alright what's up it's sean and i'm gonna start by reading you a tweet that i did a year ago it says i have a new hero and her name is sarah moore and the reason that sarah moore has my hero and somebody that you've probably never heard of is because sarah moore was in her young twenties she has no money no experience the only thing she owned in her life was her car a ra for and this crazy hustle story of how she basically decided i'm gonna buy a business even though i got nothing nothing to my name and she spends a year searching through a hundred thousand businesses and she finds this niche business called egg cartons dot com you literally this guy sells the carton that your eggs come in and she bought this million you know multi dollar business with all debt so she put no money in because she didn't have any money and so and then she had grown at a bunch since then and i just said i think this is like a twenty million dollar business that this woman bought and like wow what a hustle so i told this hustle story on the podcast and it kinda went viral it blew up nobody ever heard about this story before she done no interviews she has no social media she was like a ghost and i honestly i didn't even know if it was true because it's one of these stories that's too good to be true here's this girl who comes from absolutely nothing she talks about this in the interview like she literally had a parents she was in and out of jail as a kid like she was just trouble and then she has this turning point in her life that gave me goosebumps she ends up paying somebody to take the sat so she gets into college she hustle her way through college finds a way to buy this business and it's this amazing success story and two things happen one the story kinda went viral she said that like netflix and others reached out to her after the episode went live that people started showing up on her doorstep asking them asking her for advice on buying a business and like honestly was kinda bad like it was too much i please do that again because she's like dude i'm trying to run a business i don't even know you you start telling my story and this went crazy and so a year later now she's like okay first i was kind of like wow this is crazy then i was kind of annoyed and scared like is this gonna mess up my business but then as she started to see you know the upside of telling her story and she was like look i still have no social media i still do no interviews but you kind of you were very nice and told my story i will agree to come on and do one interview and so she's like after this i'm one and done and i'm gonna come on and i'm gonna lay it all out there i will tell you everything you wanna know about buying a business how i did it what i did the good and the bad all the mistakes that i made i'll tell my kind of the life story part two that's the sort of you know made for tvs it's it's unbelievable her life story along the way and she's like i'm doing one interview and then that's it i'm disappearing after that and she did not disappoint we just finished the recording it's one of my favorite episodes we've ever done she is somebody that i really admire and i don't use that term lightly like she is really a hustle super genuine and her stories is frankly incredible like it's not often i have goosebumps during an episode of a podcast so enjoy this episode with sarah moore after this ad for hubspot yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a road last year alright today's episode is gonna be all about buying a business rather than starting a business we usually talk about ideas that you should use to start a business but as you know like one of our best friends of the house andrew wilkinson has told us many times buying a business could be a better path but how the hell do you actually do it that is the question and we're gonna talk to somebody who not only has done it not only has done it successfully but has really never told her story you sarah moore you were basically not on the internet welcome to the internet because i first heard your story and then i went googling and i couldn't find anything you were a ghost intentional or unintentional very intentional i'm a very private person and i'm not a fan of public attention wanna blow up my spot though so things have changed a bit yeah sorry about that so we a long time ago i know what how it was a hundreds of episodes ago i came on the pod i said hey i got a story for you i said i would love to have this person as i guess but if you can't find him on the internet i said i think this is a kind of an incredible story there's this woman who out of college bought a most boring sounding business you could think of egg cartons dot com and i called you like the queen of queen of cartons or something like that i was like she's the the queen of eggs and she buys this business that some guy been running for like twenty years and she's running it she's growing it and i was like the way she did it with no money down i was like her story sounds really interesting but again there's literally one like text interview of you on the whole internet so then i i did i email emailed you and said hey love to have you come on i don't think i gotta reply or something but then i sent you a google doc and i said look i just have to know i got it i i need answers to these questions just from my own personal curiosity i sent your google doc i said just can you just fill this out and to my surprise you actually did and so when i came on the pod and i told your story suddenly a bunch of people were were very interested in you get giving you a lot of attention and correct me if i'm wrong sometimes in not the most nice nice way it wasn't all good is that right that's correct i've i've come across quite the cast of characters and why do you what do you think that what do they say to where we're how are they finding you and what do they say to you some people begged me to talk to them for fifteen minutes they'll offer someone specifically offered me five hundred dollars for five minutes of my time and it's crazy because i'm so irrelevant most days i'm out in sutton in massachusetts so there's not much happening here i'm kind of under the radar so all of a sudden i've now gotten a ton of inquiries from people a lot of people want specific information a lot of people are emailing to say hey i'm doing this exact thing how do you get financing or can i get your opinion on this business deal or i'm about to close how did you get a bank to actually do your deal without putting much or any money down right right well hopefully hopefully this podcast tells your story in a good way does not create even more people chasing me doc because we're just gonna tell all the answers right here so that people everybody leaves sarah alone after this yes plea i'm serious please do not contact my business you can email me or or lee reach out to me on linkedin but please do not contact business or show up there for that matter yeah yeah if you've had a couple of those a few str there's always a few str unfortunately there's always a few str it doesn't help that your story is kinda unique because you didn't come from money well we're gonna talk about that you didn't know how to do this it's not like you knew how to do this or you were an expert you were a total beginner when you started so that's a piece yes your woman doing this i think that's more unique so there's like there's a whole bunch of like angles and then you did it in a kind of a niche that sounds kind of like you know like boring businesses have become sexy now and so you did it in a boring business and so i think there's a bunch of reasons people are excited but let's let's start at the start so okay let's just start with the high level what did you actually do you were in school and you decided i wanna buy business first tell us why did you decide that how did you even know that that was a path you could go down oh boy there's a lot of context here so but to answer your question in the simplest of of ways is i was between my first and second year business school and i was talking to somebody about what they wanted to do afterwards and they mentioned something called a search fund which is where you essentially can go out and buy some gru business and become the ceo basically overnight without any money or experience that was very appealing to me you're hey i fit that criteria and no money knows gru businesses sign me up and so you hear this idea and you're like what was your plan before that were did you have another plan or like did this replace something or you just ever put it in a in a vacant spot so okay we'll do a bit of storytelling here yeah please when when i was in business school there was a guy was working on a project with and he was incredibly responsive almost annoying responsive kinda one of those and i asked how are you so responsive all the time and he said goldman he's referring to goldman sachs and he said goldman sachs there was a rule of fifteen minutes meaning you had to respond to whatever form you reach out to you in within fifteen minutes twenty four hours a day seven days a week and i said okay so what if you're in a shower fifteen minutes right what if you're running a marathon fifteen minutes christmas day fifteen minutes and my favorite what if your wife is giving birth fifteen looking minutes and i mean we laugh but my i worked my ass off to get into biz even graduate high school i worked my ass off to be frank and i'm thinking you went to an ivy league undergrad you're clearly off the charts intelligent you have this amazing network of people you come from money you have everything that i don't why would you choose to essentially sign up to be frankly someone else's bitch i didn't say that to him right but that was my thinking and so i had no idea what i wanted to do but up until then i was at hp harvard business school trying to fit in with all of these people and sort of find my footing and after that i'm thinking i don't wanna be like these people i don't want to do this i don't wanna be a consultant i don't wanna be a banker this is so not me and if i'm gonna be someone else's bitch like that's just not an option for me right i'm only gonna be one person bitch and that's my own yeah that's every entrepreneur ever there was a guy who really there's a guy who we went to college here's our next door neighbor in our dorm great guy samsung only and he went to work at same thing goldman or one of these one of these banks i don't even