career at Bain, talked to anyone who would listen about how I wanted to find a way to work with companies like that. And you know, guy I worked with said hey, you know, I just graduated from Harvard Business School because at the time you only really knew about search out of Harvard Business School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business and then said I really want to be a searcher, you might want to be a search fund investor. So I took a six month leave of absence from Bain, went to work with a search fund investor, Trilogy Search Partners, as you mentioned, and found that I absolutely loved the work. It was really exciting, deeply meaningful and just fun to work with these high potential entrepreneurs. And you know, one way I like to frame it sometimes is that you know, everyone who's got gets into the space, the first or second thing they do is to read the Stanford study and everyone sees that eye popping 32.1% annualized return. I don't think everyone thinks about the practical reality of that. For investors like me, it's that the average company I get to work with is doubling its equity value every two and a half years. It's the average company I get to work with. Half of them are growing their companies even faster than that. And it's like unbelievably exciting to work with businesses like that every day in and out, every day in and day out. So I think that's what really got me hooked. And I think you'll find every search fund investor has a story like that. The ah, moment for them. Spent some time back at Bain and some time in private equity, came back to the space and was just kind of fortunate enough to become someone that searchers were really excited to partner with and had the pleasure of being on the main panel at the Southeastern ETA Conference in 2021. And right after that a family office approached me and said hey, if you wanted to raise your own fund, we'd love to be your first capital in. And the reality about our space and maybe we'll get the chance to talk about it is it's not that hard these days to raise money to invest in search funds. The really hard part is having searchers out there who want to work with you, who will tell other people, hey, Somo is a great person to partner with. And, you know, I got confidence that, you know, I had those promoters in this world and also just built that conviction that there was an opportunity to launch a fund that worked with searchers in a different way and helped them with those pain points that still hadn't been addressed. And so, you know, decided to launch the Fed fund.

Yeah, that's clearly you're doing something right to make that progress that quickly. But I guess my question would be, what do you think that you offer that's different at Feda Fund from other investors? What's your value add that makes searchers excited to work with you as compared with others?

You know, it's funny, I want to go back to the thing you just said. A lot of this. Sometimes it's just better to be lucky than good. And I think one thing I feel very fortunate about or feel lucky is that, you know, it turns out if you build your career in an industry that's seven X's in 10 years, right? Number of searchers went from about 10 to about 70 from 2012 to 2021. Really, really cool opportunities sprout up. And so I definitely feel lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. So that really was a big part of it. And in terms of how I work with searchers, the way I would describe it is this. It's generally not that difficult to get support once you've become a small business CEO, once you have 2 million of EBITDA to pay for consultants and to get time with your investors, when They've written a one and a half to $5 million check in your company, people will return your calls and there are resources available for you. I think a frustration I hear from searchers is that, you know, when you're in that search stage, that kind of founding stage, just part of the name feta, you it's a lot harder, right? You know, investors have written a 15 to $75,000 check, something like that, maybe $100,000 check. You are out there sitting by yourself in a we work, sending emails all day, getting rejected and don't really have the money to spend on help or support. And the really wild thing is that a lot of the same talk track and points that searchers used to bring up and tell me in 2016, I still hear today. And so the idea of the FETA fund is it's a specialist fund, just work with a handful of folks each year to kind of give them a highly custom bespoke experience. And it's laser focused on the 600 days of the search, kind of 30 days pre capital call before you call your initial capital, up to 30 days after you acquire. And for self funded searchers, it's the same thing. We don't really have that same traditional fund structure. So I don't have a kind of similar period of time to talk about, but up from the early days and when you launch a self funded search, well before you find an opportunity. Right. I want to get to know folks really early into their search, up through about 30 days post close. And I spend, you know, 90% plus of my time helping searchers source, diligence and ultimately acquire these companies. I believe the most valuable thing search investors can offer their searchers is their time. This isn't private equity. There isn't some playbook. Right. That's part of the reason the returns and opportunities of our space have remained so great for almost 40 years. And I have found that searchers find it really helpful when you're available and kind of set up the time to be able to answer those Friday night calls and take the three hours to debrief in the middle of a conference to figure out how a searcher can spend, you know, the second day or third day of the conference and have it be more effective. I did that last night. So there's a lot of that type of stuff getting really specific and in the weeds and being there and present for the sourcing and searching and diligencing stage because that's the part that's the most frustrating. I even hear that from CEOs, they'll tell me, hey, you know, it's been a little bit challenging to step into this business where I now have to manage 140 employees. Boy, this is way better than searching. How wild is that for sure?

