Too Good to Be True: Year 1 in a $700k SDE Business

The approach of today's guest has a different flavor than you're used to hearing on acquiring minds. You could say that Zach Mutnick does not analyze things to death. He prefers action to analysis. And when he does decide on a course of action, he moves with conviction. So it was with the business that he decided to acquire, an electrical contracting business in southwest Florida. There were definitely a few flags as Zach negotiated with the seller and tried to learn about the business. But at some point, his intuition told him that this opportunity was the one to seize. Quote, I made the decision in my head. This is happening. So we're going to move. We're going to quit our jobs. This is happening. Now, you can achieve a lot with that attitude, that momentum. but it doesn't come free. Once Zach bought the business, the numbers didn't quite add up. Turnover was constant. Of the 10 original employees, one year later, just two remain. There were two ongoing lawsuits, and yes, it was a stock sale. The quality of the receivables was questionable. The demand for their services was weak. So this was a rocky transition. But a year in, revenue is up, the team has stabilized, and Zach refers to the acquisition as the best decision he ever made. Here he is, Zach Mutnick, owner of Jeff Masters Electric, soon to be Mutt's Electric. Most searchers know that a QAV can kill a deal, but in many cases, a deal should have died long before the searcher spent thousands on due diligence. The signs were there. They just didn't know what to look for. Well, today, Thursday, Andrew Hippert and Daniel Duran from Acquisition Lab Capital are hosting a webinar to teach you the early soft signals that experienced acquirers catch before ever spending a dime on due diligence. Things like dubious seller motivation, recent growth in the years leading up to a sale, excessive ad backs. These aren't accounting problems. They're judgment calls. And the pattern recognition to make them well is what separates searchers who protect their time in capital from those who learn the hard way. Andrew and Daniel have reviewed hundreds of SMB deals and are going to share their hard-won judgment with you. That webinar is today, Thursday, May 14th, noon Eastern. Link to register is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage, acquiringminds.co. Also, a heads up. A lot of you have asked over the years whether there's a way to search the Acquiring Minds back catalog by industry or acquisition model or geography. Well, there hasn't been, but soon and finally there will be. We're about to launch a searchable, filterable archive of every Acquiring Minds episode. Watch out for it next week. We hope it will be a very valuable resource to get your arms around over 400 case studies of entrepreneurs buying businesses. We're calling it the ETA database. Keep your eyes peeled. Welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith. Acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs, and on this podcast, I talk to the people who do it. You know Enzo Technologies as one of the leading IT managed service providers serving the search community. Led by Nick Akers, an Acquiring Minds guest who bought the 35-year-old business, the team at Enzo regularly works with searchers and their acquisitions. And one feature of acquired businesses that Enzo is seeing over and over is the need to implement cybersecurity promptly during the transition. So many acquired small businesses either have glaring vulnerabilities, lack security best practices, or both. That's step one to de-risk the deal you just closed should be addressing these issues. inzo is your full service it msp for post-closed stability they assess your target surface the biggest risks in plain english and give you a day one through 30 plan to cut exposure prevent downtime and even find cost takeouts like bloated telecom bills check out inzo technologies.com i n z o or email nick directly at nick at enzo technologies.com zach mutnick welcome to acquiring minds thank you for having me appreciate it zach you bought an electrical contractor in south florida things are looking good now but it has been a ride let's get into it please start us off with a little background on you zach sure thanks Well, listen to this for years. Happy to be here, by the way. Thank you. Awesome. It's exciting. Let's just start. I don't know. 18. Right. So I graduated high school. It's interesting to see where everybody starts because you can go anywhere with it. And I went to college because that's what you do. That's what everybody did. No idea what I wanted to do. So I went in business management because I knew eventually I want to own my own business. Didn't work out. Not very good at college. Went back or right. Did that for several years. Did a bunch of dumb stuff as a kid until I was about 23, started getting my life together. Joined the Navy and it took a while. So 25, I went to boot camp and I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia for five years. I was a gas turbine electrician, which is more or less where it started in terms of my qualifications. and so yeah i was on a ship all day every day and we went out to sea consistently all the time so you have to learn they say it's called a small boy a destroyer it's a small ship and they say uh it's good because you get to learn everything you get to learn a lot because there's nobody there to fix stuff and it's all you you got to fix everything so i did learn a lot um and we we did two deployments. We did a deployment in the Middle East, which was the Freedom of Trade operation. Basically what you're hearing right now was the Straits of Hormuz, Gibraltar, all that good stuff. Yeah, everything checks out. Everything's accurate with that over there. And we, so that was, that was, sorry, that was during COVID. So we pulled into Greece in late 2019 and then COVID hit. So we got one day out in Greece, one night, and then we were quarantined to the ship and then we left and we never pulled in anywhere until the deployment was done so about nine months and we had the record for most consecutive days out at sea for any destroyer which is like the worst record to have nobody wants that but a lot of people were playing video games watching movies just trying to pass the time right because the days just blur there's a period where I didn't see sunlight for three weeks. It just happens. So I had my family send me books and I read a lot of books. There's no internet. So I probably read 30 or 40 books all on buying businesses, finance, real estate. And real estate caught my interest because it seemed feasible. It seemed something I could actually do right now. And so I got back and I bought a couple of properties with a buddy. We bought three properties in eight months and then kind of stopped because I was getting out. I wanted to save a little bit of money. So I got out and I did this internship the last few months of my contract. It's called the Skill Bridge Program. So I worked at a commercial real estate firm. It was a nice building downtown, very corporate, nice people. Where? Downtown Miami. Ah, you're in Miami now. Okay. Good job. I loved real estate. So I said, this is great. I want to get into commercial real but ultimately it wasn't for me you know corporate not really big on it i think um i think you can get it but after that i delved in back back into what i knew so i i knew i knew stuff right so i was like what can i do generators i know a lot about generators so i got a job working for lumen technologies which is century link essentially and i did the backup diesel generators for their their sites. So telecommunication, internet, phone, when their power goes out, that's my job. Battery backup, generators, all that good stuff. Amazing gig. I love the people I worked with. Seriously, everybody was great. I made good money and nobody bugged me. I had my own hours. I had my own truck and I just went around the state fixing stuff. It was great. But I just got the bug. It wasn't mine. It wasn't my business. I had a lot of time in my hands. I was doing real estate and stuff. And ultimately, I got up to six properties. But it wasn't mine. I just started looking online. And I went on BizBuySell. I don't know what to do. It is my first time. So I basically looked like anybody would for a home, Zillow, right? .com. So BizBuySell, Crexie, all that good stuff. And I messaged a lot of brokers. I had no idea what I'm doing. so but you had read a couple books about it i have read a couple books about it and i listened to your podcast i listened to all these podcasts youtubes and so theoretically sure but that process was not anything that i could have dreamt of the whole process so yeah step one was a little bit obvious to contact brokers and the first step was hey you know do you have financing let me see money. So then I sold two properties and that was our financing for the business. So I did. I had financing. I could prove it. And the next step was SBA loan. I got an SBA 7A loan. Wait, Zach, when you sold the property, so how liquid were you at that point? How much cash on your balance sheet did you have? Yeah, I was a little bit over six figures from that sale. And I had other assets. I had real estate. I had investments and stuff. So that all added to it. it was interesting going through that SBA process because it didn't seem like I needed any, anything. I needed the down payment, but ultimately what, what I got from it was that they will, they will take my assets as collateral if I have them. But if I don't have them, they won't. And, but I would still get the loan. That's kind of the, just, you know. Well, and this is why a personal guarantee has different weight for different people, but it's the same personal guarantee. So if you get a personal