Latest / The Turn: Blue Collar to Billions / From 2 Million-Dollar Jobs to Dozens: How He Scaled a Fence Company

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From 2 Million-Dollar Jobs to Dozens: How He Scaled a Fence Company · The Turn: Blue Collar to Billions

• 0:01
  Kory Mitchell: Welcome back to the Turn.
• 0:02
  Kory Mitchell: I'm Kory Mitchell of Iconic Founders.
• 0:05
  Kory Mitchell: Iconic, we help businesses in the construction industry scale and sell their companies.
• 0:10
  Kory Mitchell: If you know someone who's thinking about going on that journey or is looking to break through the next level, have them reach out to us at iconicfounders.com.
• 0:19
  Kory Mitchell: This second episode of Brenden Van Buren is really about the amazing growth from acquiring a business through multiple acquisitions, adding service lines, growing organically all the way to selling the company, and the lessons he learned from those who bought it.
• 0:38
  Kory Mitchell: So let's get into it.
• 0:40
  Kory Mitchell: So let's talk about that that transition to where you had never really run anything, right?
• 0:46
  Kory Mitchell: You'd been a project manager, you went to work for your dad.
• 0:50
  Kory Mitchell: What was the most surprising thing about like actually taking over?
• 0:55
  Kory Mitchell: And like what are some of the tough maybe lessons you had to learn over like that first six months to a year?
• 1:01
  Brenden Van Buren: Yeah.
• 1:01
  Brenden Van Buren: I I think the hardest part is getting that hiring and firing responsibility.
• 1:06
  Brenden Van Buren: I would say as a project manager, I was managing teams and people and processes.
• 1:12
  Brenden Van Buren: And I ended up having to do a lot of debating and all types of stuff, but I didn't really have the hiring and firing authority.
• 1:19
  Brenden Van Buren: And so taking that in terms of, I mean, hiring's tough.
• 1:24
  Brenden Van Buren: Finding the right people, and I mean, I'd say I'm wrong half the time.
• 1:28
  Brenden Van Buren: You know, it unfortunately Yeah, you and everybody else.
• 1:31
  Brenden Van Buren: Yeah, you know, you hire someone and they're just not the right fit.
• 1:34
  Brenden Van Buren: They either realize it, you realize it somewhere you got to make a change.
• 1:37
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, and so that's really pretty common.
• 1:41
  Brenden Van Buren: And that's tough though.
• 1:43
  Brenden Van Buren: I was trying to hire some laborers right off the bat, and one in like 10 were showing up, right?
• 1:49
  Brenden Van Buren: So, like at the time, our HR uh person slash payroll person, she was you know setting up these interviews for me.
• 1:57
  Brenden Van Buren: And I'd be like, where is this person?
• 1:58
  Brenden Van Buren: And it almost became like a joke with us, like they're just not showing up because uh it's really hard to find people that want to work.
• 2:06
  Brenden Van Buren: So I I'd say that part, and then doing the performance management.
• 2:11
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, you learn about it in school.
• 2:12
  Brenden Van Buren: I've been a slight part of it at No Enterprise, uh, my family's business, but I'd never been like responsible purely for performance management or performance improvement plans or you know, any of those types of things whenever something isn't going the way you want.
• 2:28
  Brenden Van Buren: It's easy.
• 2:29
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, it's easy, it's necessary, but it's easier to give good feedback, right?
• 2:33
  Brenden Van Buren: Oh, you're doing a good job, uh, but it's whenever something's not going well, giving that feedback is tough.
• 2:39
  Brenden Van Buren: So I'd say that's the biggest thing that I had to learn to do well is is really that.
• 2:45
  Brenden Van Buren: And I mean, I go to my mentors along the way.
• 2:48
  Brenden Van Buren: So, you know, my between my dad, Russ, who you know, I bought the business from, I got a lot of feedback from them in terms of, hey, what do I do here?
• 2:57
  Brenden Van Buren: We had all types of HR issues that I don't want to go into too much detail on.