So it seems that your focus is really on the surge phase and other investors may be there for the operational or at the acquisition phase a bit more.

And just one thing that will put it is I just think in our world, for a lot of these larger investors, the burden we put on them is so hard. The expectation is that they're a one stop shop, they help with everything and, and it's really difficult to do that. Right. And so naturally they have to allocate their time or they allocate their capital. It's just a practical reality. I call the Fed Fund a specialist investor because I'm not, you know, the Fed Fund is not a lead investor. We, it's a medium sized investor. And there's kind of some power knowing that, hey, there's, you know, some number of leads, some bigger institutional players that are also in the cap table and I know they can provide support with so much stuff. And if we take that as an assumption, as a given, it creates opportunity, opportunities for other investors in the cap table to become specialists, help with one specific part of the journey. So, you know, I definitely, I want to echo and reinforce the value proposition of some of those other larger investors. They're really important. It's just the expectations on them and their responsibilities are a little bit different because they are that largest check. Sure.

I think that's really interesting. As you mentioned, the number of searches maybe 7x during the time you first got involved in 2021. I think by today it's probably an even larger multiple than that. And clearly there a need for different and more types of investors when the number of searches is increasing so quickly. I was curious how you decided that was sort of the specialty you wanted to focus on. Was it based on your own private experience that that's where you felt you added the most value or enjoyed the most, or is that just what you thought the greatest need was and you thought that you could tackle that?

You know, it's funny, one of the really fun things about being a search investor is that the people we work with are really smart and impressive, right? Anyone? I'll just give an example on the traditional search side because it's a little easier of a, of a anecdote. Anyone who can raise $600,000 for a traditional search fund from, you know, 12 very sophisticated, successful, smart individuals, that's an impressive person, right? You don't, you don't get to that place without being someone impressive and thoughtful and smart and generally, you know, if you ask folks like that, what are the parts of their life that are painful and frustrating, they'll tell you, right? Like they have a lot of great insight into the parts of this that are just not very fun. And so launching Feda, you know, again, I was given that opportunity and was thinking seriously about it, but I knew that it didn't make any sense to launch a fund. Like, searchers don't need more sources of capital. There's well over 100 search fund investors out there. That's not a differentiator. The idea, what I kind of landed on ultimately was I only wanted to do this if I saw an opportunity to provide something different. Right. The world doesn't need another generic search fund, investing fund. And so having those conversations and having that ah moment where I was like, oh my gosh, like I feel like I'm in 2016. Like literally some of the same phrases were exactly the same. That was kind of an ah, that there's probably an opportunity here. It's just going to be part of the next evolution of, of our space and just generally. Right. I think it's a good idea to spend time where people feel frustrated and challenged. It's not like a nice, nice way to get to spend your time. You know, I'd been in the space and done a fair number of things where I had experience doing that as well. And just insights I could leverage from the 50 plus searchers I've worked with since 2016. So was a place where I knew and could hear from searchers. They were looking for support, wanted more support. And it did nicely dovetail with some of that experience I built having been in the space or close to the space for so long.

Sure. You've mentioned that your goal is to help a thousand entrepreneurs acquire businesses in your lifetime. I guess. Can you talk about where that mission came from and how you arrived at it?