guarantee as a 25-year-old with no assets, it's a good time to get a personal guarantee because if they come after you, there's nothing to take. The 45-year-old, same personal guarantee, but has a lot of assets behind it, stuff that can be vulnerable to being taken. So it's why people with families and mortgages are that much less inclined to take a personal guarantee. So you're right about that. But just so you had about $100,000-ish, a little over $100,000 that you could put toward the hard cost of getting the deal done and the 10% equity. Sure. So, yes, I wanted to do it sooner rather than later. I was 33 at the time or 32. and I knew that if I did wait and I had more assets and I had more responsibility, it'd be a lot harder to do it. I thought, this is my thought process going through it. I said, what's the difference between, I'm going to own a business. I'm going to, all right? I don't know when. So what's the difference between me owning one now and me owning one, let's say in 17 years when I'm 50 years old? I went through it and ultimately I decided, I figured out that it was just age. I would just be older. I would have no more experience. I would have no more business experience. I'd be listening to more podcasts, watching more YouTube videos, but it's still all theoretical. I would have nothing different, nothing better. So why not do it now? That was my theory. So you get on BizBuySell. You are living in Miami at this point? Yes, I was in Miami. I was in Broward County. Okay. And you go on BizBuySell and you start looking for businesses there with the idea that you're just kind of learning, but maybe actually might jump on something. Right. And so what do you do you find the business that we're here to talk about on Biz by Sell? I did. I found this business. My criteria was loose. I didn't have a hard radius. It was kind of local ish. Right. I didn't want to go to Georgia, but I went across the state, you know, so it wasn't it wasn't South Florida. South Florida. Correct. I was in South Florida. I'm now on the West Coast, about two, two and a half hours away. and like yeah that was my criteria i wanted a business that was over a million dollars that's the that's the information that i gathered the data that i gathered in terms of risk right and i also didn't the whole reason i thought to buy the business was to start at level three instead of ground zero so why would i why would i want to go low when i could just i could do that in a year or two right i might as well skip a few years so that was my theory and so it was kind of right in the ballpark of what I wanted. I was thinking between one and two, maybe two and a half, something like that. So ultimately the purchase price is 1.651. Yeah. But were you looking for something that took advantage of your skills or were you open to all kinds of different businesses? I was looking for an electrical business specifically, either an electrical business or a generator business. And the idea was to incorporate the other one, whichever one I chose. So now I'm incorporating generators because that's my background. Anyway, I was going to get get my electrical contractor's license. Also theoretical. I have no idea. I've never worked in an electrical company, either residential or commercial. And I just looked up the requirements and based on black and white, I met the requirements. So I just jumped in and I figured that if I couldn't get my license, I would find somebody to qualify. I'm in the camp of shoot first, aim later. That's kind of my thing. And so far it's worked out. So you do see an electrical business in South Florida that's above the revenue number that you want it or the the when you said a million bucks over a million in revenue or over a million in purchase price revenue in revenue yes and I wanted to make sure that I was going to cover the debt service obviously a little bit more would be nice you know yeah great so so so you see this on business by sell tell us more about this business sure so I saw it was for sale 1.7 I think it was 1.5 for sale and it was five vans. It was about 10 employees, five lead electricians, an admin. And the owner was doing the bulk of the managing, all of it. He was actually doing all of it. Him and his wife were working here. And it seemed perfect because he started the business at the age that I was buying it. And he's working with his wife. And he was in the Coast Guard. I was in the Navy. It was just so perfect. And I thought this is going to go swimmingly. So it was residential primarily, mostly service work. I would say 70% service work, 30% new construction, the majority being residential. They don't do any new construction commercial. They don't do any generators, no industrial, nothing like that. What the seller told me is I like to pick up pennies rather than dollars. I hated that. I don't know why he wanted to do that. I'm not even sure what he means by that. It means he wants a bunch of small jobs. He wants a lot of jobs between $1,000 and $10,000. And he would be the one to go estimate it. And he'd come back every day and he'd do it in the afternoon. And that was his life. He lived a good life. He had a good income and he had no debt. So this was a lifestyle business and he was kind of happy to keep the job small. He wasn't trying to get bigger, basically. At one point. He'd found his sweet spot. That's what it seemed like. He owned it since 1987, so it was essentially 40 years. And it seemed like he had a larger business at one point. It grew up to 30 employees. And then now we're down to 10. He didn't really give me specifics, but it didn't seem like it was great. It didn't seem like he liked it or it worked out or whatever the case was. So he found his sweet spot. Yeah, about 10 employees. the team at aspen hr recently published a short white paper targeted at searchers entitled a new ceo's guide to human resources it lays out the key items you should be thinking about as you transition into ceo and owner of the business you bought the link to download that is in the show notes aspen hr is a professional employer organization or peo which provides hr compliance flawless payroll robust hr technology and fortune 500 caliber benefits all for a fraction of the cost compared to using multiple vendors reach out to aspen hr for your complimentary hr diligence checklist and benchmarking analysis. Go to AspenHR.com or contact Jenny Thier directly at Jenny at AspenHR.com. And so you meet him at some point? I did. I met him twice through the process. And I drove over and went to the office right here in my office to talk to him. And both times it was okay you know it didn't go great but it also didn't go terrible and i figured it doesn't matter buying the business right i don't care as long as everything what did what didn't go great about it just the back and forth i mean it we didn't click very much right me and the seller. And it was just a little bit off, man. It was, you can't really look in the books anymore. Because I actually took my dad. My dad's a CPA. He helped me through this whole process. Pretty good. You're pretty lucky, right? To have that in my back pocket. He'll teach me what a profit and loss statement is. Who gets that? It's awesome. And so he was there and he wanted more information because he gave us limited financial statements. He said, no you're not getting anything else i'm giving you whatever you have whatever is required but nothing more and come to find out everything is paper like carbon copy paper in boxes a lot of them which i don't have i have none of them but apparently they're there he doesn't have any records we have quickbooks i think it's quickbooks desktop 2014 so they don't make it anymore it is terrible we do payroll manually we write checks it's it's archaic and we man we're gonna switch to quickbooks online you know we're we're in the process we're in the process of creating you know a real business i feel like yeah you know and so at this stage where he's like not being forthcoming with a lot of information you how do you get comfortable with it i didn't I never did. I just I just wanted to do it so bad. I just wanted to do this. I've always wanted to do this. And I already made the decision in my head. If I make a decision, I don't whatever's downhill this. I'll figure it out. I made a decision in my head. This is happening. So we're going to move. We're going to quit our jobs. We're going to move over here. This is happening. And so there was a lot of red. Hindsight is 20, 20. I didn't know anything. I've never bought a business before. My dad was an amazing help, but he's never bought a business before. So we didn't have counseling at all. We didn't have a representative. I was using his broker for everything. The guy was nice. He was a cool dude. I liked him. I trusted him for the most part but I don know if everything was forthcoming You never know And going through it again I would do things completely different now of course But yeah I was never totally comfortable And you didn work with attorneys or a diligence provider I did. I had an attorney, but midway, he quit his job. So that was turned over to somebody else. That was turned over to a senior guy, but the guy had no reference. Apparently, he told him nothing about the business. So we had to start from zero again. And it was just communication was slow. I felt like every, not only like my attorney, his attorney, broker, seller, every time I would call someone, send an email, it would take two weeks to get a response. And I'm like that. I don't care what I'm doing. I'm going to respond. It doesn't take long, but they weren't. So it took nine months. That's why. Wow. So from the first time you reached out to the close was nine months, even though there really wasn't a lot of moving pieces because it's not like there were vendors who were