27 + Acquisitions, 82 Years Old and Still Going, James P. Shanahan GP at JPS Management

Record on the Welcome to the top M&A entrepreneurs. I've got a special guest today, James P. Shanahan. James has got a great book out. It's the uh Accidental Entrepreneur. It is not released yet, so pre-order at Amazon. I am not an affiliate. It's just a great read. The reason is because it's so detailed in the magazine, and if you got my email newsletter, you'll also see all the acquisitions he's done. And I'll uh share this, um, this is with Shannahan Limited operating partnerships. I count 29. Active status, either got operated, closed, or sold. So welcome to the show, James P. Shanahan. How are you? Good, John, thank you very much. I've always enjoyed watching your podcast. Oh, that's cool. So I gotta, I gotta go to a couple of questions here. Uh, the first acquisition, now you, you were working at a W-2, and then you tried to buy a crane company, and then you Bought it with an LBO which was overloaded with debt, and you just, that was a big lesson there, and you talk about that in one of the first couple chapters, like, what was it, what did you take from that? Just don't do that kind of debt, that debt level, what? Uh, no, it wasn't, it wasn't at that level that what I took from it was that if you do do a leverage by, if you do a highly leveraged transaction, that the, that you, you have to throw away the growth uh mentality that I had from many years of being in sales. It was all about growth and sales. Somebody else had to worry about the working capital. So, I thought I knew everything and discovered I was totally ignorant when it came to working capital. And growth is not the thing you want to do when you take on a lot of debt. What you want to do is grow your margins, uh, do the, do the blue collar stuff, grow your margins, get your, get your expenses down, and quickly pay down debt as fast as possible. Pay down debt. And definitely don't bring a uh a corporate culture where Have perks, country club memberships, big company car, throw all of that away and make it strictly on the basis of when the company starts to get debt-free, that you're going and that your real income is going to come long term and that the increasing value of the company. Instead, we grew and we grew tremendously, and the growth is what suffocated us because our lender was Westinghouse Credit at the time. And what, and I, the, the names are, a lot of names are changed in the book. Uh, but I'll, I'll try to use the right names here. The Westinghouse Credit was our lender, and they couldn't understand why our total debt was going up. Each year, and it was really going up because we had to fund the working capital, and the net working capital was about uh 15 cents on the dollar, 15 or 20 cents on the dollar. Our pre-tax, our pre-tax margins were about 10%. So we had a, we had a 10% gap every year as we grew, which would be makeup in the next year, but we continue to grow. Yeah. And was that because of the nature, was that because of the nature of uh big uh cost of goods, that your cost of goods were so high and the turnover was just slower with the cash flow. The nature of manufacturing was a manufacturing company. The nature of manufacturing is, is high inventory, a lot of work in process. Your, your jobs extend over, uh, in many cases, 12 months. So, from start to finish, when you book the order, it's 12 months before you ship it. So you grow your working capital every month, I mean, excuse me, you grow your inventory every month. And in many cases, it's completed contract method of accounting, so you can't invoice until you're finished. In some cases, you may get progress billings. So your receivables are going up, your inventory is going up. And that has to be funded. And it's, and if you're going up, if you're growing $10 million a year, you've got to fund $2 million. And if you're only making on that $10 million you know, $900,000 you got 11 gap. I know all of this now. I didn't know it then. Yeah. Now, could you have, like, what are the three things you could, uh, reduce, uh, increase prices, you could have, uh, reduced all the expenses, uh, and then pay down your debt or refinance some higher interest debt, like, reduce your cost of goods sold, the big variable expense. But and, and there was, and I was originally an industrial engineer, but I had spent most of my career in the previous company working for wages. In sales. So I forgot all about my industrial engineering training. And that's the that's the type of training I originally had. Like if I had stepped back, made, made the change, uh, ate the ate the drop in uh in ego and uh and identification, and became an operating guy again instead of a. Sales guy, we would have, we would have done well in that, but we didn't. So we, eventually, Westinghouse Credit, we had a technical default. We were always up to speed on our, on our interest payments, but we had a technical default on our debt to equity ratio, and they decided to get out of the business and uh they shut us down. Yeah, that's a, so that took a while to unwind for you, but I love your statement of what that bankruptcy feels like. You're sitting in your shit in your pants for the whole time. And you're the only virgin in the group. Everybody else, uh, you know, all the hires that you have to hire, the, the CPAs and the attorneys, uh, they all know what they're doing. And what you don't know is that they're gonna be there and this bankruptcy is gonna go on until you run out of money. It behooves them to Spread it out more. Their incentive is not your incentive. You want to get rid of those, you want to get rid of those pants, and they wanna keep, they wanna keep getting paid. Oh man, that's like crazy. Um, and by the way, in this book, and I, I'm gonna recommend it again because every, after every chapter, he talks about postmortem what he learned and what His ego took, you know, as a hit, and like, what I should have done or could have done and what I didn't do. So, highly recommend that book again. So, how, how did you go, I know that you found this fresh Max was, that was through a broker, or what was that through? That was a contact or? Well, we, first, you know, we, uh, we decided to form a family partnership. My wife and 54 sons. And the 4 sons had very little work experience, all brand new guys. 2 of them had hotel and restaurant management degrees. One was an MBA, 11 was an advertising major, and one of them at the time we decided to go on business was a sous chef. And of course, my wife had tremendous uh cooking experience. So we decided to uh form a partnership. And took all of our savings, which was at the time, about $500,000. That's quite a bit. I mean, you made, uh, you know, for 1992 or 1990s, the right of that. That's quite, uh, I mean, it was quite a, yeah, it was, it was. I didn't realize at the time, but uh it was quite a bit. So, uh I had gone, one of my last functions working for wages, was I had to go to California on a problem job in a refinery. We had a crane problem. And I flew out to California and I had a quick, I had time for a quick lunch, and there was a place out there called La Salsa, which was uh which was uh kind of a boutique Mexican concept, and they had a, a, a like a, not a salad, they had a salsa bar. which was unique. They made, they had homemade salsas and, and, and you, and my wife was a great salsa maker. My wife is Mexican background. So I knew good salsas. And this place, I really liked the place and, and they, uh, so I grabbed a menu. Came back to, came back to Houston. And my uh number 3 son, the NBA, he had been up in Dallas for the weekend. He comes in with a, with a menu. This is why we're uh starting a partnership. He walks in with a menu for another concept, which I call FreshMex in the book, that wasn't the name but I call it FreshMex, that was started in Dallas exactly like this La Salsa, and I thought it was, it was providential, it was an opportunity meeting our needs. We immediately started looking into that and that's, uh, and we approached the, uh, it was a franchise, and it was a new franchise. And I thought it was something that could be taken out nationally. It was going to be very successful. So we committed, uh, of that, I mean, of that