• 3:01
  Brenden Van Buren: Yeah, but um, you had we had to deal with those.
• 3:04
  Brenden Van Buren: And that was definitely within the first few months you had to deal with them.
• 3:08
  Brenden Van Buren: And it's like, okay, what do we do now?
• 3:10
  Brenden Van Buren: And creating that strategy and working on it's it's tough.
• 3:14
  Kory Mitchell: When I was building my own business and growing it and scaling it, I made so many mistakes.
• 3:19
  Kory Mitchell: I just wish I would have had someone there for me that was in my corner that could have talked to once a week or once a quarter.
• 3:27
  Kory Mitchell: And so we at Iconic Founders Group, that's what we do.
• 3:31
  Kory Mitchell: We help businesses to grow and scale.
• 3:34
  Kory Mitchell: We serve as board advisors for businesses that are one, two, three years out.
• 3:39
  Kory Mitchell: And then when it's time, we help walk you through the steps and actually take you all the way through the exit process.
• 3:46
  Kory Mitchell: We know what it's like, we've been through it.
• 3:48
  Kory Mitchell: Our team are a lot of folks that look a lot like me, someone who's built and sold a meaningful size business in the construction industry.
• 3:57
  Kory Mitchell: So if we can ever help you, we'd love to be someone in your corner.
• 4:01
  Kory Mitchell: Reach out to us at iconicfounders.com or email me.
• 4:05
  Kory Mitchell: Info at iconicfounders.com.
• 4:08
  Kory Mitchell: So, where did you see the opportunity in this business?
• 4:10
  Kory Mitchell: Uh I know you're gonna do some add-on acquisitions, but where did you see the levers of growth, you know, in order to do to believe in buying this thing?
• 4:18
  Brenden Van Buren: There were several levers.
• 4:19
  Brenden Van Buren: One, I just kind of looked at and some of them didn't work out, right?
• 4:23
  Brenden Van Buren: So, like, uh I think that's we tell our searchers you gotta go in with five strategies.
• 4:28
  Brenden Van Buren: And if, you know, because a couple of them aren't gonna work, and so you got to know when to to make adjustments.
• 4:35
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, the one that didn't, well, I mean, didn't pan out.
• 4:38
  Brenden Van Buren: We're doing fine with it, but residential is like 65% of fence, the fence industry.
• 4:44
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, we were doing like seven, eight percent of our business was residential.
• 4:50
  Brenden Van Buren: And it's like, oh, well, there's a big opportunity.
• 4:51
  Brenden Van Buren: There's we should be able to sell more residential fence.
• 4:54
  Brenden Van Buren: It's a tighter market um than commercial.
• 4:57
  Brenden Van Buren: There's not as many barriers to entry.
• 4:59
  Brenden Van Buren: You know, hindsight would would tell me that.
• 5:01
  Brenden Van Buren: But uh, so that's that's something we've done well at, but really haven't grown to the the the scale that I uh a commercial fence and a residential fence business are are kind of two different things.
• 5:12
  Brenden Van Buren: the things that have worked is I I guess I'll point out three of them.
• 5:18
  Brenden Van Buren: One was uh the fragmented industry, which meant there were acquisitions.
• 5:23
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, we've done a ton of I mean a fair amount of acquisitions.
• 5:26
  Brenden Van Buren: I've done a couple tuck-ins that I are kind of outside that six.
• 5:30
  Brenden Van Buren: That definitely has has panned out very well.
• 5:34
  Kory Mitchell: Um the next one was were these in different geographies around the state?
• 5:38
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh yeah, so I mean within a few hours, but you know, slightly different geographies.
• 5:43
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh one one was a slightly, I mean, we've acquired a um kind of an auxiliary product in terms of we had access control making gates open and closed.
• 5:53
  Brenden Van Buren: Now we can do the cameras and stuff in a couple markets from an acquisition we made.
• 5:57
  Brenden Van Buren: So like the first one was 30 minutes up the road, and they did a little bit more residential than we did.