bottlenecking this. It was mostly pretty direct. They were just very slow. Yeah, everything was pretty direct. There was a little bit more customer concentration than I thought that was initially disclosed. But there wasn't much that I saw that was a glaring red flag that said, don't do this. The tax returns looked good. Everything looked good on paper. so I said I don't know anything about this this looks legit the IRS says it's cool why wouldn't I you know so came in here blind but the process was was a huge huge learning curve yeah what was the hardest part of the process do you think the ups and downs of it and I think I'm not the only one I think a lot of people will think the same thing it's like I mean it's just like business like every day there's something great and then something terrible it's it's almost like awesome, this is going to go through. The entire thing is going to go through this week. And then everything is done. You're not buying it. And you never know. I didn't know. I didn't know what was next. So I was just doing one step at a time. And you just knock them down whenever they come up. And so give us some more bullet points on the business, Zach, what the revenue was, what the earnings were. You've told us employees and trucks and stuff, but give us more financial numbers. sure so i bought the business early 2025 but i didn't have many records from 2024 and we're already like way past that it was about to close so i didn't really care about the tax return and all that hindsight right so 2023 they did 1.7 and 2024 he did 1.3 it was a spike it was probably i think i got records from 2019 and covid was like a little bit good because of covid and then we had hurricanes, which is also another factor. It's hard to put a number on that. How much is a hurricane worth in electrical? Because a ton of things break. A ton of people's poles come down and it's constant work. We're still fixing houses from two years ago. So, yeah, it's good for us, sadly. But those were the spikes when the hurricanes came. And then it trickled down and then just shot up to 1.7%. I don't know why. And then shot back down to 1.3. And when we closed the deal, there was nothing going on. So I felt like I didn't get a 1.7 business. That's what I felt. You did not. You did not. That was the feeling. Okay. And what do you think the earnings were? What were margins and profitability on, call it a 1.5 business as an average? Sure. Sure. So let's say it was like a 30% net profit, which is very high, suspiciously high. I wouldn't know that though. So it was like $700,000 or something in EBITDA on a 1.7 revenue. And I would say a good chunk of that was new construction. So it was just reoccurring with the same people. All right. So you thought you were getting a $700,000 of earnings electrical contractor, which is like that's in the range of what people really desire. And you are also a guy who has – you don't have the electrical background really, but you have generator experience and you feel like you can get your electrical contractor's license easily. Did you do it before closing? I did it after closing actually. It was a couple months after. And he carried the license in the meantime? Yes. That was the plan. He carried the license with 5% equity. So we structured the deal with a stock purchase. There's a stock purchase and an asset purchase. Didn't know this. Asset purchase, I would have loved based on what I have read. But the SBA wouldn't let us. They said we had to do a stock purchase, which I genuinely don't understand. There's a lot of things that were vague with the SBA. They were great. The people I worked with were excellent. Seriously, everybody was phenomenal. But there was a lot of paperwork. There was a lot of due diligence. There was a lot of like, let's check your fourth grade records, stuff like that. A little bit of a probe, but I expect that. And so he did. He carried it 5%. But you're saying the SBA or your lender required that it be a stock purchase rather than an asset purchase. Yes. Which if I did over again, I would find a way to get the asset purchase. Why? I'm involved in two lawsuits right now I didn't know of. And if I had a new entity, I wouldn't. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the big reason. Were those lawsuits ongoing from before you bought it? Oh, wow. Years. Okay. Wow. And so those were undisclosed to you, of course. Yes. Okay. And so how else did you structure it? It was 10% of equity? It was 5% equity. They tried to push for 15% down payment. I got him to a 10. I put up my cash from the real estate and he put up his portion of it, which was 5%. He carried the business with his license until I got my license or I can find somebody else to qualify the business. Now, he would own 5% until that happened. And when it did happen, I got mine and I paid him out. I paid him that portion from our bank account or receive money. And I paid him, I think it was $83,500 each time. So that was my down payment. And that was what I paid him to relinquish his ownership. and it was a three-month turnover. I got my contractor's license like four days before that date, which is very serendipitous. It worked out very well and I paid him off and it was a break and I am a 100% owner now. And so you said it was about 83, so $165,000 out of pocket for you. And the SBA loan ended up being 90%. Did I get that right? But the SBA loan – oh, sorry. He's carrying another $83,000, which I completely forgot about until three or four weeks ago when we had an issue. But that's another story. That starts in 2027. I have to pay him for three years. It's amortized over three years starting in 2027, January. So that sounds like a 5% seller note that was on standby for two years. I guess so. I guess that was the original 5%. It's terrible that I don't know this, but I'm at the point where it's like that's over. I see the contract. I see I'm owed $83,000. I'm going to do that. The why is whatever. That's how I feel, but I think you're right. It's the regional, the seller carry note. Yes. Okay. There was also receivables and working capital that came with, as I recall. Yes. Receivables and working capital. So they pushed me to buy the receivables. They said it's going to be a clean break because you can buy the receivables or you cannot and just get more working capital from the bank. Same amount of money. The bank, but mostly the broker, pushed me to buy the receivables. And yeah, I wouldn't have if I knew. I won't do it again. I am going to make more business purchases in the future and I will not buy receivables. Why? Why? What happened there? Well, they weren't great. It took forever to get the money. I got $75,000 in working capital from the bank, and I bought $75,000 of receivables from him. Some of them I never got. Some of them I never collected. There was one lady that filed bankruptcy many, many months ago, and it was still on the books, and I bought it. $2,000. I'll never see it. And if I wanted to, you're only going to battle her in court. It's not worth it. Right. And so this $75,000 in receivables, these are all residential, you said. So consumers. These are people, individuals, not businesses. Yeah, we do have commercial clients, but they pay. We have relationships with them. They're pretty good. Even if it's a net 30, take a month, they pay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so you and Heron remind us how many people? Ten. Ten. 10 people, five trucks, you said? Five trucks. Five trucks. Okay. So how does it go? Tell us about the transition. So business closes. Come back to the other side. I've got to pack up and move because everything's happening in one weekend. I quit my job. My fiance at the time quit her job. We packed everything up. We bought a house over here to literally a city we've never heard of. I've never experienced this area. I live in North Port, Florida. There is no streetlights on my street. It's normal here. Not to us, but it's quite interesting. There's raccoons everywhere and deer and rabbits. So it's a rural community on the west coast of Florida? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of residential homes, but it's definitely not as built up as the other side. And they're working on that. Okay. How far from Tampa is it, for example? About an hour and a half south. Is it on the water? It is on the water. My shop is in a flood zone, bad flood zone. Oh, okay. This whole street got like six feet of water the last hurricane. So you move over there, and how does it go with the team and the early days of the transition? So day one, nobody knew anything. None of the employees were told anything. so i'm sitting in my office over in that chair and he's sitting here and all of our guys are around and we have this like little you know meeting this little huddle in the office and he says i sold the business to that guy i'm like what's up like what's up guys like yep and they had a relationship with this dude for many years you know a lot of a lot of them didn't like that They didn't feel respected. They felt like they should have known he was selling the business in a way. But I also see his point because it leaves him vulnerable to people leaving. If he's doing that and half of the people leave, half of his revenue income leaves, the deal might completely fall through. So I get both sides. And I wanted to be in the field for three weeks. I wanted to be in the field with my guys before I did anything with any of the ownership. I felt like the relationship with these people is more important than anything. I can learn it all. I can learn all this stuff, right? I can learn QuickBooks and whatever. Estimating, not a big deal, but I need to get to know these people. And I did. It took weeks. Some of them had an issue with the transition. It was tough for them. They had a real relationship with this guy and