half a million, uh, we committed $300,000 of equity and borrowed through the SBA at the time, uh, around $700,000. So we had a, it was a mild leverage, but the SBA spread your loan out. And we, we, uh, contracted for 3 of these. So 3 of the sons were gonna be managers. Each son was gonna be a manager. My youngest son was gonna be a rotating manager. And, uh, so our first deal was a franchise, which I don't recommend. It's in the book, I say 3 ways to get started. One is to start from scratch, I say, forget that. Second is franchise, and that's just being, uh, what I, I refer to as a, a surf. So theoretically, you know, if you're, you're growing the product on your land, but the landlords taking all the money. So the franchise takes all the money. And the third thing to do is, is acquire businesses, uh, yourself, and that's what we did. Yeah, buying cash flow. Yeah, so what happened to the Fresh Macs? I, I see in your active list and all the viewers are gonna get this cause I'm gonna upload it, you close that down, it just didn't. Didn't work out, but it did have provide a lot of cash flow for you for a lot a lot of cash flow initially. It was a, it was, it helped my, the learning curve for my sons. And, um, uh, we were up and running, and my wife and I were in the background, uh, doing back office work for the, for my sons. I was training my sons, and, uh, we eventually shut it down, it overlaps with, with an acquisition. So we, uh, we overlap with the, with an acquisition and shut it down, but everyone got paid, everyone got paid. The SBA got paid, all the vendors got paid. We didn't file bankruptcy. We just had an orderly shutdown, which took some cash, and it, and so we use the next acquisition. Which ran, was flushed out a lot of cats where we, you know, bought cash flow. And then, and, and it had a lot of cash flow, and we use that to restructure and, and get out of this initial franchise. Yeah, so would you say you wouldn't get in the business restaurant. Business ever again, but you did get into catering a little bit later on. I'm gonna get that later, but you got the next one up was James's Manufacturing, which was uh purchase cost, greater than $2 million cash you use the 12%, debt 88%, and still operating. Yes, and, and producing excellent cash. So, uh, we, while we were operating the franchise, uh, I had a, I had an employment contract that was going to expire. So my wife and I were taking no income from the, the, the first business. So my sons were all working for reduced uh salaries. Uh, for sweat equity because we gifted them a lot of the shares. And my wife and I were taking nothing out of the business, and I had an employment contract with the last working for wages that was going to expire. And I was sitting in the kitchen on Thursday, I know it's Thursday because the Wall Street Journal puts small business ads for sale at the time, uh, on Thursdays. And I see this very small ad for a manufacturing business in Texas. And I responded to it, and it turned out to be James Manufacturing, which was in northern Texas, about a 2 hour and 45 minute drive from Houston. And uh and I, I very, uh, this is where broken bro, some brokers can be exceptionally good. I was fortunate again, lucky, I, by the way, I said to my sons, I've got, you know, I, the Irish historically have a lot of luck, but I've, I've warned them, I said, I've had all the luck. You got nothing, there's nothing left for you. So, so I wind up with this great broker, and, uh, I like the deal. I, I get, you know, I get the financials and, uh, it's, it's, it's what I know. I know manufacturing, been in it for years. This company has a great future, and, but I said, you know, I don't see how I can get this done. I said, because I'm, I'm left with, I had a couple of $100,000 left. And this is a this is a $2.5 million purchase. And uh and he said, I, I can get it done. So he said the seller would take a million 8 note. Which, by the way, you had a question in there about and on your site. That 8, you know, lenders look at that as, as equity because it's, it's, it's, uh, it's behind everything else. It's behind them, it's behind everything. So a 8, a million 8 sellers note is like a million 8 investment to the bank. I can get you 18 from the seller. He said, I've been to M bank in, uh, in Corsicana, and he says, I can get 400,000 from Mbank. I think it was around that. Anyway, I, I was, I was gonna have to come up with a couple of $100,000. It was a stock sale, so I had access to all the cash that the company already had. We're going to use some of that cash to get the deal done. So it became highly leveraged, and which was OK except for one thing, the seller debt, uh, and I, I could have negotiated differently. Again, ignorance. The seller debt I made prime plus. And uh Prime went up considerably. Like today, it went up 75 basis points. So let's have they announced it? Yeah, they did. I saw this morning, yeah. OK. So, so Prime went up considerably and for a period of time, uh, we were operating with negative amortization. So for your viewers who don't know what that is, your, your, your principal and interest payment is fixed based on the original interest rate, and I think we did a A five-year note with a fifteen-year amortization. So the, the principal and interest payment is fixed. But the principal portion of the uh uh uh of the loan is not going down because the the increased interest is eating up too much of the principal and interest. Yeah. Yeah. So I refinanced with the bank. And, uh, and by then, we had accrued a lot of cash from the catering company, and we used a bunch of cash and went back and refinanced with the seller, paid his loan down with cash, and did a refinanced at a 6% fixed rate. I think it was 6% fixed rate. And uh off we went with great cash flows and, and uh being able to fund additional acquisitions. Why, why do you think that uh James Manufacturer, the seller was so motivated uh by taking Uh, uh, seller financing. I mean, this is like you talking in your book about the, the, the start of the two-tier, uh, retirement plan. I think it was started. So why was he motivated by that? It's like the tax advantages, plus what? Yeah. OK. So, I, I never gave up my talents for selling. And so our, our, our, our approach is you approach the seller as if you're trying to sell him. You don't approach the seller like a buyer, and you treat the seller with the utmost respect for what he's accomplished. You keep the conversation levels at, at whatever, whatever, uh his default is, whatever he whatever analogy he has. So, the, the idea is to build a rapport very fast. Because after that, everything, all of the issues that come up, fall back to that initial rapport and trust that you've built with the seller. The seller in this case was motivated to sell because although he didn't disclose it to me initially, he had a Parkinson's. And, and, and he didn't, he had a, he had a, a son and a daughter, and a, and two son-in-laws in the business. And he didn't trust them. As opposed to me, when he compared, as opposed to me, he didn't trust them for protecting his investment. So, uh, uh. That, that was his motivation. He said, he, he, he wants to, and I, and I talked to him about, uh, the two-step retirement, which means that you're still involved because you have the note. And, uh, you can't wait until the perfect opportunity, because when you need the perfect opportunity, it might not be there. Yeah. And did you say something about like, well, what happens if I screw up the business and I can't pay the seller out, it just goes back to him. Go back to him. Yeah. And well, and we also personally guaranteed it. If you're gonna, if you're gonna do a substantial seller's note that, to give, give them more confidence, we, we personally, the entire family personally guaranteed his note. But our view was, you know, we had, we, we're at a point where we got, we got all our capital investment. Yeah, so what, what are we left with if, if, if this thing, if this thing pulls? Yeah. What did you, what did you think of brokers, you know, this was a good experience one, obviously, but did you always include them in the conversations or did you just tell them, hey, you know, you're gonna get paid, I need to talk to the owner. You're