Yeah, you know, I just, I guess I would put it this way. Look, it's cool to talk about deals, right? Like, who doesn't have a nice time thinking about investing millions of dollars and investment opportunity that has big potential and like, you know, kind of hard, amorphous problem? Like, that's really fun and exciting to talk about. But what got me into this, the thing that I really love about working with searchers and the thing I loved, you know, all the way back in the early 2010s, working with small businesses is. It's so personal. Right? You're. These aren't companies with tens of thousands of employees. You know, it's like 40 typically. Right. And impact is measured not in terms of gross dollars created, but the impact on the lives of specific people have names. You know, you can say, hey, you know, pushing increasing pay for our workers who make minimum wage. You know, yeah, it's smart for the business so we can attract great talent and retain people. But like, think about what it's going to mean for Elizabeth and Jonathan and Frank and whoever else. Right? Like, how fun is that? And so I think framing what I really want to do over the next 30, 40 plus years as a search fund investor, not in the context of doing a thousand deals or, you know, generating a billion dollars of equity value, but as the, from the point of view of the specific human beings I want to work with. I think it just better captured what is why I'm so passionate about, about search and working with searchers. It's really about the people. And yeah, you know, the company growth stories are fun and exciting, but also I can't even imagine how wild it is for me to get to know someone, you know, their first year of business school and they're trying to decide if they want to go back and take their private equity VP offer or whatever. Right. And versus that, versus doing a search and then, you know, five or seven years later, you know, they might have successfully exited and taken home $25 million. Like the velocity of the stories just so happens so fast. And that's a part of it too. Getting the chance to be along for that journey, not just for the 50 plus I've worked with so far, but for another 950.

Definitely. Yeah. I think that's why either on the search side or investment side, it's a very exciting option compared to a lot of the other things you could be doing with your time. So if you want to impact people's lives, why not work with traditional small businesses that are in communities across the country?

Exactly.

Maybe you could give me an example of one or two searches that you really enjoyed or the story was the most rewarding for you.

Oh yeah, I'm happy to do that. But there's like four or five different lenses we could talk about that one would be transformational stories about companies, could be about personal growth. Can you just give me a specific example of the vector you want me to talk about that on?

Yeah, I think that what interested me most about what you were talking before was about how these entrepreneurs can come in and impact the employees lives. So I was wondering maybe if there's one where the company grew and it also became a better employee culture or just impacted the lives of the employees there. It could be interesting if there are any examples like that.