he was micromanaging every aspect of the business. That was his style. And when I came in, I said, no, dude, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to want to spend my life like that. So you guys need to be capable of being independent. That's the business I'm going to run. And if you can't, this might not be for you. And a lot of them couldn't handle it. There was many instances when they would do things like pull the GPS out of their vans and go somewhere where I couldn't sit and like sit somewhere for two hours. Things that they would have never gotten away with with the last guy. They were pushing away. So he was he was a micromanager. He over managed them, but it kept them on a tight leash. And then you actually wanted to give them more agency, more autonomy. But when you did that, they abused it. They abused it. they they they wanted to push and see how far they can get you know they didn't know me and they want to they want to see what what what kind of job they can have can they can they we call it skate in the navy but it's like can they do not can they not work and get paid let's see so they did push it they push the boundaries which is it sucks man because i have i have uh good intentions for all these people and you know it's like work with me i'll work with you but some people just like push it a little too much a little too much and um you know ultimately we have two people from the original 10 right now so eight people quit or left or quit or fired and several people were hired and left a lot of people were hired and left so we've had a significant amount of churn in the last year we have a pretty solid crew right now it's it's the culture it's it's selectively choosing people now as opposed to inheriting everyone so i can choose hey does this guy fit with the rest of our guys? Will they get along? That's a big one. That's big for me. Yeah, a lot of people have experience. There's a lot of people with a lot of experience. Well, actually, Zach, let me ask you about that because as you pointed out, like they are your people are who generates revenue for you. And so if you, part of the fear of losing people is that they walk out the door with revenue and that it is actually hard, hard to find people, as we all know, in the trades these days. And it sounds like where you are, it's not like the most populous area. So it might be even harder, but it doesn't sound like you struggled with that and or that it worried you. It didn't. Well, I was worried they were going to leave. I, I worried so much that everybody was going to walk out on day one and I had nothing and I got to figure it out. And I got all this debt. And it's funny because they thought I was going to fire them. So we're both like shielding ourselves. And, you know, we sussed that out over several months, but it's reasonable on both sides. You don't know. Yeah, sure. And so the but all of the turnover that happened, what anything to any learnings from that? I mean, do you think it was healthy? Do you think it was what you would want? Or did some of the people believe that you wished hadn't or what can we take from that after weeks my wife and i we you know we talked and we said like who do you think is going to be with us long term or who do we want you know who's going to fit the culture and it wasn't it wasn't many it was these two people here i felt like everyone else didn't and they weren't bad they weren't you know they weren't evil they just they just didn't fit with with who we are and so we selectively chose people yeah And then going back, Zach, to something you said earlier about starting – part of the reason you buy a business is so that it's a bit of a shortcut. But if you basically are here with just two of the original people, you start to wonder if like could you have spun that up from scratch and hired – You start to think that. Yes, one does think that. And yeah, it goes across my mind all the time. But I will say that I have Hannah. She's our office manager. She's awesome. She's doing our lead categorization right now. So I created I'm a spreadsheet nerd. So I created a spreadsheet and our CRM system isn't like fantastic. It's jobber. It's not, you know, all around. It was a little bit cheaper than the other one. So we chose it. So we're doing some things by manual. But I'm seeing where the leads are coming from. I'm looking at the conversion rate. I'm looking at how much it costs per lead, where it's coming from. And we have a lot of existing customers. the majority it was it's it's like 50 50 with google and then other trickle in you know andy's list or whatever like small but it's it's mainly uh existing customers google and referrals so i did buy a business with with with people that want to pay me money there's a lot of it is the panel stickers i listened to that other podcast you had and he said the same thing and And it's funny because it's so true, man. This guy that owned it put the same panel sticker, a little bit fancy creative now, but it's essentially the same panel sticker on every electrical panel that he did in 40 years. So all the time, I see people, customers with a 40-year-old sticker, and it looks good. Nobody opens the panel ever. So it looks preserved almost. So a lot of people call it. And when people buy houses here all the time, there's an intellectual issue. Who do we know? We're new here. I don't know. Well, there's a sticker on the panel on the column all the time. So, yeah, you know, is it worth what I paid? Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't know. I don't even think about that anymore. I just think about growth. Like, how do we send it at this point? You know what I mean? I think I'm going to start other locations. I don't think I'm going to buy one because of what I know now. I think I can spin it up, you know? Well, let's put a pin in that, Jack, because I want to return to it. That could be a really interesting topic. Did I ask you yet before for the purchase price? Yeah, it was 1.65. 1.65. So it seemed like it was a great deal if it was about 700 in rings for 1.65. So that's less than 2.5, I guess. Right, it was 2.3. and it was fantastic numbers. I actually saw that deal several months ago, even if not a year ago, prior to inquiring about it. And when I was working and looking to buy a business and I was sending inquiries, I told myself, I found this business. I found this one. I was like, oh my God, it's still for sale. I told myself if the broker calls me, which they never do, if he calls me, I'm going to buy it. The next day, I'm doing an oil change on this diesel engine and he calls me he's like i think you'd be a great fit and it was just you know it worked out from there but yeah it looked like a fantastic deal i was like what 30 percent it's 30 percent yeah it's got to be you know it's just the it's just the industry it's just the industry and then little have i learned you know i've seen many profit and losses now and it's not the same um what do you mean what what else have you discovered i've discovered that our labor cost is a little higher than his because I gave everybody raises. He was not, I felt like paying them what they deserved. Granted, this area is more rural. A lot of people come from the North, Pennsylvania and New York specifically, and they were used to getting paid a lot more. But they take a huge hit and I felt like it wasn't fair. So everybody slowly got a raise when I thought it was fit. And so our labor costs rose. We added some commission stuff. Our labor costs rose because he never did any of that. He told them they would pay them commission, but he didn't. So they didn't trust me for a long time. I had to prove myself over time that I would actually do the things that I say I'm going to do. You know, Zach, given things like that that you just said, and that he was a micromanager, and that you came in encouraging people to have more autonomy, I would have thought that people would be really receptive to a new owner and excited about a new owner. It sounds like it might not have been the best culture in the world under the previous regime. And I think about that all the time. Not as much anymore because it's not my day-to-day, but I used to. I mean at this point my thesis is that Stockholm Syndrome They just so used to it and they used to being that that the way it is right that how it done and so they just became it normalized and then when when I came in and I you know gave them access to things they've never had access to they felt like it was bullshit they felt like that's not real you know it's done like this it's been done like this for decades you're gonna tell me this guy's coming in changing everything and that's gonna work you know a lot of blue collar people like their job they want to do their job and they want to do it well they want to get paid well and they want to go home and i respect that and so when you switch it up even if it's for the better and you give them raises sometimes it doesn't work and then so finding new people was not it was not a problem There were electricians to be had. In quantity, yes. In quality, no. We've had some good, some bad. We started advertising like they used to on Craigslist, which is absolutely insane to me, right? But we did it, and we would get people. And the quality was exactly what you think, you know, Craigslist had. But then we started posting on Indeed. And even still, there's just not that many people here in general. It's a county of 220,000. Over where I'm from, it's 10x that. So there's just not a big pool. And so we would get people, but we kind of had to poach a few of them. We got some good ones from either they were working for someone else or they were just working for themselves, freelancing. A lot of electricians do that. And they're like, yeah, give them an opportunity. Hey, want to come work for us? Culture, future, you know, stuff like that. And it worked. That's that's that's it's sad, but it worked. It's what it is. 