gonna get paid. I need to talk to the owner. I'm going to develop the relationship with the owner. And if, if we hit a hiccup in the road somehow, then you can step in and, and, and help keep the deal on track. But otherwise, I'm gonna talk, I, I'm dealing with the seller directly. Yeah. So this, uh, James Manufacturing, and then you create an offshoot from that James Industrial, those are still operating. Who's running those? Uh, uh, we have, we have general managers, general managers on that, and we, you know, we create business plans together and we, uh, and James Manufacturing eventually, uh, I created what's good, and I, I talked about it in the book. I create what I received when I went to work for Crano, I created what's called a rabbi trust. I think they have other names for it now. Yeah, but it's still, I mean, if you go to Investo I had to look it up. So you had to go to Investopedia, uh, they still have a name for it, but I think it's today's world, it's a little insensitive, so, so, yeah. Right. So, I went to, uh, I went to the general manager at James at one point, uh, because he would periodically get off the rails and get upset and uh threatened to leave. And I, you know, and he was crucial, uh, because he leaves, I'm, I'm back up in Corsicana again instead of down in Houston. And so I offered him uh 11% a year based on of equity in the company through the rabbi trust, which is non-voting equity, kind of off-balance sheet equity. Uh, and offered him 1% a year over a 10 year or up to 10% based on providing results. And then when he finally retired, that we would convert that, that obligation, that liability, we would convert it into a retirement check, which we would pay out over 10 years. He's current, that first general manager is currently, he's in his 5th year on getting that payment. So this, we did the same thing recently, 2 years ago. With the general manager of uh the uh James Industrial Contracting, which by the way, is, is twice as big as James Manufacturing now. It's wow, really? Yeah, and we, we not, so you just, we, uh, we tried a bunch of other things that I didn't write about in the book. Well, I did write some about, but we tried to get into the uh glass rack business and we were successful for a while. We tried to get into. The uh dumpster business for waste management. We were, we were, we were trying all sorts of things with the, with the manufacturing company and the one that, that I think are probably 4 or 5 or 6 over a period of 10 years, and the one that really hit was this James Industrial contracting. Yeah. What I, uh, you got went over to catering then back into kind of the food business, but it looks like you catering acquisitions, creative cuisine, catering, uh, you got those going, acquisitions less than a million, but uh eventually closed those down also. Why, why, why did it go back to food? That's a kind of a, yeah, I, I, I like, I can't do food. I just can't restaurants, yeah. Yeah. What happened was As we were having problems with FreshMex. The, the first one we opened, the problem was they We're rebuilding the streets, the sewer system on the street in front of us, which I mentioned in the book, if we'd have done a better job of due diligence, we would have known that. That we, we, we'd have gone in the city records and see what the planning commission was planning and seeing if there was going to be some, some uh construction problems. Construction problems destroy a retail business. It's yeah they do. I don't care how good you are, people aren't going to drive into a construction area. So that business was failing. Uh, the other two we had up and running were doing great, and the first one had been doing great. Um, so I took my youngest son, who was the rotating manager. And I said, we got, we got capacity now in this first business. I said, we got to fill this capacity. I said, so I want you to start making sales calls on companies for, for uh for catering. So we're gonna cater Mexican food to local uh industry. So he started and my youngest son, when you, you know, you give him a, a sales assignment, uh, he'll stick with the, he'll stick with the disciplines, and he's having some success. Excuse me. And he came to me one day and he said, Dad, he said, he said, I can't just sell Mexican food. He said, these guys want other products, and we can't cook other products in this Mexican kitchen, so we have a problem. I said, you're absolutely right. Let's look for, let's look for a site that we can put, we can open up a catering operation where we can make anything. So, in, uh, we went and saw, there was a catering company that was moving. I'm talking about corporate catering now. Julio's, was that Julio's? Yeah, that's not really the name, but that's what. So they were, they were moving and the, and the realtor brought us there, uh, and he shouldn't have since we were interested in catering business, but he brought us there to see their operation, and I couldn't believe it was, it was manufacturing. It was manufacturing and it was, but it was, they turned everything over in a day. Everything happened in a day. And we got there about 10:30 in the morning and they, and it was a very efficient, I mean, they had a very efficient flow, and this, this particular company did about 10 or 12 big orders, big orders for local companies, you know, Exxon, Shell, uh, you know, oil companies, law firms, and, and they took the, the employees from the kitchen. And they turned about half of them into, in the driver, because then you say, well, how does the food get to the sites? Well, they had, they had vans. Their names on the vans and about 12 of the people from the people from the kitchen went out and delivered all the products, set it up, you have to set, you know, you have to have setups and everything else. And so I'm impressed by this. So I'm, I'm more now interested in catering than I was. And somewhere in there, someone says, There's a, there's a about a mile away on the same street. There's a, there's a business, catering business for sale. You, you, you never know how these things are gonna come up. So I, I sent my, uh, son down there, one of my sons down there to visit with the owner to find out if that was true or that she want to sell her business. And it turned out she, she did, but she was, uh, not totally settled on it. But it was enough for me to schedule a meeting with her. And she was in a different type of catering. She was in what's called box lunches. So she was doing 55 or 60 orders a day. And there was a policy, if you ordered by 10:00 a.m. Uh, they would guarantee a 12, between a 12 and 1 delivery if you were, there was nobody else in the city doing it. And she was very successful and very disciplined, and, uh, over a period of time, several meetings, uh, I talked, she, I, she wanted to get back into residential catering, parties. That's where she started and then go to box. So we really got into catering to supplement the problem that was going on with our restaurants. And then catering, uh, uh, I don't know how much detail you want, but we, we grew the catering business 29% the first year. Now that all becomes, that's, that's all uh margin that goes to the bottom line. I mean, all the fixed costs stay the same. And we, this was just a cash machine. And from the cash we bought, we bought the property. Now we bought the property, then we, from the cash, we, we used the cash in that, in our manufacturing and, and it, it continued, it continued the cash flow just Like, like almost no other business for about a decade. Just, so as, so as we went along, then, so now we've said, hey, let's, let's scale this up. Let's look at some other catering companies. And also it was a period of our evolution where in the beginning, the evolution was, uh, the analogy I used is My grandparents all came from Ireland, both sides, and I'm sure that their incentive for coming, they just said, there's no jobs here, where are the jobs? And somebody said, well, there's jobs over in the United States. So they got on a boat and they came, their, their total plan, their business plan was go to the United States. And once they arrived, they figured out where are we going to live, what kind of jobs are we going to get. Uh, all of that was figured out after, that's