Oh yeah. All right, I'll give a great one. So in the last couple of years there has been a big change. There are always changes, I guess in health care. But one of the interesting regulatory changes in health care is that in some states it's now acceptable for nurse practitioners to serve as primary care providers for like standard visits, checkups for patients. They're always able to be the tip of the spear. But in a lot of states to this day, a doctor kind of needs to come behind them and sign up on it. So a couple states they've changed that because it's so hard to get primary care that they wanted to increase the number of providers that could do it. So they allowed nurse practitioners to it. And a very unintentional consequence of that is that it opened up this massive opportunity for assisted living facilities. So if you're a patient at an assisted living facility, you're a relatively acute patient, so you need to be seeing the doctor several times a year. And the way that typically works is, you know, a member of the team at the assisted living facility will be out of pocket for a whole day. They'll take, you know, several patients at the facility and put them into a van and then drive them across town. And then they have to kind of wait in the patient waiting room for several, several hours. And then they get seen and then they get put in a van and they come back and it's a really bad experience for everyone. And it's not just. It's uncomfortable for the patients. And then, you know, you lose a staff member at the assisted living, the assisted living facility for a day. There's also fall risk and, and there's data to support. And many of us have anecdotes to support the idea that if you're older and you're not in great health and you fall, it's a really big impact on mortality. You know, it's terrible. And it started to be a big change in the way you could serve those patients. Rather than picking them up and taking them to the doctor's office, you could do the reverse model. You could bring the primary care providers to the assisted living facility. Now, we've had the ability to do that for decades, right? But for whatever reason, it's harder to convince a doctor to do that as opposed to nurse practitioners. There's several examples of them doing home care. And so I think it felt kind of, for whatever reason, culturally, it was able to convince folks to do it. And so there's a searcher. She buys the largest provider in the Pacific Northwest, which is. Which had, you know, not that much revenue, even though it was the largest provider in the Pacific Northwest, like solidly a small business, if, if anything, like even a little small for search fund acquisition. And the reason it was small was simply because, you know, this was a very recent regulatory change. And we're talking like, you know, 20 nurse practitioners that are going out there and serving, serving patients at these assisted living facilities. But, you know, they, there was demand from other assisted living facilities that they couldn't service. And they had grown the number of nurse practitioners seriously over the prior 12, 24 months. And so we come in. Oh, and the person who'd been operating the business was a nurse practitioner herself. So someone who'd kind of built this business around it, but candidly wasn't that passionate about the business of actually growing and scaling the company. Right? She got into this because she wanted to serve patients. So, you know, we had the opportunity to come in really young, dynamic CEO, she steps in with the appetite to build systems and processes in place and investors come in, you know, willing to put a bunch of growth capital. And we actually didn't put any debt on the business because we wanted to make sure that any cash flow that was generated was going to service and invest in growth, not to service debt. And over this 18 month period, they increased patient count by 50%. You know, just this absolutely wild story of being able to serve all of these more assisted living facility patients because now we have the capital and someone with the time and bandwidth to want to go out there and hire a bunch of more nurses, right? And also, you know, contact assisted living facilities and say, hey, we have this product, like this is a no brainer for you, like, let us serve you. And all while she's doing that, she's improving the life of these individual nurse practitioners, right? She's putting systems in place so they're not like taking notes on their phone to try and like, you know, then go home and chart up the stuff, right? Like making it so that these nurse practitioners can spend time with patients rather than, you know, these manual processes. Not because, you know, the prior owner didn't, you know, want to put that stuff in place. You just didn't have the bandwidth. Man, it's really hard running a small business when you don't have access to capital and resources and there isn't a dedicated person out there growing the business. Love that story because it, it just captures all of the different vectors or many of the different vectors on which we can impact the lives of people with these small businesses, right? So to increase patient count by 50%, we of course have to hire more nurse practitioners. Those are folks who are getting, you know, great paying jobs, doing meaningful work as, as part of making the company more professionalized. Are all these systems put in place that removed annoying and repetitive and manual inefficient processes and put stuff in place to improve quality of life of the nurses themselves. We serve 50% more assisted living facility patients. That's fewer patients who are going to fall, you know, fewer patients that are stuck suffering all day in a, you know, you know, Physician's office, waiting room. Right. How do you not get excited about a story like that? You know?

Totally. Yeah. I think there's the irr, which gets a lot of people excited about search, but actually there are so many options for the people who get into search coming from these top schools. And one of the most amazing things is bringing in these smart people to work on problems that impact everyone's daily life. I mean, my grandmother was in an assisted living facility, had similar issues. I'm sure most people have. And not only is there that, it's working with the employees, listening to their needs and just creating processes that can improve their lives. So amazing. I mean, if there weren't enough reasons already to get into search, I think ones like that just make it such a great option and an essential one, I think, which is why it's great that you have the goal of a thousand people. The more people we can get involved in this work, the better.

And you know, the funny thing is I don't, I'm not sure how, honestly, for those who are actually in the CEO seat, you know, when I catch up with them and hear how they're doing, they're never starting the call saying, oh my gosh, like we're absolutely, you know, hitting our financial base model that I put in my deal sim two years ago and like absolutely crushing it from an IRR perspective. That's like, that's not, it's not how folks are wired. Right. Like when you're, it's fun to think about that stuff before you jump in, but when you're actually in the CEO seat, the things that like keep you up at night and the things that are on your mind is like, how do I make sure I can run this company in a competent enough way where I can keep putting food on the table of these families? How do I give my employees a great experience? How do I make sure I serve my customers well and how do I grow this company so we can bring more people in the tent, we can have, give more customers a great service experience and we can give more high paying jobs, like that's the stuff that they're thinking about. So. But I think it's one of those things that until you actually get in the seat, you. It's hard to like actually understand and internalize that. Hopefully that makes sense. You know what I mean?