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And so you went from 10 down to 2, and now you're back up to 10? we didn't go from 10 i mean the original cast yeah we went from 10 to 2 but we we replaced people as we had people leave so it was almost like a one for one there was at some point where we had right maybe six something like that maybe five but yes it it does keep up now we're about eight or nine something like that it's flux yeah sure and and you feel like you're um more stable now? Or do you feel like this churn, this turnover is, is, is going to be a feature of the business kind of forever? It's just the nature of the industry. No, no, I knew that it was like going to be a snake shedding its skin. I knew it. I was telling my wife that, you know, it's, it was tough. It was tough days. And so I would have a mantra, you know, it was like, it's not forever. This, this, this issue specifically, and these issues are going to subside once, you know you chop it every day a little bit bite the elephant whatever and it did it did it worked out and right now fantastic i mean we just got back from japan from our honeymoon for nine days we went i got like two calls wow things things were things were good they were overloaded with work my main you know my head guys were uh a little flustered so there's things to fix but it was kind of like the stress test. Let's see what breaks. And the big things didn't. So we have a really good, solid crew right now. And Zach, let's hear about your own knowledge. So you come from working on generators. So you understand generators and sort of energy, but you weren't an electrician, but you did get your electric electrician, your electrical contractor's license. So anyway, talk to us about, is taking over a business like this something that only you could do? Or how much of your existing, pre-existing knowledge has been helpful here, even necessary? Completely, 100%. I wouldn't know. Oh, okay. So you're really leaning, you're leaning all on all that time in the Navy, on all of the century. I mean, I'm into this stuff. I build things on the side. I've done it for, you know probably since i was a kid i just loved how things work and the older i got the more i did now i do like circuitry for fun at home right but it was the the navy was the industrial side of it that was the main like here's what you can do to make money right you could do all these things for fun you can make lamps and speakers and all this stuff but here's how you make real money you work at a power plant essentially i ran i didn't run i worked at a power plant and what are you on on On the boat? Yeah, on the ship. Say more. What does that mean? I was a gas turbine electrician. So I was a mechanic and electrician for, yes, gas turbines. We had two forms. One was purely propulsion. One was for generators. And there was three generators, four propulsion. We had probably a crew of 30 in our division, so we would all work on it. But it was so much equipment. There's so much auxiliary equipment. to move a 500 foot ship there's there's so much that goes on that you don't hear about on a cruise ship you sip a margarita it's on every ship they all have the same issues they all have pumps motors motor controllers they all have lube oil leaks and fuel to transfer and so much to do every day i know at a certain interval i was working over 100 hours a week for probably like three months straight so i knew the military wasn't a long-term thing for me i knew that going in um but but it was it was a lot of work it was a lot of work but i learned so much and i became a leader in the navy i was never in charge of anything before that and they do that that's how it's a systematic thing that's what's amazing about the military they build leaders if you want to be right if you want they don't not everybody becomes something basically right so if you if you want to do that you can and i did and it was just a really fulfilling thing to have you know my guys under me and work with them every day be in the field in the field in the ship with them and work and show them the ropes i love that i love being a leader um but ultimately i learned there and definitely here that i'm not a good manager i am a good leader i'm a visionary but the day-to-day and which is probably a reason some of these guys left maybe it felt a little chaotic to be honest i was learning and i'm not i'm not a great organizer i got allegedly i got AHD. I don't know. Never diagnosed. But everybody tells me that. So I got, I don't know, 17 notepads on my freaking desk right now. I have a lot going on. It's just chaotic. It is chaotic, right? And how you do one thing is how you do everything. My house is chaotic too. So I don't, I get it. I get that part of it. But those are the things you figure out what breaks, right? And then you fix it. And that's what we're doing. And that's one thing that I learned in the Navy that They're not a great manager. I am a good leader. I'm a good teacher. And Zach, how do you work around that? Because when we think of we normies, civilians, when we think military, we think order above all. Order, authority, that there are systems and the opposite of chaos. So you figured out a way to make your chaotic self work in a very ordered system. And now here you're in your own business that you've acquired and you're creating the system from above and you probably recognize that order is valuable, that the chaos works for you, but it might not work for everybody. So how are you going to deal with this or manage around your own chaos? Yeah. For a long time, I battled with do I work on my weaknesses or do I not, basically. yeah now i'm at the point where i outsource everything i am all in on the things i'm good at because i know those can produce fruitful things right and to me i am so inefficient at doing those other tasks it would it would cost so much more in my time my my lifetime to do the books or to do you know scheduling stuff like that so that's all outsourced um i do as little as i can but it's it Yeah, the owner. There's so much. There's so much to do. But it's learning systems that I'm still working on. But moving and growing, it's the who, not how. I'm not doing that. And so you're often thinking about who to put in this seat to deal with this thing that I'm delegating. All the time. I got to figure out who's going where. And that's something that I'm still working on. With this one location, it's fairly straightforward. essentially i want when we grow i want to almost triple this business okay so we have we have five bands still i want to have 15 essentially about 5 million in revenue is my goal and i want to have almost divisions so we'll have a generator division residential commercial um and generators so everybody will kind of stay in their own lane everybody has the shop and you know get together materials all that good stuff but there will be a guy in charge of this one and this division and this division and then there'll be a gm that's my thesis right only we'll only know in practice right now i got um essentially one guy below me he's like my number two he does all of the field work like i told the guys don't call me i was getting like 40 calls a day i and doing you know i couldn't do everything i was i was going crazy before i delegated anything i had so much to do and it was so overwhelming and I just, I hated, I hated it. So I was like, you know what? I have to delegate. There's no alternative. Like this is not going to work if I don't. So I did. So there was a stretch there where you hated the business that you bought or hated the- Oh yeah, yeah. I mean those first three months, the transition was three months with the seller. Awful, awful time in my life. Awful. And it was not very good for a while because I was still figuring stuff out. Now I'm by myself. I got to do everything. He didn't teach me anything. So I that's why I wish it was like a three hour transition. I didn't learn anything. So I did day one was in three months. And so for the next three months to six months was a learning curve. And it was a lot of a lot of stressful days, you know. And how do I do this? Like, who do I call? Every day is something new that I've never encountered. And I got to figure it out. But that's like that's what I've done for years. I figured out. and for people for people who might find themselves in a similar situation was there anything you learned from just getting through that period or is it just kind of like keep going i would advise you find people that are doing what you're doing or have done what you've done and talk to them i'm doing that now i'm starting to do that now i'm on social media now i'm like post on TikTok and people sometimes tell me, hey, I'm a contractor in your area. And this guy hit me up this week. He's like, you want to go golfing? I said, no, but I'll go to the driving range. So I'm going to go buy a driver today. So we're going to do that. And it's cool. Find people that are like you. And I feel like it's tough because I'm a very unique person. I feel like i'm very like i'm super motivated a lot of people like don't want to do as much as i do be like as risky as i am and i get it i 100 understand that i want to live a good stable life i totally get it and my wife is more on that line too so it's it's it's you know who can you talk to that understands and i'm i have now i i hired a business coach i'm talking to a mentor through score the SBA program, which is fantastic, by the way. It's free. And it's helpful. Not that they're running my business, but it's nice to say, hey, I got an idea. I got this marketing idea. Let me bounce it off you. What do you think? And they're like, I did it. Don't do it. They're