the same thing with Growing by acquisition. You, you, you don't, uh, uh, another analogy is Apple, uh, didn't start off knowing they were going to do music. Uh, Amazon didn't start off for sure. They started off with books. And look at Amazon today. I mean, it's probably 90% of the retail sales. So you don't know, you, you have to, you have to get your toe in the water and then You're going to grow and how fast you, how flexible you are, how intelligent you are, how much capital you have is where you go. So ours was first opportunity, and then we went to, uh, I want, uh, we had one general manager, my oldest son at the catering company. I'm running the the manufacturing company only because no one else in the family could run it. And uh so now it's the idea was to make some acquisitions to get the other two sons uh jobs as general managers. So that was, so that's our revolution, went through that for a while and that took us out. Yeah, so I was looking at this, between 1993 and about 2010, all of your acquisitions were about under a million dollars. I mean, and then you tell the lesson about this as soon as you start getting a bigger cash position, buy bigger businesses. Right. Is that your, yeah. OK, so if I could, uh, excuse me. I, I class, you know, I'm a blue collar acquisition guy. And so there's mom and pops, and then there's blue collar, and then there's private equity. So we saw and and blue collar goes from maybe 1 million in revenue to 5, maybe 10 million in revenue. And we saw the best return on investments. In that low, at that low end range. So you could buy companies at that low end for 2 to 3 multiple. With very little risk, high cash flow, very little risk, uh, very little working capital requirements. And so that was, that took less due diligence, uh, less appetite for risk, and more, and, uh, almost a guaranteed cash flow. So that's why we stayed at the low end for so long. In addition, remember all of that restructuring we had to do from the, from the initial failures of, we had to get all that paid off. We were using the cash flows to pay that down. So we weren't generating a lot of excess cash. Uh, we, we're generating enough to do these small acquisitions because we, we never brought any outside investors in. And, and from then on, our model was always do 50% equity, 50% seller debt. So if, if we're doing a, if we're doing a million dollar revenue business, and it's generating somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 cash flow, and we're going to buy it for, say, 5000 or $600,000 we got to come up with the 250 $300,000 cash. And so we had a, and, and we didn't borrow a lot beyond that. And so that's why we're in those ends, that's why we're at that low end. Yeah, it's, we still stay, we still are, we do not want to get into the private equity. We don't have any outside investors. And so now we see the standard of private equity radar, you have to be down into our, our current model, I'm jumping ahead, down around 3, 5 million to 20 million in revenue and 1 million to 3 million in what I call free cash flow. Yeah. Yeah, then you, I gotta, you jumped over to some opportunities, the carpets, the fashion floors. I, I just make a note, you know, each one of those businesses, whether it's uh food supply or catering or manufacturing or franchises, restaurant kind of deal is, you know, it's a different metric to make the bell ring. How did you acquire this knowledge to say, well, we know what to grow it as, I like, we know what makes the bell ring. Uh, a couple of ways, uh, you know, as you're, as you're going along with these business 1st, 1st of all, I, I love looking at businesses. If I look at 10 businesses and we only do one, I don't view the other 9 as a waste of time. I, I, I am a, a voyeur. I love looking under the skirts. I love looking at the numbers. And generally speaking, uh, there's a couple of Uh, for sure. One is, generally speaking, whether it's manufacturing, or it's retail or it's, uh, or it's food, generally speaking, your gross margins run about the same. The gross margin on a healthy company. The gross margins are somewhere around 50%. You can do a little research and see the coms for everybody else, for the well-run companies and poorly run companies and say, OK, this is what is gross margin. And it's generally about the same ratio, material and labor and burden. and manufacturing you talk burden. And these other businesses, you don't talk burden, but the burden is still there. And if, if you haven't been in manufacturing, the idea of burden is Your, your, uh, gross margin is after your variable cost. So it's revenue minus material, minus labor, uh, equals your variable cost, then your expenses are your semi-variable and fixed costs, and when you subtract those out, you're at the pre-tax. Now, in manufacturing, you take a big portion of those expenses and you and they become what's called burden. And so you, in the beginning of the year, you budget, and I, and I learned this all the way back at my first manufacturing company when I, when I was an industrial engineer. In the beginning of the year, you budget a certain amount of hours, you budget a certain amount of spending, uh, you divide the hours of the spending by the hours, and you get a burden rate cost per hour. So now you can estimate your, your cost. And typical burden rate is It is 2.5 to 3 times your labor. So if your labor is 10, your burden rate is gonna be 30%. So, and the material costs generally run about 20. What I'm trying to say is it's very common. Now, in different, in different industries like in our retail business, we don't think in terms of burden. We just think in terms of expenses. So we know we have to, we have to absorb a certain amount of expenses to get past the break even. Based on, but yeah, the higher your gross margin is, the lower your break even. These, uh, I was gonna go back to that carpets come in fashion floors. You got into that and got out, it looked like, uh, that just didn't work out. What was the reason for the that selling that? So, remember I said the evolution was, uh, find, find each on the job. So, my son, Dan, #3 son. had left the partnership when we bought the catering, first catering company. He left the partnership because he had made a commitment to his wife, which I was unaware of when they got married, she was, she's a dual citizenship, a dual citizen, US and uh Chilean. And he had made her a commitment that they would, they would go back to Chile. They go to, they would move to Chile. And so he can come in one day, telling me, with the two of them, meeting with my wife and I, and tells me about this commitment. And so I went along with it, and they went back, they left the partnership. He left the partnership, and his shares stayed at the same level, we did. So as the other, as the other partners shares grew over time, his shares stayed at the same level. Uh, so, He went to Chile for 6 years. When he came back from Chile, he worked in some dot-com businesses. You remember the dotcom? Oh yes, yeah, yeah. He got offered a million dollars for a pitch deck, or just an idea one time at a trade show. I remember the dotcom days. Yeah, OK, so you remember. So he got in some dot-com businesses and it wasn't working. So we were out in LA. He or they came back to LA because the, the company she worked for, uh, Uh, she ran the, uh, Chilean operation because she was bilingual, and the company she worked for headquartered in Los Angeles. So they promoted her to Los Angeles. So they, they, they all moved back to Los Angeles. And, uh, so my wife and I are out there for a granddaughter's birthday. He walks in, just lost a second job. I said why don't you come back in the partnership. I said, he said, yeah, I'd like that. And so I gave him, exactly. I, I said, I'll give you $500 a week. You hire a couple of brokers and you go find a catering company. Because I said, we know catering. And so, uh, we went at it and we found a catering company. I'm not going to bore you with the whole story. Uh, but, uh, we, we got right down to the final strokes, letter of intent. Doing our due diligence, and I say, if we find something irregular, our motto is we tell the sellers up front, we're not gonna renegotiate. So, you know, be honest with us before