Buyers and Builders
00:13:16 · Mikk
[00:13:16] S0: I wanna ask here, what about the underwriting risk when it comes to this acquisition? You twenty years ago and you today. How much you I know it could be like a very loaded answer, loaded question, but how do you view maybe deals and people differently compared to who were back then and all the lessons you've learned. Because it's a like Staff One, it looks like a very attractive search deal on paper, recurring revenue, succession driven seller, sticky service, fragmented market. It's... It could be a great acquisition today as well.
00:13:52 · Mark Sinatra
[00:13:52] S1: Yeah, that's a really good question because the environment... I mean, you know, it's different nowadays, right? But a lot of the core tenants of what investors look for and search operators look for in acquisitions have stayed the same, right? I mean, it's still kind of tried and true predictable revenue streams, recurring or highly, highly reoccurring. Potential to to scale, like you said, you know, large growing, industries, certain level of fragmentation. But at the same time, there's a there's a lot that has changed since that time. You know, number one, we obviously have significant AI opportunities and potential for disruption. And so, so that is certainly a lens that that, you know, searchers and investors really look through when when you're, you know, they're evaluating opportunities today is AI more of an opportunity or or disruptive threat to to the mode of that business? Number two would be the proliferation of private equity, particularly like in the in the lower middle market. And so what that has done is it's been a double edged sword. Right? On one hand, private equity has been a fantastic partner on on the exit side for searcher operated businesses. But at the same time, private equity has has also, you know, been an increasingly, you know, more kind of serious, you know, kind of competitive, you know, competitor, for for a lot of, search acquired companies on the buy side. Whether that's, you know, as a platform or or what's maybe more common as, an add on to a a PE backed platform. And so now you have to look as a searcher, industries that could be attractive, you know, twenty years ago, right, like the PEO industry as an example, that didn't have really barely any private equity at that time. Now, there's a lot of private equity in that industry, right? There's a lot of private equity in HVAC. There's a lot of private equity in MSPs. So, and you know, the list kind of goes on and on a bit. So, you know, you got to be really mindful of, okay, if you're searching in an industry, what's what, you know, is there kind of the realistic cost to buy into that industry? And are you gonna be, you know, spinning your wheels, talking to owners at, you know, that have this really inflated valuation expectations based on the market.
00:16:39 · Mark Sinatra
And so, and then number three, is, and this kind of relates more directly to your question, my experience with my search operated company, One, the the amount of technological tools that exist nowadays to foster workforce collaboration and to make that seamless, efficient, effective across the world, across countries, across states and regions, is is quite quite impressive. Right? There's just so many options out there. And when I think back to to to my experience, you know, at at, you know, Staff One, you know, we just didn't have those level of collaborative tools like like the one we're on now. Right? You know, Zoom, Teams, Slack, etcetera, etcetera. And so I asked myself, well, you know, if you had a business, and, you know, in my case, you know, I ended up moving that that company down down to Dallas after a couple years, you know, whatever, I just kept the headquarters there. And I probably, you know, would've if, you know, we had all of these collaborative, tools and the technology that we had today. Right? So in other words, like, you know, thinking at a business and, you know, the remote workforce, and there's certainly been a reversion, closer reversion back to to to, you know, working in the office. But still, you know, a lot of small medium sized companies are still hybrid or remote and they're using that as an advantage to grow. They're using that as an advantage to to hire because they're not constricted or constrained by geographical, borders. And so that's a really interesting dynamic today that didn't exist twenty years ago.
00:18:34 · Mikk
[00:18:34] S0: So you bought the business very close into the great financial crisis. Could you explain the first maybe a year, you as a first time buyer operating the business? Maybe you can share like how much depth you were using and how was the day to day when it comes to you operating the business? And how was the reality now? Because again, it was your first very first acquisition.
00:19:02 · Mark Sinatra
[00:19:02] S1: Yeah. The timing was was really, really tough. Right? You know, if I didn't buy the business at that at that point in time, Mikk, I'd probably have hair like like you have. You know? It's... It was very... It it it it was super tough because, you know, we had clients that some of which, you know, were, were going out of business. A lot of them were looking at ways to significantly cut costs and, you know, to their credit, you know, we, they had asked us for, you know, reduced fees and, you know, we, it's kind of one of those things where you have to really think about, you know, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And so you kind of, you know, work with them to, to retain the client, but you have that margin erosion there. You know, all at the same time concurrently trying to learn the business as well. And I remember it was like, you know, two or three months after we closed, there was a, we had a high deductible workers' comp program with one of our, with our clients. And we had an employee that unfortunately had a bad accident, and that was a max deductible, $250,000 claim that we had to come out of pocket for. So we had all this stuff happen, right, in the first, like, three to six months. I went in and it forced forced me to really learn the business very, very quickly and to to, you know, be, obviously extremely hands on, but I felt like I was constantly fighting, fires and putting out fires and was operating in like more of a reactive mode, if you will. You know, I got a question the other day. I thought it was really interesting. Nobody had had asked me this. And the question was, you know, during that search CEO period of of, you know, nine years, when did I first feel like, you know, I was a CEO? And I thought that was a really interesting question because when I look back on it, you know, there were so many mistakes I made, particularly like in the in the earlier years. And part of that is learning to become a CEO. But I personally didn't feel like I was a CEO until I was able to figure out the winning formula from a talent perspective. And that's putting exceptional people in the right roles and providing them the resources and the vision that they needed to grow and to excel.
00:21:54 · Mark Sinatra
And once I kind of figured that out, and unfortunately for me, this is, you know, quite, quite embarrassing, but, you know, I didn't really figure that out until, well, I figured it out. I didn't have that set in place, I should say, till at least, you know, I want to say three to four years, you know, into the deal. Took me too long to get there. But once I got there, Mikk, that's when I was able to finally work on the business versus versus in the business. And when I say like more specifically, you know, I was able to devote much more time to growing, you know, organic revenue, to helping the sales team, to, you know, our marketing strategy and redesigning that, and then ultimately focused on, add on acquisitions as well. So stuff that really kind of moved the needle from a growth perspective. And it's no coincidence that, you know, our growth really then started to kinda take off. You know, once once I started putting really, really good people in in those right seats, it just unlocked the the entire business. But for the first few years, you know, I was just... I was fighting fires. I was I was reactive. And again, you know, I didn't really figure out and execute the winning formula until till about three or four years in.