like, okay, you just saved me three grand. So find people earlier than you think you need them. Great, Zach. And on the finances of the business, we've heard you say a couple times that it was too good to be true or that that the purchase price for the earnings the reported earnings or the claimed earnings too good to be true right so what did you what did you find about the actual earnings and revenue of this business when you got in there day one it was quiet phones were not ringing nothing was happening my guys are going home early and it was it was like that for months several months i would you know just sit waiting what do i do this guy never advertised once in 40 years. He was a part of the Chamber of Commerce. He sometimes network, but it was all word of mouth. I got 150 grand in the bank from the bank and these receivables. Okay, so maybe not 150, close. So I was like, what do I do with it? How do I get work? And that was a big stressor of mine. Having this huge debt service. I have over $100,000 in overhead a month and that's new to me. And I got all these guys that need a paycheck. So who do I call? How do I get people to call me? So I spent a lot of money on marketing. Like I said, if I had these people, maybe I would have bounced ideas off them. But I've done everything under the sun that you could think of. And I've learned what works and what doesn't. A lot of it doesn't. I've wasted a lot of money. And you're talking about putting Google ads and social media ads. Google ads, meta ads, YouTube flyers in person, you know, just driving around, talking to people, networking, different groups, everything. Community barbecues. Yes. Community barbecues. Tell us that story. So we had a 4th of July barbecue. This was four months into owning the business. So we knew nobody. Like we didn't definitely not outside of the business because we had no time. We didn't do anything with anybody. So we threw this barbecue. We're like, we're going to have so many people. We've got 100 chairs. We'll get tables. We'll get cornhole, free beer. I got my grill from my home. So we're like, this would be great. Community. American flags everywhere. It was sweet. I thought it was good. Nobody showed up. Sorry. Sorry. One person showed up with her husband. And it was literally, literally one person. And it was so awkward. Oh, my God. It was so bad. I felt for the first time in my life, I felt awkward. I was sitting there and I'm like, dude, what do I say? How do I tell? Because she's a customer that we did work for like two weeks ago. We're like, hey, we got this barbecue. it's gonna be sick come by it's gonna be fun everybody's coming nobody came it was my family we were eating macaroni just hanging out and did and employees didn't come either sorry they did yeah most of them did some of them brought their kids and stuff so they stayed I feel like it was a little obligatory they probably didn't want to be there some a couple did but most probably was like oh the boss is doing this thing you know let me just let me stay for a half an hour so it didn't last but yeah man oh i'm sorry good no it's funny because i start i started tick tocking around that time and i posted this video i made a little mashup of what happened and i got like hundreds of thousands of views comments saying like no we would have came you should have told us so it kind of was i mean it was our fault we didn't put it out like we should have and we we could have a pretty sweet barbecue right now i'd be confident i can get enough people to where it'd be fun but it's that like we've never done it yeah how do we do this we you know we give a chamber of commerce 100 bucks they put it on the website oh 5 000 people get our newsletter whatever zero right yeah zero so this lady came i don't know what to say to her but she was sweet you know she was so nice and her husband like trying to make conversations like yeah i'm a veteran too and i'm just like you can see my face i'm not happy i couldn't help it i was like damn this sucks dude I felt bad but very sweet people very sweet people well nice of you to share that with us Zach I'm sorry that would have been that would have been brutal I kind of I kind of do want to encourage you to take another stab at it this coming 4th of July you're going to you're definitely going to do it my thing is I want to have like a veterans day party I want to have like a big veterans day where you can invite anybody but specifically veterans a lot of veterans are here and it's just a get together you know a community get together it's not about electrical work it's not about business it's just about like community Yeah, yeah, great. Okay, back to the phone is actually not ringing. You're not getting any inbound. You're pouring money into marketing. A lot of it's not working. So how do you fix that? So I drove around. I didn't know what to do. I talked to anybody and everybody that would listen to me. I got marketing material and I passed them around. And I was so frustrated because it wasn't working immediately. It wasn't like, here's a pamphlet. They're like, cool, here's a generator work. It didn't work like that. It's funny because last month I got a call from this RV park that I passed out flyers to six months ago. And we're doing work for them. They have like 300 lots. It just it takes time. And that's that happens all the time. What does they say? On average, three percent of people are ready to buy. So it's a numbers game. And I knew that. I knew that. But I couldn't produce the numbers maybe that I needed. I drove around. But on the but on the other hand, Zach, part of the reason we buy business. is because the phone should already be ringing. You've got stickers in the electrical panels of hundreds, maybe thousands of people around the area. Why wasn't that generating inbound? I didn't. I don't know. You know, I got suspicions, but I don't know. Ultimately, you can easily say like the economy sucks, but it's such a cop out. That's such a cop out. I get people that come in here all the time for interviews. They're like, oh, my company's going out of business. I need a new job. And I'm like, damn, must suck. But there's also a company over there that's making a ton of money. Don't blame the economy. What are you doing? What's your strategy? And if you're not making money, pivot. So yeah, it was tough. Okay. And so then how did you fix it? Just kept hustling and eventually the phone started ringing? Or was there a silver bullet? It wasn't a silver bullet. It was a little bit of everything. There's still no silver bullet. I'm getting there. I'm close. I can feel it. I'm close. I'm coming close to a strategy. But it's just waiting. I mean, it's basically what he did. I didn't know what else to do. I was doing Facebook ads. I was spending so much money on ads. I wanted work so bad. I felt so bad sending my guys home at 11 o'clock. How do I look them in the face and say, I just bought this business. By the way, you got 20 hours this week. Yeah. And it wasn't a seasonality thing. It wasn't just that you bought into the low season and through the natural progression of months business was going to come back i don't know this is my first cycle so we bought it last march you know what is it april so it's our first year so over time we're gonna see because i i don't trust the records i have i don't know um historically what's happened month to month oh what do you mean because it's all paper and you haven't you just it's not easy to analyze or oh it's easy to analyze it it's very black and white i just don't uh trust it oh you know i don't i don't know and i don't want to i don't want to lean on that for my data i want to make new data i want to figure out my own stuff that i know is legit and yeah so i i don't have that data i know like macro level april is peak season and then it slowly drops off so we were in a good time oh yeah it was you bought it right at But the peak Yeah Yeah And I you know sit down with the seller You know what going on He like I don know I don know Phones aren ringing I don know what to tell you All right Go like keep your one point five like drink a margarita I fix this you know yeah so how did that relationship with him evolve or devolve is my landlord that it um it didn it didn go well we've had some arguments many arguments um there was times it was just it wasn't good man um for instance you know there's times where he wanted to i wanted him to take me on an estimate there was i didn't know estimating i didn't know anything i'm like dude teach me everything nothing he says no to that request because that seems like say yes and then he would just go and not tell me when he's going i see yeah so he would say i said yeah there's a generator um estimate for a car dealership i was like dude i really want to meet these people you know i want that account okay for sure for sure no i didn't get to go and then when i did I didn't learn much. I felt like I didn't. So I stopped. I stopped even trying. Right. I was like, I'll figure this out on my own. I don't care. And so the relationship went downhill and basically went downhill a lot. Yeah. He would like he would put USB outlets in his closet and say, I think you guys stole some material. Like he's trying to drive a wedge between it is, you know, it's just very odd, very odd. And so how do you deal with or how do you recommend people deal with a seller that they don't feel like they can trust or don't like having around? It's just clearly a toxic relationship. Dick Rock. Just ask him to. You got to go. Is that what you eventually did? Yeah, I probably would have fired him in the contract. I could say, go home. I'll pay you, but go home. Do that. But really, if I'm being honest, I probably wouldn't have bought the business if I knew who the seller was. Real, you know, but I didn't know. I didn't know