we get to the letter of credit, before we get into the detailed due diligence, because if we find something that you should have told us, or you should have known about and didn't tell us. Uh, we're not gonna renegotiate. We're gonna walk. And is this like kind of a stern warning that you look face to face into the person and just go, hey, look, uh, uh, one last thing I need you to, to say, right? It's, and for two reasons. The positive reason is, is if he's got something he hasn't told us yet. He's going to then reveal it. The second thing, and because, because we're going to get into a lot of right now, we're going to start doing the hard work, but what I call the, the due diligence at that point, we're going to do the real due diligence and the hard work, and it's going to take us 3 or 4 weeks. And I don't want to waste my time if, if he's got, here's the second reason though. The second reason is I get to tell him about, look, you're going to have private equity sniffing around here. And I said, let me tell you how they operate. They come in with one price and that's not the price they're going to pay. They know every company has problems. And when they get into due diligence, they're going to keep bringing these problems back. And every time they bring back a problem, they're going to reduce the price. So we're not reducing. We know you're going to have problems. We're, and as long as they're not substantial, we're not coming back and renegotiating the price. We're going to either buy it at the price of a letter of intent or we're walking. So it's a warning about private equity too. Because that's what they do. Yeah, yeah, I've had that experience. Yeah. OK, well, and you, and I'm sure there are people, people are listening here who are private equity and don't like to hear that, but I don't like to hear that, but it was like, hey, well, we do do that. So it's the same thing with general contractors, and I have a rule with my sons. Never trust a general contractor. When a general contractor bids a job, they leave, they have very little margin in the job because their, their attitude is, they're going to pick up all their margin on the change orders. because nobody, nobody writes a perfect spec. So now you're out on the job, you're starting to do, and they say, well, wait a minute, where's the grass? Oh shit, we didn't put the grass in the, in the documents. Yeah, well, and now you get, you know, instead of getting your 5% margin on the job, you're getting 40% on the grass. So that, it's, it's a, these are just things that come along, like, uh, like, uh. on, on, on a ship, you, you just collect these things, you go along in the water. If you're paying any attention at all, and you don't, you shouldn't be doing acquiring by acquisition if you're not, if you're not enjoying it and paying attention. So when you ask, how did you learn this, these barnacles just collect. So you, in 2010, you launched, launched a Shanahan Training LLC and that was a pretty nice run, it looks like, cause you acquired CPR experts, Delios emergency medical training, heart attacks, bandage training, vital signs training, and Liberty emer emergency services. That was a pretty nice run, it looks like. Right. So, the company we bought for Son number 3, when he came back into the partnership, when the first deal didn't work out, uh, uh, I said, have you got anything else? I'm out here now. If you got something else, I can look at. Uh, and he says, yeah, there's a training company. He said, I like the training company. I like the, I, I preferred the uh the catering because you guys have all the knowledge about this training company looks great. I said, well, make a, make it. appointment. So this is in the morning, we're having coffee together, the three of us, and he makes an appointment, we get an appointment in the afternoon. Turns out to be our, uh, it's, uh, what's called CPR and Advanced cardiac life support training, which if you were in the medical field, any type of medical and dentists, doctors, nurses, if you're in the medical field, you cannot practice without a, an up to-date American Heart Association certification for CPR training. So it's mandated, it's mandated training. This is the model. It's mandated training every 2 years. It's like razor blades, they got to come back 2 years later. And it's, it's a negative working capital model. They pay in advance. So you have this, so you have, it's actually a negative working as opposed to, you know, needing working as your sales grow, it throws off cash. Yeah, but it's retained earnings though because you still haven't delivered the training yet sometimes prebooked, right? Exactly. So, uh, so we, we bought the company and Dan became the, the manager out there and uh. The seller, uh, in our model, we always try to uh make sure we have chemistry when we're looking at a deal because we want to be involved with that seller the rest of our lives. Yeah, you, you get, you go to them and meet them. You just don't do it over the phone instead of like Warren Buffett sends somebody a letter, send me your books, I'll send you a letter, right? But, but we want not only go, we want to develop. But I, I call it the chemistry dance. We want to feel good about, because these are people we're going to be involved with for a long time, and you don't have to be involved with people you don't like when there's so many opportunities. So we have to feel good about that. We have to trust them. They have to trust us. So there was this energetic, charismatic, enthused guy that was selling this business. His name was Armando. And everything I'd asked for was instant. He was, he, he'd grab it or he would have the book, uh the uh administrator grab it. and Armando was, Armando was excited about life. I mean, he was just a great guy. So I became like a father to him. He was, uh, in his early 30s, and I maintained contact with him after we bought them, and he wanted, he said he wanted to be an attorney. He was selling because he was gonna become an attorney. That was his reason, because he's a young guy, and I'm saying, why are you selling? So, um, Uh, we, we stayed in touch constantly about once every 3 months we're talking. And Armando's always saying to me, when are we gonna do something? And I said, well, whenever you're ready, Armando, we'll fund it. You'll run it, we'll do something. So, with these calls happened over several years. Finally I get a call, uh, and he had a guy that he had worked with, that he says, hey, this guy's looking to do something, and he, he knows this training business. So I bring that guy into uh Houston. Uh, and, uh, I thought this training model was great, but we didn't have anybody to scale it. And, uh, we didn't have anybody that had the contacts to find the businesses. I knew that it was fragment, it was a fragmented industry, but I didn't, I didn't have the. He had a lot of the contacts. So I put together a deal with this guy, I put, I put a business plan together, uh, over 10 years or 8 years, we're going to acquire 10 businesses, and we were gonna, we're gonna put a million equity in the deal. And after 3 and, and a million of available financing, we would, we'd have a million available financing plus a million equity. He comes in with no investment, and over a period of years, he would earn 20% through sweat equity, and we'd go out and make these 10 acquisitions. And, and that was the start of our training, uh, our training companies and scaled up. So we wound up with a total, you see, you've just added, wound up with a total of 1010 companies including Bolt ons. A bolt on would be where we would just buy a smaller company and attach it to the original company and use the original company's back office. And the the, the margins, it was another printing press for cash. So, and this gives me a chance to just segue into something. During this period of time, when we're throwing off all this, and this guy, by the way, we paid him very well. When I'm talking about cash flow, he was the highest paid guy in our company. When I'm talking about cash flow, I'm talking about after his payment. And plus he's earning, he earned this 20% in 5 years. He's now a 20% owner of this subsidiary, and we're 80% owners, which is Shanahan training LLC, separate