• 6:02
  Brenden Van Buren: And so that was one of the acquisitions.
• 6:04
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, one was an hour from here, a competitor of ours that we we folded in.
• 6:08
  Brenden Van Buren: And so a little bit of everything, both product mix and and geography.
• 6:13
  Brenden Van Buren: the next strategy was just I was from central Pennsylvania.
• 6:18
  Brenden Van Buren: I knew a lot of general contractors from central Pennsylvania, I had a network there.
• 6:22
  Brenden Van Buren: I also knew the heavy highway industry really well.
• 6:26
  Brenden Van Buren: Promax had done some heavy highway work, but those were uh expanding west towards the markets that I was familiar with in Pennsylvania.
• 6:35
  Brenden Van Buren: I I grew up about three hours west of Reading, and so that's where my network was.
• 6:40
  Brenden Van Buren: And so I was like, oh, I can execute, I have a network of general contractors here.
• 6:44
  Brenden Van Buren: We could start selling to them.
• 6:45
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh we ended up opening an office in 2021 in State College because it was a good kind of move in that direction.
• 6:53
  Brenden Van Buren: the last or the next one was just my familiarity was with large projects.
• 6:58
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, I managed, you know, at the end of my time at my family's business, a $50 million bridge project.
• 7:06
  Brenden Van Buren: Managing a million dollar or two million or five million dollar fence project really was very simple compared to those projects.
• 7:14
  Brenden Van Buren: And so I felt like we could start taking on bigger work, which is something we've really succeeded at, I'd say significantly.
• 7:22
  Brenden Van Buren: Our win rate on the big work has gone up pretty much every year.
• 7:26
  Brenden Van Buren: I think before I acquired Pro Max, they'd done like two jobs over a million dollars.
• 7:32
  Brenden Van Buren: We've done dozens of jobs over a million dollars now.
• 7:35
  Brenden Van Buren: And so those are good work, especially now.
• 7:38
  Brenden Van Buren: There's data centers.
• 7:39
  Brenden Van Buren: We're doing tons of data center work now.
• 7:41
  Brenden Van Buren: Those are all really high high security, expensive fence projects, which I think we're very capable of managing.
• 7:49
  Brenden Van Buren: And so those, I'd say those are kind of the three that worked and panned out.
• 7:53
  Kory Mitchell: And one other you mentioned already as well is the is the service line, right?
• 7:56
  Kory Mitchell: We with the the add-on acquisition, it had some new service lines that you weren't able to do.
• 8:01
  Kory Mitchell: Did did you grow that service line throughout the rest of the business?
• 8:05
  Brenden Van Buren: So that goes into there's there's things you run into that you're not planning on, right?
• 8:09
  Brenden Van Buren: And so there's this access control, which you know, I talked to Russ, and he's like, oh yeah, we we also do some gate automation, right?
• 8:16
  Brenden Van Buren: And so as you're diving into it, you're like, well, this gate automation thing's a really good product mix, product offering.
• 8:23
  Brenden Van Buren: And so I I mean, pretty much we've been trying to hire as many technicians in that space as we possibly can since I bought the business.
• 8:32
  Brenden Van Buren: It it was it's been it took some time figuring out how to find those people, and I can't even tell you we're still 100% successful at doing that.
• 8:40
  Brenden Van Buren: We already talked hiring people is the toughest thing.
• 8:42
  Brenden Van Buren: But that was a service line that we've grown significantly that I didn't even know or I hadn't I hadn't really put any stock into whenever I bought the business.
• 8:53
  Brenden Van Buren: And so, you know, our goal is to get that to 30 plus percent of our business by 2029 now.
• 9:00
  Brenden Van Buren: And and um there are additional service offerings that we can offer with that.
• 9:04
  Kory Mitchell: Brenden had a vision for where he was going to take this company.
• 9:08
  Kory Mitchell: He started out knowing that there was a real opportunity, and so many buyers that are looking to acquire in this space, they start out with the knowledge that there's an opportunity for growth.