what I was buying. I'm happy now. Obviously, I'm happy. It's like you have a kid at 16. You're not happy when you're pregnant, but like you have the kid. You love the kid, right? One of those. One of those. Speaking of how you're psyched now, things are going well. So you, despite the fact that you struggled to get to generate demand for the business, in fact, you ended last year at what you think was higher revenue than your prior, right? It was 1.73. Yeah. He closed at 1.3 last year. Dude, I hustled my butt off. I mean, the phone was not ringing, but I was making sure something happened, right? And it was working. We upped our prices. That's another thing that helped a lot. I kept my guys busy for the most part and it worked out ultimately at 1.7 we're still here well you're not only still here you're doing better it seems like the business is in much better shape than when you bought it not only is revenue higher the culture is more and more yours and you've turned over people who were not going to agree with your culture and now you have people as you said earlier you have a crew that you're really pretty psyched about So you – on the one hand, I hear like last year was this brutal struggle and the phone wasn't ringing and failed marketing and pouring money into that, a lot of turnover. On the other hand, it seems like where you emerged is a really good place. It was also cyclical. There were some months. Hurricane C is a big year. We did over 200,000 in like July. August was very similar. So those are – it's our bread and butter. And like I can sell generators like no other. I mean that's my thing, dude. so we were doing that a lot and it was working and we still are we're going to do that again uh but it was cyclical so there were some months that was very low some months that are high you know it was it was rough but yeah no we're doing great we're um we're crushing it right now and we're rebranding and it's like it's like a it's gonna be sick rebranding talk talk us talk to us about that because that's usually one of the things that we buy business for is the brand name recognition. So, but you're getting, tossing that out. So talk us through that. Highly controversial thing to do. A lot of people do not agree with me. And rightly so. I understand where they're coming from. However, I don't want it. I want my own. I want my own business. And I feel like it's not fully mine because that's not my name. You know? It's his name? It's his name. What's the name of the business? Right here is Jeff Masters Electric. And we still go by that right now. All right. We're slowly rebranding. I just got a new website. um there's a lot that's going on i just got a new website but it's like it's for this business because i was like i did it before we ran it so i was like hey by the way yeah new website again but yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be cool we just got our first new van delivered yesterday it's electric it's massive it's just i bought it because it's a billboard so it's gonna be wrapped um and right now we have those like how do i say this the white no window vans right with a couple like a handyman it looks like a discount handyman and i hate it uniforms suck i mean i could change it but whatever it just doesn't look value and that's what i want i want a company that is like prestigious almost right like people respect and it's not that they don't respect because we have amazing electricians but it's definitely that local like mom and pop they'll do it for cheap almost like kind of vibe you know what i mean and i don't that's that's not me you know we're growing it's going to be a completely different business and do you okay so this is a interesting question so so you have all of that you have referral business and you have all those stickers on all those panels um you do wonder like is it maybe it's just the phone number being everywhere that's where i'm at with it yeah and maybe the jeff masters brand actually isn't that valuable it's more like the phone number being on the side of all these panels of course Although when you think about the referral business that comes in, people probably refer to the business as Jeff Masters Business. So that will be confusing. So you'll probably lose something there. But it's interesting because I think it's too simplistic to be like, well, part of the reason that you buy a business is for the brand recognition. Well, maybe the brand, the actual name of the business isn't always so valuable. It's true. It's tough. It was a tough decision, honestly. The phone number is important. And that's kind of where I'm at with it, too, is it's the same phone number. We're going to reroute the emails as well. So we're still keeping the same email, but it's going to be forwarded to our new email. Everybody that comes in is still going to come to us, but it is going to be a learning process. I think it's going to be years because people call us from years ago that they haven't seen us in a long time. So it's going to happen in five years for this person didn't know we changed. So I'm going to have to change my email footer. We changed everywhere, everywhere and everywhere. I'm doing a marketing campaign. It's a whole thing. And it sucks that, you know, we got to do that. But ultimately, I know long term, that's the move. And I just like I'm happy with it. Like, I think it looks cool. And, you know, I want to rock it. Like, honestly, dude, I don't wear this when I'm in the gym or when I go to Home Depot. Like. And I want there's some negative connotation as well, as we've alluded to. We are the county's electrical contractor now. So I won the bid to be the contractor for up to three years. And we gave them, it's like a flat labor rate, but we get business in. And when we had our first meeting, we had six head dudes from the utility and maintenance department. And the vibe was such that they expected the seller. They didn't know that he sold it. Jeff Masters Electric bought or they won the bid. Not me. They have no idea. So I walk in with my wife and it was like a sigh of relief from them. And they they talked about it a little bit, you know, talks about like they knew him type stuff. So it is. Oh, wait. So even though he they had awarded him this contract, they weren't psyched about they weren't psyched about the business. It was just the lowest bidder. It's one of those. I see. Yeah. They have no say in it. It's just it's just bureaucracy. So they don't get to choose who they work with. it's contractual, you know, I think they're a little happy now, but yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of burned bridges and that's another reason. Like, yes, there is a lot of brand recognition. A lot of people that, that, that know this and call because they know it, they specifically search that name in Google and we'll still have that. That'll still be a thing or just be rerouted. But there's also a lot of people that don't work with us anymore. Don't want to work with us anymore. You know, go around to specific people who are like, they will never work with you anymore no matter what if that's the name you know and that's i think and i bet i can get it it's a goal of mine i'm gonna get them you know new business and what's the new the new brand uh it's called mutts electric m-u-t-t lightning bolt s and it's a plan my name so is that that's the new logo that's the new branding new logo oh that's great i can't see the i can't it's a little oh yeah yeah i couldn't see the apostrophe is lightning bolt but that's great yeah we're fixing a little bit here but it i think it looks sweet so i was drawn on my ipad for a year trying to figure this out i was like i feel like i should rebrand i don't know but i'm not in love with anything that i figured out and i just i never pulled the trigger because i wasn't in love with it and i was like if i'm not totally digging it i'm not doing it because it's gonna be such a headache so finally i came up with this and i was like that's it you know that's it i'm gonna do that you came up with the the logo oh yeah so it's months and then there's electric here that isn't going to be on you know a lot of stuff i think i i just want it as a symbol right chase not chase bank so you're gonna you're gonna see this symbol everywhere and it's gonna be ubiquitous you're gonna know it's an electrical company because you know months it doesn't need to say electrical and i think it looks pretty sweet just you know one word yeah yeah and you were going for kind of vintage vibes yeah i the whole the whole time while i was designing was focused on 1950s 1960s aesthetic we have a lot of old people where we're at and and on the other side of the state florida general you know i mean they call this area heaven's waiting room that average person in this county is 65 years old so we do work for 90 year olds um and so yeah it's kind of like nostalgic for boomers you know i think it looks cool but also like i know what i'm doing you know i think mutts is a great mutt so mutts yeah it's a little confusing i know people like whoa is there a dog mascot which i totally understand but like no and i i assume mutts is a nickname that you've had in life yeah my last name is muttnick you know it's uh it's a play on that i added two t's because people can't like pronounce it with one and people would call me mutt in the navy and stuff so i figured short and sweet i always i wanted it one or two syllables i don't want a long name i hate saying yeah jeff masters electric it's too long i hate it so i wanted something short and sweet must electric boom money you know zach one of the things that about you that is different than many of my guests is you uh go with your gut a lot you have strong um feelings about things and you go with the feeling on this podcast uh in in our world probably certainly my