LLC, yeah, so, uh. Uh, we're, we're, we're spitting out a lot of cash, and the cash is sitting in the operating account that some of your listeners will grasp this. Uh, this cash is sitting in all these various companies operating accounts, idle, earning nothing. Now, inflation at the time, you know, we haven't seen inflation like we're having now since, since, since the, uh, Yeah, 1981, 1981 it was 20%. Uh, and, uh, so we're, we, and I think we're going to see that again. So meanwhile, this, this money is sitting in the bank at 3%, but you're inflation, so you're still losing 3%. And I decided that we needed to open up an investment account. We needed to create another leg. To put money in his investment account. The idea originally was sweep all the cash out of the operating companies, put it in the investment account, earn some money. And uh we weren't really thinking about uh buying stock. We were thinking about, you know, more, uh, fixed investments, bonds and things, and leave it there until we had a next acquisition. Then we pull the cash out, make the next acquisition. So it was a parking place. Well, the cash was coming off so fast. And, uh, we went from in the beginning, we had, we had a lot of, a lot of people and not very much cash of capital. And now, now suddenly we got a lot of capital and we don't have the talent to employ it. So that capital's building up and I decided that, wait a minute, this is another investment arm, and, and which is the Warren Buffett, I mean, we're, we're such micro Warren Buffett, but that's what Warren Buffett does. He's got $360 million invested in other stocks. And so we started taking that excess cash flow and we put it in the market. And so now, uh, that, the cash that we have sitting in the investment account is not a parking place, it's a business. That's one of our legs. So getting back to your. So we, uh, we wind up after we have over 8 years, we, we accomplished our business plan to acquire 10 of these companies. The plan originally was to pause, reflect on it, and then do another 10. With, with having an assistant for the guy we had running that business because he was doing it, he was doing it all alone. Yeah, he was out there making the acquisitions and acquisitions doing due diligence, making it happen, monitoring results and uh we had and we're very decentralized. And I wrote a paper, uh, that's not in the, in that book, but I have a paper now which if you'd like, I'd send it to you on centralization versus decentralization and the risks, what risks you take if you're centralized, what risk you take if you're decentralized. We set up all our operating companies, we're very, we're we're decentralized. So all those training companies were decentralized. Every one of the managers ran it like it was his own business. They have their own check. All the, all the cash is out there, they write the checks. We're in the background as, as uh soft investors, and we just take the cash flow. Yeah, let me, let me ask you, did you ever get together occasionally and kind of cross-pollinate or share best practices, ideas and say, how can we, oh, hey, we're making revenue doing this like. And that this, this other group adds that idea. We did it, but not as well as we should have done. Not nearly as well as we should have. It was part of the problem that we have with the guy running the business. He, he's, uh, the, the level, when we got to 10, he started to have some health issues, he started to have some stress issues. So some of these, these good, uh, creative ideas like you just talked about, weren't getting implemented. And uh so eventually he wanted to, he wanted to sell. He wanted us to sell that. Now I should mention that we, we buy, we buy forever. We're not intending to sell anything. Uh, we're intending to grow this. I have, I got my sons, then we got the grandchildren, but this is supposed to go on forever. And so we're not, so he, uh, he wanted to sell, long story, I won't go through the story. And eventually I agreed to sell for a book by the way, it's in the book, and I mean, he was reaching out to private equity firms without your knowledge. It's in the book, it's in the book, right? So, so we did sell, and by the way, we sold, we sold in June of 20, and I think the market hit bottom in about April 20. So we were able to put all that money to work in that third leg, that leg, that investment leg at really good prices. So, and then we turned that, we turn all that around and then, and we created a new scaling, which is the, uh, and we're up to, we're up to 4 locations now, 3 businesses, uh, one of which is not on that chart I gave you, because we didn't, we acquired them after the book was, uh, we acquired them May 3rd. Uh, so we closed on a transaction for a $12 million revenue business on May 3rd, bought the property also in Florida. So we now have, uh, 3 golf cart sales, service and, and uh rental companies. Yeah, let me, let me go back. Let me go back to the, this, uh, the training business because it's all about CPR and face to face training. COVID kill it after you set it off because, because people had to send people to locations for training, right? It, it, it didn't kill it, and we also had. And, uh, we had, that was the original bull's Eye was the CPR mandate. We increased the bull's Eye as we went along by opportunity and acquired similar businesses. So the first similar business we acquired was a vocational school for nursing vocational. So we acquired a vocational school. The second one we acquired, uh, and the bull, which is slightly outside the bull's eye, was EMTS and medic training. And so, uh, There was very little COVID effect. There was, uh, not what you would, not what you would think of, uh, because they remember they had, they had to have their cards. They couldn't, if their card was expiring, it wouldn't work. They had to have their card. So you got into the, you, you, uh, you, you bought a couple other uh flooring businesses, you closed, clothes, flooring manorial, then you made a big jump to golf carts, which is this, these big, bigger businesses acquisitions, which we did after we did after we sold the training businesses, because now we have a lot of cash. And we had, we knew how to scale. We had learned how to scale, so that became our scale. Just, just let me back up on the flooring, cause I haven't explained it. It's in the book, but I haven't explained it. The flooring was, remember I accommodated my number 3 son. Uh, so now my #2, my number 4 son walks in on with his wife on a Sunday morning, and they part of this. They want to move to Austin. They want to move to Austin. And I said, well, you, you know, your job is here. Yeah, but we want to move to Austin, etc. And when I'm resisting, you know, I get the final needle was, well, you did it for Dan. I I think I gotta tell you, James, people are gonna say, well, how do I become a son of James? Well, I, I, I can tell you that family was always first. And everything we did, family was always first. It is, and I also say that you get rewarded or punished in the last third of your life for what you did in your 1st 2/3. I'm definitely in my last third. And so I, and I feel good, you know, I, I think I might not look as good as I feel, but I feel good because I, you know, I, I, uh, I put family first over everything. So I accommodated uh my sons and, and I, so this, he wants to move to Austin. I said, OK. When he threw the damn thing at me, I said, OK, I'll make you the same deal as Dan. $500 a week, you go over to Austin, get a broker, find a business, and the business he found was flooring. That's how we got into the flooring. And it was a good and same model again. You're, uh, it's a, it's like a contracting business. You have material on labor, uh, and, uh, good margins. Uh, it's a, you know, every, uh, there's a, uh, I'd say every 7 years people change their flooring. Yeah, it's like beds or two, like uh mattresses and stuff. Yeah, you just follow the housing and you're following them. So it's a great, so we then acquired another one over there, and, and then we, we're gonna roll it out over here in Houston, and it, it's a long story in the book about why we didn't roll it out. We eventually sold the, the Austin to the number 3 son. He, uh number 4 son. He's