know what the hell that was so i a foreign world to me i don't know sam's gone and he doesn't you know he's busy now he works eighty hours a week and he he read our blog we used to blog about how we were building our company and we'd be like yeah we woke up we did we had these calls so we were pitching this guy and then we went for a hike because we lived in boulder like we went for hike in the middle of the day because that was awesome that we had an idea on the hike we came back and did it and it sounded so sexy in reality was honestly pretty lame but you know it was like blogging it was like social media doesn't like instagram back then you make it look good and so sam quits his job and he moves into our our bedroom our moves dark our our living room he lives on our couch and he's like i'm gonna do this like dude you making six figures you're making zero figures here and he's like and he's he's like yeah but it's better and we we couldn't really understand the culture and then he sent an email and we were like hey sam you sent something in this email i've never heard before what you said hey could you get that to me asap or sooner and i was like hey wait asap or sooner asap means as soon as possible like oh that's a banking thing it's asap or sooner i was like what the fuck is sooner than asap and i was like that's the mentality i was like i get it i get while you quit i get while you're out of there because asap sooner is not a way to live not at all and it honestly blows my mind again given the pe of these people you would think you would shoot for the moon you would wanna have this freedom in your life but you're literally choosing a form of enslave it enslave it in my opinion right right right yeah any anytime you know i think banking consulting these are often brain drains the talent really talented people go there because it's sort of safe and and it's like a well respected path but if you think about how much how many more cool interesting things could be built or created if those same talented people went out and and and did more but you know whatever it keeps their so you hear that you're like alright i'm not gonna do that and now you're you hear this idea of buying a business okay give where do you start how do you even know how to start and we're gonna go into your full backstory story but like the kind of the high school how you even got to college which is a crazy story itself we're gonna get to there but first you hear this idea about buying a business okay sarah now what what do you do great question so i to your point in the beginning i lacked the ability to evaluate businesses i had no experience doing that prior to business school i was in the steel industry and i thought if i could get a business i was pretty comfortable with the idea that i could run it probably if i tried it hard enough but searching in itself i thought i need to have background in private equity i have no idea what i'm doing and people say you have a harvard mba but harvard is very corporate they don't teach you how to look at a corporate commercial window washing business and evaluate their financials to see if you wanna buy it right they're looking at the very complicated financial models which these are not at all and so i thought i probably need to go the investor route because there are investors out there then we'll actually pay you to search i'm thinking that's incredible someone's gonna pay me to look for this and then they're gonna invest this is amazing we'll look further into it and see that if you were to get an investor sur back you they'll give you plenty of money you can live a c life you can do this in a fancy office you can whine and dine these sellers but you have to pay back one and a half times that and so if they gave me to fifty percent increase so if they had given me two hundred k to search i'd have to pay back three hundred k so that in and of itself was absolutely ridiculous and so one of my friends actually sammy me down and convince me that if you it's similar to dating you said and if you get enough reps in you cannot not recognize a good business when you see one and for whatever reason that i figure i may as well just try and go my own worst case scenario literally worst case i bring someone in midway but why not at least give it a go on my own and see what happens right so what so what did you do you you decide to go on your own how do you go about what was your process okay so step one for me i'm not go with technology and i didn't have any money so step one is i'm gonna leverage what i've got around me which is i'm now at a school with a bunch of smart people so i had one of my smart friends scrape one of the databases with all the private companies within an hour and a half of my apartment in boss that's the one yeah you're like you're like my criteria is it's an hour and a half away tell me every private business in this area truly and the problem is with these databases people think oh you've got all this great information not really the we estimated just by looking at some financials we actually knew about that the database was accurate about fifty percent of the time accurate meaning the owner's name is correct the revenues correct the employee count all of those metrics because they're all self reported right so who's actually gonna give you accurate information knowing it could be public right and so we tried to pair down the list by revenue but we did it by a multiple of like five meaning mh let's say a business so for instance the business i'd worked for previously it said that business did a million dollars in revenue the business is doing over a hundred million dollars of revenue right there's all this misinformation but we tried to narrow with down somewhat anything over i think a hundred thousand or i'm sorry a hundred million dollars we took off the list revenue wise it was fair game yeah after that it was obvious so when i say obvious i mean it you have to be sure so that would be a legal firm or an accounting firm or seven eleven other than that again fair game because my business was actually under underperforming so everything else you don't know it's it's self selected the industry we kept the rest there so we were still locked with a pretty massive list of companies and you told me by the way you said one of your things is like you think industry is overrated do you think people over index on i'm looking in this space this is the niche this is the industry i'm looking in you don't believe in that and you didn't do that what why do you think that's the case so initially here's why i i i think that from experience initially i did what i think most people do what investors actually require you to do you sit there and do you a thesis about the kind of industries that would be great businesses and usually those industries have characteristics that make them stable which is what you're looking for when you're buying a business below that and what i found is that the industries were absolutely relevant what matters is that you find a business that is established and has been consistently profitable for a number of years everything else garbage there are so many businesses in amazing industries like let's talk pest control right great industry you've got people that have passed they're not gonna say you know what not a great year for me this year i'm just gonna let my house be invested like that's not really a thing right it almost gives you i think industry is a false sense of security because you think just because i'm in this pest control business i'm good when you're really hot there's way more to it than that and so what i've i found is find a business that's established and consistently profitable forget the industry because people could say them in e commerce right so that's that's a this an unstable industry i worked in the steel industry you would think that's an absolute hell business i used to work for it's a holly yeah it's a great great business right but industries would tell you otherwise gotcha so you didn't look top down at industry instead you were just stuck okay i have this the other list you remove the obvious outliers businesses that are way too big for you to buy and then now you have still an enormous list and here you are one person sitting on campus trying to sort through this so what was your approach what'd you do well i wasn't a one man's show here thank god or i wouldn't have made it i hired hell interns and i didn't mean for it to get as big as it did but initially i ed five interns that worked for me and we actually did the industry approach we did the painstaking process of look each internet to give me fifty companies a week with they were they met my criteria these companies you found email addresses for and then we contacted number five you had five interns but you're a college should you're an intern what how did you get it yeah how does an intern have interns what what it would happen here so i made quite the pitch and the truthfully here's what it is oh and i swear it like i use what i learned searching every single day and my interns tell me this all the time we text each other about it all the time private equity this is private equity and private equities in industry where they don't do free internships you're more of a liability waste of their time than the free internship so you're not gonna get a free internship at a private equity firm you need to have actual skills you need have investment banking skills probably before you're even at their front frontier and so this opportunity is hey you're gonna get private equity experience and i'm gonna give you transparency into everything i'm huge on transparency so i created a conference line and i said i'm gonna let every single person listen on these calls whenever they want so those were calls with all the owners brokers accountants attorneys anyone from b anyone that i contacted my phone was basically tapped twenty four seven if you're interested in finance this is very helpful actually i mean who wouldn't want out it's like you sean sure people would would is weirdly enough want to listen in on your calls when you're talking business when you're doing business deals you would learn a lot i'm sure so that's a huge portion of it the learning ben graham told warren buffett warren buffett was he admired benjamin graham and he wanted to go work for him and he said i'll work for you for warren buffett says i'll work for you free and ben graham goes your price is too high and