• 9:21
  Kory Mitchell: Brenden saw multiple of those avenues.
• 9:25
  Kory Mitchell: He added service lines, he did business development with general contractors that the company'd never worked for before.
• 9:33
  Kory Mitchell: And so by knowing where the business could go before he even bought it, he was able to really build a vision and execute on it.
• 9:42
  Kory Mitchell: So, I mean, you got Resi didn't work, but you know, four pieces really did.
• 9:47
  Kory Mitchell: You know, you fragmented markets, so you can buy some add-ons, some in different geographies.
• 9:52
  Kory Mitchell: You you add service lines, you add n market, you know, which is these additional sort of GCs and other markets that you had some relationships with through like I guess business development and then larger projects, right?
• 10:05
  Kory Mitchell: So, I mean that's there's a major unlock in growth opportunity there.
• 10:09
  Brenden Van Buren: Yeah, and and to me, it takes I mean we talked about bottlenecks, you know.
• 10:13
  Brenden Van Buren: I I I'm not a I mean, I'm a a lean thinker.
• 10:17
  Brenden Van Buren: I can't say I'm the best at running a lean management or a Keynesian program, but what I would say is I look for bottlenecks and I try to unclog them.
• 10:25
  Brenden Van Buren: And the owner, Russ, and he'll admit it, I mean, he was a bottleneck, right?
• 10:30
  Brenden Van Buren: And so the first thing I had to unclog, or one of the first few things I had unclogged was myself, which really, I mean, I would I mean, I'm a big fan, don't make any drastic changes in the first, you know, six to twelve months.
• 10:44
  Brenden Van Buren: But after that, start making those changes.
• 10:47
  Brenden Van Buren: And so I I hired JP, my my operations manager, pretty quickly so that I got out of the day-to-day scheduling of the business and cruise, because that was a huge bottleneck and we couldn't grow uh without unclogging that.
• 11:02
  Brenden Van Buren: And I think that's you know, in the search fund world or really any the the entrepreneurship through acquisition or any small business world, even even if you start your own business, you got to look for your next bottleneck.
• 11:14
  Brenden Van Buren: And you know, currently I'm working on unclogging, unclogging myself again.
• 11:18
  Brenden Van Buren: And so, you know, we're we're probably gonna hire a president role here very shortly, and that's because I've become the bottleneck again, right?
• 11:26
  Brenden Van Buren: And it just anytime you're the bottleneck, you stagnate growth.
• 11:30
  Brenden Van Buren: And and so early on, we've we kind of went through and there were kind of three bottlenecks.
• 11:35
  Brenden Van Buren: So it was myself on the billing and scheduling side that was causing strain.
• 11:40
  Brenden Van Buren: There was we were at our capacity from an estimator, so we hired an estimator pretty early on, and our project managers couldn't really handle many more projects, and so we hired a project coordinator, and so it was kind of looking at what are the next things.
• 11:54
  Brenden Van Buren: You know, it it's one of the toughest things in in business is though you make those investments, and it does take 12 plus months with most sales cycles to make them pan out, right?
• 12:04
  Brenden Van Buren: And so uh, I mean, I I didn't hire my operations manager until I kind of felt like we were getting to that point where I was gonna quickly become the bottleneck.
• 12:13
  Brenden Van Buren: Although I had been talking to him since the day I moved to Reading because he was my best friend from high school, and I was like, you need to come work for me.
• 12:21
  Brenden Van Buren: And first I tried to hire him as a project manager, and he wouldn't take the job.
• 12:24
  Brenden Van Buren: So I eventually got a role that I could convince him to come to.
• 12:28
  Brenden Van Buren: But you know, point is you gotta look for those bottlenecks and start on clogging them, or you're not gonna grow.
• 12:34
  Kory Mitchell: So often the number one problem in small businesses is actually the owner.
• 12:39
  Kory Mitchell: Brenden calls it the owner bottleneck.
