No SBA, No Investors: The Liquidity Access Line

Not the most obvious path to go from Fortune 500 digital marketing to acquiring a direct mail business. But today's guest saw an opportunity that most people miss. Brian Jungles acquired City Publications Atlanta, a direct advertising business that has served the local home services market since 1996. The flagship of an 11-market franchise system, It connects local home services companies with Atlanta homeowners through targeted print campaigns. Brian had spent nine years at Adobe managing a $34 million book of digital marketing business, pitching campaigns to Fortune 500 CMOs. What he kept hearing, even from the most tech-forward companies, Can this integrate with our direct mail? That signal, combined with the growing analog revolution, ad blindness online, proliferation of AI slop, is the heart of his thesis. Listen for how Brian financed the deal. He skipped the SBA entirely and instead borrowed against his investment portfolio via a liquidity access line from his bank. Roughly half the SBA interest rate and no fixed monthly repayment schedule. It's a structure I hadn't heard before. And if you have a material balance sheet, it's worth understanding. Also listen for Brian's reasons for buying so small. One employee, no payroll, no investors. And why he saw all of that as feature, not bug. Here is Brian Jungles, owner of Citi Publications Atlanta. You know that a quality of earnings report uncovers critical financial risks in your target acquisition. But a QAV also comes with a significant price tag, so you don't want to kick one off before you're actually ready. In a webinar tomorrow, Tuesday, Chris Williamson and Derek Pitts of diligence firm Kane Crossing will show you how to do more of your own lift before engaging a diligence provider in spending money on the QAV. Among the topics you'll learn, how to conduct a pre-quality of earnings financial review. How to assess ad backs and common mistakes to avoid. balance sheet red flags that deserve closer attention, how to build an effective pre-QAV data request, and the key information your QAV provider will request to kick off diligence when you're ready. You'll leave the webinar with a practical framework for evaluating a company's financials before investing in the QAV. The webinar is Don't Rush, How to Prepare for a Quality of Earnings Report, And it is tomorrow, Tuesday, July 21st, noon Eastern. Link to register is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage, acquiringminds.co. Then on Thursday, we're hosting top SBA loan broker, Heather Anderson. We hear it all the time. a smart buyer closes on a great business, then quickly realizes they underestimated how much cash they need to actually operate it. Well, Heather's going to take a deep dive into working capital and its role in entrepreneurship through acquisition, including what working capital actually is and how it functions in a business, why so many buyers underestimate their working capital needs, how working capital impacts deal structure and SBA financing, common post-close cash flow challenges, including payroll, operating expenses, and how to prepare so you have the liquidity you need from day one. The webinar is Working Capital, One of ETA's Most Expensive mistakes. And it is this Thursday, July 23rd, noon Eastern. Link to register is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage, acquiringminds.co. 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. If you ask owners in the ETA and search community, which insurance broker provides highest quality work, great outcomes, and has a practice dedicated to searchers and acquisition entrepreneurs, one name comes up again and again. Oberle. Oberle Risk Strategies has worked with hundreds of searchers over nearly a decade and is in fact led by a two-time successful searcher, August Felker, which makes Oberle a specialty insurance brokerage for searchers by a former searcher. And if you've got a business under LOI, Oberle will provide complimentary due diligence on that business's insurance and benefits program. An easy, no-risk way to get to know August and the team at Oberle. To take advantage, check out oberle-risk.com. That's O-B-E-R-L-E-risk.com. Link in the notes. Brian Jungles, welcome to Acquiring Minds. Thanks, Will. Very excited to be here. Brian, you bought City Publications Atlanta, a direct advertising business for local service providers. The business was quite small. Your goal is to grow it 10x in five years. Let's dive in. Can we get some background on you, please, to begin, Brian? Absolutely. Yeah, so I live in Atlanta. I've got two degrees from the University of Georgia. I had an advertising undergraduate, went into big tech consulting, program management later into sales and account direction. Also, I have an MBA that I took. I got a few years outside of school in Atlanta. So a lot of time in Atlanta working locally. And I can get more into it. But really got the bug for ETA around 2023, 2024. And got some inspiration that drove me ultimately to acquire the business. Well, Brian, give us a little bit more of your career history so we understand where you're coming from, your years at Adobe, etc. Sure. Yeah. So I came out of school. I worked at a digital agency here in Atlanta. And so we were supporting some of the big Fortune 500s in Atlanta, mostly with digital marketing, software implementation, services and consulting. I was a program manager, so really learned the ropes from understanding business requirements and what are the businesses really asking of this technology? So that really got me into the tech side. Most of the software we were recommending and implementing was the Adobe Experience Cloud Suite of Solutions, which is, if folks aren't familiar, it's kind of the go-to suite for the top companies for enterprises when it comes to digital marketing. We work alongside your Salesforce, CRM, and some of the other extensions that you've probably heard of. So there was a couple of folks my boss brought me over from the agency into Adobe, which I was there for about nine years. I grew up through the program management side and consulting side within Adobe and ultimately went into consulting. And in 2024, I was an account director. So I actually managed a $34 million book of business owning the relationship with the C-suite. So that's mostly chief marketing officers, chief technology officers, intermediary between our technology and product teams and all the customer success and helping them realize the value out of their investment. So I always thought Going into my career when I was earlier on, and especially at Adobe, I don't know what path I'm going to take, but I want that C-suite title. I want to be influencing the business and running the business. And as I progress to that account director role, it's kind of the pinnacle of where you can go as an individual contributor. And I got a feel for what that looks like at the top at the same time of starting a family. My wife and I have two girls now and had kind of an values assessment. So all these things are happening at once. And I'm actually thinking, is this corporate ladder what I want to commit to? What's on the other side? So seeing how that C-suite operated, engaging with them personally. And then at the same time, I mentioned I got some inspiration. So I had a friend who left another company called Clary and bought a local boring business. And that really turned me on to ETA. historically, I took the bug or that feeling I had inside me as I want to influence business. I want to make capital allocation decisions. And I actually looked down the route of venture capital and learned I wasn't necessarily on the right path to achieve a role like that. So I always thought, well, entrepreneurship is cool, but I don't have a big idea. So how do I channel that? I saw this guy leave the sales role at Clary and took over a business and he started turn it around. And what I concluded is, listen, I've got a stretch of really hard work in my career. At the end of that, am I going to come out and have built something that can serve myself and my family and leave a legacy? Or am I going to have a Zoom happy hour, which is what I was witnessing at Adobe, 12 people show up on a Thursday and you've worked there for 35 years and that's it. That's it. So that turned me on to ETA. And Brian, when you talk about looking forward and seeing the C-suite and it not being appealing to you? Is it the Zoom retirement call thing that turns you off or was it much more than that? What didn't you like? That was part of it. I also, you know, I think about our girls growing up, right? And, you know, just how can I possibly have the lifestyle that it takes as an international company, especially? I know those folks actually, you know, they live on the road and I know because I get emails from them on, you know, two o'clock, whether it's a Saturday night transition to