because you're right it's the time the energy so for for for a lot of people they're not even they're gonna say no to a free for to if somebody's willing to work for free because the time and energy takes to train somebody and give them that access is too expensive relative the free labor but you were smart you made it a a different viewer in the opposite position you're like i do need help i do need free labor and you've rebranded yourself as private equity which technically you were but absolutely private equity we're sure it's like where is your office it's like it's in the cafeteria we sit at this table and that's my office alright so works and these were other harvard students or these are just people in the in the area no in fact i initially used the student job boards and they were actually the worst you get these cookie cutter students who think like everybody else they were basic the best interns i found came off craigslist my one of my first interns who was with that initial badge of five he was with me from the entire duration of my search and he came off of craigslist nice it's people that aren't just thinking like every other college student and by the way a lot of these weren't college students you told me something you were like you know initially we're going through this list like four hundred thousand businesses that like you know we're in the criteria and so even if you're doing fifty outreach a day and we have five ten fifteen interns doing this the math ain't math it just doesn't work you can't get through this list so you change your approach what did you do absolutely so we realized our response rate is awful i you no matter how customize you get you're reaching out to people most of which aren't looking to sell their business so the very low response rate so if it's already this bad we may as well just and we're already filtering in the wrong way we made many mistakes the entrants would have all these false positives false negatives we decide we're just going to light everybody and their mother up because if you look at email addresses they're all more or less the same you start to see a pattern if you're looking all day for an email address you see most emails are first name last initial at domain first initial last name at this it's the same four patterns so we created a big excel file guess the combinations and then ran them through something i think it was bulk email checker to see whether or not they were actually like real addresses and so you you get their contact info and now you're gonna email all of them one generic email because you're like fuck my response rate is bad anyways if even if it gets cut in half but i can email five times more or ten times more people oh yeah that's a good train absolutely and what was interesting is you know we we had this huge list of people and we you'd think oh well if somebody reaches back out to me how am i gonna talk to them but you realize it's kind of the same conversations over and over so we would do this approach where it's like bombs away and i after we'd send out an email we'd be getting tons of phone calls from people and we had sent the emails out in such a way that it looked like it was done targeted like it looked like we specifically did our research and said hey i i'm looking for a business to buy and yours seems to perfectly fit the bill because it's within this revenue range it's been around for a really long time and it's been profitable for a number of years and the people that reached the that responded and said actually know you idiot yet that's not true great now we know perfect right yeah and then your survey essentially yeah they didn't but they didn't realize that they thought they were telling us off yeah and the best replies were the ones that were wow you really did your research here this is great they reach out to me they're telling me how much research i've done i have no idea who they are i've got the interns scrambling figuring out what area code is this who is this what could this possibly be as i'm pretending to spend this time researching their business i have no clue right it's like being at a party and then somebody knows you but you don't remember where they're at so you have to say really generic things to to keep the keep it going while your brain is like searching searching like how do i know this person what is their name exactly exactly and so you what was your specific criteria did you have like a revenue target or did you have like a a eb target that you were using initially i looked at businesses ideally between four million and twenty million in revenue and i wanted something at or above a million and a half in eb okay but over time that changed again just like the industries you realized why does it need to be this way i realized so much of what i was doing was just based off of what i had heard over and over and so things got tweaked as i realized i didn't need to necessarily have that criteria i actually lowered my expectations a hot and standards it worked out while i think and so you you lower you you widen your thing you're reach out to bunch of people and at and one of them is this business at cards dot com so what's stood out there and then tell the story about how you ended up buying that company okay so i send out that email which again looks like it's customized but it's not the owner sent back a very long emails thing wow you've really done your research i am so impressed and he starts outlining the specifics of what i said in the email you're right we have been around for a while we started in two thousand and one and this business has been to your point profitable ever since consistently we have an amazing reputation we have a very strong customer base and from there i said okay this has my interest because at first let me back up i'm getting this email and i'm thinking guys we're reaching out to farms now because it looked like they were a farm feed store it really did and so i the first thing i always wanted to know was okay let's see this financials because if the numbers aren't there numbers meaning you have actually been as you alleged consistently profitable for a number of years i'm not really interested right but they were there and so anytime you see that you know because it is a rare by the way i would say maybe five percent of the business as we looked at we're consistently profitable and established that that's few and so he had he met those parameters i'm immediately interested and so i started asking about the business and learning a little bit more like okay this is a commodity right and he says no it's not we actually have a lot of proprietary products we have some patents i explain explain what it is it's literally the carton that your eggs coming in your you buy a dozen eggs they have to be packaged in something yes this guy was making the packaging he's manufacturing it or he was the middle man he was the middle man yeah i'll back up so i found out what they're basically doing is there a wholesale distributor and they're buying storing and selling a occurrence so i immediately think okay this is simple enough that in person with average intelligence me can do this like i think i could sell an a car i think i could buy one too that was a essentially what it was the business of course though again there were proprietary products there were a couple things that made it much more desirable but at the end of the day we're buying and selling eight cartons right right and the website i went to it now which is like you know after you took over and it's so basic and we've talked about this on the thing the logo isn't even just the logo it's egg cards dot com so you you have the dot com in the logo which is great and then under it attached to that in the same image is your one eight hundred numbers like you know we call one eight eight eight two five or whatever whatever and so this business is so simple and so old school looking but you weren't scared away by that you actually you wanted that you didn't want some internet business you didn't want something that was like kind of new and innovative is that right that's correct i think you have to play to your strengths here this is where you it's not so general you you can buy a business that suits your abilities mine were honestly kinda limited i'm not handy i'm not good with technology anything with engineering is over my head so i figured this simpler for me the better i didn't wanna rely on anybody going in there for the first couple months to just learn the basics this was a business you could walk into and day one more or less get it and so you what happens you make them an offer you meet them for lunch how do you how do you actually get this deal done so for me i stopped going anywhere until we spoke about a tentative price range so i would always throw out a number very quickly because they were all kinda going between three to four times so i think okay if you're above the average business i've looked at this month you you're closer to four if you're below that you're closer to three maybe be closer to to profits or revenue profits i immediately got down to that on the phone it was great you're in this range they didn't really understand terminology i wanted to keep it very simple so i say okay what's your income looking like what you guys averaging each year right and they say the numbers and so the i immediately was thinking you know this is this is worth three and a half times i always went a little bit up because i always knew there'd be more in the numbers to bring it down right but you wanna be a little optimistic but you're not ripping them off you're not being dishonest for being in best case scenarios probably around here right so i threw out a number and i go is your it is your price anywhere within that range because a lot of people the combo ends because they think their business is worth ten and it's just not right so i give out the number and he goes okay yeah i think i can work somewhere with that range he had looked into selling his business previously so he was a lot more aware of what these small businesses are actually worth a lot of owners realistic about his baby versus say exactly this is the best thing ever it's worth twenty times profit right the second thing for me was a seller's note that was a non negotiable for me the because a seller's note to me was a substitute for getting equity and i didn't wanna get any investors involved so the next step was okay are you willing to do a sellers