a lot like me and he doesn't like authority. And so, uh, I'm an authority figure. So, uh, to, to accommodate that situation, I said, you know, you, you're gonna accept this authority at the bit. You're gonna accept this bit, or, uh, you're gonna just become a salesman. For anybody that's not doing what he's talking about, he's talking about horse bits. OK. I, I said that, or you're just gonna become a salesman. We don't have any other job for you. I said, but I'll give you one other option so you don't feel trapped. I said, we'll sell you the business. And we'll finance it. We'll sell you the business and we'll find, he took that last option. He bought the business, we financed it. Uh, we financed it because he sold some of his shares back to the, back to the partnership, and we took that money to finance them, and he eventually sold and he made money on the sale, and now he's, he's doing properties and some other things. He's still not back in the partnership. Huh. And we haven't invited him back to the partnership. So he's inactive, the eldest son is inactive. I got two active partners, which is the number 2 and 3. They're running things. Yeah, would you say it's difficult to have, you know, your son so involved in, you know, your personal life and your business life and, and that relationship? There's a whole section in the book about what complications family businesses have. And if you're not willing, if you're not willing to work with those, with those complications, then you shouldn't do it. And one of, one of the complications that we, I, I believe I saw ahead of time and head it off is we had two issues when we formed a partnership. One, no wives, no wives in the business. Two, buy-sell agreements. Everybody, so nobody could feel trapped. If you, if you're in the business and, and you, and you don't like the, the, the authority or the rules. We'll buy out, you know, make us an and nobody has exercised to buy sell. They, they did exercise. Hey, we could use some cash right now as opposed to getting cash later and, uh, and we'll, we're willing to, uh. Sell the equity back to the partnership to get this cash now. So, two of the sons took, took some cash out. Do you recommend, let's say some of your sons don't have the entrepreneurial jobs that you do? Do you recommend like, hey, I need you to go to this 6 month training class or 3 week training class or read this guy or or suggest they get into masterminds or things like that? Yeah, 2 things. I sent, I sent the partner we, we bought out, the one in The one that was in the training. I sent him and my son, Dan and my son, Mike. I, I'm the general partner. So the general partner has total control over the, over the capital. So, And they're in my will, the 3 of those guys were in my will, that when I pass, the general partnership goes to those 3 guys. A third, so they each, the general partner has 1%. So they each wind up with a 33. 13%, and they, you know, and they would now have the decisions, but it would take 2 or 3 votes. And one of those votes is going to be the outside guy. He's no longer now it's the 2 votes on, on my two sons. So, uh, And as part of that, Uh, I gifted away the final remaining shares I had. In 2015. So, I only have the 1% general partner. Uh, nobody has to kiss my ring. Everybody, they're, they're the owners of the business plan. And no, no wives buy sell agreement. And I sent them all, I sent them, I sent these three guys to a school in Chicago, run by a Canadian, I forget the guy's name. It's all about delegation, because I had, you know, I, I had gotten where I was at, I pointed that out to him by delegating everything to those guys. Yeah. Now, in addition, in the back of this book, there's a thing called business essays, which were really papers that I wrote over the years, which were instructions when we run into something and my sons needed more training. To clarify in my own head, I would document what I was trying to teach. Yeah, these are like constitutions. Like, if you ever got in trouble, just go back to the Constitution, back to the rules, right. Yeah, that was, so they're and they're gonna find some, some things in there in 10 years from now that will be valuable to them then that aren't valuable now. But there, there, there is a, there is a If you set the structure up right and you train and be willing to delegate, I'm sure, do you have children, Jim? Yeah, I got twins, boy and a girl. Yeah, and, and, and, uh, sometimes they look pretty stupid, but you, we, we forget how stupid we were at certain points in my life. And, and so I'm, I'm willing, uh, I learned early that you gotta, you gotta see them the way you were then. And be willing to delegate on that basis. You can't, can't be delegating. Yeah, I, I like from the outside, I'd say, man, uh, to your sons, how, uh, Lucky you are to have a mentor right next to you, like that. and how lucky I was to have these 4 guys who were 100%. I mean, you can't have anybody more loyal than these guys. There's no, there's no castles, treachery, there's, there's no backstabbing. There's, this is, this is the way small businesses should be. And these guys, we're equally loyal to each other. My sons, early in the, when we started to accrue some cash. Uh, we used to have, uh, at that ski place we had, we, we would have our annual partner meeting. And, uh, uh, and one of the things that came up in the, one of the first meetings was I said, look, we've got, we've been accruing cash. Here's our situation on the cash. I said, we can pay dividends if you'd like. And I said, uh, I'll leave it up to you and uh if you vote for the dividends, we'll pay dividends. I thought I said, here's what's going to happen with dividends. The dividends, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna, your wife is gonna probably spend it all and, and, and buy things you don't need. But even if you, you don't have that happen, let's say you're smart enough that you invest it. You're gonna invest. We're making 25% return on investment. You're gonna take after-tax money and, and are you going to be able to earn 25% somewhere else with that after-tax money? And they all agreed, Charlie, uh, Charlie Munger on one shoulder and Warren Buffett on the other talking that that, that's my mentors, exactly. So they said no with no dividend, so we have never paid a dividend. 30 years, we've never paid it. All the money has been reinvested. Never paid a dividend, and they, and they've never come to me. I, I never had one son come to me and say, hey, I need a raise. I, you know, or, or, you know, why can't I take some money out of it? N, has never happened. I mean, so I, I'm, I'm at the other side. I'm lucky to have had these guys. These are, these are good, these are good guys. They were, uh, my wife was the, uh, at the time, uh, until she passed away early, was the most unselfish woman I've ever met. And they, they all, they all picked up the, this character this character traits from their mother. And, and I've been training them on business and mixing that in and Yeah, so we're both lucky. Yeah, that's fantastic. I, I, I wanna kinda answer some, ask you some kind of personal questions like, uh, I mean, is there any kind of business or opportunities you uh will turn down now? I mean, let's say right now you've got a number of operating businesses, you definitely like the golf carts business, but is there any kind of opportunities you do turn down just like, no, right out of the bat? Yeah, if it's a dirty business, uh, gambling. Uh, well, payoffs. You know, debt collection or anything like that. No, I mean, you know, there are a lot of in contracting businesses, you know, there's a lot of guys getting money to be favored. We, we, we won't touch, we don't do any cash business. We buy some businesses that have cash, whether, whether, you know, and it's not going across the book, and we immediately put it through the books. We don't do anything to reduce our taxes. We have, we have a, a statement, we say we'd rather overpay our taxes and sleep at night. So we don't, nothing dirty. Anything that's, and there are a lot of dirty businesses out there, so won't touch a dirty business. Yeah, this is my personal question. You, you mentioned, why did you move everything to QuickBooks, you know, you