Sunday or Tuesday transition to Wednesday, cause they're in Japan or Australia or whatever it is. Um, and I really liked the leadership part of it and the ability to, uh, organize a team around a mission at scale and leverage those resources. Uh, but I also have a very strong desire now to, you know, what if my daughter plays track or volleyball in high school, like being there as well. So this kind of, I saw this, especially as I got into buy then build and the HBR review and understanding more and talking to people on my network. It's like, listen, this is not an easy path. This is a very, very difficult path, but the results can be actually realizing the financial and the legacy goals that I have for myself and my family while also being very present with my family. And when you had looked at venture capital for a while, what was it that turned you off ultimately about VC? I liked, I really liked VC. I had a frank conversation. It was interesting. Adobe had a Adobe Ventures arm and I looked the guy up through our intranet and I called him and, and he was like, I can't believe you found me. Like we're not really doing this much anymore. I was thinking maybe I could just do a lateral move in there, learn the ropes and go out. And he, And he was just, listen, like, I don't want to rain on your parade, but, you know, if you, there's a couple of ways to really get into big VC and it's not really corporate VC. It is, you come out of business school and you go out as an analyst and then you work your way up or you're going to, or you can be a founder, right? And then grow your company and, you know, you exit and then you enter the VC world. Or he's like, for you, I'm a program manager at Adobe. And at the time, considering my next path, and he's like, what I would do, if you really want to commit to this, you need to start a portfolio. You need to place some literal or figurative, but allocate some capital to yourself and build a resume and a portfolio based on that. And then that's how you get into the world. And it's still going to be very hard. And you're probably going to be 10 years later than a lot of folks entering. uh and uh so you know i did life was busy and and i i said well i'm not going to quit what i'm doing now i'm on a good path um you know i was i was rising through the ranks rapidly at adobe everything was going well by all means in it um so it was a confluence of a few of those things that said uh it's time time to shift the thing that i probably didn't mention i maybe touched on it the other thing at adobe is you know i'm in atlanta um i've been i was working remote since 2015 they didn't know, they have an Atlanta office now, but it didn't open until 2022. So I started in 2015. My boss was in New York. My headquarters were in San Jose, California. I'd never went, I'd never been to headquarters the entire time. So it felt very distant to me. My clients were in Massachusetts and Chicago, some in North Carolina. That's the closest. And so meanwhile, I've got this great community. I mentioned University of Georgia, especially the business school, Terry's College of Business, what an amazing asset to somebody that's involved. I was chair of the Young Alumni Board for a few years. And it just felt very separated. It felt like I was building equity in the business community and locally in Atlanta and the passions that I have for the neighborhood. And then my business said, on paper and even by policies, Adobe said, that's great. Do all that stuff. We want you to be involved in the community, et cetera. But it was this effort of involvement here was not supporting the effort of my career growth. And I also saw a So tell us more then about the appeal of entrepreneurship through acquisition. Why specifically that? We've heard why you didn't want to continue in corporate, why VC wasn't a fit, why you wanted to control your time, but at the same time, really be able to pour yourself into something during the most productive years of your career. Anything more to say about why buying a business was the answer? Yeah. I think buy then build and some of these, learning more about the ETA community really brought shape around this feeling that I had of, I think I could do something here as an entrepreneur, but I don't have the big idea. I'm not sitting here as Mark Zuckerberg in my dorm room. I don't know what that is, but how cool would it be to find something? So that's when I do what I do whenever I'm trying to make a big decision is just start tapping the network and ask as many people as I can, what do you know? Who do you know that I could talk to about this whole concept of ETA? So tell us some of the parameters of the search and what you kind of went out there looking for once you decided on ETA as the path. Yeah, the search cadence was interesting. So I kind of get my heart set on this path and I'd start ingesting the content. Like, let's start listening to Acquiring Minds. Let's read all the books. Let me ask everyone in my network. Pretty early on, a couple months in, so I'm learning about what does a proper search look like? What's your thesis? How are you going to raise funds, et cetera, et cetera. As I'm doing this and I'm asking my network, one of the first conversations in my network was one of my good buddies said, hey, talk to my father-in-law. He's been in small business for a long time. He's got a lot of experience. He also left corporate about 20 years ago. And so he'd be a good resource. So of course, I took a call with him. And during that call, he said, hey, listen, I've got this business. I know I haven't been putting what I should be into this. I'm ready to move on into a retirement type phase. And I think there's a lot of potential here. And so I started, you know, I heard him out and that started to progress. That was City Publications Atlanta. So as I'm consuming all this, I'm also saying, well, this is the first, you know, real thing that's come across my desk. And I hadn't even launched a formal search. I'm like learning about what a proper search looks like as this is developing. So I told them, I said, I'm going to, you know, this, I'm liking what I'm hearing so far, but let's, I need to slow pay this a little bit because I got, I can't do myself the disservice of not seeing what's out there. Um, so there was some urgency on that deal. There's some other folks looking at it, which I was aware of. And, uh, I engaged with a broker, uh, you know, I'd been looking at biz by sell the whole time, but hadn't gotten close to, you know, really reaching out, just kind of learning what deals look like out there. What are the multiples that different businesses are selling for? And, uh, and the broker mostly was bringing, uh, DeNovo franchise, uh, builds and, uh, you know, So it's really, I couldn't get, the thing that was really tugging at my gut was the relationship I had with the seller and the legacy of the business in Atlanta. City Publications just started under a different name in 1996 here. So we can say we've been serving Atlanta, connecting Atlanta with the local market for 30 years now. And between that and the trust with the seller and the trust that I felt with the rest of the franchise organization and the franchisor, it felt like anything's going to be an unknown. But this is a pretty – there's some safeguards up with this unknown. And what about the kind of type of business that you wanted or the size of business that you wanted? Had you defined all of that for yourself yet? Or it was still kind of amorphous, but when this opportunity appeared, it just, it felt right for reasons that hadn't actually really been defined yet. Yeah. Yeah, it was a little bit of both. I did want to, and we'll talk about the financing a little bit, but I did want to avoid any kind of major financing given this was my first time truly getting into business ownership. Having a lot of confidence in my ability, given my experience in the educational background, but I didn't know what I didn't know. And that proved out. So I think that was the right path. So I did not consider... The other thing I'll say about the timeline is once I had my heart set on it, I couldn't get my mind off it. So I also did not assume... I did not calculate a time where I could have an unpaid search. So I was working full-time while I was trying to do this search in my spare time. I needed to continue to receive that salary and I needed a clean break. And so there's only so much time and effort that I could put into it when I'm working much more than 40 hours a week trying to manage that book of business at Adobe anyway. Running payroll, paying your bills, closing your books, and producing financials. These are critical tasks every business owner must do or oversee, but spending time on them distracts you from the leadership in growth work you want to do. So let System 6 do it for you Owned and led by a former searcher Chris Williams System Six is a leading