note and i i phrase it a different way to make sure he understood it but he actually did and he was willing to do that and so then i said okay let's talk now and just to the number what a seller's notice is so define what is a seller's note for anybody doesn't know absolutely i'll use an example let's say you're buying a house for a million dollars rather than giving the seller a million dollars upfront no this let's say you have a twenty five percent sellers no you would give that seller at close seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and then they would get paid the remaining two hundred and fifty thousand dollars over time and whatever you define those terms at whenever interest rate you decide on and time horizon the seller becomes the bank they're sort of financing you to be able to purchase exactly the rest of the business exactly and it was also great because the argument there is okay because some sellers didn't wanna do it and the argument is well you're telling me how greater your businesses you're telling me that it's simple enough for me to operate if those things are true why would you have an issue doing a seller's note right right this stable right exactly and my friend i helped my friend just buy a business actually kinda similar to yours recently and he did a good thing which was in the sellers know he said look here's the purchase price here's the sellers note but if eb was to drop way below where it is today because you know i find some skeletons to the closet or this thing turns out to have been built on some quick sand then we're gonna forgive the rest of that sellers note right and he was able to structure it accordingly so so it's a it's a good mechanism for for any buyer that's doing i i i i don't know did you do that or did you just do us sellers as is i did it as is there is something called earn out which is similar to what you're saying and it's based on the performance of the business and you choose if i could do it on revenue or profits for me i tried to keep this extremely simple because the devil really is in the details here and these sellers a lot of them don't even have high school degrees but they're very good at business they've been very successful so i'm trying to do a deal here where these terms are extremely straightforward and when you start doing terms like that the seller freaks out because then it's wait i may not get this money i don't even know you all a sudden he's skeptical a goal of you so i'm not a big fan of those yeah that was that was the other thing one one of your points of view was like you know industry over overrated i like that point why you know because you're really looking for just actually just this rare beautiful business that's stable and profitable and you shouldn't like use industry filters for that necessarily or have have the thesis and walk in as this genius who has a thesis up front you know right be open minded at at the at the start and then the second part is you were like i try not to use any jargon like no but even though you covered business school you weren't saying eb you would say how much money are you making or income you know you were not trying to or even in the structure you were not trying to get super fancy in the structure because if you don't understand it they're not gonna understand it essentially right yes and that's the biggest mistake too because people think well i don't have a harvard mba or i don't know any of this i honestly think ignorance truly is bliss here because the less you know it's kind of better because you can keep things extremely simple for the seller and i think that breeds trust and so you buy this business how much cash did you put into the business to buy it you don't need to put any cash town and i didn't have to because of the sellers note so i did a twenty five percent sellers though and a seventy five percent bank note and the idea there was when shopping around for a bank to do the deal it was all about and it took me you know twenty plus banks to figure this out it was all about how did they view the sellers know banks said dude that sellers know which very few did as equity i could i could work with the ones that didn't not so much just if they viewed it as equity it's like well you're okay there's twenty five percent equity we'll loan you the other day five percent exactly exactly now how'd did you get able to think that that was equity because it's not is kind of non equity i say wish i could have some like really savvy answer here but to be worrying and i'm not trying to say this about all banks but most bankers have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about surely i had to learn this the hard way they think they can finance this the deal they have no idea how to finance the deal they have no idea what these structures look what the details are of these structures so a lot of it i'm sorry it's just ignorance of them and their board right here's the purchase price and then here's how much we need it from the bank and then they're like oh the exact and they didn't call it equity they knew it was dad they called it debt but the way they reviewed it like when they're looking at their ratios for these these banks they have all these rules it was whatever internal rules they were using to evaluate the debt ratio and and one big thing is this the bank had priority of everyone else right so the bank was gonna be paid before this seller and the business had many many years of a track record of profitability yes that's why that that is so important you have to hack they're really banking on that business track record and then a little bit with you it's a question of okay it's done well for twenty years what could you do to make it not do so well right right and so you you buy this thing you told me you go the only asset i had at the time i had no money no experience no whatever i only own my my my car i had a ra four and that's literally like all i had to my name and you were able to buy a multimillion dollar business and then walk in and be the owner of it just by really hustle and a a kind of a numbers game so though we didn't even talk about some of the hustle of this so some of the hustle of this was scraping the database some of the hustle was getting people off craigslist to be in terms to sift through the database then it was well those inter a place to work so you got fake ids to get them into the library is that right like tell the fake ids absolutely we hustle for those ids too we hustle for those that was hard work you said you what was it you like went to a alarm you like yeah like looking at the intern and you're like alright which a alarm looks like this intern and then can ask them for their student id hours of that truly hours we just talked to hundreds and hundreds of people buckets and so you've got these interns then you realize hey we needed to be blasting this kind of like fake till you make it email where it looks like we've researched them specifically and they'll sort of self select you ended up be doing this deal where you don't put any money down because you were able to shop forty banks or something like that to get them to to give you the financing for it a lot of this to me the story here is like not counting yourself out because yeah a lot of people are somewhere along that way would accounted themselves out i don't know how to do this i you know this is uncertain i don't have the money i don't have the experience i don't have the time they would find a way to count themselves out you didn't do that figure out a way to get it done so like you know don't all the rules are sort of imaginary you can you could sort of work around them and the last one is just the numbers game like you said it's like it's like dating we're just gonna need to look at a lot of businesses we're gonna need to get a bunch of interns to find the good ones we're gonna look at a bunch of businesses to find the good ones we're gonna talk to a bunch of banks to find the one that we'll do this deal is that accurate because that's what i'm hearing yes if there are two things i'm very passionate about in this world it's obviously occurrence but also it's this concept of spreading the good news which is that anyone who wants to buy and i really mean anyone who wants to buy and operate a small business can do so it is not a matter of can or can't it's a matter of will or won't that's a fact because this is an industry where you can choose any type of business you want any size business you want you could be a cleaner looking to buy another really small cleaning business from a guy or gal that's looking to retire you can buy dog walking company there is truly no limit here and that's what i love about it because to me one of the few areas left of the american dream where you can go out and just put in a ton of effort in elbow grease and make something of your life and actually make good money without killing yourself and i'm having to work you know three jobs right and so you since you took over the business you don't have to share the exact numbers but let's just say if the business was making a hundred dollars before in the years since you've bought the business what have you been able to do like how have you've grown the bit how much have you grown the business and how would you do to actually grow the business because the guy had been operating for whatever fifteen sixteen seventeen years year or something like that you come in as a beginner but you've been able to grow the business so i wanna know kind of roughly like how much value were you able to create many multiples of what you bought for and then also what did you do what what were the new insights or techniques or or operational things that you've been in place to create that value great questions here so when i first bought the business the first couple of years things may have been on to decline a little bit i may have made quite a few mistakes and so wasn't i'm looking too too promising you're not getting invited on the podcast for that story at that time no you bought a business and you are driving it straight into the ground how does it i'll tell us more what what's your secret yeah i probably would have been fired or kicked off the ceo but what happened was so when i first bought this business i'm just gonna back up really fast i really thought i'm in the egg industry so i'm looking what's the duck egg market like what's the chicken egg mark you know these things and really again mark it's kind of