Maximizing Business Valuation and Exploring Growth Strategies with Rob Macklin

Rob Macklin KNOWS mergers and acquisitions having done over 200 of them. He shares his knowledge RIGHT OFF BAT! Here we go! Depending on your exit strategy or planning, you will need to structure your business and personal finances to make it easier for someone to ‘see’ how well you are performing. They are also looking for how to use your platform to grow quicker and be more profitable. When you listen to this episode, I guarantee you will look at your business differently and will act on at least one piece of advice that Rob shares with us! I did ;) Did you know our amazing voices can go beyond just the microphone? Yes, we have video! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here!

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Rob’s Links:

•  LinkedIn | @robertlmacklin

•  Website | www.oneandfund.com 

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GOLD NUGGETS:

(00:00) - Business Valuation and Growth Strategies

(03:33) - Selling and Structuring a Company 101

(14:37) - Selling a Small Business

(26:34) - Investing in One and Fund Finance

(39:56) - Reserves, Law School, and Parenting

(45:48) - Book Recs, Home Features, & DIY Nightmares

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Books Mentioned:

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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Previous guests on The Small Business Safari include Amy Lyle, Ben Alexander, Joseph Sission, Jonathan Ellis, Brad Dell, Chris Hanks, C.T. Emerson, Chad Brown, Tracy Moore, Wayne Sherger, David Raymond, Paul Redman, Gabby Meteor, Ryan Dement, Barbara Heil Sonneck, Bryan John, Tom Defore, Rusty Clifton, Duane Johns, Beth Miller, Jason Sleeman, Andy Suggs, Chris Michel, Jon Ostenson, Tommy Breedlove, Rocky Lalvani, Amanda Griffey, Spencer Powell, Joe Perrone, David Lupberger, Duane C. Barney, Dave Moerman, Jim Ryerson, Al Mishkoff, Scott Specker, Mike Claudio and more!

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If you loved this episode try these!

• You Should be in the PeopleWare Business Not Just the Software Business | Mark Herschberg

• HR Usually Sucks…but It Doesn’t Have To | Wendy Sellers

• Are Leaders Born or Trained? – Ron Reich

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Have any questions or comments? Connect with me here!

Transcript

Chris Lalomia: 0:00

Even if you're doing a million, you're thinking, yeah, I'm putting 500 in my pocket. Of course the first number is, no, you're not. And if you think you are, you're really not. Not in the home services business, especially Too much to serve. And so when you talk about multiple, they think you know what I got it and so I'm gonna go do this. And you're like, well, do you have? And Robert, you brought this up do you have a job or do you have a business? Right, and then his job, he just brought up numbers, guys, and I'm gonna tell you right now your job is not five or six multiple, it is three at best, and most likely two to two and a half. You gotta hear that because nobody's willing. I finally had somebody finally cough it up and say that to me until you build your business, chris, nobody's gonna pay you more than three. And I was like you know bullshit. You know I'm smarter than everybody else, I'm gonna figure this thing out and you know what he's right and you know what. That's what you gotta think about. So everybody thinks your business is worth way more than it is Rob's laying out the skinny. I don't care if you're a 10 to $50 million business. And if you're a one to five, it's the same stories. Man, you guys think your business is worth way more than it is and you have not really built the structure that you want to to get there. And you gotta start doing it. And you gotta start doing it now If you wanna exit the next three to four or the next two to three right.

Chris Lalomia: 1:13

Welcome to the Small Business Safari where I help guide you to avoid those traps, pitfalls and dangers that lurk when navigating the wild world of small business ownership. I'll share those gold nuggets of information and invite guests to help accelerate your ascent to that mountaintop of success. It's a jungle out there and I wanna help you traverse through the levels of owning your own business that can get you bogged down and distract you from any of your own personal and professional goals. So strap in adventure team and let's take a ride through the safari and get you to the mountaintop. We are back, we are rocking, we're gonna make this happen. Small Business Safari get in here, let's lock in and listen quickly, everybody, because if you really wanna get a law passed in the world, alan and I just heard from our guest who's about to come on, that the law has to be something we both agree on. When one we are sober and two we are Rob, rob Add a boy, and since Alan and I have both been both, we know that once though again.

Chris Lalomia: 2:18

You're hurting our reputation To get a law passed, everybody. If you can think it up sober, you can think it up drunk it's a law. I think we're onto something. Rob Macklin, thank you for joining Everybody. We're about to have some fun and I'll tell you why. Why, chris? I'm glad you asked me, because the audience is all dying to know why, why, why, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think people just pulled over just to wait.

Alan Wyatt: 2:42

You know what you should.

Chris Lalomia: 2:43

You're at a red light right now and it turned green and you're like wait, what's he gonna talk about? Guys, I'm gonna talk about what everybody here wants. You wanna start a business, you wanna grow a business, but you know what you wanna do.

Alan Wyatt: 2:55

Make a ton of money when you get out of the business and get out of that fucking business and make a ton of money, did I just say that you put that down?