outsourced finance team for hundreds of SMBs including over 50 searcher businesses Chris, Tim, and the System Six team understand firsthand the challenges, the opportunities of jumping into a business as its new owner. So whether you own your business already or have one under LOI. Talk to System 6 about how they can give you time back and improve your financial operations. Mention Acquiring Minds and they'll provide a free review of your books in financial ops, a $500 value. Check out system6.com, link in the show notes, or email hello at system6.com. Tell us more about the business then, Brian. What is Citi Publications exactly? Yeah. So you mentioned direct advertising. So City Publications for the past 30 years has been supporting Atlanta local businesses and reaching their target market. And that's over time has mostly been through print advertising targeted direct mail. We talk about direct mail. You'll think of probably a postcard that you got in your mailbox. That is a lot of what we do. It can be very tailored and targeted and fully custom. Um, turns out when you're talking to home service businesses, when we talk about who do you want to reach, 90% of them have very similar targeting criteria. So it lends itself to programs that are called shared mail programs, which is essentially, you know, either you create a, you know, all different form factors. One of the things we do is the best of Atlanta card pack. That is a collection of locally owned home service businesses that all come together in like a deck of cards. That's a shared mail program. We also have a new movers targeting new homeowners is a really high value audience. So we have something that goes out every month that targets that group. So that's the recurring revenue. You're in the best of Atlanta card pack. You're in the new movers. You're in XYZ. We do community booklets to certain neighborhoods. And those are recurring. So you go, okay, sign up for three months, six months recurring, 12 months recurring. and then even but even on the what we call solo mail just a postcard campaign just like any advertising it's you know you blast that one time and either you hit somebody on the right day or you didn't they were home or they weren't so a lot of even those that work with the business to say okay what is an acceptable minimum where we feel good that we gave this a solid run three consecutive months controlling for seasonality controlling for these other factors or or even longer if they say like i want to go out quarterly you know we really continue to push towards that sort of engagement because it truly is best for the advertiser to gain the repeat impressions, but it yields the recurring revenue status. Can you give us a sense of the size of the business? Yes. So my current, the territory that I acquired historically showed uh, in the, the finances, uh, between 650, 750, uh, thousand annually in revenue. Um, and year one acquisition, uh, held constant. So I finished, I think it's 742,000 in revenue. Um, and, uh, this year, you know, I'm, I'm planning for growth. So my goal for this year is to break a million dollars in revenue. Great. And what about employees earnings? Give us kind of the bullet points of the business and paint a picture. Sure. Yeah. Um, One of the opportunities I saw for growth was that the previous owner had no employees. He actually had no contractors. So he's leaning on the corporate team to execute the advertising and he is selling and maintaining relationships. He'd been doing this for 20 years. And he still has some incredible relationships within the industry, in the market. And so for him, it was you could call up some folks and keep sales going enough to keep the business somewhat steady. And that's what he had been doing, according to the legacy model. So that actually was a huge help. And I'd say in the transition, one of the things I talked about when we transitioned was that's a big risk, the relationships that he has. Is it a one-man business? If he goes, they all go. So, and he said, you know, his words to me that I remember when he said this, he's like, these people are my best friends. It would be weird if I was just ghosted on them. And he wanted to make sure that the business transition went smoothly. Great. And Brian, say more about how he transitioned these relationships to you. First couple of days in the business, I go, I'm available. He wanted me to get started much earlier, but I, you know, I had to kind of have a clean break with Adobe. We showed up at his house. We go through everything, literally everything, brain dump. I'm filling out my spreadsheets. I'm kind of connecting the puzzle pieces. And he'd set up one, two, or three meetings a day with the most loyal clients. And we'd go get a meal with them or go to their office and sit down. And he'd have something as his normal course of business. He'd sit down with them and talk about whatever was on the agenda. But he'd bring me along. And it was really like, hey, Brian's on board. I want you to meet him. Brian, tell him about your background. He's going to help us grow this thing. We're going to get back into growth mode and X, Y, Z. And it all made sense for the clients because I knew he's working towards retirement. So, okay, this guy's going to take over, but it was really message. It was his message kind of ambiguously. So it was kind of vague, but the implication was I'm kind of buying him out over time. In reality, he had the cash and I had the business and I cannot express how grateful I am for the way that was done. Um, he will still, you know, get somebody to call him and he tell me somebody, sometimes, uh, somebody did business with five years ago, give him a call and be like, Hey, can, can we start something up? And he just form on to me, port them on to me. And, uh, so I, I still talk to him at least weekly. Um, he is a, he's a great guy. Um, and, uh, and, and so that cadence of introduction and it was funny, there was still no formal announcement, but I just started doing more as I assume more of the relationships. I started sending out the monthly customer newsletter. I started doing this and kind of taking the leads. And they said, okay, so what's your status of the buyout? And I go, yeah, I bought it out. It's mine now. Dave, he's still involved. He's supporting me. I talk to him. We still talk all the time. And so they go, okay, okay, okay. So it gave me time to kind of introduce in a controlled manner, here are some new things. Here are some new things. He's still visible. And I don't know how I would have pulled it off if it was more of a black and white. it was him, then it's me, one day, then the next. Yeah. But it was, from the get-go, it was kind of implied that you were going to be taking ownership at some point. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was just an overtime thing instead of, you know, just introducing the new guy and dropping the mic. So, Brian, this was really buying a job. It was a one-man business. and it was it sounds like it was a very particular function which was relationship management that actually even the service delivery the the development of the postcards and the graphics work and the mailing all of the actual distribution of these marketing pieces was done by the franchisor and so it it feels like while it is a franchisor franchisee relationship it was almost like a sales relationship for a business, that he was a salesman for the franchise or for corporate. Right. Yeah, and that's one of the things, when I look at it and I saw the opportunity, I was kind of adding it up, like, what are your responsibilities? Let's understand this, this, this, and this. Okay, and knowing that when you're trying to grow a business versus when you're just getting to retirement, there's a very different level of effort that goes in. So one of the things I remember saying that I always now, luckily I kind of chuckle about was, you know, if I simply worked five days a week and put the same effort that I'm putting in at Adobe to this business, it's going to take off. And now I know there's a very ignorant thing to say, but, you know, that's really how it was. And it was a little bit, I underestimated how effortless that was for him being there for so long. But that's correct. So that's how it was painted for me. Now, when I get in and understand what growth actually looks like, and I talked about how I calculated EBITDA, the true story was a bit different when I understand what actual quality of earnings looks like. So I actually, it's required putting the foot on the gas. And now that I see these scale up, you've mentioned 10x in five years, that requires staffing. So that's a lot of change management. It means introducing a culture that's not just in my head, but creating it for the employees and contractors that I'm working with and making investments and making bets that may or may not pay off. So I really see the attract. What I