bs it's all a bunch of crap these frameworks and stuff because you don't really really know until you're in it and i realized when i got in it i'm not really in the egg industry i'm in specialty packaging and so it actually was a lot more of an opportunity than i ever realized and i wasn't at some genius figuring this out i just looked at our order history we were getting orders from people that were selling crickets and dubai roaches and people that were using they egg currents for small parts people that were using them for bath bombs cupcakes i estimate now that forty percent of our revenue has nothing to do with eggs and so when i realized that there was a lot of potential there and i realized that our specialty was really also these proprietary products i spent most of my time focusing on that not this really amazing modern website but focusing on these products that i call really sticky kind of a silly jargon term here but these products were we're making a custom mold for a customer that they then are gonna keep buying from us assuming we don't rip them off or totally bot it right and so from that and then covid covid was like cheating because we five six x during covid to answer your question on the numbers we really blew up so it was a combination of recognizing how big our market really was and then recognizing that covid was an incredible opportunity for us to take all of our capabilities and run with it right i like that and when you when you talked about specialty packaging you you said something to me you go in that google doc you go we're don't we're not about egg cartons anything that needs what did you call a separation and protection i always say anything we're requiring protection and separation is fair game and i stand by that one hundred percent it's true anything and you think about how massive that market is it's enormous right yeah you could be making bras with that definition i love it is this is not to be anything this is we're talking cups we're talking whatever whatever you want so you truly and so are you like reaching out by the way because like you your website still egg cartons dot com and i'm not trying to sean parker you but like drop the eggs just cartons dot com that's the way to go here if you're making forty percent off of non egg stuff why don't you kinda rebranded it so it's funny we are actually in the process of doing a little bit of that and i've continued to buy a bunch of domain names so things like machine shop trays or bath bomb cartons ins any variations of that i'm just buying domains left to right who knows whether they'll stick but that's that's each portion of it it but it's it's very challenging to figure out how to do that without compromising other important variables other important revenue drivers it's a lot more challenging than you'd think but we are to your point looking into that i'm always like stop with the eggs and one of the companies like we sell egg carpet it's taking me years to really get people to understand this is bigger than eggs we're not abandoning the farms we're not abandoning the chickens you guys it's just way bigger than that so like stop talking about the chickens and the ducks and whatever the gee i'm so jealous of you because i feel like if i ran an egg carton company i could fulfill my dream of being michael scott at under mi and like just come into the warehouse so i just imagined that this is like a under mi style business and you could come in and like you know you know just have a be the crazy boss every day do you when you look back now at what you did because again we talked about starting as a rookie if you could go back and i gave you an hour that you could spend with you know younger you either during the search process or during the early days of of the business what would what would you if i could give you that time when would you go back to and what would you tell yourself as advice with the wisdom and the benefit of hindsight so i would actually just borrow the advice i got for my mentor but i actually follow it which there were two pieces it was higher and fire fast didn't into that huge mistake and do not change anything big or really anything at all the first year both of those things cost me a lot and what what about that that second one tell me more about that so it's obviously a temptation you come in you're so excited you've been searching you've been searching if been searching you finally find the thing you closed the deal after painful you know you don't know it will it go through well and go through it it finally closes and now the keys are yours it's gotta be tempting to go play with the toys what what's the what's the wrong way to do that what's the right way to do that yeah so let's get today actually when i come in i'm thinking okay i knew i didn't know much truly i didn't think i was gonna reorganize the warehouse or start changing anything seemingly big but there were things that i thought were really simple like the phones we had hard wired foam in our office and there were cables everywhere because we've got all these offices in conference rooms i'm thinking to this is like twenty whatever like we're in twenty twenty here what are we doing with this we should just change our phones to v phones so that i can see everything remotely where there's not phones ringing let's get you know into the modern nature seems like got a big thing no that was one of the biggest mistakes i made because you call there our phone numbers actually extremely important people look at the domain that's great but our number is used by our biggest customers by the the new customers it's everything to us and we actually have multiple phone numbers but that one eight hundred numbers forwarded to like ten twelve lines and so it's very important and spectrum may haven't lost our phone lines mid porting and so our phones were down for almost a week and it was a huge deal because it was a new owner and people are thinking did they go out of business right what is going on here because you're not their phones are gone they're they're dead now and it was a huge so it's like maybe they just do first of off i wouldn't do anything with the phone lines now i'm i'm to this day i will not change our phone lines because i've been so traumatized by the experience but if you were maybe just like change one phone line two maybe out all of them but something like that that you think is small can actually be pretty big i like that and you you said like we kinda hinted at this earlier but i wanna make this point which is i've you know i said one thing you didn't do is you didn't count yourself out and that's important i think one of the reasons people count themselves out almost subconsciously is that they they don't see themselves a certain way they've never done that their family didn't do this and so they just sort of like i don't know i guess that's just something other people do and that's even if you hear something you're like that it sounds like a cool idea but like we're we're about i start i i have no i have no foothold here to do that and you have a pretty unique background that i think should you know debunk that idea of of of kind of like even if you're not from that track you can sort of get on that track at any time and so when i first was talking to you i was like wow this is some whip smart you know at harvard per it's like basically you take the harvard pe but then she added some some street smarts so i'm hustle and i thought that's what i thought what i meant you and then you were like you said something like you you're like i didn't even take the sat and i was like how'd you get into harvard business school tell the story of your background because i think it's kind of amazing okay yeah this is a little detail here so we're gonna go way back i'm one of three and my sisters and i would say sort of had a sub par up upbringing in that we didn't really have parents and we were split up and we bounced around and they're living in a lot of different homes my two sisters they made the most of it they are really into academics and sports i made the worst of it i would say and i became somebody that you would not want your kids hanging out with okay i was partying all the time i had i didn't go to school so i had a t officer i went to jail i i was just so disrespectful to everyone and i got away with it because people felt sorry for me and the beginning of high school i was living with a woman there was an alcoholic and her favorite thing when she got drunk was to take all my items and throw them out to the front lawn and just tell me to leave and i really have anywhere to go i was a kid and so there was a woman named natalie bra who used to pick me up and take me to our house and she'd let me stay there until this woman inevitably you know came back to earth and said where did you go and called the police and so i was constantly going back and forth between natalie at the bra house and this other household i was being transported by the police and no one to really do anything about it nobody seemed to really care and one day just she just got so fed up and she said i'm gonna adopt you obviously it was pretty transformational so i'm living in her home with with her family and her daughter i was actually friends with and so her husband one day kinda let me have it because i was trying to skip school like the first week living there and he sat me down and he he literally explained it sounds it's embarrassing almost to say that he literally explained how life works to me the basics of you don't lie you don't just skip things when you don't wanna show up that's not how this isn't reality and he explained my life was going which was basically absolutely nowhere and it was very emotional for me because up until that time a lot of people had given me lectures but it felt like it came from this place of you're bothering me or this is really inconvenience me so can you just stop your crap where he came from this place i could tell he really cared and up until then i didn't really feel like anybody did care and so i got my shit together very quickly after that i really did i was so nervous about like being like sent back or them regretting their decision because up until that time no one and i mean no one was looking to invest in me i was like a junk bond investment wise this is not a safe investment i was not a good kid i didn't do myself any favors and so after that in getting my shit together step one was getting a job and so the first