Sure, yeah. Once it becomes real, you realize that small business is about people. It's not just about these numbers.

Exactly.

Yeah. Switching gears a little bit, how I first came across you was that you have a very active social media presence, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter. And you have a lot of really insightful posts that help people like myself who are kind of new to the search community and trying to gain some knowledge. And, you know, I've been reading books and all that, but you have a lot of very insightful stuff that's clearly based on experiences like this that you've had. I was curious what your goal is with sharing all of those posts and how you generate the ideas for them. Is it like you have a regular posting schedule and you just come up with, oh, this is something that I experienced this week, or how does. How do you go about that? What's your process?

Yeah, I'll start with the why, and then I'll talk about the how. Is that? Okay, perfect. Great. So the why. Most people who launch a search are doing it out of business school, but when they think about doing a search, they're not thinking about it in the way that business school students think about on campus recruiting. Not really thinking, oh, am I going to work at Google or am I going to take a job at McKinsey or am I going to do a search? And the reason they don't think about it that way in my experience is because search is a lifestyle, right? It's not just, I'll do a couple years consulting and then figure it out from there. When people commit to this, it's because they want to change their life, do something entrepreneurial and they're in it for the long haul. You know, in a lot of cases, people are making a 10 year commitment and they don't even have 10 years of work experience. Right? The typical searcher is 32, so you can see how that would, would work, you know, if, especially if you're coming out of business school and so you spent two years in business school, the map kind of turns out that you're going to spend more time, you're making a commitment to search longer than your entire career up to that front point. And generally, you know, when people are grappling with the idea of trying to change their life and do something that's not just a job, but kind of truly change their lifestyle, they're thinking about it a lot. And it's kind of nice to have content available to them that they can see every day. Right? Like snackable content is the way to think about it. There is a ton of excellent long form content in our space. Great podcast from the Polsky Center. There are two folks who write long form blogs that I love. There's many more, but certainly two I'll mention here. It's a guy named guesswork Invest on Twitter who writes big deal small business. It's a lovely substack, deeply insightful. And then there's another well known search fund investor named Steve Devitkos who has a lovely blog. There's a, there's a ton of great long form content out there, but it just felt like in terms of stuff where people can get out of bed and they're of course thinking about search funds anyway and just be able to open their phone and get on Twitter or LinkedIn and just have just a little reminder, some snackable content, something small for them to look at and be like, yeah, like this is something I want to do with my life. And you know, hopefully it's helpful or hopefully it's inspiring. Just felt like there was an opportunity to do that and it's been kind of fun for me to sit down and write that stuff. And you know, often get teased about how ubiquitous the content is. You know, I go out of my way to post every day, but that's kind of a feature, not a bug. I think it's the regularity of it that is part of what I'm trying to do here is just give folks the ability to every day engage with it and reinforce that decision. And sometimes it's from prospective searchers and I've had searchers text me or call me and say, hey, honestly, like I knew I know this thing about like if I'm going to reach out to 8,000 business owners over the course of a search, that literally means I'm going to get 7,999 no's for the one yes. I get like, I knew that, right? But it's kind of nice to like wake up and see someone write it and just like remind me of that. Right? So stuff like that, it's kind of the idea is educational, inspirational and the regularity of it is a big part of it. Given that search is a lifestyle, not just a two year job. So that's kind of the why. And then in terms of the how, you know, what I do is I just sit down for four hours on a Sunday and try to write out this content and schedule it for the week. I just find the quality of it is higher in my opinion when I sit down and have some like really clear, structured working time for it. And in terms of the inspiration for the content, actually, you know, the great thing about spending my entire week talking to searchers and prospective Searchers. And for the searchers, particularly those in the search phase, which, as you'll, as you've seen, that's basically where all my content's about. It's all about the search phase. They'll say smart, thoughtful, insightful things and I'll just jot it down. And then on Sunday, you know, I'll pull up that notepad file and say, oh, yeah, like this is a really great insight this person shared and let me anonymize it for their privacy and then find a way to write it. To write it. Maybe other folks will find it helpful. You know, again, it goes back to this thing. It's really nice. I get to work with really smart, impressive people and smart, impressive people have great insights when they're out there doing this. And I try to play a small role in taking those insights directly from searchers and communicating it to potential searchers and other people who are interested in our world.

Sure. It's clearly a great approach and I think it kind of shows one of the benefits of being a bit of a younger investor is that people in this generation are spending a lot of time on their phone. And that quick LinkedIn reminder is a great way to keep it at top of mind rather than having to go to the effort to read a book and maybe question related to the advice that you've given searchers when it comes to the search phase, what are some red flags that are often missed or what are some stories you have when it comes to due diligence where the search sure should have figured something out sooner than.

Yeah, I mean, I think about this stuff every day. Right. Like, yeah, as search fund investors, you know, it's not like private equity. Right. We're not really like capital providers. I really think of myself as the steward or custodian of the careers of these people who decide to give up the opportunity to do something else and do this right. It's a really serious commitment when things go wrong. It's, you know, painful, really painful on the lives of these specific people and by extension should be painful for us Right. As investors. So I think about that a lot. I think my advice there would be. It's actually funny. It's going to echo some of the stuff we talked about earlier about small business being all about people, like you said, Nick. And it's that it's so easy in the diligence stage to be thinking about the company and the revenue quality and the business model and the customer concentration and reading the contracts and converting the financials from cash basis to GAAP and working with your lawyer and your accountant and your tax support and all that stuff. A lot of whether or not your acquisition is going to be successful is based on the seller. You know, as a gentle reminder, the seller literally hired every employee at that company. The seller literally sold every customer that that company has ever worked at. Even if they're on a beach in Bora Bora, even if they seem like they're out of the picture, they still have a massive impact on the company. And little bit of a non sequitur. That's actually a really key difference between this and real estate, for example, right? Like this isn't like self storage where not to pick on that in particular, but you know, certain types of real estate where once the seller is gone, you can kind of figure it out and there's not that much impact from them as long as they weren't committing fraud or something. Right. It's really different. These companies aren't turnkey. Even if the seller wasn't that involved day to day, they have a ton of influence. So you've got to really make sure that seller relationship is right. My number one piece of advice for things that people forget to do. And it's funny, like I'll tell people this and then, you know, it's no big deal. I get it. Searchers get busy. But four months later, Searcher will find a deal and I'll ask them if they did this thing and they'll be like, oh, I totally forgot. Thanks for the reminder. Somo, as soon as you sign your LOI background check the seller, like that day, right? Because if there's some big red flag, you know, the seller went to jail 20 years prior for fraud. Like, like it doesn't matter how great the multiple is. That's not a buyable business. Little shout out to Ethos. Risk Ethos was acquired by a searcher, Micah Smith, several years ago. I've used them a lot. I've never had an issue where they missed something. They're quite expensive. $700 as of this moment. But generally I'm a big fan as a search investor for paying up for quality because again, we can't afford to get it wrong. You know, it's. Investors might lose a little bit of money, but from the point of view of the searcher, it's catastrophic on their life. So just generally try to pay up for quality. Ethos does a great job. The day you sign your LOI, pay the $700, use Ethos. Make sure there's no problems there. So there's the tactical stuff like that, like background check the seller, but just generally over the course of diligence that kind of 90 days in the post LOI period, just make sure that there's not any kind of weird signals from the seller. Make sure this is someone who's got integrity that you're dealing with and just seems like someone you wouldn't mind having a business relationship with over the next several years. Because again, they have a ton of influence.