learned is opportunity is a lot of work. Growth is a lot of work. So, yeah, that's an accurate picture of how things had been when I came into the business. But it's been an adventure since. Brian, you said that he didn't have his foot on the gas sort of thing. And so he was maintaining relationships, but not aggressively trying to grow the business. And so your calculation is the same as many business buyers for a business like this, where the previous owner is just not applying themselves like they once did or could. They're kind of resting on their laurels. And if you just take their 20 hours a week and make it 40 hours a week, you should be able to see a lot more results. On the other hand, there's this concept of sort of seller hours. So one hour of his time might translate to three of yours just because he knows this business like the back of his hand. And so he just does everything more efficiently. It sounds like some of that crept in as well. Why did your calculation of like, well, if I just put in the same amount of time I was putting in in my corporate job, I'll take this to the moon. There was something there that you'd overlooked. What was it? Yeah. Well, it's actually one of the more interesting things is market testing the ideas I had. Right. So there's a couple of challenges. One, I'm just so ignorant on how exactly the dynamics of implementing some of these ideas would work. I assume some level of infrastructure that's there in corporate and it's simply I can have an idea and I can roll it out and then the next month it will be live. Ideas take infrastructure, whether it's technology infrastructure or it's people and process infrastructure that didn't exist. And even on the client side, people have been used to doing it that way for many, many years. So also, when I bring ideas to clients, are they always going to be open to innovation? There was a period where I'm just getting a hold on things. I'm actually having the business in my tracking for the first time, recalculating the costs now that I'm actually having the invoices come in and at some point saying, wait a second, I thought your costs were this. It looks like they're this. That takes up a lot of headspace and focus as I'm learning QuickBooks for the first time. But also, let's say all that's cared for, there's a culture when a business is coasting, there's a culture of expectation from the client that that business is going to coast. And so when a new person comes in and change is introduced, no matter how positive I think that change is, even if I come out. And my one thing I struggle with is a CMO speak, right? Fortune 100 C-level executive presentation is a lot different than local painter, plumber, business owner presentation on how we're going to deliver value. The language is different. And so that culture shift in myself, okay, there's actually going to be a time period where number one, I got to understand what the hell's going on here. Then I need to gain the trust of the client base. And then I need to understand how to articulate that properly in a way that this market will be receptive. And that really took most of the first year before I could say, all right, let's start putting some of these ideas in market. The good news is, after I go through all that, a lot of those ideas had changed. I thought based on my experience, we could do X, Y, and Z, and instead it's A, B, and C. That's actually the things that people need because I had to stop and listen so much. Buying a small business sounds simple. Find a company, do diligence, get a loan, close. In reality, you wear every hat just to get the deal done. And then the moment you close, you have to throw those deal-making skills out the window and learn how to operate. You shouldn't have to rebuild this infrastructure from scratch. And you definitely shouldn't do it alone. That's why Walker-Deibel created Acquisition Lab. What started as an accelerator has expanded into a complete ecosystem for acquisition entrepreneurs. Over six years, the lab's 1,200 members have acquired over a billion dollars in businesses. The lab puts everything under one roof, an active community, deal reviews, post-close services, and a dedicated fund helping experienced operators buy larger businesses. If you're serious about buying a business, come see why lab members have a 40% success rate. Learn more in the show notes or at acquisitionlab.com slash acquiringminds. Well, what a perfect example of buying a business best practices where you think from the outside you have all these great ideas that everybody else inside the business has slept on or whatever, or you're bringing new eyes or a different experience set than the previous owner had. And you're going to transform the business or grow the business with all these great new ideas. And then you get into the business and find out that all of these theses that you had won't work for X, Y, or Z reason. But your exposure to the business and now being the owner and living the business for a year shows you that there are still opportunities. They're just not the ones you thought. But it's just such a familiar pattern. Anything to add to that? Because it's almost like business buyers almost shouldn't have ideas. They should maybe see a business where there's a very broad macroeconomic thesis there, evidence of tailwinds, a seller who's clearly kind of taken their foot off the gas, but very specific ideas about how you can transform that business. Maybe don't even waste your time on having those because they're almost certain to not be the right ones. And you'll learn what the right ones are, but not until you get in there. Or am I overstating it? No, I think one thing I would not do is assume growth when you are looking at finances. The whole 20 to 40, if I simply put in 40 hours a week, then it'll grow so I can factor that in. I maybe give some leeway into what I see. Maybe I have a question about this line item, but it's not going to be an issue because sales are going to increase anyway. look at the business for what it is and do not pay for growth that you are going to drive. I think that my experience, and I'm so grateful for all the lessons that I've learned, but I have learned a lot and I didn't understand how much I had to learn. It's another way we talked in the pre-call a little bit about how the small purchase was actually how I hedge. Sometimes we talk about large purchases, how you hedge against some of the stuff. And it would hedge in a different way. If there was a team that stayed on and they could run a system, they had the systems to begin with. But I was able to learn these lessons in a way that if I underestimated working capital, then it doesn't mean that I'm missing payroll and people are not feeding their families that week. So I've learned those lessons on my dime. And I feel like I am just miles with more wisdom and experience than the Adobe career and the NBA and all this experience I thought I had. It's been totally humbling. And I would just encourage a searcher to expect something like that more than like, don't get it done. The pride comes before the fall. So don't get too prideful. Yeah. Well, we're going to get into more about your point about buying small and how you saw that as a hedge here in just a second. But just to close out on why, more on why this business, First of all, it seems like there was great business buyer fit because you had all of this sort of marketing sophistication coming out of Adobe. And this is fundamentally a marketing advertising business. And you knew that there was also this trust factor because you knew the seller, or at least you kind of shared a network. Anything more to say about what it was about this particular business that you liked? And size, and we're going to get to the size in a second. Sure. Yeah, I'll get into, I think there's three converging themes that I saw and have just been a huge advantage for me. Number one, so, and before that, I'll just brief story. When I was at Adobe, we were doing these big implementations and managing this digital marketing infrastructure. And we do this complex customer journey platform and you get all your data, you connect it here, here, put your ads out to the digital channel or your email or website or XYZ. and these big fortune 100 fortune five companies ever consistently i'd hear can this integrate with my direct mail and i'd say why why do you need a dinner like why are you doing direct mail and they'd always say this is one of our highest performing channels um and i would say okay yeah sure um but you know i thought of it as as old school and i had that conception but i still had something with back my mind so there's three themes that i think make it me unique as a great fit for this business that I've seen playing out. Number one is a concept that we call the analog revolution. And this is the pushback and distaste of just the unbridled progression of technology, especially when it comes to ad tech. Ad blindness online, when anyone can create an infinite amount of content and anyone has access to distribution through the social media channels or advertising networks, then there is just a lot out there and it's so hard to stand out. You'll see, I'll get targeted with stuff. It's like, I replaced my marketing team with this one AI prompt. Okay, well when the AI prompt is controlling everybody everybody marketing is going to look the same So how do we stand out Meanwhile the data maturity I talked about the data that we have access to on homes and homeowners This data has come such a long way in terms of targeting So we basically take all the data sources that you can use for digital marketing targeting, and it's layered on home data that comes from public records and deeds and home sales, et cetera, highly valuable stuff for home services and other people that want to reach homeowners. And the third theme that kind of goes into that is complacency in the industry. It is a, you know, not a lot has changed in terms of who's kind of the incumbents in this industry. There aren't people that are coming from the digital marketing side into the print side. Now, there's a couple of companies that I follow that I think are doing an awesome job that like integrate with Shopify and they'll essentially activate direct mail use cases where it used to be email use cases, but now all email goes to the spam filter. Well, there's no spam filter ad blocker in the mailbox. So when you know the questions to ask when you have done this sort of configuration and implementation at the C-level at Fortune 500s. And then after I've taken the time to understand how to speak this language to smaller businesses, that's when it really comes down to, man, this audience is really powerful. And we also have a really powerful way with advertising tactic that you can feel that you can hold onto in your home for months. And when you're ready to act, then you know who to call It builds trust and it's highly local. And then the complacency I'd say in the industry is when I talk to these clients and then, you know, I'm moving from a, and this is what my whole goal all along, like we're going to move from a order taker vendor to a strategic partner. And I'm going to sit down with you and we're going to understand what exactly are your needs. And we're going to tailor a marketing and outreach campaign to those needs. So a lot of that experience, some of it comes part of my thesis and a lot of it's been unexpected and has played a lot bigger role than I expected to in this new world. But Brian, when you had skepticism about direct mail during your Adobe days and saw it as old school and stuff as probably many listeners do. So how did you change your mind on that to get comfortable around this business? Maybe you didn't have skepticism. Maybe you were hearing from Fortune 500s that it really worked. And so you had the opposite. Maybe it was the opposite. Maybe I mischaracterized it. It wasn't the opposite. It was somewhere in between. It was, I have an inkling that this works. I don't see how yet. But talking to this business that's sustained for 30 years, that's been through 2010, Facebook, Google, really hyping up the ad marketplace online, COVID, everything else, it's sustained. I mean, just looking at the industry, TAM, it continues to grow. It's not at an astounding rate, but there's a lot of literature out there that not only is it still relevant. In fact, I don't like when people say it's still relevant. It's actually more relevant than ever. Um, and, and when you talk to people and, and, and have this conversation and they go, yeah, you know what, when I, when I get a postcard, everyone goes, I just throw those things away. All right. Well, you get a digital ad impression. Do you even see it? You know, the worst case here is you're, you're walking from your mailbox to your trash can and you're holding something. You get a, you feel it, you touch it. Uh, you know, I guess you could smell it. Uh, but there is a lasting impression, uh, that the brand makes on you. And then the best case, like I mentioned is, is that it does sustain. Um, and then the last thing I'll say about that regarding Tam, I actually recently, engaged. I had the pleasure to engage with Emory and Georgia Tech, two local universities, their MBA program did pro bono consulting through one of their clubs. And they did a growth exercise for me, which was exactly what we talked about, 10x in five years. And I don't have the numbers up in front of me, but they essentially said the market size here is not an issue. Atlanta has an incredible number of home service businesses that are spending on marketing. It's highly competitive. So they need to be smarter than each other. And that compared with direct mail industry figures, I don't recall the exact number, but it was honestly with that combined with the complacency I mentioned, if there is a guy that's going to be me that goes out and goes, this is not your grandfather's direct mail. We're taking modern tactics to a legacy media. And we're going to make this data-driven and we're going to show real change in the numbers that you care about and the KPIs for your business. That's the opportunity. Yeah. Well, one little side observation. The other thing that we've heard about in our world a lot, Brian, is how home service advertising, of course, has gone all online, all digital, starting about 10 years ago. but that those cost per clicks have just gone sky high. And so in a completely saturated online marketing, digital marketing, pay-per-click environment, this is a really ripe moment for you to come in and say, we offer an alternative to spending all your money on Google ads and Facebook ads and so on, which probably a lot of little guys have been priced out of. Yeah, I'd say so. And I talk about where I didn't think, I didn't know that my background was going to play such a big role, but the attribution part, right? Adobe's got a tool called analytics. We had attribution AI. Now I was more on the sales side, but I had been in meetings with C-suite talking about how we're going to make sense of all this data and price. And we're going to attribute exactly what spend is driving what return. And so just having that experience at my disposal, when I go in, I can speak the language, I can traverse the entire marketing environment. We're spending this, we're seeing this, we're spending this, we're seeing this, put it all together. All right, here's where I go next. And it's never just switch all your budget to direct mail, but it's enough to say, let's start a controlled trial. We're gonna take an acceptable budget. We're gonna be very specific and measure return. We're gonna be very targeted on who your audience is. And then we're gonna see if it's a good fit to continue ongoing. And more often than not, that approach has worked well and driven some growth. Brian, let's hear more on what we touched on a minute ago about how you wanted to buy small. You embraced buying small, which is a little bit counter to the conventional wisdom, which is kind of buy as big as you can or buy a million dollars of earnings if you can for reasons of stability, for reasons of being able to reinvest, for reasons of higher quality revenue. And the business is likely more durable at that size. the reasons that people have heard many times. Buying small means a lot more fragility, it would seem, in the business itself, but there can be benefits as well. How did you think about it? Yeah. I would say if someone's looking at buying small, I mentioned the legacy. I mean, 30 years, local reputation, just critical to fall back on. So speaking of the risk, early on, I did say, well, how much can I afford? I mentioned with the full-time job, I didn't feel that I had the bandwidth necessarily to open up a funded search to raise capital and do this full-time. But I did look at going bigger. The HBR guide and others kind of assume the SBA route. So I certainly looked into SBA and I think it's Live Oak Bank that a lot of people use that someone referred me to. And I was surprised that the rates, the interest rates, they were very high. So I think I was quoted 12 to 14% interest and that was gonna be a recurring payment right off the bat. And I had uncertainty on the business cashflow. And so I saw that as a significant risk and something that I wouldn't be able to just kind of pivot out of. So as far as a scope for when I define, and what can I afford? I'm thinking I'm leaving Adobe. Over time at Adobe, I've gathered restricted stock units and employed stock purchase program. So I had a big concentration of wealth within the company. If I'm leaving Adobe, I'm going to stop getting those. And essentially by betting on myself, I should kind of take some of that money off the table and not bet on a company where I'm not even working. So I liquidated some of that position. And then we went through an exercise of consolidating everything that we could into our primary bank where we've got our financial manager overseeing the investments and the other things that we had. So that's all combined. So I kind of maximized the collateral with the bank that we're with and worked with them to open up a liquidity line. So it was essentially a line of credit that I was able to borrow against to get cash with no obligation to repay. And so, it gains interest at about half the rate of what an SBA loan would. And I did make a habit of paying that interest every month. But if I needed to skip a couple months because the cash flow wasn't there, then I could do that without penalty. Okay. Hold on a second here, Brian. We got to unpack this. Yeah. So, you choose not to do SBA because the interest rates are so high and because of the... It's a traditional loan. So every month you're going to have to make that loan payment. With your current bank for your personal liquidity, they offer you a line of credit. What was it? What was the instrument? Yeah, they call it a liquidity access line, LAL. It's a line of credit. A line of credit. And you use that to buy the business. And we actually haven't touched on what the acquisition price is. What is that? Yeah. So I, like I said, I estimated about 150,000 SDE. So I was looking for 2.5 to 4X purchase price, which would have been 375 to 600,000. Had the conversation with the owner. He asked for 400,000. I said, that's on the lower end of my range. So there wasn't a lot of negotiation. I mentioned there was another buyer that had not submitted anything official, but he's essentially saying, I'd like entertaining this other offer too, and very potentially just some sales tactics. But I said, look, it's going to be a leap of faith, like I've said before, for many respects. This seems like a fair price. Um, so what I did is, so I tapped, uh, I looked recently, I tapped 332,000 from that liquidity access line. And then from the liquid, some of the liquidation of my, uh, stock that I had with Adobe, I funded the rest of what is that? Uh, 68,000 or so. And, um, and then, so I bought the business for cash and I, and, and that was a personal loan to the business that now the business is repaying me back and we'll pay down the liquidity access line. Okay. So the purchase price is $400,000. And so this, I'm going to call it a line of credit. How did you arrive at that? I've never heard of this. So you basically get a line of credit, a personal line of credit for $330,000 or whatever it was. And you use that to buy the business in cash. The terms of this line of credit are way more favorable than an SBA loan because the interest is about half, first of all, huge. And it's a line of credit. So you haven't taken a loan that you're then servicing with a loan payment every month. You can pay it back according to your own schedule. Correct so far? Yeah, that's right. So there is a calculation based on the investments that I have with the bank that they consider collateral. It's something like 60 cents on the dollar, 50 cents on the dollar per invested asset. So I don't need to liquidate some of the securities or the other investments that I have. But cash at the bank is dollar for dollar. So based on the spread of everything that our family had at this bank, they determined the permissible amount. And then the rate is determined by SOFR, which I'm still not exactly sure what that is. It's a standard rate, interest rate, plus 3% spread. So right now that is three points, SOFR is 3.6. And at the time it was about 4.5. So 4.5 plus three is about seven, seven and a half was my interest rate at the time. And it's variable. So it's lower now. Okay. And your repayment looks like what? How do you repay this money? What's the amortization? How does that work? I've set it up automatically to draw the interest. So at least I'm not gathering, you know, the total amount is not ballooning as we speak, but I keep the interest payment down. And then over time, right, there is repayment, right? If I'm, you know, if I've got the cash, depending on the seasonality and, you know, what's going on with the business, then I'll pay down a chunk and a chunk and a chunk. But yeah, there's just a lot of flexibility there. So we talk about early in the business, not no obligation to repay a loan monthly and no payroll monthly. And I really use that early on. Exactly. So I use the word amortization because this isn't a loan. There is no amortization schedule. This is more like paying down your credit card. Yeah, exactly. It's like I have a big credit card balance without a solid due date. Okay. And so, sorry, say again the calculation for how much of this cash they would extend to you, how much of this credit they would extend to you is half of what you have with them or twice of what you have with them? Invested assets were collateralized at, and I don't remember the exact number, but it was about 50, 60 cents on the dollar. So if I have $10, then it counts as five as collateral or six as collateral. But any cash that we had with them was dollar for dollar, $10 equals $10 into the line of credit. Okay. So you had to add some hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments in your account for them to give you this $330,000. Okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the Adobe stock moving over 401k investment moving over, these are things that I had been contributing to for 12 years in corporate that were now under the umbrella that served as collateral. So I had looked into HELOC, ROBS, everything, and this was just far and away the best way to access the cash or the capital with as little dependency on others as possible. So again, just totally betting on myself. Yeah. No, it's really interesting. I haven't heard anybody talk about this. Now, this is probably something that this probably only works when somebody has material savings, which you did, obviously, like a balance sheet. and is buying a quite small business. Those two things both have to be true for this to work out. But if you can swing it, pretty good deal structure, I'd say. Now, back to this betting on yourself and the lack of dependencies. So say more about that. So you wanted to de-risk your first acquisition, meaning not have investors, not have stakeholders other than yourself, essentially, right? So say more about this kind of philosophical approach. I don't think we've heard you. Yeah, you know, I think, you know, part of it was if the business is this small and it's sustained at a steady rate for, you know, this long, then there is a basis there to grow and the upside must be huge. We talked about the 20 to 40 hours a week thing. So I think that was a big part of what made that attractive. But yeah, I think the, you know, I had the conversation with my wife, obviously, early on, and she was incredibly supportive of the whole, you know, what does this look like in 10 or 15 years? Where does this put us in our family and me specifically in my obligations to my career? And so in that sense, it's how do we maximize alignment with that principle and not open this up to, okay, well, there's something out of my control or that ends up bringing this down. or the absolute worst case scenario is if this does, let's say this failed, let's say the acquisition does not go how we want it to go or down the road. I last a year, I last two years. I decided to fold it up, right? Then we've got the loan. I can get back into a corporate role and get a paycheck and just pay this thing down over time versus being stuck with how am I going to figure out how to get the rest of this loan off my back? So yeah, I think the the smaller, see it as kind of a controlled, now experiment is probably too simplistic, but this is a way in a controlled setting to learn how much I don't know. And I see, I really, like I said, how much I've learned over the past year and a half. Now I would have the confidence to go, okay, if I want to do the next one, or if I sell this and do the next thing or do an acquisition, then I've been through this. Let's go big. Okay. So I may be beating this to death and it's pretty simple. A smaller business for a guy who has not yet been an entrepreneur, you just felt was less of a bite for your first bite. So no employees to worry about. That's its own piece of business ownership that is complex and difficult. No investors to answer to. No big onerous loan payment every month. This is going to be a small amount of debt because it's a small business. And because of this flexible instrument that you have, you're not, you don't have to make that loan payment every month on like an SBA loan where there is no room for error. So in all of these ways, it was just, it was just, it felt less risky, essentially. As a project, as a next step in your career. Even if the business itself, the business itself might have been a slightly riskier business than say, a business throwing off a million dollars of earnings. Yes, exactly. Yeah, there's no... So if you're considering this, I would say, and you're buying especially a one-person operation, I would be so strict on the criteria that that business must have just like any we talk about documented and proven systems where it can run without that person so that there no concern of the exit of the owner and or even better both is the legacy status, right? That this has sustained and there's something here that you can grow and build. So yeah, I don't think, I think there is certainly all the risk that people probably assume with any given very small business probably applies to my situation as well. But I think it was a great confluence of some of these trends that were actually maybe counterintuitive. But a lot of it, the legacy, the owner relationship, these are really about trust that I saw that those were also de-risked in this situation. Yeah. And now that you've been in it for a year and a half, you closed in December 2024. Now that you've been in it for a year and a half, you feel like already after 18 months as a business owner that you could go bigger next time? I could go bigger than I did this time. I've also just, it's like the more you know, the more questions you have. I've been just so humble to understand how much there is to learn. So I do not have, in fact, I'm probably down a peg in how much I think my resume made me qualified to run a large business. I think I go a step up. I've learned so much about managing. So I've had a lot of luck with offshore staffing. So I have folks that are supporting operations. I've got fractional roles helping here and there. So it's not, well, it's not a payroll that I have to manage. There is orienting a team around this mission and vision. And yeah, I could take that a step up. But I have no delusions that I could take over. A lot of my clients' businesses, right? Like I'm serving folks that, I have a lot of folks that acquire businesses like I did, and they require a renovations company or a fence company or this or that. And we talk about this all the time, just how humbling that is in terms of how much there really is to learn. So I'm very realistic about that ongoing as well. And so you had, even though it sounds like you were pretty humble coming in, you needed to be even more so. What has been so humbling about this process? Yeah, yeah. I know we talk about the fetal position moments. There wasn't anything where I said, what have I done? What a mistake. It was like, wow, what am I going to learn here? I think the one person operation, you just wear so, so many hats. And I mentioned learning QuickBooks kind of jokingly, but I get that first month of just invoicing and I'm still like watching the training videos on QuickBooks. And meanwhile, if I'm going to get any cash in the business, then I need to actually properly send these invoices. And also I need to do it in a way that honors the relationship that we have. I'm the new guy sending invoices. That's a very precarious situation to be in. And so losing a day in sales and business development or doing this or that on any given thing that comes up is just, I think when I, especially maybe month two, three, four in, at the end of the day at night, I just been like, man, I don't know how much progress I'm making here. Are we skidding backwards? And meanwhile, there's basics that I still don't understand. In an industry where I assumed the industry I was working in was not superior, but maybe more encompassing. We're supporting the entire vision of marketing for Fortune 500s. Now I'm doing this one thing for small businesses. But like I said, the way that a textbook is different than relationships. When you introduce people in the mix, people have expectations, they have different motivations. Some people don't want me to be a strategic partner. They just want to send me an order when they need postcards. And so when I push for that relationship, they don't want that. They think they have a guy for that or they're too busy or X, Y, Z. And so setting my own expectations, it's been a big lesson. But I mean, honestly, Will, I think it's made me discover so much about myself. I've gotten very into, more into my faith over the past year and a half. And that's been a huge factor in all this. When you talk about humility and setting expectations and just understanding that things happen for a reason, when you're going through a hard time, it's because you're learning something. And now I look back and I realize with gratitude how much I've learned. And I'm so much more fulfilled. And I think if I stayed at Adobe and I did that 35 years, and then I had the Zoom retirement party, I would be ignorant to all this. And I would have never known the better. So we were talking about, I think if there are a situation where I took a different direction and the business was on the market and it was going for even less than I paid for it, I would say, listen, the tuition that I had paid for in this experience is invaluable. And I truly mean that. And that's part of the reason I think like the growing the business and the ETA is so rewarding because you can do the thing that we all think we're going to do, which is just take something and make it great because we have ideas. But the journey along the way, that's a huge part of it as well that I didn't expect. Yeah, that's well put. Brian, we've said this is a franchise. This is an unusual franchise. We think of franchises as, first of all, larger businesses than this franchisor is. I assume this franchisor must have, you know, a handful of franchisees because a business like this is probably only in the major metro areas around the country. Yeah, that's right. So there's, I think there's 11 active markets right now and it is, you know, you need some, you need some minimum threshold of businesses, especially in the home services. That's really what the case studies that we have and the experience we can point to. So yeah, there's big suburban areas around cities is really where you can find city publications. Okay. And so this is a, but it is a franchisor still and all. How did you diligence it? Does a business, I mean, it must have an FDD, even though it's really small. How big is the corporate office? Give us a picture. I mean, again, we think of franchisors as kind of big corporations and this is not that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which I meant like the access is really great. Tomorrow I'm going in and we're going to sit in the office with the CEO and we exchange ideas. So I've enjoyed that part of it. Now, the due diligence on the franchisor was brief, right? So I had legal review of the FDD and my franchise agreement, but the legal review was mostly, is this a fair? fair? Is this fair? According to industry standards, does the FDD meet all the obligations that an FDD needs to fulfill? So what I didn't do necessarily, which I encourage people to do entering a franchisor relationship, is do some scenario planning. Ask them, based on what you've seen, let's say things go this way or they go this way. What am I on the hook for? If I need this help, what does that mean? At that point in the deal, I had my heart set on the business and I was kind of in burn the boats mentality. This is going to be my thing. So I have a five-year term. This is going to be my thing for five years. I think I'm going to crush it. I'm so pumped and excited to move on to this thing, see what I can do. Attorney says FDD is up to snuff. It's according to standards. Let's sign it. And it turns out by nature, most FDDs are very one-sided. You know, you look and there's minimal commitments from the franchisor and, you know, there's royalties and fees and this and that. So what I would do is part of setting my own expectations was two months down the road, by the way, it's time to pay this fee, which, you know, I should have been very aware of. And, you know, it's just it's a thing after I was spending all day fighting with QuickBooks. And then I learned about that and that hit my expectation. So quality of earnings on the FTD and the franchise orders is something I'd recommend as well. And wait, so the franchise fee snuck up on you is what you're saying? Not the franchise fee necessarily. So the big fees, the big picture, got it. This is how it works. This is what you do for me. This is what I do for you. But anyone that works in a franchise system will say that there's a nuance when this comes up and you're on the hook for this. It's small stuff, but I had not done enough planning and diligence to kind of understand all the nooks and crannies of the FDD. And it's nothing that was crazy. It's just I wasn't as versed as I should have been. And it just added to the, oh, my gosh, here's another thing that I didn't expect when you get a couple months into it. These FDDs are long, man. They're like – And so the advice for – Yeah, these are very long and detailed documents. So it does deserve the, like I said, I think the two wave of the review with the attorney. Number one is this compliant, right? Which is what I got. But then the next is the, let's actually go through each of these terms and make sure that we take the legal speak and apply it to as I'm operating this business, what it's going to mean for me and when. Yeah. And of course, the other kind of famous section of the FTD is, what is it actually, section 19 or something, where they talk about the revenue, the average revenue generated by all the other territories or locations or whatever it is. I assume that you looked closely at. Yeah. Yeah. Which everything, everything seemed in line, right. Enough where again, we're going, okay, I, yeah, I've sat with these people face to face for hours and we've had these, these conversations, we've built the trust and the trust is sustained. So, yeah, we wanted to get this thing going and want to get in here and start growing it. So, like I said, luckily, in my case, and the other thing with the local, which I'd stress this even more, if you're looking at a franchise system that is national, PE-backed, etc., you're not going to have, number one, the access like I have, where if I have an issue or a question, I'll bring it to the CEO. We'll work it through it. He wants me to grow and I want the system to grow. And what I've learned is that's very unique. So there was nothing crippling, luckily, to begin with. But if there was something crippling, then we have the relationship to fall back on. When you were looking at the average revenue per territory or whatever, was that in line with where Atlanta already was? And I guess this idea of being able to grow your business so much. I mean, when you look at the average revenue per location of a franchisee, while you expect yourself to be an outperformer and do better than the average, it does anchor your expectations to what's possible here. So if everybody's doing half a million dollars a year, or the average is half a million bucks a year, the idea that you're going to get it to 5 million starts to feel unrealistic that in a single territory, you can get it there 10 times what the average is. Um, so maybe, so did, did you have any of that sort of calculus going on? Yeah. And you know, that we, I say, I say 10 X in five years, that is a little bit of, uh, Steve jobs, reality distortion field. Uh, so that's not, I was, this is not like conservative expectations. It's just saying like, I, we are going to change this whole, we're going to shake it up. Like we are going to build something new together. And that's, that's part of the assumption. It's, and it's, it's a lot of ambition baked in there. Yeah. But so yeah, so no, Atlanta was on the higher side of average, but it's also an excellent market that only... So my territory is very large. My territory is essentially all of greater Atlanta, mostly doing business, if you know Atlanta, between 75 and 85 North, so the affluent suburbs North. There's other pockets that haven't even been tapped yet that I'd have access to. So I have a lot of geographical expansion, even within my territory. We've talked a lot about that with the franchise or developing that out, right? There's potentially, you know, maybe I could, you know, as I build out a team, right? Having a rep go develop just another part of that territory, these sorts of things are on the table. So, and the prior owner, he had done a lot of that, but he went from zero to one. Well, he went to zero to one after the business was in Atlanta with the new franchise territory. And he had come a long way. He had a lot of recurring, Most of the revenue was recurring, which is great. So I followed that model. You can expand upon that model. And then the geographical expansion and then the innovation was the third thing that I threw in there. So I think all these things together certainly would yield the ability to grow past what historical average would be. I saw this as a unique opportunity. Okay, Brian, wrap us up by telling us what you've done in the last year and a half. Revenue is up. Yeah. Yeah. So the turnover rate and attrition was, I was really pleased going from one year to the next. Let's say, I think we were around 10%. And a lot of that was people that probably weren't going to stick around, whether he was there or it wasn't because of the transition. I got to work around renewal time and had, you know, got more in depth into value. Let's, let's, let me help you uncover, let's have a transparent analysis of this data. We've done a lot more to track actual performance based on, you know, congruency with the rest of the marketing that they're doing to, to prove what value we're driving for the business. That helped me with renewals. And I think by the end of March, I had booked, so contracted the totality of my 2025 revenue. So everything I've sold since March is an increase in sales. And that's mostly on renewal of the annual engagements, plus new business in annual recurring engagements. And so throughout the year, we're continuing to build it out. The other thing that I'll touch on is the potential for this business in local political advertising. As you probably know, you live outside DC, direct mail is a huge part of that. So there's an opportunity to expand there. So I've been lucky enough through some of the folks I know to find some local consultants and they talk to me and they go, man, no one else is talking about direct mail like this. And so that could be its own thing that takes off. So right now that's going to be, that might be up to 20% of the business this year. We'll see. Elections aren't until November. So it's still early, but I was lucky enough to support some primary races that won. So very still focused on the home services strategy, driving more value for our current clients, and then figuring out how to scale what works best to the broader market. And then on the political side, it's really interesting as well. So lots of exciting stuff. And where do you forecast 2026 revenues landing? I'm very conservative by nature and I am confident that we can get to a million dollars. So I've got some people that I'm working with that are going, no, man, we're going to beat this. But I've got a fractional chief revenue officer who's an awesome guy that's doing engagement with me. And he's like, no, we can do more than a million. But that was my stretch goal at the beginning of the year. And here in June, it's starting to materialize. I can see that it could be real. So I'll be very pleased if and when that happens. And if you make it to this million dollars revenue, Brian, and then you just kind of have a sense for the market overall, do you feel like now that you're in the business that there is a lot more market share to grab? I mean, could this become two and three million dollars with time and building the business and applying yourself? Yeah, it's going to take staffing. Like I said, I'm having good luck with offshore resources and a mix of fractional people. At some point, I need to figure out how to build that sustainably, continue to focus on processes. But the more that I am able to create those systems to let the business perform at a high level without me being hands-on with everything, the more that my brain is opening up to pay attention to the market, follow what companies are winning, listen to my clients, understand their feedback, and then implement it to iterate on those systems. If I get that flywheel going, then yeah, I think the market's huge. Any last thoughts, Brian, before I let you go? There's been a lot of really scary things in this whole journey. But like I said, the wisdom and the experience that I've gained has been invaluable. I would not trade it for anything. And I'm really excited about the future and seeing where this goes. I would say, if you're, especially for somebody that's thinking about leaving corporate, one of the hardships that I anticipated, which I experienced at the beginning was the management structure, the leadership, your mentors are built in a large organization. And that's not there when you're on your own, especially when you're a solopreneur. The more that I have said, I'm not going to accomplish this on my own community. Let me talk to people. Let me bring in somebody to do some consulting that I trust. Let me lean on you to do this. Like, let's build this together. There's a feedback in the entrepreneur community wants to help each other. And that just, that yields business growth and it yields accelerated development of the business. So, so just be comfortable and don't do it on your own. Work with your connections and they'll help you. Great advice. Brian Jungles, thanks for coming on Acquiring Minds. Thanks, Will. Hope you enjoyed that interview. Don't forget to subscribe to the Acquiring Minds newsletter. 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