time i ever remember studying truly in my life was with missus bra and when i was learning a menu to get a job at a diner and then from there i applied those new study skills i had to school mister bracket had i'd explained like listen you got a two point zero here kid you're not getting anywhere but community college with that so you need to like gay act together and so from there i got all a's because i wanted to boost my average at least two a three point o i'm working at this diner and that this couple would come in all the time and they never had kids and we just got along that's the best way to explain it i ever told them about my upbringing really initially i think my c was probably did thirty days i probably weren't there and they probably could just tell and so they offered me a job at their company probably initially had of sympathy out of the kindness of their heart and i started working there and it just it just seemed to fit and so when i was working there i got waitlist listed from northeastern and up going to college and when i was waitlist listed the owner of the so these two i'm sorry backing up this couple i had no idea they were extremely wealthy i always thought rich people were at fancy restaurants but this couple is coming in going to a dime getting cheeseburger to eat week i had no idea like they're worth a lot of money and when i was waitlist steve said you need to take yourself off a financial aid because of these schools especially a school like north or without a big installment they're gonna take that into consideration when evaluating your candidacy and i said how am i gonna take myself of eight i have no money in the school so expensive and he said we're gonna pay for your school wow and so yeah i mean it's i it's very it's hard for me to not get emotional talking about because it's so between these two couples i mean they changed my entire life they it wasn't just the money too it wasn't just the home it was these people changed the way i viewed myself they invested in me when i was truly the world's worst investment i mean who takes the kid like me what i was like and say you know what i'm gonna go all in on this like they put their ass out in the line for me on multiple occasions with so worst track record record you can possibly imagine like truly possibly imagine and from these two these two families i had this whole concept in my head of i just wanna be that one person for one person because for me i literally begged when i was a kid sometimes for people help me i would beg judges i would beg attorneys i would beg social workers to like put me in better circumstances or out me with x and y nobody helped me at all they felt sorry for me but nobody took action so this concept of being that one person for one person carried over into college because i went to northeastern to be a social worker initially mh and that was way too k by for me as you can probably tell i'm not like that's just not me and so from there i said okay something a little bit more aggressive more me could be law i was watching csi what i thought of law right so figured i'm gonna be in juvenile justice i i can be i i can be the it's already i wanted to have i can be the social work i wanna have but again it was i just realized these professions were just not me so one day i called steve the owner of this company i worked for i i call him boss and i said hey boss like i don't know what i'm gonna to do here i'm now junior in college and i've worked for you but that's kind of my only work experience and i have no i have no experience in anything but criminal justice now in social work and i don't wanna do these professions and he said you are not an academic you're you're geared for business it comes naturally to you and he said and you can have a way bigger impact in business than like criminal justice or social work and so i said okay well what am i gonna do now though because i'm in my junior year and i don't have anything to show for this i can't just go and get a i can't just go into a business who is gonna want me and he said you need do a business school because he had gone i didn't even know it he had gone to stanford for business school and back in the day they went right after school but now the average age of business school candidates at least at the ivy leagues like harvard is twenty eight and when we were talking about this i was like twenty one i was about to graduate and i said there's no way i'm gotta get into a business school he didn't know i had paid my sister to take my sat for me because i had confidence i can study art but i'm not gonna get caught up enough i don't even know what's on the sat i imagine it's all of the subjects but i just had no confidence in myself like when i got to college i was at a thirty three percent reasonable novel what does that mean i i went off campus one day i like i like you it was horrible so i went off campus one day because i was convinced this is horrible i was really convinced i was mentally handicapped when i got to college because i just did not understand anything and i got this test on and they said there's really nothing wrong with you're just like at a low level year right and they did say my intelligence was below average at that time and so it was it was horrible because it was a factual evidence hey you're not too bright and by the way you're you're at the thirty three percentile like oh that's fucking great like why we basically put in into pay onto to paper that i'm an idiot and it was heartbreaking for me but i was so embarrassed and i didn't want anyone to know and so the only thing i really knew at that point was to just try really hard and again i didn't wanna disappoint like my biggest fear to this day it would be a disappoint the black ends or the grains like ever and i just i figured if they've gotten me here i have to make this work and so i i studied like you wouldn't believe like nobody knows the northeastern train university library like i do so i studied my ass off and i my biggest girl was even getting a beat about that that part i've met a couple people on my life who have had that sort of like i don't come to jesus moment or the but but i call it like the conversation with yourself it's like there's a day where you have a conversation with something like look it's this either gonna go one of two ways either this is what it is and it'll just be what it's gonna be or like i'm gonna change it and i always ask them because i i i think these mo there's a few moments in your life for like decades are are sort of decided and it's some conversation you have with yourself is my theory i don't know you tell me was there a conversation you had with yourself at that time to be like okay i'm just gonna apply i'm gonna go in bury myself in this library until i come out with a ninety nine percent reading level or what what happened there i've never been one of those like long term planners it was for me it's more of a day by day week by week thing but i did have this mentality i remember of i'm gonna give this literally everything that i have everything that i have like every day i really mean that because i will i had a mentality of i will not disappoint these people i will not disappoint them so if that means i studied round the clock and it still wasn't good enough at least i can say i gave this literally everything and i'm sorry that was kind of my thinking that was it a lot of people think that it's it's you know the hardest thing is when nobody believes in you actually the most pressure is when almost nobody believes in you but a couple people do and when a couple people do it adds a whole different level of emotional pressure to the situation more so than nobody believes in you yes it's funny i i it's rare to i i don't never mind actually anybody that gets that but that's exactly i felt i wanted to live i felt like what they believed in me wasn't true and so i wanted to live up to who they thought i was that who i didn't think i was so that's i i mean i come from the situation you came through from i was luck here than that you'll just be born into the right set sort of family in circumstances but yeah the the birch family here in san francisco they're the ones who were that for me where you know twenty four years old and they they've invested in me and they they sat they literally sat me down and said i think you're gonna do special things they go we've met a lot of people in silicon valley i think you're gonna do special things you're gonna go on to do special things we want you to do them you know we just think then they named me ceo of the company there i here's the keys we think you should do them here you're you're gonna do them at some point and at that time i didn't really view myself as special in any way it was kinda of the first time that somebody ever really said something like that but also put their money where their mouth was that wasn't it maybe my parent where my parents it's like in in a way you sort of take that for granted unfortunately and so i took that for granted when my parents would say oh you're so great like yeah just like every mom you know thinks their kids so great you know that's how i felt at the time and hearing a total outsider you know this billionaire say no no i believe in you and then the and then for me it soul crushing the next six years i like didn't succeed but i was trying really hard but i wasn't succeeding and i remember feeling that pressure of like i was i remember everything like i wish nobody believed in me that would be easier than somebody really believe me you and you're not wanting to disappoint them that was i remember just feeling that day by day so i i definitely at least resonate with that part of your story yeah no that's that's really re that's that's very real it's funny a lot people will say oh i didn't have it as bad as you but it's all i learned a lot of the same and you adapt to what you're going through so i'm sure the feelings in a lot of ways were actually almost the same right but the external just looked a little bit differently yeah yeah your life is a movie and my life is you know like you know the the the the the normal thing but like your life is literally i told you this on the phone your life is literally the plot of the movie blind side like you're just not this like a huge football player instead you you know you're you went bought a business instead but like same sort of idea where people you know took a took a chance on you have you taken that mentality of like be one person what was it be one person for one be that person for one person be that one person for one person i love that that's kind of a amazing is that from something or did you invent that it just like a it just came to me i don't know it was just something i thought of one day have you done that do you feel like you've been able to do that do i feel like i've been able to do that that i do actually and that's truly one of the most rewarding things about my job now and why i try and keep my circle very small i'm really big on doing what these families did for me as much as possible which is a lot of one on one mentorship because i can only do so much on a mask scale but one on one i can really bring people to the next level whatever that level is and i'm huge on and i have no tolerance for people self doubting i'll say nope you can do it like do it again we're doing this again and i will sit there and every everyone of the business i used to say i will come any day anytime i will sit with you for as long as it takes if you try and you're honest with me i'm not gonna give up on you and i i really mean that if somebody tries and they're honest with me i'm not giving up on them right you when you were talking i was getting goosebumps on my arm here because i i mean love the story but also i think that coming on a podcast like this and telling your story is gonna do that for someone somewhere that you don't even know it's a different way of doing it but like somebody out there gonna hear this where they're gonna forward it to somebody who's and say listen i don't even know if you know what the podcast app is but you need to hear this because you know something in there gonna resonate with somebody and so that's why i was getting because there's a way to kinda like the egg carton story and buying a business is school that was kinda the bait but the the real kind of like the real story here is is is kind of just the mentality and also those families that did that for you you know i think that's it's not as flashy as you know creating a foundation and giving away a billion dollars or whatever but it is it is a version of like you know phil or should giving back or con contributing that is you know it can change change somebody's life in a in a huge way versus a lot of people's lives in a small way right and i think that's what's way more important to me and seeing it helps me a lot it keeps me motivated because unfortunately the farther removed you get from it the harder it is to remember what did you have to do when you kind of rewire yourself like what was the when you did try to that's a big shift right you basically changed all your habits maybe not overnight but like you changed all the shit you were doing that was getting you the bad results into things that started to get you good results was it like but what was what was that like how did you do that i wish it was deep and i had like steps for you but it was a lot of fear i was really scared of being anything like what i was i was scared of what i would be in the future kinda like a drug addict that nearly dies from an overdose and they are just scared straight i was kinda scared straight and so i also honestly lost interest in a lot of things i used to be interested in i used to get into fights i used to gossip i used to there was this golf course i used to get drunk pass out on the golf course wake up to the sprinklers no joke and i was disgusted by it afterwards thinking about it like who is that i don't even wanna be around that it was like right the idea of the taste or the smell bothering somebody it was like that but from there it was hard because i didn't know i didn't have any of the tools like i never i did not read a single book in high school not one book right you i have a couple of docs here that i wanna share one is because i think it's cool to see the actual screenshots you you shared with me because the funny thing is when you told the story that what when we told the story the first time on the podcast there was two reactions one is wow that's an incredible story because here's what i tweeted out so i said i have a new hero and and her name is sarah moore at under thirty years old she had no money no experience in the biggest asset was her car a ra for she spent one year hunting through like a hundred thousand businesses to find one to buy and she bought a guest at the time i didn't know if this true she bought a you know multi million dollar business called egg cartons dot com was all debt no no cash down and so i told that story and i told on the podcast and basically the two reactions were wow that's incredible so awesome you know you go girl and on the other side it was calling bullshit no way and people were like that's that's not you know you can't buy it all debt nobody could sift through a hundred thousand businesses how do you go to harvard and not have anything not not have any money and honestly i started to and when i saw those tweets i was damn that i never occurred to me actually like yeah you're right she was saying she kind of came from nothing and blah she said at harvard business school like and i was like am i getting fucking there are those right now is this elizabeth holmes and i'm just getting dupe and so so that happened and then we have this researcher the researcher you you text us the other day you're were like hey somebody's like contacting a bunch of my old interns and it was like our researcher fact checking just to make sure we don't look like idiots that like we're putting somebody on who did this actually happen but i think that's kind of a cool thing that your story was literally too good to be true that people just started calling bullshit and i remember you didn't have any social media so there was no way for you to explain or tell your side of the story and then i think your sister like created a twitter account or something it started like that day she was like tweeting like no i'm in the car with her right now but yeah we grew up broke and like we didn't have a family and like all this stuff and i was like wow i don't know what's happening right now but this is fascinating do you remember that that is so yes it started blowing up on twitter and everyone my company was talking about it and my interns was talking about and they're like sir you need to go out there and defend yourself like we're out defend you and i was worried about i know the internet can be vicious and i was worried about anybody getting any of that like you know pointed at them and then i started worrying about my company so my sister got there and she is we're very protective of each other she was she created a twitter just to go on there and fit is this the sat sister or the other this is the sat this is the bright well they're both exceptionally bright but she's actually the director of hr for abe and fit like corporate level so she goes so we're husband now but fiance the time goes you need to delete this jane like you you have something to lose yeah it is a loose situation like you guys are idiots while you're trying to find yourself amongst like people in line were like it's getting out of hand so we had no i just that was my concern that people were gonna think this was fake and this was somehow having a snowball in a negative direction and all i cared about was preserve the business like gold fuck they cars dot com don't with this random dude on the internet blow this blow spot alright so then you share with us a bunch of the things so you share with us the craigslist we'll put this on on youtube so people can actually see the the craigslist post but you wrote kingston green what's ken that's what you named to your thing i'd a mental mentor recommended to make the name of the company a name it that would have a story to it so i deliberately said i wanted to say sam from cleveland and i worked in the steel business i wanna say i'm a blue collar or gal here right and so ken was the name went ice school cleveland what i'd say and green was the name of the family i had worked for in the steel industry right so when they would ask immediately what's i don't know one what's right hey i'm they don't care but when they'd say what's kent green it was my way of giving an intro without giving an intro that's amazing also it sounds kind of powerful and old money sound means for that but yeah no it works so you wrote it's small an orthodox private equity firm accurate unorthodox for sure dot crowd very private just me and you said unlike a traditional pre private equity firm we will acquire just one business and the principal will operate upon acquisition alright no lies are told i said you will be working for an eccentric un harvard mba alright i like it and exposed to live m and a deals interactions with brokers accounts and attorneys and due diligence and negotiations of various sorts every day see that's awesome you're you're saying i like the value you're gonna get out of this edi unique experience we're looking for interest to help manage our multi stage high volume funnel high and all caps in the most efficient way possible it includes blah blah blah you said you know i like this work will not include financial modeling sophisticated analyses or anything that you or anyone else thinks is a waste of time tell me about that because that is beautiful love that in a in in a job bust i hate wasting people's time one of my biggest pet peeve are these jobs people have to sit there until five six whatever clock and rub their fingers to leave it's like when your work is done just leave and don't pretend to be busy don't pretend like you're not on your cell phone so i'm not gonna ask them do to do anything that's not gonna be important very important right and they're not doing some this isn't harvard we're not gonna be doing these crazy financial analysis right it's really simple it can be done on the back of a piece of paper because most of the time when you call these businesses you're like so what's your profit for the year and they're like i think it's like one point four no let me one point six i don't have my numbers in front of me hey they're like and then you look at it's like actually you made nine hundred k last year and they're like yeah i don't know what's i gotta ask my guy about that like it's not like you're doing you know the diligence it's like they don't know their business it's not like they're hiding something you they don't know it themselves this so common alright so then you said a bunch of other