• 12:42
  Kory Mitchell: Well, it's true that the owner can be literally the primary thing that holds back growth in a company.
• 12:50
  Kory Mitchell: What we learned from his story is that moving himself out of the way actually created opportunity for the business to grow and thrive.
• 12:59
  Kory Mitchell: He brought in a key number two that he trusted.
• 13:02
  Kory Mitchell: And that move really was a differentiator for him because it meant that if he wasn't there every day of the week, it could actually continue running without him.
• 13:12
  Kory Mitchell: And if he were gonna sell the business, there was actually a succession plan waiting to occur.
• 13:18
  Kory Mitchell: And so owners of these companies, as they grow and scale, they hit ceilings of their ability to stay involved in every part of the business.
• 13:26
  Kory Mitchell: It's when you figure out that you have to get yourself out of the way that you have to unclog the bottleneck that really allows for the opportunity to scale.
• 13:36
  Kory Mitchell: Let's let's transition to the sale.
• 13:39
  Kory Mitchell: You know, you decide to sell the company.
• 13:42
  Kory Mitchell: Was there some reason why you ultimately made that decision?
• 13:46
  Kory Mitchell: Because it sounds like everything's working well.
• 13:48
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, a couple different things.
• 13:50
  Brenden Van Buren: So we've been looking at these acquisitions.
• 13:52
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh, we just bought Able Fence, which was down the road.
• 13:55
  Brenden Van Buren: Right before I did that, I was like, I was looking at the financing options, right?
• 14:00
  Brenden Van Buren: So I go to the bank, get financing, or you know, you can infuse equity, right?
• 14:06
  Brenden Van Buren: Those are your generally your two options.
• 14:08
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh and I actually talked to an investment banker friend of mine at the time who actually lives in Reading, which you wouldn't think there's any investment bankers in Reading, Pennsylvania, but there are a couple.
• 14:19
  Brenden Van Buren: But the uh the point being, he and I were talking for a little bit, and he's like, no, Brennan, go go buy that.
• 14:26
  Brenden Van Buren: If you can finance it with that, go do that, get that closed, and then come back to me in like six months after you do that.
• 14:34
  Brenden Van Buren: And so he'd been buying, I we bought ABL, everything was going actually very smoothly, and he was bugging me, right?
• 14:41
  Brenden Van Buren: Because he's an investment banker trying to make sales.
• 14:43
  Brenden Van Buren: But he's like, Brennan, I'm telling you, this is the opportunity to do it.
• 14:47
  Brenden Van Buren: And I did have a whole bunch of other acquisitions that I kind of was trying to line up.
• 14:52
  Brenden Van Buren: I was kind of looking like I couldn't go take on more debt at that time.
• 14:55
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh, the market was in a good position.
• 14:58
  Brenden Van Buren: He then pitched us, right?
• 15:00
  Brenden Van Buren: He's like, hey, this is this is what I think I can do for you guys.
• 15:04
  Brenden Van Buren: And it had a lot more to do with we were looking at the team that we had, and we'd assembled a pretty young team of individuals at Pro Max.
• 15:14
  Brenden Van Buren: And I mean, I'm 37, my operations manager's 37, then we were only in our we were 30, uh, I guess 34 or whatever.
• 15:24
  Brenden Van Buren: Those people weren't gonna grow beyond us, right?
• 15:27
  Brenden Van Buren: And so, in order for our people to grow and our team to grow, we really felt like we needed to go do something to cause that growth.
• 15:37
  Brenden Van Buren: And we couldn't go finance more, right?
• 15:40
  Brenden Van Buren: So it just, I mean, there's only so much you can do growth-wise on your own capital.
• 15:45
  Brenden Van Buren: And so it was okay, well, then let's let's grow in a different manner and let's grow personally, learning more about growth and scaling.
• 15:54
  Brenden Van Buren: And I mean, the insights that a private equity firm in the lower mortal market can provide to a business owner are uh they do it every day, right?
• 16:03
  Brenden Van Buren: They they have, you know, whatever it is, seven to twelve portfolio companies that are all somewhere close to your size range or started in your size range.
• 16:13
  Brenden Van Buren: And it's okay, how did how do they grow?
• 16:16
  Brenden Van Buren: And we've learned tons about platform building.
• 16:18
  Brenden Van Buren: You know, you think you have a platform until you start talking to a private equity company, and then you're like, wow, geez, I gotta go fix this, this, this, and that.
• 16:27
  Brenden Van Buren: And that's what we've been doing.
• 16:29
  Brenden Van Buren: We're we rebuild our CRM, we're rebuilding our ERP now, we've re-standardized a whole bunch of processes.
• 16:35
  Brenden Van Buren: AI is phenomenal.
• 16:37
  Brenden Van Buren: It can help.
• 16:37
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, we're building tools in days that would have taken a year or two to build.
• 16:42
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, and all that's because we partnered with this private equity firm.
• 16:46
  Brenden Van Buren: They helped us find some management coaches, and so I've got a coach, JP's got a coach.
• 16:51
  Brenden Van Buren: Clearly, I'm already in YPO, so that helps.
• 16:54
  Brenden Van Buren: But he they they brought me one of our board members uh who's basically an ideal customer for us.
• 17:01
  Brenden Van Buren: And so he and I talk monthly on on what growth looks like and how do we, you know, how do I manage my team?
• 17:08
  Brenden Van Buren: And he was uh the CEO of one of the larger general contractors in the United States.
• 17:13
  Brenden Van Buren: And so it's one of those, like those are those are the type of resources that partnering with a private equity company brings.
• 17:20
  Brenden Van Buren: Like as a small fence business, going and asking you you can get mentors, but getting a mentor of that caliber, now YPO helps significantly with that, you know, you know, Kory, as you're well aware, but it it really does bring you a lot of more insights uh working with a private equity firm than we ever would have had.
• 17:40
  Brenden Van Buren: And so for the growth of our people and the growth of ourselves, we really decided it would be the next best move to make, you know, in Pro Max's life.
• 17:51
  Kory Mitchell: It's been a common theme on this show to get involved in a peer group.
• 17:55
  Kory Mitchell: But one thing that Brenden talks about that I'm not sure we've covered is getting an executive coach.
• 18:02
  Kory Mitchell: I myself have worked with a coach for years.
• 18:05
  Kory Mitchell: I think it's one of the most powerful things you can do because as we hear all the time, it's lonely at the top.
• 18:11
  Kory Mitchell: When you're running that business, you can't talk to your team, your spouse, they get tired of hearing about it.
• 18:16
  Kory Mitchell: So having someone that you can use as a sounding board who's also been through the trenches before, it can really be this sort of release valve for owners of businesses.
• 18:27
  Kory Mitchell: And so often when I get involved with companies and the board of advisors that we have on our team, it's just such a relief to have someone they can talk to.
• 18:36
  Kory Mitchell: I like that perspective because, of course, you hear a lot of horror stories about private equity, right?
• 18:42
  Kory Mitchell: It's this kind of swear word with a lot of folks.
• 18:44
  Kory Mitchell: And some people, when they tell me, like, look, I I want to sell, but I uh I'm just never gonna sell to private equity.
• 18:51
  Kory Mitchell: And the fact that at least so far, you you know, you've you've had a real educational experience, you've learned, you've grown um in a different way than you probably would have on your own.
• 19:00
  Kory Mitchell: Because they they just they surrounded you with some new concepts, which I I experienced as well.
• 19:04
  Kory Mitchell: Like all this stuff, I'm like, God, I had no idea how all this stuff really worked once you get to a certain size.
• 19:09
  Kory Mitchell: Um, so I appreciate that perspective.
• 19:12
  Kory Mitchell: But what for you has changed, right?
• 19:16
  Kory Mitchell: You took some chips off the table, so you put some put some money in the bank account, diversified your assets away from this one business.
• 19:23
  Kory Mitchell: Like, how is it how has your day-to-day changed since the the deal?
• 19:27
  Brenden Van Buren: I'm probably working more, to be honest.
• 19:29
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, we have a goal that we want to hit by 2029, and you know, that's what I'm working towards.
• 19:35
  Brenden Van Buren: You know, if you ask my wife, I'm probably uh more busy than I was before.
• 19:39
  Brenden Van Buren: From a role changing, I've really been trying to get myself more and more on the business and less and less in the business.
• 19:47
  Brenden Van Buren: Now that isn't the easiest thing in the world to do.
• 19:49
  Brenden Van Buren: Um, I mean, that's been something I've been trying to do since I bought the business in 2018.
• 19:54
  Brenden Van Buren: Um but I'd say I would thought I was there in 2023, whenever we sold the sawmill.
• 20:01
  Brenden Van Buren: But it once again, it's like like we said, you learn a lot about what is you're doing right and wrong.
• 20:06
  Brenden Van Buren: And and so I'd say life is a little bit more stressful.
• 20:09
  Brenden Van Buren: the company has grown.
• 20:11
  Brenden Van Buren: We're we have I've learned a ton.
• 20:13
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, the stuff I've learned about platform building and and how to create better business processes and business flow has significantly uh grown in in this partnership.
• 20:28
  Brenden Van Buren: And and I'm gonna harp on relationships a lot.
• 20:30
  Brenden Van Buren: I think relationships really are key.
• 20:32
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, whenever we're doing diligence on Sawmill, and really all we we had several very competitive offers on Pro Max, and my COO and I did tons of work diligencing the private equity firm.
• 20:46
  Brenden Van Buren: According to Sawmill, nobody had diligenced them as much as we diligenced them in in the past.
• 20:52
  Brenden Van Buren: And so, I mean, we were interviewing every one of their CEOs and COOs and CFOs that we could get up, you know, that would they would let us talk to.
• 21:00
  Brenden Van Buren: And asked, I mean, we asked them, hey, that's great.
• 21:03
  Brenden Van Buren: I want someone who's not doing well right now.
• 21:05
  Brenden Van Buren: Like find us one of those companies because I want to know what it looks like.
• 21:09
  Brenden Van Buren: And frankly, I mean, we haven't we've hit a lot of our small wins.
• 21:14
  Brenden Van Buren: We haven't had the big wins yet, I'd say, from a partnership.
• 21:18
  Brenden Van Buren: We have acquired several businesses.
• 21:20
  Brenden Van Buren: EBIT has been stable-ish, but it hasn't kind of grown where you'd we'd think it would be at this point.
• 21:26
  Brenden Van Buren: But that's partly because we're making tons of investments.
• 21:28
  Brenden Van Buren: I mean, yeah, our staff is way bigger.
• 21:30
  Brenden Van Buren: There's a lot of infrastructure you need to build, which kind of goes to you know, lessons learned.
• 21:36
  Brenden Van Buren: There's probably a little bit of that I would have liked to have done prior to partnering with them, but I didn't know what I didn't know.
• 21:42
  Brenden Van Buren: Right.
• 21:42
  Brenden Van Buren: And so that's one of those like there's whenever we were of the original size, it would have been nice to kind of do a couple things that we're doing now, then.
• 21:51
  Brenden Van Buren: But it that's hindsight's always 2020.
• 21:54
  Brenden Van Buren: And so that's it's easy to look back and say that.
• 21:57
  Brenden Van Buren: Uh, but that's what I like, it was I want Someone that's been struggling, how do they work on that with you?
• 22:03
  Brenden Van Buren: What are you doing?
• 22:04
  Brenden Van Buren: Like, you know, how are they treating your people?
• 22:06
  Brenden Van Buren: All that type of stuff.
• 22:07
  Brenden Van Buren: And that's what we were diligenting all the firms on.
• 22:10
  Brenden Van Buren: What's your strategy relating to acquisitions?
• 22:12
  Brenden Van Buren: You know, some of the people places we talk to, it's like we're buying everything and we're figuring out how to combine them.
• 22:18
  Brenden Van Buren: Some we're on the other extreme, you know, we're only buying select.
• 22:21
  Brenden Van Buren: And so we just kind of worked our way through.
• 22:23
  Brenden Van Buren: What is your philosophy on all these types of things?
• 22:26
  Brenden Van Buren: And uh frankly, whether it's a pest for investment bankers or brokers or whatever, I I mean, for one, I think he did our investment banker delivered us tons of value.
• 22:37
  Brenden Van Buren: He also, though, gave us tons of advice relating to this.
• 22:41
  Brenden Van Buren: We had competitive offers.
• 22:43
  Brenden Van Buren: He's like, here's what you should do, here's what's going to be best for you.
• 22:47
  Brenden Van Buren: Figure these things out in this process.
• 22:50
  Brenden Van Buren: And, you know, I think some people see big shiny numbers and do those types of things and then make those decisions.
• 22:57
  Brenden Van Buren: And, you know, I think that's also where you hear a lot of the horror stories, right?
• 23:01
  Brenden Van Buren: Is from those.
• 23:02
  Brenden Van Buren: And you know, we're also in the lower middle market.
• 23:05
  Brenden Van Buren: And so those guys are planning on growing, right?
• 23:07
  Brenden Van Buren: They can't grow by cutting costs.
• 23:09
  Brenden Van Buren: It just, you know, you can, you know, it doesn't work that way.
• 23:12
  Brenden Van Buren: And so we diligenced the firms on that stuff too.
• 23:15
  Brenden Van Buren: Like, what are your plans with our people?
• 23:17
  Brenden Van Buren: I think that really helped.
• 23:18
  Brenden Van Buren: I don't know if that even answered the question actually.
• 23:20
  Kory Mitchell: Well, I gotta tell you, um, that was that was perfect because I really believe that diligencing your buyer is like number one.
• 23:30
  Kory Mitchell: But what but but running that proper process actually allows you to have leverage so that way you don't have to necessarily take the highest buyer, but you can make the decision based on what's going to be right for your future.
• 23:43
  Kory Mitchell: And hopefully the highest buyer can also be the one that's culturally right.
• 23:47
  Kory Mitchell: But having that proper process that your banker obviously did for you put you in an amazing position.
• 23:53
  Kory Mitchell: It is so critical that you diligence your buyers.
• 23:57
  Kory Mitchell: What does that mean?
• 23:58
  Kory Mitchell: It means calling any business they've ever bought, finding out how it went.
• 24:04
  Kory Mitchell: It means not just getting the phone numbers of the ones that went well, but calling the ones that didn't go so well.
• 24:10
  Kory Mitchell: How did that private equity fund, how did that buyer react when things didn't go so well after the sale?
• 24:19
  Kory Mitchell: Because we all know in this industry, things are not just always up and to the right.
• 24:25
  Kory Mitchell: There's bumps and bruises along the way on that journey towards growth.
• 24:31
  Kory Mitchell: I could talk for another two hours because you got like there's been so many amazing lessons, I think, that you've you've told, and so many of them I relate with because of my own experiences and in transacting a few times.
• 24:43
  Kory Mitchell: I'm super grateful for you making the time because this was like a a seminar, honestly, in so many different topics, and and some of them that we haven't explored on the show yet.
• 24:54
  Kory Mitchell: So I'm I'm I'm grateful that you were able to educate us and our audience.
• 24:59
  Brenden Van Buren: Well, thanks for having me, Kory.
• 25:01
  Brenden Van Buren: Anytime you want to dive deeper into one of these subjects, let me know.
• 25:05
  Kory Mitchell: I will.
• 25:06
  Kory Mitchell: Thanks for joining us on the second episode of Brenden Van Buren.
• 25:09
  Kory Mitchell: I can't wait to see where he takes it from here.
• 25:13
  Kory Mitchell: But until next time, let's win.