personality but i think the personality a lot of people who are on and listen to this podcast very analytical need to justify every decision with a you know a coherent argument as opposed to instinct and you are a guy who acts on instinct fair i mean i think we've been seeing that i think about this too i i know for a fact i'm good at marketing and I know I'm good at business, but I have no proof. I've never done it. So now I got to do it. Historically throughout my life, I just like a very, I don't know, mechanical and creative. So I could invent things. So I write down things. I have several notepads from when I was like six, you know, seven. And I would have these inventions. And then a few years later, it would be a thing. I'm like, dude, that was my idea. Dozens of them, like all the time. um and so i did have that like confirmation it is kind of like dude that sucks but like also i didn't do anything about it and i can't be mad because i didn't i didn't act on it so now when i have an idea i'm like screw it i'm gonna do it every single like not every single i have a lot of ideas not every single idea let me focus but i'm gonna do it right i'm gonna pick the one i want to do and i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm an actor like i do things man i'm sick of thinking i've been doing that my whole life. I've been sick of dreaming. I'm going to do it. That's awesome. That's a great philosophy, Zach. That probably is where we should end it, but just a couple things to wrap. So you've touched on what you want to get into, the areas that you want to take the business. Say those again for us. What's the kind of flesh out that vision, that dream to triple the business from one and a half, 1.7 to 5 million of revenue over the next few years? So I think it could be pretty substantial residential. I think it has good brand awareness. It'll be good for for residential leads. I do also want commercial service work. We've been bidding commercial new construction. And ultimately, I don't think that's our I don't think that's our thing, man. I'm not into it. Too much liability, just not into it. So service work all in residential new construction as well. But we're also doing industrial and commercial commercial. We're doing cruise ships. you know i go on cruise ships sometimes and fix stuff and we're doing everything we're doing generators obviously i'm the generator guy so we're now doing you know generac whole home generators we're doing commercial diesel generators install and fix anything and everything um we're not doing solar that's probably the only thing we're not doing everything else we do and everybody in this in this building has a specific um experience right and it's all different so everybody kind of meshes together and has their specific thing that they're good at. So yeah, I feel very comfortable with it. And so when you talk about growing, it's basically adding service lines, although you've already added a lot. And then as demand drives you to have to hire more people into that division, you just do so and you grow along with demand. But I guess the point is your perception is that there's, I mean, obviously electrical is an enormous market and you feel like you can just grow into a much larger business if you're hustling after it than it was when you bought it. Exactly. Yeah. I think I could probably double the residential side and then increase the commercial, increase the industrial, and those things will trickle in. I'm not going to focus heavily on it, but it's nice. I think that stuff's interesting. But we are going to be still primarily residential service work and new construction. And I heard you say you go on riverboats or cruise. Yeah, it was like the first job I ever did. I don't go in the field. You know, not my thing anymore. Talk to us about that, Zach, because I'm working in the business or on the business or as a technician, because you did say that all of your background has been super relevant to doing this successfully. But in fact, you're you're not getting your hands dirty anymore. I will say. No, I will say being a veteran has helped a lot with networking and like a lot. you know it's a little secret code like you're in a little secret society once you know you're someone else is a veteran like all guards down you know immediately you can talk to them it's like you already know them um so it's a lot of who you know someone called in we have a lot of people that find us from google someone called in and she's you know a manager of sorts for cruise ships and she said i need i need to fix this thing nobody can help me i don't know what to do no company can go out right now i was like i don't know man we don't really do that but that's exactly what I did in the Navy? Like, let me see. So I was like, let me talk to the engineer. So I get on the phone with the engineer. It turns out we had the exact same job in the Navy and we were in the same city at the same time. And we like, we just clicked. And I was like, dude, I'll come, you know, I'll come out. I came out in like two hours. I took one of my guys and, um, it was just fun, man. I enjoyed it. I'm not going to do that all the time, but sometimes it was fun. So yes, we are looking for people that can do that kind of stuff. We're partnering with other companies that already do it. I found a guy in Fort Myers. He's pretty solid. He does that work. So we're just going to almost like sub it out, but we're going to be with him. I told them the cruise ship. I said, you know what? Hydraulic, if it's water, fuel, I don't care what it is. Call me. If it's broken, call me. I'll be your dude. All right. I'll be your once. I'll fix your pain. Stop dealing with everybody else. I'll figure it out. And so how are you spending your days these days? that in this chair man it's it's like uh a lot of monitors you know there's so much to do there's just so much to do but i've realized i need to leave the office um i don't get much done when i'm here and i feel like my team kind of does the same because i get interrupted all the time and there's you know adhd pretty bad i got my calendar and i'm very good with using my calendar because you know the adhd whatever i have come up with systems for my personal you know for myself and i have this calendar that i follow i have notes in my app blah blah blah i have alarms for my appointments and stuff i have alarms to say look at the calendar yeah yeah it sucks but you know what that's what i have to do and i don't get to check off any of those several you know most days because i'm just there's just so much other stuff to do there's always stuff to do so i got to go home i gotta go to starbucks or jimmy john's i don't care i just go hang out and work from there and get more done and and because a lot of times you're being interrupted by your team or they just come in with a quick question sort of thing yeah but constantly but it's so funny because like if i'm not there they figure it out they don't need it they don't need me maybe it's like a hey we should ask the boss of respect kind of thing because most most of what i do now is approving things i don't you know i'm not i'm not doing sms mainly i'm not doing any of this stuff so they come to me they say hey what do you think about this job i laid it all out and i was like what do you what do you think they're like well i think you should do this and i was like do it so i'm just doing more and more of that for them to get comfortable with like okay the thing that i chose is correct so because i tell them take ownership you know you got you got control but you know it's taking time for them to be comfortable with it great sack anything we didn't get to that you wanted to you're feeling good about this this move in life oh yeah man oh solid it's like the it's the best decision i ever made i would i would always do it over again you know ultimately it was what i was gonna do so just do it now that's what i got if i if i had to tell somebody you're not gonna be ready ever just do it like just do it you know and it's it's fun it's stressful but it's probably the most rewarding thing you can ever do and you know to give people bonuses when you don't have to just like it's i don't know it's really rewarding um i like to help people and i want to i want to help the community i want to help our employees i want to have a dope place to work where they get paid more than they ever did and like it just feels good i my my goal is to have a company picnic like in the office where they add all those different branches and they have a softball team or volleyball that's my goal i want that right i want that culture i want that you know everybody's cool with each other um and it's i work here too i tell them all the time like i want to have fun too like i don't want to be miserable so i want i I want to like you guys and likewise, right? It's great, man. You get to choose. You get to do things. If you want to do the marketing, you want to change your business, you can do it. I mean, there may be repercussions, but you could do it. And it's just fun, you know? Zach Mutnick, really fun interview. Great story. Thanks for joining us on Acquiring Minds. Yeah, man. I appreciate it. Anytime. Hope you enjoyed that interview. Don't forget to subscribe to the Acquiring Minds newsletter. We send an email for every episode with an introduction to the interview, a link to the video version on YouTube, and soon key takeaways, numbers, and more essentials from the interview for those of you who don't have time to listen or watch it. Subscribe at acquiringminds.co. You'll also find all our webinars there on the website, both those we have coming up and recordings of past webinars. At this point, there are over 30 webinar recordings, a wealth of information on all the technical nitty gritty of buying a business.