things you look for somebody hungry hungry comfortable with chaos then here's compensation because some people were also like oh unpaid interns that's crazy and it's like dude don't have any money and like this is a these are willing enable people choosing to do this because they see some value in it for them you said this is an unpaid internship if you're looking for a glamorous internship in a formal prestigious work environment this job is not for you we are operating out of an una spot in a library and i will provide letters of recommendations as well as introductions to anyone in consulting firms banks or private equity firms should you perform well should good qualifier i will also help you with recruiting interviewing and grants will prep if you want me to wonderful this is wonderful this is so good i love seeing this i also have here an email you sent i think you were maybe sending this to a broker but just very clear and direct to the point you're were like hey my name moore i'm recent business school grad living in boston i wanna buy a small business that means this criteria a hundred percent of the businesses for sale the eb or seller seller earnings are one to two million it's been profitable the last three years and seller financing is available i have preference of b i have a preference for b b service but this is not a requirement i'm able to finance which just below twenty five million please let me know if you have any listings like very direct clear and were things like that like how did you increase your luck so like how does you put things out there to increase the amount of good things that would come inbound to you let's go there actually i i have something for you guys i put to the side here okay so people talk all the time about this industry and being a woman and they think that it's a disadvantage well that's matter of perspective i deliberately wanted to leverage my gender and so part of that was within the broker community it's all men usually so i'm five nine and i would go to only free broker events but i would go to them in five inch heels so i'm walking around as this six foot two amazon and i'd always wear like a ridiculous outfit to like a loud color so when i'd call the brokers i'd say because i never remembered they'd say who are you again i'd say i'm that extremely tall chick that introduced myself to looking for a business there wasn't a single person that didn't remember that's for the brokers but then i'm very active so i'd be going around boston on these blue bikes which are free of course and i would be running or doing whatever and i wore this sweatshirt a version of this too like every day i wanna buy your business and then the back was my number i it was an interesting experience with this yeah where you were anything to get your site it was anything free where i can i wanted the world to know i am looking to buy in business and i'm serious did you get any good inbound from this was like did somebody call you being like hey i just saw you ride by me on a bike i think i caught this number correct i'd like to sell you my business it's funny it i i didn't think it was working but you'd be amazed at what comes out of the wood work there's actually somebody that came over and said you know what my my dad asked me about whether or not this was actually a legitimate business like are you actually looking to buy something and that worked out and then i fax everybody that was one of the interns idea to send out mass fax and part of the fax campaign was just putting anything that will get their attention so part of it i did put my picture on there and i'd say we wanna buy your business and i i told you this to this day i have people that recognize recognized me from those boxes people in the mail that i work in said wait a second i was wondering why you looked so familiar did you try buy my business like people on my street to this day in downtown boston and will say pure that girl that was wearing that sweatshirt or you're that girl that was fax me all the time that's what i wanted unfortunately i i i a lot of those replies came back after i bought a business right but i was just that was what i was really hoping for somebody to see it and know i was serious well that's brilliant because you're looking for these kind of long standing sort of boring b2b service businesses they have fax machines yeah nothing interesting it's coming through the fact machine so it's a completely untapped un channel you're like and i'm gonna turn my disadvantages into advantages okay people say you disadvantage to be a woman you're not gonna be taking seriously blah blah you're you're you're you're not gonna be included in whatever well i'm also gonna stand out if i'm the minority right like i'm gonna be different than everybody else and i'm gonna use the sort of psychology to my favor here and i love that you did that or not like shy about that because i think a lot of people are very shy about things like this and i love that you did that you're fax a picture is to me like it's in the all time hustle moves and i'll also say it doesn't matter if some of this stuff works because one life motto do it for the story i think that's that's a that's already just like a winning thing to do it's just do things for the story and two is there's something that comes with the mentality of nothing is off limits i will do anything i am all fucking in and it's a signal to yourself it's a signal to your interns in your team it's a signal to everybody in the world that i am all fucking in and no idea is off limits no ideas too dumb no ideas too to out there or too to you know too loud no no we are everything's on the table as as a thing that we might do and i think that is the value of some of these things whether it's the lead that actually brings in the business or not is kinda secondary and i love that you did that anything sean truly i was shameless if i had anything i could throw out there i was thrown it out there whatever i stuck i was okay with hey sarah sarah moore five foot nine if that's your thing yeah i'd love to buy your pest control business really whatever it takes and if i could find out maybe the profits of your business i'd be happy to join you for a coffee let's let's do this that's so so funny yeah and if you could leave any listeners of this with one i don't know message or takeaway away what's what's your kind of what's your message what's your what's the last thing you want us to leave in people's minds here so my biggest values is freedom this country was not founded on inequality despite how things seem now with the culture it was founded on freedom and part of freedom is using everything at your disposal so gender sex age whatever makes you you you can use any of those things to literally poll about buyer bootstrap and make your life what you want it this industry i can promise you is one of those industries you don't have to have harvard mba what made me successful at this i really think was largely my upbringing those things weren't taught to me at harvard the to get a business the things i do day to day we're not taught to me at harvard they were taught at the cliche school of hard knocks so if you wanna be free pursue this route freedom is not free it's gonna cost you time it's gonna cost you like a lot of effort but i can promise you that anyone that wants to do this can do this if they really put their all into it and normally i say at the end how should people follow you or reach you but you don't really have social media and i think we may not want people to be reaching you after this so like what's your best is leave for the fuck alone is it stay way you want to be contacted from this what what what would you like my biggest thing i i've said what i want is for anyone who wants to pursue this career path i want everyone to have a fair opportunity to do so which is why i'm talking about it i'm going to give people within a q and a type format detailed information to answer all the questions i get but we've truly experienced this crazy amount of volume on my in my inbox on my linkedin of messages like thousands and it really breaks my art not being able to get back to all of them so i'm doing a mass reply that's that's the idea here we're gonna give you as much information as we possibly can but please understand that i cannot respond to all these inquiries like i have a full time job like i own other companies too we're very busy so the biggest thing is please do not contact our business please do not show up at the business we're gonna create a google doc something for you guys to fill out if you want information we'll send it to you but i i just can't get packed everybody like i'm not used to this i went i'm like a nobody and i'm not used so all this attention and all these inbound inquiries but i can't i can't respond to them all i worked do i really would but i can't so we're gonna put a form in the description here that'll be like people could fill that in you'll send them a blast and amazing if there are people who fill out that form i might cherry pick a couple of the people be like hey if you're serious about this like i'll help you do it like yes i don't i i'm i'm taking a break from running companies you know we sold our last company last year i don't wanna start a new company right now but i do wanna do fun fun projects and one of the fun things is helping people buy businesses that's yes one of the things that is actually pretty pretty dope because you learn about all these niche businesses you get like the free mba right yeah so so so i think it's a good time you learned so much searching when i hear about people failing at this it's like you really can't fail unless you get investors of course but you really can't i i mean the amount we still laugh at some of the businesses out there and you view the world differently you i think of the freeway now and the the lines on the freeway and the signs on the freeway somebody made all of that right like these christians come in like wow god made this and i'm thinking that and all these businesses made like all this stuff that we're looking at and using it's kinda wild right you're like no that's trent in cincinnati he does that he what you mean he has a name alright sarah thanks so much for coming on i really appreciate it and really inspired by your story so thank you for coming ton thank you for having appreciate it i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days on a road less travel never looking back