Chris Lalomia: 3:02

That's why you stayed. That's why everybody's beeping at you from behind. Pleas, just don't have that I'm a student driver sticker on there. Oh my God, people are putting two of them on there now. They're old too. You drive by these people that said I'm a student driver, and you drive by and you're like 45 years old. You're like dude. If you're a student driver, you need to stop. Just get off the car. You're out of here. So, rob, thank you for indulging us for a minute. So, rob Macklin, welcome to the show Today. You're with one and fun, but before this, what did you do?

Rob Macklin: 3:33

I have been all over the place. I'm a lawyer by trade and I started out doing mergers and acquisitions for a very large law firm so some of the biggest M&A deals in the world firm called Skadenarps. So we were doing when two major airlines emerged we would handle things like that so big deals. And then I went in-house and it was general counsel of a bunch of different companies public-traded companies but probably more importantly for a lot of your listeners a lot of private equity companies.

Rob Macklin: 4:04

So I was on the management teams for private equity companies and various public companies were buying up a lot of these small businesses all over the place. So we would sit there and do these deals and take a look at these and evaluate small companies and gosh one of the companies in particular. I was the general counsel of a public company and we probably saw 200 deals a year come across our desk that we would evaluate to one extent or another, and we do a few dozen of those on a regular basis.

Chris Lalomia: 4:32

So it all sounds sexy and we'll come back to Rob's history, but let's get into this. Because it all sounds sexy, we all want to leave the business. We think it's going to be really easy, but you just said 200 deals a year came across. You were just your company's desk, right? What makes it so hard to sell a company?

Rob Macklin: 4:51

Not being prepared to do so, not having the right structure, the organization, not listening to the right advisors. It's an art form to sell a business, and so if anybody wants to sell a business, I'm going to say two things. One is look, I'm a lawyer, I sell businesses for a living. But I'm also going to say I'm your first hire, but I'm probably not your most important hire. Your most important hire is a good investment banker that knows what they're doing in a space that you're in. Now. You hire me first because you need somebody to negotiate the deal to your investment banker to make sure that you're actually paying them a reasonable fee. But getting that banker in that can actually get you in front of a couple hundred companies is appropriate.

Rob Macklin: 5:38

So I mean right now we're selling a company and I obviously can't go into details, but my firm has probably looked at 60 non-disclosure agreements so that the investment bank has sent out enough teasers to various folks that that's generated 50 or 60 non-disclosure agreements of people that are interested in taking a look at that. That is not uncommon, that's fairly usual. So getting a banker who is well connected, who can actually get you in front of the most people possible, is absolutely critical. That's the first step.

Alan Wyatt: 6:11

Brilliant that was it.

Chris Lalomia: 6:14

I thought Alan was going to have this amazing hard hitting Knock your socks off the question. He goes tough. Question that's good.

Alan Wyatt: 6:21

Now you know what the problem is. Rob is, you don't know this, but over the two years we kind of keep score on who asks good questions. And Chris asked a good question and it really hurts me to say that Ah, that was a good one.

Chris Lalomia: 6:33

I've got to follow on this even better. No really, let's back up. You said structure, so for a lot of our business owners and a lot of people listening to the podcast, either thinking about starting a business or I'm in one, scaling it up. Maybe I've got five to 10 employees, maybe I've got 10 to 20 employees. When you say structure, talk to us a little bit more about that. What are you looking for?

Alan Wyatt: 6:57

There's kind of a break that down to three components.

Rob Macklin: 7:00

The first would be making sure that the structure of the business actually reflects your family's interests. You start a business and you've got a couple kids I don't know they're eight, nine, nine and 10, simple like that and if you're starting this business as a legacy for them, the best time to handle your estate planning is right now, Because at this point in time you've got like the business isn't worth anything.

Rob Macklin: 7:27

And it's really easy to give your kids shares of a business that isn't worth anything. If you come back to me seven or eight or 10 or 12 years later, you're like oh the businesses worth $39.

Rob Macklin: 7:36

I'm going to go. We got some gift tax issues to deal with If you want to get this money in the hands of kids. So starting that first. That's number one. Number two is getting the company structured from a financial perspective that is easy for a buyer to understand. So you got to think about if you're gonna exit to a large company, to private equity. There's like a set of expectations that they have around what a business is supposed to look like, and that set of expectations is basically like all of us. It's like how do we do it right? Or private equity we do things a certain way. We have Gap, a County right.

Chris Lalomia: 8:09

We have a cool based accounting.

Rob Macklin: 8:11

We don't have cash based accounting, like if you're paying taxes to the IRS. Cash based accounting is fantastic. If you want to sell a company, you got to have a cool based accounting, and so if you're in an industry, I do a ton of stuff at home improvement right now, right, so you get guys that will be on cash based accounting and they'll say well, my revenue is up 50% this year.

Rob Macklin: 8:29

Well, not really. What happened was you just booked a lot of orders and took a lot of deposits. