How I Bought A Multi-Million Dollar Egg Carton Business For $0 | Sarah Moore Interview

All right, what's up? It's Sean, and I'm going to start by reading you a tweet that I did a year ago. It says, I have a new hero and her name is Sarah Moore. And the reason that Sarah Moore is my hero and somebody that you've probably never heard of is because Sarah Moore was somebody who was a student in college that, you know, she's in her young 20s. She has no money, no experience. Uh, the only thing she owned in her life was her car, a RAV4. And she hustled this crazy hustle story of how she basically decided, I'm gonna buy a business even though I got nothing, nothing to my name. And she spends a year searching through 100,000 businesses and she finds this niche business called eggcartons.com. Uh, you literally, this guy sells the carton that your eggs come in. And she bought this million, you know, multimillion dollar business with all debt. Um, so she put no money in 'cause she didn't have any money. And so, and then she had grown it a bunch since then. And I just said, I think this is like a $20 million business that this woman bought and like, wow, what a hustler. So I told this hustle story on the podcast and it kind of went viral. It blew up. Nobody had ever heard about this story before. She has done no interviews. She has no social media. She was like a ghost. And I honestly, I didn't even know if it was true. 'Cause it's one of these stories that's too good to be true. Uh, here's this girl who comes from absolutely nothing. She talks about this in the interview. Like she literally had no parents. She was in and outta jail as a kid. Like, She was just trouble. And then she has this turning point in her life that gave me goosebumps. She ends up paying somebody to take the SATs, so she gets into college. She hustles her way through college, uh, finds a way to buy this business, and it's this amazing success story. And two things happened. One, the story kind of went viral. She said that like Netflix and others reached out to her after the episode went live, that people started showing up on her doorstep, asking them, asking her for advice on buying a business and like, Honestly, it was kind of bad. Like, it was too much. And please don't do that again. Because she's like, dude, I'm trying to run a business. I don't even know you. You start telling my story and this went crazy. And so a year later now, she's like, okay, at first I was kind of like, wow, this is crazy. Then I was kind of annoyed and scared. Like, is this going to mess up my business? But then as she started to see the upside of telling her story and she was like, look, I still have no social media. I still do no interviews, but you kind of, you were very nice and you told my story. I will agree to come on and do one interview. And so she's like, after this, I'm one and done. Fine. I'm gonna come on and I'm gonna lay it all out there. I will tell you everything you wanna know about buying a business, how I did it, what I did, the good and the bad, all the mistakes that I made. Uh, I'll tell my kind of the life story part 2. That's the sort of, you know, made for TV. This, it's, it's unbelievable, her life story along the way. And she's like, I'm doing one interview and then that's it. I'm disappearing after that. And she did not disappoint. We just finished the recording. Um, it's one of my favorite episodes we've ever done. She is somebody that I really admire. and I don't use that term lightly. Like she is really a hustler, super genuine, and her story is, um, is frankly incredible. Like it's not often I have goosebumps during an episode of a podcast. So enjoy this episode with Sarah Moore. All right. Today's episode is gonna be all about buying a business rather than starting a We usually talk about ideas that you should use to start a business, but as you know, like, um, one of our best, uh, friends of the house, Andrew Wilkinson, has told us many times buying a business could be a better path. But, uh, how the hell do you actually do it? That is the question. And we're gonna talk to somebody who not only has done it, not only has done it successfully, but has really never told her story. You, Sarah Moore, you are basically not on the internet. Welcome to the internet because I first heard your story and then I went Googling and I couldn't find anything. You were a ghost. Uh, intentional or unintentional?

Very intentional. I'm a very private person and I'm not a fan of public attention. You kind of blew up my spot though, so things have changed a bit.

Yeah, sorry about that. So we, a long time ago, I don't know what, how it was, hundreds of episodes ago, um, I came on the pod and I said, hey, I got a story for you. I said, I would love to have this person on as a guest, but you can't find 'em on the internet. I said, I think this is a kind of an incredible story. There's this woman who out of college bought a most boring sounding business you could think of, eggcartons.com. And I called you like the queen of, queen of cartons or something like that. And I was like, she's the, the queen of eggs. And she buys this business that some guy had been running for like 20 years. And, She's running it, she's growing it. And I was like, the way she did it with no money down, I was like, her story sounds really interesting. But again, there's literally one like text interview of you on the whole internet. So then I, I did, I emailed you and I said, hey, I'd love to have you come on. I don't think I got a reply or something, but then I sent you a Google Doc and I said, look, I just have to know. I gotta, I need answers to these questions just for my own personal curiosity. I sent you a Google Doc and I said, just, can you just fill this out? And to my surprise, you actually did. And so when I came on the pod and I told your story, suddenly a bunch of people were very interested in you, giving you a lot of attention. And correct me if I'm wrong, sometimes in not the most nice, nice way. It wasn't all good. Is that right?

That's correct. I've come across quite the cast of characters.

And why do you— what do you think? What do they say to you? Where— how are they finding you and what do they say to you?

Some people beg me to talk to them for 15 minutes. They'll offer— someone specifically offered me $500 for 5 minutes of my time. And it's crazy because I'm so irrelevant. Most days I'm out in Sutton, Massachusetts, so there's not much happening here. I'm kind of under the radar. And so all of a sudden I've now gotten a ton of inquiries from people, and a lot of people want specific information. A lot of people are emailing to say, hey, I'm doing this exact thing. How do you get financing? Or can I get your opinion on this business deal? Or I'm about to close. How did you get a bank to actually do your deal without putting much or any money down?

Right, right. Well, hopefully, hopefully this podcast tells your story in a good way, does not create even more people chasing you down because we're just going to tell all the answers right here so that people— everybody leave Sarah alone after this.

Yes, I'm serious. Please do not contact my business. You can email me or reach out to me on LinkedIn, but please do not contact my business or show up there for that matter.

Yeah, yeah.

We've had a couple of those, a few stragglers.

There's always a few stragglers. Unfortunately, there's always a few stragglers. It doesn't help that your story is kind of unique because you didn't come from money. And we're going to talk about that. You didn't know how to do this. Not like you knew how to do this or you were an expert. You were a total beginner when you started. So that's appealing. Yes.

Yes.

You're a woman doing this. I think that's more unique. So there's like— there's a whole bunch of like angles. And then you did it in a kind of a niche that sounds kind of like, you know, like boring businesses have become sexy now. And so you did it in a boring business. And so I think there's a bunch of reasons people are excited. But let's, let's start at the start. So, okay, let's just start with the high level. What did you actually do? You were in school and you decided, I want to buy a business. First, tell us, why did you decide that? How did you even know that that was a path you could go down?

Oh boy, there's a lot of context here. So, but to answer your question in the simplest of, of ways is I was between my first and second year of business school and I was talking to somebody about what they wanted to do afterwards. And they mentioned something called a search fund, which is where you essentially can go out and buy some grungy business and become the CEO basically overnight without any money or experience. That was very appealing to me.

You're like, hey, I fit that criteria. No money, no experience. Absolutely.

Grungy businesses, sign me up. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot. Grow better.

And so you hear this idea and you're like, what was your plan before that?

Were you—

did you have another plan or like, did this replace something or you just put it in a vacant spot?

So, okay, we'll do a bit of storytelling here.

Yeah, please.

When, when I was in business school, there was a guy I was working on a project with and he was incredibly responsive, almost annoyingly responsive, kind of one of those. And I asked, how are you so responsive all the time? And he said, Goldman. He's referring to Goldman Sachs. And he said at Goldman Sachs there was a rule of 15 minutes, meaning you had to respond to whatever form they reached out to you in within 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And I said, okay, so what if you're in the shower? 15 minutes. What if you're running a marathon? 15 minutes. Christmas Day? 15 minutes. And my favorite, what if your wife is giving birth? 15 fucking minutes. And I mean, we laugh, but my— I worked my ass off to get into business, to even graduate high school. I worked my ass off, to be frank. And I'm thinking, you went to an Ivy League undergrad, you're clearly off the charts intelligent, you have this amazing network of people, you come from money, you have everything that I don't. Why would you choose to essentially sign up to be Frank, someone else's bitch? Like, I didn't say that to him, but that was my thinking. And so I had no idea what I wanted to do. But up until then, I was at HBS, Harvard Business School, trying to fit in with all of these people and sort of find my footing. And after that, I'm thinking, I don't want to be like these people. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be a consultant. I don't want to be a banker. This is so not me. And if I'm going to be someone else's bitch, like, that's just not an option for me, right?

I'm only going to be one person's bitch, and that's my own. Yeah, that's every entrepreneur ever. There was a guy who Really? There's a guy who we went to college with. He was our next door neighbor in our dorm. Great guy, Sam Soley. And he went to work at, uh, same thing, Goldman or one of these, one of these banks. I don't even know what the hell that was. That's just foreign world to me. I don't know. Sam's gone and he doesn't, you know, he's busy now. He works 80 hours a week and he, uh, he read our blog. We used to blog about how we were building our company and we'd be like, yeah, we woke up, we did that. We had these calls that we were pitching this guy. and then we went for a hike cuz we lived in Boulder. It was like, we went for a hike in the middle of the day cuz that was awesome. Then we had an idea on the hike and we came back and did it and it sounded so sexy. In reality it was honestly pretty lame, but you know, it was like blogging was like social media. It's like Instagram back then. You make it look good. And so Sam quits his job and he moves into our, our bedroom or moves into our, our living room. He lives on our couch and he's like, I'm gonna do this. I'm like, dude, you were making 6 figures. You're making zero figures here. And he's like, um, and he, he's like, yeah, but it's better. And we, we couldn't really understand the culture. And then he sent an email and we were like, hey Sam, you said something in this email I've never heard before. What you said, hey, can you get that to me ASAP or sooner? And I was like, hey, what do you mean ASAP or sooner? ASAP means as soon as possible. And he's like, oh, that's a banking thing. It's ASAP or sooner. I'm like, what the fuck is sooner than ASAP? And I was like, that's the mentality. I was like, I get it. I get why you quit. I get why you're out of there because ASAP or sooner is not a way to live.

Not at all. And it honestly blows my mind. Again, given the pedigree of these people, you would think you would shoot for the moon here. You would want to have this freedom in your life, but you're literally choosing a form of enslavement. Enslavement, in my opinion.

Right, right, right. Yeah. Anytime, you know, I think banking, consulting, these are often brain drains. The talent, really talented people go there because it's sort of safe and it's like a well-respected path. But if you think about how much, how many more cool, interesting things could be built or created if those same talented people went out and did more entrepreneurship, but you know, whatever, to each their own. So you hear that, you're like, all right, I'm not going to do that. And now you're, you hear this idea of buying a business. Okay. But where do you start? How do you even know how to start? And we're going to go into your full backstory, but like the kind of the high school, how you even got to college, which is a crazy story in itself. We're going to get to there. But first, You hear this idea about buying a business. Okay, Sarah, now what? What do you do?

Great question. So I, to your point in the beginning, I lacked the ability to evaluate businesses. I had no experience doing that prior to business school. I was in the steel industry and I thought if I could get a business, I was pretty comfortable with the idea that I could run it, probably if I tried hard enough. But searching in itself I thought, I need to have background in private equity. I have no idea what I'm doing. And people will say, you have a Harvard MBA, but Harvard is very corporate. They don't teach you how to look at a corporate or commercial window washing business and evaluate their financials to see if you want to buy it. Right. They're looking at very complicated financial models, which these are not at all. And so I thought, I probably need to go the investor route because there are investors out there that will actually pay you to search. I'm thinking, that's incredible. Someone's going to pay me to look for this and then they're going to invest. This is amazing. Look further into it and see that if you were to get an investor to back you, they'll give you plenty of money. You can live a cushy life. You can do this in a fancy office. You can wine and dine these sellers. but you have to pay back 1.5 times that. And so if they gave me, it's a 50% increase. So if they had given me $200K to search, I'd have to pay back $300K. So that in and of itself was absolutely ridiculous. And so one of my friends actually sat me down and convinced me that if you, it's similar to dating, he said, and if you get enough reps in, you cannot not recognize a good business when you see one. For whatever reason, that I figure I may as well just try and go out on my own. Worst case scenario, literally worst case, I bring someone in midway. But why not at least give it a go on my own and see what happens, right?

So what, so what did you do? You, you decided to go on your own. Um, how do you go about it? What was your process?

Okay, so step one for me, I'm not good with technology and I didn't have any money. So step one is I'm going to leverage what I've got around me, which is I'm now at a school with a bunch of smart people. So I had one of my smart friends scrape one of the databases with all the private companies within an hour and a half of my apartment in Boston. That's step one.

Yeah. You're like, you're like, my criteria is it's an hour and a half away. Tell me every private business in this area.

Truly. And the problem is with these databases, people think, oh, you've got all this great information. Not really. The— we estimated just by looking at some financials we actually knew about that the database was accurate about 50% of the time. Accurate meaning the owner's name is correct, the revenue is correct, the employee count, all of those metrics because they're all self-reported.

Right.

So who's actually going to give you accurate information knowing it could be public?

Right.

And so we tried to pare down the list by revenue. But we did it by multiple of like 5x, meaning let's say a business. So for instance, the business I'd worked for previously, it said that business did $1 million in revenue. The business is doing over $100 million in revenue, right? There's all this misinformation, but we tried to narrow it down somewhat. Anything over, I think, $100,000— or I'm sorry, $100 million— we took off the list. Uh, revenue-wise, it was fair game.

Yeah.

After that, it was obvious things. And when I say obvious, I mean it— you have to be sure. So that would be a legal firm or an accounting firm or 7-Eleven. Other than that, again, fair game, because my business was actually under farming. So everything else, you don't know. It's, it's self-selected, the industry. We kept the rest there. So we were still left with a pretty massive list of companies.

And you told me, by the way, you said one of your things is like, you think industry is overrated? You think people over-index on, ah, I'm looking in this space, this is the niche, this is the industry I'm looking in. You don't believe in that and you didn't do that. Uh, why do you think that's the case?

So initially, here's why I, I think that from experience. Initially I did what I think most people do, what investors actually require you to do. You sit there and you have thesis about the kind of industries that would be great businesses. And usually those industries have characteristics that make them stable, which is what you're looking for when you're buying a business. A lot of debt. And what I found is that the industries were absolutely irrelevant. What matters is that you find a business that is established and has been consistently profitable for a number of years. Everything else, garbage. There are so many businesses in amazing industries, like let's talk pest control, right? Great industry. You've got people that have pests. They're not gonna say, you know what, not a great year for me this year. I'm just going to let my house be infested. Like, that's not really a thing, right? It almost gives you, I think, industries a false sense of security because you think just because I'm in this pest control business, I'm good when you're really not. There's way more to it than that. And so what I found is find a business that's established and consistently profitable. Forget the industry because people could say I'm in e-commerce, right? So that's, that's a, this is an unstable industry. I worked in the steel industry. You would think that's an absolute hell no. Business I used to work for, it's a hell yeah. It's a great, great business.

Right.

But industries would tell you otherwise.

Gotcha. So you didn't look top down at industry. Instead, you were just like, okay, I have this. You have this list. You remove the obvious outliers, businesses that are way too big for you to buy. And now you have still an enormous list. And here you are, one person sitting on campus trying to sort through this. So what was your approach? What'd you do?

Well, I wasn't a one-man show here, thank God, or I wouldn't have made it. I hired hella interns and I didn't mean for it to get as big as it did. But initially I had 5 interns that worked for me and we actually did the industry approach. We did the painstaking process of look, each intern had to give me 50 companies a week with— they were— they met my criteria. These companies you found email addresses for, and then we contacted. There were 5.

You had 5 interns, but you're a college student, you're an intern. Well, how does you get it?

Yeah.

How does an intern have interns? What, what, what happened here?

So I made quite the pitch and the truthfully, here's what it is. The, oh, and I swear to you, like I use what I learned searching every single day. And my interns tell me this all the time. We text each other about it all the time. Private equity. This is private equity. And private equity is an industry where they don't do free internships. You're more of a liability, waste of their time than the free internship. So you're not going to get a free internship at a private equity firm. You need to have actual skills. You need to have investment banking skills probably before you're even at their front door. And so this opportunity is, hey, you're going to get private equity experience and I'm going to give you transparency into everything. I'm huge on transparency. So I created a conference line and I said, I'm going to let every single person listen in on these calls whenever they want. So those were calls with all the owners, brokers, accountants, attorneys, anyone from HBS, anyone that I contacted. My phone was basically tapped 24/7. If you're interested in finance, this is very helpful, actually. I mean, who wouldn't want to? It's like you, Sean. Sure, people would, would weirdly enough want to listen in on your calls when you're talking business, when you're doing business deals. You would learn a lot, I'm sure. So that's a huge portion of it, the learning.

Ben Graham told Warren Buffett— Warren Buffett was, he admired Benjamin Graham and he wanted to go work for him. And he said, I'll work for you for— Warren Buffett says, I'll work for you for free. And Ben Graham goes, your price is too high. And, um, because it's, you're right, it's the time, the energy. So for for a lot of people, they're not even gonna, they're gonna say no to a free, to somebody who's willing to work for free because the time and energy it takes to train somebody and give 'em that access is too expensive relative to the free labor. But you were smart, you made it a different, you were in the opposite position. You're like, I do need help, I do need free labor. And you rebranded yourself as private equity, which technically you were, but—

Absolutely, private equity. We're sure.

It's like, where's your office? It's like, it's in the cafeteria. We sit at this table and that's my office. All right. So you start—

Whatever works.

And these were other Harvard students or these are just people in the area?

No, in fact, I initially used the student job boards and they were actually the worst. You get these cookie cutter students who think like everybody else. They were basic. The best interns I found came off Craigslist. My— one of my first interns who was with that initial batch of 5. He was with me from the entire duration of my search, and he came off of Craigslist.

Nice.

It's people that aren't just thinking like every other college student. And by the way, a lot of these weren't college students.

You told me something. You were like, you know, initially we're going through this list of like 400,000 businesses that like, you know, were in the criteria. And so even if you're doing 50 outreaches a day and we have 5, 10, 15 interns doing this, the math ain't mathin'. It just doesn't work. You can't get through this list. So you changed your approach. What did you do?

Absolutely. So we realized our response rate is awful.

I've—

you know, matter how customized you get, you're reaching out to people, most of which aren't looking to sell their business. So the very low response rate. So if it's already this bad, we may as well just— and we're already filtering in the wrong way. We made many mistakes. The interns would have all these false positives, false negatives. We decide we're just going to light everybody and their mother up. Because if you look at email addresses, they're all more or less the same. You start to see a pattern. If you're looking all day for an email address, you see most emails are first name, last initial, @domain, first initial, last name, @this. It's the same 4 patterns. So we created a big Excel file, guessed the combinations, and then ran them through something. I think it was Bulk Email Checker. To see whether or not they were actually like real addresses.

And so you get their contact info and now you're going to email all of them one generic email because you're like, fuck it, my response rate is bad anyways. If even if it gets cut in half, but I can email 5 times more or 10 times more people. Oh yeah, that's a good trade.

Absolutely. And what was interesting is, you know, we, we had this huge list of people and we— you'd think, oh, well, if somebody reaches back out to me, How am I going to talk to them? But you realize it's kind of the same conversations over and over. So we would do this approach where it's like bombs away. And I— after we'd send out an email, we'd be getting tons of phone calls from people. And we had sent the emails out in such a way that it looked like it was done targeted, like it looked like we specifically did our research and said, hey, I, I'm looking for a business to buy and yours seems to perfectly fit the bill. Because it's within this revenue range. It's been around for a really long time and it's been profitable for a number of years. And the people that reached, that responded and said, actually, no, you idiot, that's not true. Great. Now we know. That's perfect, right?

Yeah. And then that's your survey, essentially. Yeah.

They didn't, but they didn't realize it. They thought they were telling us off.

Yeah.

And the best replies were the ones that were, wow, you really did your research here. This is great. They reach out to me, they're telling me how much research I've done. I have No idea who they are. I've got the interns scrambling, figuring out what area code is this? Who is this? What could this possibly be? As I'm pretending to have spent this time researching their business, I have no clue.

It's like being at a party and then somebody knows you, but you don't remember where they're at. So you have to say really generic things to, to keep the— keep it going while your brain is like searching, searching. Like, how do I know this person? What is their name?

Exactly. Exactly.

And so you, uh, what was your specific criteria? Did you have like a revenue target or did you have like a EBITDA target that you were using?

Initially I looked at businesses ideally between $4 million and $20 million in revenue, and I wanted something at or above $1.5 million in EBITDA.

Okay.

But over time that changed. Again, just like the industries, you realize why does it need to be this way? I realized so much of what I was doing was just based off of what I had heard over and over. And so things got tweaked as I realized I didn't need to necessarily have that criteria. I actually lowered my expectations a lot and standards. It worked out well, I think.

And so you, you lower, you widen your thing, you reach out to a bunch of people and one of them is this business, Eggkartons, that the Eggkartons.com. So what stood out there? And then tell the story about how you ended up buying that company.

Okay, so I send out that email, which again looks like it's customized, but it's not. The owner sends back a very long email saying, "Wow, you've really done your research. I am so impressed." And he starts outlining the specifics of what I said in the email. "You're right, we have been around for a while. We started in 2001 and this business has been, to your point, profitable ever since, consistently. We have an amazing reputation." We have a very strong customer base. And from there I said, okay, this has my interest. Because at first, let me back up, I'm getting this email and I'm thinking, guys, we're reaching out to farms now? Because it looked like they were a farm feed store. It really did. And so I, the first thing I always wanted to know was, okay, let's see the financials. Because if the numbers aren't there, numbers meaning you have actually been, as you allege, consistently profitable for a number of years, I'm not really interested.

Right.

But they were there. And so any time you see that, you know, because it is rare, by the way, I would say maybe 5% of the businesses we looked at were consistently profitable and established that few. And so he had— he met those parameters. I'm immediately interested. And so I started asking about the business and learning a little bit more like, okay, this is a commodity, right? And he says, no, it's not. We actually have a lot of proprietary products. We have some patents. I own—

sorry, just explain, explain what it is. It's literally the carton that your eggs come in. You buy a dozen eggs, they have to be packaged in something.

Yes.

This guy was making the packaging. He was manufacturing it, or he was the middleman?

He was the middleman. Yeah. I'll back up. So I found out what they're basically doing is they're a wholesale distributor and they're buying, storing, and selling egg cartons. So I immediately think, okay, this is simple enough that an average person with average intelligence, me, can do this. Like, I think I could sell an egg carton. I think I could buy one too. That was essentially what it was, the business. Of course, though, again, there were proprietary products. There were a couple of things that made it much more desirable. But at the end of the day, we're buying and selling egg cartons.

Right, right. And the website, I went to it now, which is like, you know, after you took over. And it's so basic. And we've talked about this on The Thing. The logo isn't even just the logo, it's eggcards.com. So you have the.com in the logo, which is great. And then under it, attached to that in the same image is your 1-800 number. It's like, you know, call 1-888-825-whatever, whatever. And so this business is so simple and so old school looking, but you weren't scared away by that. You actually you wanted that. You didn't want some internet business. You didn't want something that was like kind of new and innovative. Is that right?

That's correct. I think you have to play to your strengths here. This is where you— it's not so general. You, you can buy a business that suits your abilities. Mine were honestly kind of limited. I'm not handy. I'm not good with technology. Anything with engineering is over my head. So I figured the simpler for me, the better. I didn't want to rely on anybody going in there for the first couple of months to just learn the basics. This was a business you could walk into and day one more or less get it.

And so you— what happens? You make them an offer, you meet them for lunch. How do you, how do you actually get this deal done?

So for me, I stopped going anywhere until we spoke about a tentative price range. So I would always throw out a number very quickly because they were all kind of going between 3 to 4 times. So I'd think, okay, if you're above the average business I've looked at this month. You, you're closer to 4. If you're below that, you're closer to 3, maybe closer to 2.

Profits or revenue?

Profits. I immediately got down to that on the phone. It was great, you're in this range. They didn't really understand terminology. I wanted to keep it very simple. So I'd say, okay, what's your income looking like? What are you guys averaging each year? And they'd say the numbers. And so the— I immediately was thinking, you know, this is, this is worth 3.5 times. I always went a little bit up because I always knew there'd be more in the numbers to bring it down.

Right.

But you want to be a little optimistic, but you're not ripping them off. You're not being dishonest. You're being in best case scenario, it's probably around here, right? So I threw out a number and I go, is your— is your price anywhere within that range? Because a lot of people, the convo ends because they think their business is worth 10x and it's just not right. So I give out the number and he goes, okay, yeah, I think I can work somewhere within that range. He had looked into selling his business previously, so he was a lot more aware of what these small businesses are actually worth. A lot of owners—

More realistic about his baby versus saying—

Exactly.

This is the best thing ever. It's, it's worth 20 times profit.

Right. The second thing for me was a seller's note. That was a non-negotiable for me. The, because a seller's note to me was a substitute for getting equity and I didn't wanna get any investors involved. So the next step was, okay, are you willing to do a seller's note? And I phrased it a different way to make sure he understood it, but he actually did and he was willing to do that. And so then I said, okay, let's talk now.

And just to define the numbers, what a seller's note is. So define what is a seller's note for anybody who doesn't know?

Absolutely. I'll use an example. Let's say you're buying a house for $1 million. Rather than giving the seller $1 million upfront, this— let's say you have a 25% seller's note. You would give that seller at close $750,000 and then they would get paid the remaining $250,000 over time. And whatever you define those terms at, whatever interest rate you decide on and time horizon.

Yeah, the seller becomes the bank. They're sort of financing you to be able to purchase the rest of the business.

Exactly. And it was also great because the argument there is Okay, because some sellers didn't want to do it. And the argument is, well, you're telling me how great your business is. You're telling me that it's simple enough for me to operate. If those things are true, why would you have an issue doing a seller's note?

Right, right. The same thing, right?

Exactly.

And my friend— I helped my friend just buy a business, actually kind of similar to yours recently. And he did a good thing, which was in the seller's note, he said, look, here's the purchase price, here's the seller's note. But if EBITDA was to drop way below where it is today because, you know, I find some skeletons in the closet or this thing turns out to have been built on some quicksand, then we're going to forgive the rest of that seller's note. Right. And he was able to structure it accordingly. So it's a good mechanism for, for any buyer that's doing it. I don't know. Did you do that or did you just do a seller's note as is?

I did it as is. There is something called an earnout, which is similar to what you're saying, and it's based on the performance of the business. And you choose, am I going to do it on revenue or profits? For me, I tried to keep this extremely simple because the devil really is in the details here. And these sellers, a lot of them don't even have high school degrees, but they're very good at business. They've been very successful. So I'm trying to do a deal here where these terms are extremely straightforward. And when you start doing terms like that, the seller freaks out because then it's, wait, I may not get this money. I don't even know you. All of a sudden he's skeptical of you. So I'm not a big fan of those.

Yeah, that was the other thing. One of your points of view was like, you know, industry is overrated. I like that point. Why? You know, because you're really looking for just actually just this rare, beautiful business that's stable and profitable. And you shouldn't like use industry filters for that necessarily. Or have the thesis and walk in as this genius who has a thesis up front, you know.

Right.

Be open-minded at the start. And then the second part is you were like, I try not to use any jargon. Like, no, even though you were at Harvard Business School, you weren't saying EBITDA. You would say, how much money are you making? Or income? You know, you were not trying to— or even in the structure, you were not trying to get super fancy in the structure because if you don't understand it, they're not going to understand it essentially, right?

Yes. And that's the biggest mistake too, because people think, well, I don't have a Harvard MBA or I don't know any of this. I honestly think ignorance truly is bliss here because the less you know, it's kind of better because you can keep things extremely simple for the seller. And I think that breeds trust.

And so you buy this business. How much cash did you put into the business to buy it?

You don't need to put any cash down. And I didn't have to because of the seller's note. So I did a 25% seller's note and a 75% bank note. And the idea there was when shopping around for a bank to do the deal, it was all about— and it took me, you know, 20+ banks to figure this out. It was all about how did they view the seller's note. Banks that viewed that seller's note, which very few did, as equity, I could, I could work with. The ones that didn't, not so much.

Because if they viewed it as equity, it's like, well, you're okay, there's 25% equity, we'll loan you the other 75%. Exactly.

Exactly.

And how did you get them to think that that was equity? Because it's not. It's kind of not equity.

I say I wish I could have some like really savvy answer here, but to be frank, and I'm not trying to say this about all banks, but most bankers have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about. Truly. I had to learn this the hard way. They think they can finance a deal. They have no idea how to finance the deal. They have no idea what these structures look like, what the details are of these structures. So a lot of it, I'm sorry, is just ignorance of them and their board.

Right. So here's the purchase price and then here's how much we need from the bank. And then they're like, oh, exactly, exactly.

And they didn't call it equity. They knew it was debt. They called it debt. But the way they reviewed it, like when they're looking at their ratios for these, these banks, they have all these rules. It was whatever internal rules they were using to evaluate the debt ratio. And one big thing is this: the bank had priority over everyone else.

Right.

So the bank was going to be paid before this seller's now.

And the business had many, many years of a track record of profitability.

Yes. That's why that, that is so important. You have to have— they're really banking on that business's track record. And then a little bit with you, it's a question of, okay, it's done well for 20 years. What could you do to make it not do so well?

Right, right. And so you, you buy this thing. You told me, Hugo, the only asset I had at the time I had no money, no experience, no whatever. I only owned my, my, my car. I had a RAV4 and that's literally like all I had to my name. And you were able to buy a multimillion-dollar business and then walk in and be the owner of it just by really hustle and kind of a numbers game. So we didn't even talk about some of the hustle of this. So some of the hustle of this was scraping the database. Some of the hustle was getting people off Craigslist to be interns, to sift through the database. Then it was Well, those interns need a place to work, so you got fake IDs to get them into the library. Is that right? Like, tell the fake IDs story.

Absolutely. We hustled for those IDs too. We hustled for those. That was hard work.

You said you, uh, what was it? You like went to alumni? You like, you're like looking at the intern and you're like, all right, which alum looks like this intern? And then can I ask them for their student ID?

Hours of that. Truly hours. We reached out to hundreds and hundreds of people. Hundreds.

And so you've got these interns, then you realize, hey, we need to just be blasting this kind of like fake it till you make it email where it looks like we've researched them specifically and they'll sort of self-select. You end up doing this deal where you don't put any money down because you were able to shop 40 banks or something like that to get them to, to give you the financing for it. A lot of this to me, the story here is like not counting yourself out because— Yeah, it's a lot of people somewhere along that way would have counted themselves out. I don't know how to do this. I, you know, uh, this is uncertain. I don't have the money. I don't have the experience. I don't have the time. They would find a way to count themselves out. You didn't do that. Uh, figure out a way to get it done. So like, you know, don't— all the rules are sort of imaginary. You can, you could sort of work around them. And the last one is it's just a numbers game. Like you said, it's like, it's like dating. We're just gonna need to look at a lot of businesses. We're gonna need to get a bunch of interns to find the good ones. We're gonna look at a bunch of businesses to find the good ones. We're gonna talk to a bunch of banks to find the one that will do this deal. Is that accurate? Because that's what I'm hearing.

Yes. If there are two things I am very passionate about in this world, it's obviously occurrence, but also it's this concept of spreading the good news, which is that anyone who wants to buy— and I really mean anyone who wants to buy and operate a small business— can do so. It is not a matter of can or can't. It's a matter of will or won't. That's a fact. Because this is an industry where you can choose any type of business you want, any size business you want. You could be a cleaner looking to buy another really small cleaning business from a guy or gal that's looking to retire. You can buy a dog walking company. There is truly no limit here. And that's what I love about it because to me it's one of the few areas left of the American dream where you can go out and just put in a ton of effort and elbow grease and make something of your life and actually make good money without killing yourself and not having to work, you know, 3 jobs.

Right. And so you, since you took over the business, you don't have to share the exact numbers, but let's just say if the business was making $100 before, in the years since you've bought the business, what have you been able to do? Like, how have you grown the— how much have you grown the business? And how would you do to actually grow the business? Because the guy had been operating for whatever, 15, 16, 17 years, something like that. You come in as a beginner, but you've been able to grow the business. So I want to know kind of roughly like how much value were you able to create, how many multiples of what you bought for? And then also what did you do? What were the new insights or techniques or operational things that you put in place to create that value?

Great questions here. So when I first bought the business, the first couple of years, things may have been on the decline a little bit. I may have made quite a few mistakes. And so it wasn't looking too, too promising.

Pretty soon you're not getting invited on podcasts for that story at that time. No, Sarah, you bought a business and you are driving it straight into the ground. How does it feel? Tell us more. What, what's your secret?

Yeah, I probably would've been fired or kicked off the CEO. But what happened was, so when I first bought this business, I'm just gonna back up really fast. I really thought I'm in the egg industry, so I'm looking, what's the duck egg market like? What's the chicken egg market? You know, these things. And realized again, market's kind of BS. It's all a bunch of crap, these frameworks and stuff, because you don't really, really know until you're in it. And I realized when I got in it, I'm not really in the egg industry, I'm in specialty packaging. And so it actually was a lot more of an opportunity than I ever realized. And I wasn't some genius figuring this out. I just looked at our order history. We were getting orders from people that were selling crickets in Dubai, roaches, and people that were using the egg cartons for, um, small parts, people that were using them for bath bombs, cupcakes. I estimate now that 40% of our revenue has nothing to do with eggs. And so when I realized that there was a lot of potential there, and I realized that our specialty was really also these proprietary products, I spent most of my time focusing on that, not this really amazing modern website but focusing on these products that I call really sticky, kind of a silly jargon term here. But these products where we're making a custom mold for a customer that they then are going to keep buying from us, assuming we don't rip them off or totally botch it.

Right.

And so from that and then COVID— COVID was like cheating because we 5, 6x during COVID To answer your question on the numbers, we really blew up. So it was a combination of recognizing how big our market really was and then recognizing that COVID was an incredible opportunity for us to take all of our capabilities and run with it.

Right. I like that. And when you, when you talked about specialty packaging, you said something to me, you go in that Google Doc, you go, we're not, we're not about egg cartons. Anything that needs separation. What is it? Separation and protection. What did you call it? Separation and protection.

Protection. I always say anything requiring protection and separation is fair game. And I stand by that 100%. It's true. Anything. And you think about how massive that market is. It's enormous, right?

Yeah. You could be making bras with that definition. I love it. This is— this could be anything. This is— we're talking cups, we're talking whatever you want. So you truly— and so are you like reaching out, by the way? Because like you, your website's still eggcartons.com and I'm not trying to Sean Parker you, but like drop the eggs. Just cartons.com. That's the way to go here. If you're making 40% off of non-egg stuff, why don't you kind of rebrand it?

So it's funny, we are actually in the process of doing a little bit of that and I've continued to buy a bunch of domain names. So things like machine shop trays or bath bomb cartons, any variations of that. I'm just buying domains left and right. Who knows whether they'll stick, but that's, that's a huge portion of it. But it's very challenging to figure out how to do that. Without compromising other important variables, other important revenue drivers. It's a lot more challenging than you'd think. But we are, to your point, looking into that. I'm always like, stop with the eggs. And every one of the companies like, we sell egg cartons. It's taken me years to really get people to understand this is bigger than eggs. We're not abandoning the farms. We're not abandoning the chickens, you guys. It's just way bigger than that. So like, stop talking about the chickens and the ducks and whatever, the geese.

I'm so jealous of you because I feel like if I ran an egg carton company, I could fulfill my dream of being Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin and like just come into the warehouse. I just imagine that this is like a Dunder Mifflin style business and you could come in and like, you know, you know, just have a— be the crazy boss every day. Do you— when you look back now at what you did, because again, we talked about starting as a rookie. If you could go back and I gave you an hour that you could spend with, you know, younger you, either during the search process or during the early days of the business, what would— what would you— if I could give you that time, when would you go back to it? What would you tell yourself as advice with the wisdom and the benefit of hindsight?

So I would actually just borrow the advice I got from my mentor, but I'd actually follow it, which there were two pieces. It was hire and fire fast. Didn't do that. Huge mistake. And do not change anything big or really anything at all the first year. Both of those things cost me a lot.

And what about that? That second one? Tell me more about that. So there's obviously a temptation. You come in, you're so excited. You've been searching, you've been searching, you've been searching. You finally find the thing, you close the deal after painful, you know, you don't know, will it go through, won't go through. And it finally closes. And now the keys are yours. It's got to be tempting to go play with the toys. What, what's the, what's the wrong way to do that? What's the right way to do that?

Yeah, so let's get into that actually. When I come in, I'm thinking, okay, I knew I didn't know much. Truly, I didn't think I was gonna reorganize the warehouse or start changing anything seemingly big, but there were things that I thought were really simple, like the foams. We had hardwired foams in our office, and there were cables everywhere because we've got all these offices and conference rooms. I'm thinking, dude, this is like 20-whatever, like we're almost in 2020 here. What are we doing with this? We should just change our phones to VoIP phones so that I can see everything remotely where there's not phones ringing. Let's get, you know, into the modern age here. Seems like not a big thing. No, that was one of the biggest mistakes I made because you called our phone number is actually extremely important. People look at the domain, that's great, but our number is used by our biggest customers, by the new customers. It's everything to us. And we actually have multiple phone numbers that that 1-800 number is forwarded to, like 10, 12 lines. And so it's very important. And Spectrum, they have lost our phone lines mid-porting. And so our phones were down for almost a week. and it was a huge deal because it was a new owner and people are thinking, did they go out of business?

Right.

What is going on here? Because you're not— their phones are gone, they're dead now. And it was a huge— so it's like, maybe just do a— first off, I wouldn't do anything with the phone lines now. I'm to this day, I will not change our phone lines because I've been so traumatized by the experience. But if you were, maybe you just like change one phone line, maybe two, Maybe not all of them, but something like that that you think is small can actually be pretty big.

I like that. And you said, like, we kind of hinted at this earlier, but I want to make this point, which is I've, you know, I said one thing you didn't do is you didn't count yourself out. And that's important. I think one of the reasons people count themselves out almost subconsciously is that they, they don't see themselves a certain way. They've never done that. Their family didn't do this. And so they just sort of are like, I don't know, I guess That's just something other people do. And that's, even if you hear something, you're like, that sounds like a cool idea, but like, where would I start? I have no foothold here to do that. And you have a pretty unique background that I think should debunk that idea of kind of like, even if you're not from that track, you can sort of get on that track at any time. And so when I first was talking to you, I was like, Wow, this is some whip-smart, you know, Harvard per— it's like basically you take the Harvard pedigree, but then she added some, some street smarts and some hustle. And I thought, that's what I thought when I met you. And then you were like, you said something like, you're like, I didn't even take the SATs. And I was like, wait, how'd you get into Harvard Business School? Tell the story of your background because I think it's kind of amazing.

Okay. Yeah, this is a little detail here, so we're gonna go way back. Um, I'm one of three, and my sisters and I would say sort of had a subpar upbringing in that we didn't really have parents, and we were split up, and we bounced around and living in a lot of different homes. My two older sisters, they made the most of it. They got really into academics and sports. I made the worst of it, I would say, and I became somebody that you would not want your kids hanging out with. Okay, I was partying all the time. I had a— I wouldn't go to school, so I had a truancy officer. I went to jail. I, I was just so disrespectful to everyone, and I got away with it because people felt sorry for me. And the beginning of high school, I was living with a woman that was an alcoholic, and her favorite thing when she got drunk was to take all my items and throw them out to the front lawn and just tell me to leave. And I didn't really have anywhere to go. I was a kid. And so there was a woman named Natalie Bracken who used to pick me up and take me to her house, and she'd let me stay there until this woman inevitably, you know, came back to earth and said, where did you go? And called the police. And so I was constantly going back and forth between Natalie's— the Brackens' house and this other household. I was being transported by the police, and no one could really do anything about it. Nobody seemed to really care. And one day, just— she just got so fed up and she said, I'm gonna adopt you. Obviously, it was pretty transformational. So I'm living in her home with, with her family, and her daughter I was actually friends with. So her husband one day kind of let me have it because I was trying to skip school like the first week living there. And he sat me down and he literally explained— it sounds— it's embarrassing almost to say that he literally explained how life works to me. The basics of you don't lie, you don't just skip things when you don't want to show up. That's not how— this isn't reality. And he explained where my life was going, which was basically absolutely nowhere. And it was very emotional for me because up until that time, a lot of people had given me lectures, but it felt like it came from this place of you're bothering me, or this is really inconveniencing me. 'Can you just stop your crap?' Where he came from this place, I could tell he really cared. And up until then, I didn't really feel like anybody did care. And so I got my shit together very quickly after that. I really did. I was so nervous about, like, being, like, sent back or them regretting their decision, because up until that time, no one— and I mean no one— was looking to invest in me. I was like a junk bond investment-wise. This is not a safe investment. I was not a good kid. I didn't do myself any favors. And so after that, in getting my shit together, step one was getting a job. And so the first time I ever remember studying truly in my life was with Mrs. Bracken when I was learning a menu to get a job at a diner. And then from there, I applied those new study skills I had to school. Mr. Bracken had explained like, listen, you've got a 2.0 here, kid. You're not getting anywhere but community college with that. So you need to like get your act together. And so from there I got all A's because I wanted to boost my average at least to a 3.0. I'm working at this diner and this couple would come in all the time and they never had kids and we just got along. That's the best way to explain it. I never told them about my upbringing really initially, but I think my co-workers probably did. There were days I probably weren't there and they probably could just tell And so they offered me a job at their company, probably initially out of sympathy, out of the kindness of their heart. And I started working there, and it just, it just seemed to fit. And so when I was working there, I got waitlisted from Northeastern, where I ended up going to college. And when I was waitlisted, the owner of the— so these two, I'm sorry, backing up, this couple, I had no idea they were extremely wealthy. I always thought rich people were at fancy restaurants, but this couple's coming in, going to a diner, getting cheeseburgers each week. I had no idea, like, they're worth a lot of money. And when I was waitlisted, Steve said, you need to take yourself off of financial aid because of these schools, especially a school like Northeastern without a big endowment. They're going to take that into consideration when evaluating your candidacy. And I said, how am I going to take myself up 8? I have no money and this school is so expensive. And he said, we're going to pay for your school. Wow. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's very, it's hard for me to not get emotional talking about because it's so between these two couples, I mean, they changed my entire life. They, it wasn't just the money too. It wasn't just the home. It was these people changed the way I viewed myself. They invested in me when I was truly the world's worst investment. I mean, who takes a kid like me, what I was like, and say, you know what, I'm gonna go all in on this? Like, they put their ass out on the line for me on multiple occasions with the worst track record you can possibly imagine, like truly possibly imagine. And from these two, these two families, I had this whole concept in my head of I just want to be that one person for one person. Because for me, I literally begged when I was a kid sometimes for people to help me. I would beg judges, I would beg attorneys, I would beg social workers to like put me in better circumstances or help me with X and Y, and nobody helped me at all. They felt sorry for me, but nobody took action. So this concept of being that one person for one person carried over into college because I went to Northeastern to be a social worker initially. And that was way too kumbaya for me. As you can probably tell, I'm not like— that's just not me. And so from there I said, okay, something a little bit more aggressive, more me, could be law. I was watching CSI, what I thought of law. So I figured I'm gonna be in juvenile justice. I, I can be, I, I can be the attorney I wanted to have. I can be the social worker I wanna have. But again, it was, I just realized these professions were just not me. So one day I called Steve, the owner of this company I worked for. I call him boss, and I said, hey boss, like, I don't know what I'm gonna do here. I'm now a junior in college and I've worked for you, but that's kind of my only work experience, and I have no, I have no experience in anything but criminal justice now and social work, and I don't want to do these professions. And he said, you are not an academic. You're, you're geared for business. It comes naturally to you. And he said, and you can have a way bigger impact in business than like criminal justice or social work. And so I said, okay, well, what am I going to do now though? Because I'm in my junior year and I don't have anything to show for this. I can't just go and get a— I can't just go into a business. Who's going to want me? And he said, you need to go to business school because he had gone. I didn't even know it. He had gone to Stanford Business School back in the day. They went right after school. But now the average age of business school candidates, at least at the Ivy Leagues like Harvard, is 28. And when we were talking about this, I was like 21, I was about to graduate. And, um, I said, there's no way I'm going to get into a business school. He didn't know I had paid my sister to take my SAT for me because I had confidence I can study hard enough, but I'm not going to get caught up enough. I don't even know what's on the SAT. I imagine it's all the subjects, but I just had no confidence in myself. Like, when I got to college, I was at a 33% reading level.

What does that mean?

I went off campus one day. I like, I like, it was horrible. So I went off campus one day because I was convinced, this is horrible, I was really convinced I was mentally handicapped when I got to college because I just did not understand anything. And I got this test done and they said, there's really nothing wrong with you. You're just like at a low level here. And they did say my intelligence was below average at that time. And so it was, it was horrible because it was factual evidence. Hey, you're not that bright. And by the way, you're, you're at the 33th percentile. Like, oh, that's fucking great. Like, basically put into paper that I'm an idiot, and it was heartbreaking for me. But I was so embarrassed, and I didn't want anyone to know. And so the only thing I really knew at that point was to just try really hard. And again, I didn't want to disappoint. Like, my biggest fear to this day would be to disappoint the Brackens or the Greens, like, ever. And I just— I figure if they've gotten me here, I have to make this work. And so I studied like you wouldn't believe. Like, nobody knows the Northeastern University library like I do. So I studied my ass off and I, my biggest fear was even getting a B.

Can I ask you a question about that part? I've met a couple people in my life who have had that sort of like, I don't know, come to Jesus moment or that, but I call it like the conversation with yourself. It's like there's a day where you have a conversation with yourself. You're like, look, it's, this is either gonna go one of two ways. Either this is what it is and it'll just be what it's gonna be. Or like, I'm gonna change it. And I always ask them, 'cause I think, these mo— there's a few moments in your life where like decades are, are sort of decided and it's some conversation you have with yourself. This is my theory. I don't know. You tell me. Was there a conversation you had with yourself at that time to be like, okay, I'm just going to apply my— I'm going to go bury myself in this library until I come out with a 99% reading level? Or what happened there?

I've never been one of those like long-term planners. It was, for me, it's more of a day by day, week by week thing. But I did have this mentality, I remember, of I'm gonna give this literally everything that I have, everything that I have, like every day. I really mean that because I will, I had a mentality of I will not disappoint these people. I will not disappoint them. So if that means I studied round the clock and it still wasn't good enough, at least I can say I gave this literally everything and I'm sorry. That was kind of my thinking. That was it.

A lot of people think that it's, you know, the hardest thing is when nobody believes in you. Actually, the most pressure is when almost nobody believes in you, but a couple people do. And when a couple people do, it adds a whole different level of emotional pressure to the situation, more so than when nobody believes in you.

Yes, it's funny. I, I, it's rare to— I don't ever met actually anybody that gets that, but that's exactly how I felt. I wanted to live I felt like what they believed in me wasn't true, and so I wanted to live up to who they thought I was, that who I didn't think I was. So that's—

I mean, I didn't come from the situation you came from. I was luckier than that, uh, you know, just to be born into the right sort of family and circumstances. But, um, yeah, the Birch family here in San Francisco, they're the ones who were that for me, where, you know, I'm 24 years old and they, they invested in me and they They literally sat me down and said, I think you're going to do special things. They go, we've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. I think you're going to do special things. You're going to go on to do special things. We want you to do them. We just think, then they named me CEO of the company. They were like, here's the keys. We think you should do them here. You're going to do them at some point. And at that time, I didn't really view myself as special in any way. It was kind of the first time that somebody had ever really said something like that, but also put their money where their mouth was. That wasn't maybe my parent, where my parent's like, ah, in a way you sort of take that for granted, unfortunately. And so I took that for granted when my parents would say, oh, you're so great. It's like, yeah, just like every mom thinks their kid's so great. That's how I felt at the time. And hearing a total outsider, this billionaire say, no, no, no, I believe in you. And then for me, it was soul-crushing. The next 6 years, I didn't succeed, but I was trying really hard, but I wasn't succeeding. And I remember feeling that pressure of like, I remember thinking like, I wish nobody believed in me. That would've been easier. than somebody really believing in you and you not wanting to disappoint them. Um, that was, I remember just feeling that day by day. So I, I definitely at least resonate with that part of your story.

Yeah, no, that's, that's really re— that's, that's very real. It's funny, a lot of people will say, oh, I didn't have it as bad as you, but it's all, I learned a lot of the same and you adapt to what you're going through. So I'm sure the feelings in a lot of ways were actually almost the same. Right. But the externals just looked a little bit differently.

Yeah, yeah. Your life is a movie and my life is, you know, like, you know, the normal thing. But like, your life is literally— I told you this on the phone— your life is literally the plot of the movie Blindside. Like, you're just not this, like, huge football player. Instead, you know, you're— you went and bought a business instead. But like, same sort of idea where people, you know, took a chance on you. Have you taken that mentality of like, be one person? What was it? Be one person for one— be that person for one person. Be that one person for one person. I love that. That's kind of amazing. Is that from something or did you invent that?

It just— I kept— it just came to me. I don't know, it was just something I thought of one day.

Have you done that? Do you feel like you've been able to do that?

Do I feel like I've been able to do that? That I do, actually. And that's truly one of the most rewarding things about my job now. You know, I try and keep my circle very small. I'm really big on doing what these families did for me as much as possible, which is a lot of one-on-one mentorship because I can only do so much on a mass scale. But one-on-one, I can really bring people to the next level, whatever that level is. And I'm huge on— and I have no tolerance for people self-doubting. I'll say, nope, you can do it. Like, do it again. We're doing this again. And I will sit there and everyone in the business, I used to say, I will come any day, any time. I will sit with you for as long as it takes. If you try and you're honest with me, I'm not going to give up on you. And I really mean that. If somebody tries and they're honest with me, I'm not giving up on them, right?

When you were talking, I was getting goosebumps, uh, on my arm here because I mean, I love the story, but also, um, I think that coming on a podcast like this and telling your story is gonna do that for someone somewhere that you don't even know. It's a different way of doing it, but like somebody out there is going to hear this or they're going forward it to somebody who said and say, listen, I don't even know if you know what the podcast app is, but you need to hear this because, you know, something in there is gonna resonate with somebody. And so that's why I was getting goosebumps 'cause there's a way to kind of like the egg carton story and buying a business is cool. That was kind of the bait. But the real kind of like the real story here is kind of just the mentality and also those families that did that for you, you know, I think that's a— it's not as flashy as, you know, creating a foundation and giving away $1 billion or whatever. But it is, it is a version of like, you know, philanthropy or sort of giving back or contributing that is, you know, can change, change somebody's life in a, in a huge way versus a lot of people's lives in a small way.

Right. And I think that's what's way more important to me. And seeing it helps me a lot. It keeps me motivated. Because unfortunately, the farther removed you get from it, the harder it is to remember.

What did you have to do when you kind of rewired yourself? Like, what was the, uh, when you did try to— that's a big shift, right? You basically changed all your habits, maybe not overnight, but like, you changed all the shit you were doing that was getting you the bad results into things that started to get you good results. Um, was it like— what was, what was that like? How did you do that?

I wish it was deep and I had like steps for you, but it was a— it was a lot of fear. I was really scared of being anything like what I was. I was scared of what I would be in the future. It's kind of like a drug addict that nearly dies from an overdose and they are just scared straight. I was kind of scared straight. And so I also honestly lost interest in a lot of things I used to be interested in. I used to get into fights. I used to gossip. I used to— there was this golf course. I used to get drunk, pass out on the golf course, wake up to the sprinklers. No joke. And I was disgusted by it afterwards, thinking about it like, who is that? I don't even want to be around that. It was like, right, the idea of the taste or the smell bothering somebody. It was like that. But from there, it was hard because I didn't know. I didn't have any of the tools. Like, I never— I did not read a single book in high school. Not one buck, right?

You, um, I have a couple of docs here that I want to share. One is, uh, because I think it's cool to see the actual screenshots you, you shared with me. Because, uh, the funny thing is when you told the story, the— when we told the story the first time on the podcast, there was two reactions. One is, wow, that's an incredible story. Because here's what I tweeted out. So I said, I have a new hero and, and her name is Sarah Moore. At under 30 years old, she had no money, no experience, and the biggest asset was her car, a RAV4. She spent one year hunting through like 100,000 businesses to find one to buy. And she bought a, I guess at the time, I didn't know if this was true, but she bought a, you know, multimillion dollar business called eggcartons.com with all debt, no, no cash down. And so I told that story and I told it on the podcast and basically the two reactions were, wow, that's incredible. So awesome. You know, you go girl. And on the other side it was, I'm calling bullshit. No way. And people were like, that's, that's not, you know, you can't buy it all debt. Nobody could sift through 100,000 businesses. How do you go to Harvard and not have anything, not have any money? And honestly, I started to— when I saw those tweets, I was like, damn, that never occurred to me, actually. Like, yeah, you're right. She was saying she kind of came from nothing and blah, blah, blah. But she's at Harvard Business School, like, and I was like, am I getting fucking Theranos right now? Is this Elizabeth Holmes and I'm just getting duped? And so, so that happened. And then we have this researcher, the researcher, uh, you, you text us the other day, you were like, hey, somebody's like contacting a bunch of my old interns. And it was like our researcher fact-checking just to make sure we don't look like idiots that like we're putting somebody on who did this actually happen. Um, but I think that's kind of a cool thing that your story was literally too good to be true that people just started calling bullshit. And I remember you didn't have any social media, so there was no way for you to explain or tell your side of the story. And then I think your sister like created a Twitter account or something. It started like that day. She was like tweeting like, no, I'm in the car with her right now. Yeah, we grew up broke and like we didn't have a family and like all this stuff. And I was like, wow, I don't know what's happening right now, but this is fascinating. Do you remember that?

That is so— yes, it started blowing up on Twitter and everyone in my company was talking about it and my interns were talking about it and they're like, Sarah, You need to go out there and defend yourself. Like, we're gonna defend you. And I was worried about— I know the internet can be vicious, and I was worried about anybody getting any of that, like, you know, pointed at them. And then I started worrying about my company. So my sister got on there, and she was— we're very protective of each other. She was— she created a Twitter just to go on there and defend me.

Was this the SAT sister or the other sister?

This is the SAT. This is the bright— well, they're both exceptionally bright. But she's actually the director of HR for Abercrombie Fitch, like corporate level. So she goes— so her husband now, but fiancé at the time goes, you need to delete this, Jane. Like, you're—

you have something to lose.

Yeah, it is a lose situation. Like, you guys are idiots. Why are you trying to defend yourself amongst, like, people online? We're like, it's getting out of hand. So we had no— I just— that was my concern, that people were gonna think this was fake and this was somehow gonna snowball in a negative direction. And all I cared about was preserve the business. Like, don't fuck with eggcartons.com.

Don't let this random dude on the internet blow this whole— blow your spot up. All right. So then you shared with us a bunch of the things. So you shared with us the Craigslist. We'll put this on YouTube so people can actually see the Craigslist post. But you wrote Kenston Green. What's Kenston Green? That's what you named your thing.

I— a mentor recommended to make the name of the company a name that would have a story to it. And so I deliberately said I wanted to say I'm from Cleveland and I worked in the steel business. I want to say I'm a blue-collar gal like you, right? And so Kenston was the name of my high school in Cleveland, I'd say. And Green was the name of the family I had worked for in the steel industry.

Right.

So when they would ask immediately, what's— I don't— no one wants an intro, right? Hey, I'm— they don't care. But when they'd say, what's Kenston Green? It was my way of giving an intro without giving an intro.

That's amazing. Also, it sounds kind of powerful and old money sounding.

So I like that.

But yeah, it works. So you wrote, it's a small, unorthodox private equity firm. Accurate. Unorthodox for sure.

Very unorthodox. Proudly unorthodox.

Very private. It's just me. Um, he said, unlike a traditional private equity firm, we will acquire just one business and the principal will operate it upon acquisition. All right. No lies are told. He said, you will be working for an eccentric, unpretentious Harvard MBA. All right. I like it. And exposed to live M&A deals, interactions with brokers, accountants, and attorneys, and due diligence and negotiations of various sorts every day. See, that's awesome. You're, you're saying how to like the value you're gonna get out of this unique experience. We're looking for interns to help manage our multi-stage high volume funnel, HIGH in all caps, in the most efficient way possible. It includes blah, blah, blah, blah. And you said, you know, I like this, work will not include financial modeling, sophisticated analyses, or anything that you or anyone else thinks is a waste of time. Tell me about that, 'cause that is beautiful. Love that in a, in, in a job post.

I hate wasting people's time. One of my biggest pet peeves are these jobs. People have to sit there until 5, 6, whatever o'clock and rub their fingers to leave. It's like when your work is done, just leave and don't pretend to be busy. Don't pretend like you're not on your cell phone. So I'm not going to ask them to do anything that's not going to be important. Very important. Right. And they're not doing some— this isn't Harvard. We're not going to be doing these crazy financial analyses. It's really simple. It can be done on the back of a piece of paper.

Yeah, because most of the time when you call these businesses, you're like, so what's your profit for the year? And they're like, I think it's like 1.4. Now let me— 1.6. I don't have my numbers in front of me. And they're like— and then you look and it's like, actually, you made $900K last year. And they're like, yeah, I don't know what— I got to ask my guy about that. It's not like you're doing, you know, the diligence. It's like they don't know their business. It's not like they're hiding something from you. They don't know it themselves. Right. So common. All right. So then you said a bunch of other things. You look for somebody hungry, hungry, comfortable with chaos. Then here's compensation, because some people are also like, oh, unpaid interns, that's crazy. And it's like, dude, I don't have any money. And like, this is— these are willing and able people choosing to do this because they see some value in it for them. You said this is an unpaid internship. If you're looking for a glamorous internship in a formal, prestigious work environment, this job is not for you. We are operating out of an unassuming spot in a library. I will provide letters of recommendations as well as introductions to anyone in consulting firms, banks, or private equity firms should you perform well.

Should you perform well.

Yeah, good qualifier. I will also help you with recruiting, interviewing, and grad school prep if you want me to. Wonderful. This is wonderful. This is so good. I love seeing this. I also have here an email you sent. I think you were maybe sending this to a broker, but just very clear and direct to the point. You were like, hey, my name's Sarah Moore. I'm a recent business school grad living in Boston. I want to buy a small business that meets this criteria: 100% of the business is for sale, the EBITDA or seller earnings are $1 to $2 million, it's been profitable the last 3 years, and seller financing is available. Um, I have preference of B2B— I have a preference for B2B service, but this is not a requirement. I'm able to finance acquisitions below $25 million. Please let me know if you have any listings. Like, very direct, clear. And were things like— like, how did you increase your luck So like, how did you put things out there to increase the amount of good things that would come inbound to you?

Let's go there. Actually, I have something for you guys I put to the side here.

Okay.

So people talk all the time about this industry and being a woman, and they think that it's a disadvantage. Well, that's a matter of perspective. I deliberately wanted to leverage my gender. And so part of that was within the broker community, it's all men usually. So I'm 5'9" and I would go to only free broker events, but I would go to them in 5-inch heels. So I'm walking around as this 6'2" Amazon, and I'd always wear like a ridiculous outfit too, like a loud color. So when I'd call the brokers, I'd say, because they never remembered, they'd say, who are you again? I'd say, I'm that extremely tall chick that introduced myself to you looking for a business. There wasn't a single person that didn't remember. That's for the brokers. But then I'm very active, so I'd be going around Boston on these blue bikes, which are free, of course. And I would be running or doing whatever. And I wore this sweatshirt, a version of this too, like every day. I want to buy your business. And then the back was my number. I— it was an interesting experience with this.

Yeah.

Everywhere you were, anything to get yourself— it was anything free where I can— I wanted the world to know I am looking to buy a business and I'm serious.

Did you get any good inbound from this? Was that like— did somebody call you being like, hey, I just saw you ride by me on a bike. I think I got this number correct. I'd like to sell you my business.

It's funny, I didn't think it was working, but you'd be amazed at what comes out of the woodwork. There's actually somebody that came over and said, you know what, my, my dad asked me about whether or not this was actually a legitimate business. Like, are you actually looking to buy something? And that worked out. And then I faxed everybody. That was one of the interns' idea to send out mass faxes. And part of the faxing campaign was just putting anything that will get their attention. So part of it, I did put my picture on there and I'd say, we want to buy your business. And I told you this, to this day I have people that recognize me from those faxes. People in the mill that I work in said, wait a second, I was wondering why you look so familiar. Did you try and buy my business? Like people on my street to this day in downtown Boston will say, you're that girl that was wearing that sweatshirt, or you're that girl that was faxing me all the time. That's what I wanted. Unfortunately, I— a lot of those replies came back after I bought a business, but I was just— that was what I was really hoping for, somebody to see it and know I was serious.

Well, that's brilliant because you're looking for these kind of longstanding, sort of boring B2B service businesses. They have fax machines.

Yes.

Nothing interesting is coming through the fax machine. So it's a completely untapped, unsaturated channel. You're like, and I'm gonna turn my disadvantages into advantages. Okay. People say it's a disadvantage to be a woman. You're not gonna be taken seriously, blah, blah, blah. You're, you're, you're not gonna be included in whatever. Well, I'm also gonna stand out if I'm the minority, right? Like I'm gonna be different than everybody else and I'm gonna use the sort of psychology to my favor here. And I love that you did that and are not like shy about that. I think a lot of people are very shy about things like this. And, um, I love that you did that. Faxing a picture is to me like it's in the all-time hustle moves. And I'll also say it doesn't matter if some of this stuff works because one life motto, do it for the story. I think that's, that's a, that's already just like a winning thing to do is just do things for the story. And two is there's something that comes with the mentality of Nothing is off limits. I will do anything. I am all fucking in. And it's a signal to yourself. It's a signal to your interns and your team. It's a signal to everybody in the world that I am all fucking in and no idea is off limits. No idea is too dumb. No idea is too, too out there. Too, too, you know, too loud. No, no, we are— everything's on the table as a thing that we might do. And I think that is the value of some of these things. Whether it's the lead that actually brings in the business or not is kind of secondary. And I love that you did that.

Any thanks, Sean. Truly, I was shameless. If I had anything I could throw out there, I was throwing it out there. Whatever stuck, I was okay with.

Hey, I'm Sarah. Sarah Moore, 5'9", brunette, if that's your thing. Yeah, I would love to buy your pest control business.

Truly, whatever it takes.

And if I could find out maybe the profits of your business, I'd be happy to join you for a coffee. Let's, let's do this. That's so, so funny.

Yeah.

And if you could leave any listeners of this with one, I don't know, message or takeaway, what's, what's your kind of, what's your message? What's your, what's the last thing you want us to leave in people's minds here?

So my biggest value is freedom. This country was not founded on equality, despite how things seem now with the culture. It was founded on freedom. And part of freedom is using everything at your disposal. So gender, sex, age, whatever makes you, you, you can use any of those things to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make your life what you want it. This industry, I can promise you, is one of those industries. You don't have to have Harvard MBA. What made me successful at this, I really think, was largely my upbringing. Those things weren't taught to me at Harvard to get a business. The things I do day to day were not taught to me at Harvard. They were taught at the cliché school of hard knocks. So if you want to be free, pursue this route. Freedom is not free. It's going to cost you time. It's going to cost you like a lot of effort. But I can promise you that anyone that wants to do this can do this if they really put their all into it.

And normally I say at the end, how should people follow you or reach you? But you don't really have social media. And I think we may not want people to be reaching you after this. So like, what's your message? Is it leave me the fuck alone? Is it stay away? Way? Do you want to be contacted from this? What would you like?

My biggest thing, I, I've said what I want is for anyone who wants to pursue this career path, I want everyone to have a fair opportunity to do so, which is why I'm talking about it. I'm going to give people within a Q&A type format detailed information to answer all the questions I get. But we have truly experienced this crazy amount of volume on my, in my inbox, on my LinkedIn. Of messages, like thousands, and it really breaks my heart not being able to get back to all of them. So I'm doing a mass reply. That's, that's the idea here. We're going to give you as much information as we possibly can, but please understand that I cannot respond to all these inquiries. Like, I have a full-time job. Like, I own other companies too. We're very busy. So the biggest thing is please do not contact our business. Please do not show up at the business. We're going to create a Google Doc something for you guys to fill out. If you want information, we'll send it to you. But I just can't get back to everybody. Like, I'm not used to this. I went— I'm like a nobody, so I'm not used to all this attention and all these inbound inquiries. I can't— I can't respond to them all.

I'd love to.

I really would, but I can't.

So we're going to put a form in the description here that'll be like— people can fill that in. You'll send them a blast.

And amazing.

If there are people who fill out that form, I might cherry-pick a couple of people and be like, hey, if you're serious about this, like, I'll help you do it. Like, Yes, I don't— I'm taking a break from running companies. You know, we sold our last company last year. I don't want to start a new company right now, but I do want to do fun, fun projects. And one of the fun things is helping people buy businesses. That's— yes, one of the things that is actually pretty, pretty dope because you learn about all these niche businesses. You get like the free MBA, right? Yeah. So, so I think it's a good time.

You learn so much searching. When I hear about people failing at this, it's like you really can't fail unless you get investors, of course. But you really can't. I mean, the amount— we still laugh at some of the businesses out there and you view the world differently. You like— I think of the freeway now and the lines on the freeway and the signs on the freeway. Somebody made all of that, right? Like these Christians come in like, wow, God made this. And I'm thinking that and all these businesses made like all this stuff that we're looking at and using. It's kind of wild, right?

You're like, no, that's Trent in Cincinnati. He does that. What do you mean? He has a name. All right, Sarah, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it and really inspired by your story. So thank you for coming and telling it.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.