talked about Sage, you talk about Great Plains, but why did you like QuickBooks so much? By the way, I worked for Intuit for 5 years, so I, I like QuickBooks too, yeah. So, when I bought the, the, uh, well, when we started um the franchise. The, we hired an outside bookkeeper who was an accounting firm, and he used QuickBooks. Prior to that, you know, I had no knowledge about QuickBooks. I worked in big companies, you know, huge companies. Yeah, yeah, they don't use QuickBooks. It's for good for SMBs. So this guy used QuickBooks. So, uh, we adopted QuickBooks from, from that. And then when I bought the manufacturing company, they were using Peachtree and uh uh the uh Uh, There was an accountant we had at the catering company. Uh, and she, she, uh, so we started using QuickBooks Catering Company. So I, and her husband, ex, well was her husband at the time. He was a CPA and she said he could install QuickBooks for us at James. So I brought him to install in this install QuickBooks because Peachtree was a, a batch system. It wasn't, it wasn't, uh, user-friendly. So we've been QuickBooks ever since and we've never had anything too large for QuickBooks. Now, our recent acquisitions. In the retail business because there's a lot of what they call point of sale business in retail businesses, yeah, right. So we've, we use whatever software they're currently operating under this point of sale, we use that. So we're using, we're using on. Uh, 2 acquisitions ago we're using Sage. One acquisition ago, I mean, the one we just acquired is using Sage. We just updated, modernized it. If you've ever heard of Sage. Yeah, yeah, I do know Sage. Also, so the, the, the papers, the papers are what I give my sons. You asked about the question what, so I sent them to seminars that, that, uh, that I think apply. Uh, I, I give them these papers and I tell them, I, I, I have an expression, I say, I tell them, I tell them what I told him and I tell him again, and then I audit. And then I tell them, I tell him I told him, and I tell him again, and then I audit. Now, today, when I audit, when I ask questions, I always, I always sign to distinguish what role I have on, what hat I'm wearing. If I'm just giving advice, I sign at Coach Gym. They don't have to, they don't, Coach Jim means you don't have to do it if you don't want to. I'm coaching you. If I write uh Jim Shannon and General Parker, now that's, that's an order. But they're very seldom, I do that now. It's all, it's 99% coach Jim. So Coach Jim might say, look, you need to read this book. Uh, uh, you know, you need to read The Accidental Entrepreneur, and you need to keep it on your shelf because in the back of that book is going to be a reference document for the, for, for all times. And I keep putting those papers on. I, I put two papers out this week. One was on the moat, you know, what Warren Buffett calls the moat, and I wrote a paper on centralization and decentralization. So I'll, I'll, I continue to write the papers. And there are a lot more papers that I didn't include in that book. So that's the education, the, the continuing education for this. By the way, I'm constantly reading myself. I'm being continually educated myself, and I'm, and I'm mentoring people. But, uh, there's a guy that, uh, got on LinkedIn and wrote a review I saw, and he says he knows you from a couple of years, he went to some class with you, and he's in Lithuania. I'm, I'm mentoring two guys in Lithuania. One is the one, they, and they both are from Israel. One immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, and the other immigrated to Israel from Russia, and they're partners now, and I'm mentoring them. I have a call every week, a Zoom call with them. I, no kidding. What was his name? Maxim, Maxim, uh, Gro Groman, Maxim Groman, and Nikita, the second other guy. But Maxim says, you know, I told him about this call. He said, I know Johnny. He says, I was, I said, how do you know him? I said, I went to a class with him. I said, Do you know him from the, the LinkedIn business? And he said, No, I went to a class with him. Oh, OK, I gotta look that up. And he, he put a review in the uh On the LinkedIn thing, you were, you had your review. I honestly, that was, I, I really feel, you know, that you're a knowledgeable guy and I really got, I really got excited about the, the positive for you. I want to thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a, I, out of all the books I've read, I mean some of them are instructional, but this is so detailed about each specific uh acquisition, like what you went through, how where you found it, what you offered him, how much you paid, what the deal stack looked like, uh, the problems that happened after you integrated it. Um, sold, operating, or closed. All of that is in 27, 28 different businesses, and I don't think I've read a book like that before, so I, I love it. OK, great. I, I wrote a book before this called the uh Finding the Angle, but I wrote that book pri primarily for my grandchildren, but in it, Uh, you know, when you write, I don't know how much writing you do, probably a lot. But you discover, which I discovered most of the stuff I've discovered late in life. When I, when I talked to these two guys I'm mentoring in Lithuania. I, I say to them, honestly, you, you know, I, I, I just envy you guys. You're, they're both in their late 20s and they're learning things that I didn't learn until I was in my 60s. I know, I see that too. I go, man, I, do I envy you guys. So I, I, you know, I'm still learning things and, and, and it's amazing how much more you can learn and, and it's uh. As I said, I'm a voyeur on businesses. I love, I love looking and that's one of the reasons I like looking at your podcast, because somebody's in there talking about their business. But as I mentioned to you when we first talked, that often you'll ask them a question about something about the actual, how did it, how did it come out, you know, what happened? And it, it stays too broad. It doesn't, so I, I, I deliberately made the second book. I knew that there wasn't a book out there that I could see. That went into the detail. So, and if you, if you follow the things I've laid out, anybody can do it that is willing to, to, to willing, willing to first of all, put some money in, and then secondly, understand a little accounting, and then third, to be disciplined and consistent. Yeah, yeah, and we all we try to do is hit singles and doubles. We're not trying to, we've never hit a home run and don't, and aren't trying to hit a home run. Singles and doubles. I, I made a post about that just a couple weeks ago, like most of the Major League baseball hits are singles and doubles, and you move the base around, you know, I've never had the ability to like hit a home run and just out of the park. It's just singles and doubles. Yeah. Well, man, I, I, I really appreciate this. I, I, I, I, I, I really appreciate that. We are already passed an hour, and I want to just thank you so much for your time talking about your book. Everybody get on uh Amazon, it's pre-order, it's accidental entrepreneur, practical guide to financial freedom through successful business acquisitions. Yes, and, and they can also get on, uh, what's it called? Good books? Good reads or good books. No, there's a, uh, it's, it's the publishing. A company that Amazon uses and no. I don't know what it is. I can't. I'm sorry, I don't have the name not much on promoting, I guess. So when will, when will this podcast be available to see? Oh, it's gonna be available in the next 24 hours. Really that fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a little bit behind. I got behind on some projects, so I gotta get this podcast out. Well, I'm impressed with your with the way you schedule things that you throw that out. there and bam, and then you're, when it's time to get off, you're getting off. So I'm, I'm not gonna hold you any longer. I, again, this is one of those in. I hope we become friends and, uh, I think this is the start of a friendship. And, uh, cause I, I, I like, I like what you do and I like the way you do it. Uh, thank you so much. I have learned so much from you just from your book and getting an hour with you. So thank you so much. Thank you, John. All right, take care.