Definitely all of other people at every stage of the process. Just one quick follow up. Why Ethos over other background checks? Is it just that they uncover more than others would or.

Man, I'm a massive homer for search fund acquired businesses. You know, if I ever have the opportunity to buy something from a searcher acquired business, even if it's more expensive and not as good, I'll do it basically every day. So it's nice because Ethos does and it's like part of the reason and then folks who are search adjacent. Right. It's part of the reason. I think our community has really embraced people like August Felker. So just generally whenever I have the opportunity to support a searcher led or searcher required business, it's kind of a no brainer. And Ethos does this thing, right? And you know, I've used them for so long. I also am just like a big believer in the quality of the product. I've never, I've never worked with a searcher that used an Ethos background check that had where there was like a miss and post close. We were like what the heck? Like what was the point of paying several hundred dollars for a background check if you missed this important thing? So yeah, there are definitely cheaper background check providers out there. But again like for me, worth paying up for quality and like yeah. And also it's just nice to support a search required business. Right?

Yeah. And I think there's always something to be said to work with a business that's used to playing within the domain that you're working in and has that expertise also.

True. Exactly.

So yeah, I've taken up enough of your time. Maybe just one last question. Do you have any message you'd like to share with the audience or a sentence or two about your life mission? What would it be?

Yeah, thanks for asking, Nick. Small business is inherently personal, right? Almost by design. You know, I first, when I first started working with small businesses in 2010, what I came to learn quickly is that small businesses are people sized businesses. They're businesses where the trajectory, the company is fundamentally altered, can be fundamentally altered by the addition of one key person. And the impact, as you measure the impact of those businesses, it's primarily based on the lives of the people. It impacts the individual people who work at that company and the individual people who are the customers of that business. And when you think about it from that lens, there's this really interesting macro trend that's happening in our country that ties directly to that. Right. So it's called the Silver Tsunami. Many of your listeners will have heard of it before. Two thirds of jobs created in the United States in the last 25 years were an American small business. 50% of American small businesses are owned by baby boomers. The youngest baby boomer is 60. Our country is about to undergo this massive change where there are all of these small businesses that employ millions and millions of Americans and they need to find a new home, they need to find someone to run them. And I've done my fair share of pro bono small business consulting. I do, I still do that to this day where someone will be working with us because the owner died and someone inherited the business and doesn't know what to do to be able to keep the lights on and continue to employ these people at the company. Right. The business had no transition plan. The owner was like constantly thinking, I'll figure it out next year, I'll figure it out next year. And eventually next year never came. So it's a really serious problem when we don't have a solution for who's going to own these businesses after the baby boomers retire or pass. And in addition to just feeling deep personal mission for working and supporting these individual high potential entrepreneurs as they transform their lives by acquiring and running small businesses. One thing I love is that what we're doing as searchers and search investors plays a tiny role in solving that problem. Right. And it's how cool is that that the work that we do not only transforms the lives of the CEOs and owners of these businesses, the new owners, the searcher entrepreneurs who are running these businesses, but also helps playing a small role in fixing this massive macro problem the United States, our country's about to have. So it's a pretty special thing. And I think we don't take the opportunity enough as an ecosystem to just think about that impact that we're having besides just generating a lot of people a lot of money or something like that. So thanks for the question. It is really fun to talk about the mission and, and some of that stuff that's behind the work that we do as a community.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much, so much for your time. It was an absolute pleasure. One last question. How can people reach you or find you?

Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to contact me on Twitter. My handle is etafund. You can join 55,000 other people who are excited and passionate about search and entrepreneurship and I Also post on LinkedIn Somil Jirawala. You can find me on there by my name and the fund once again is called fetafund. F E T A F U N D. Feel free to reach out to us from our website and would be thrilled to get to know you.

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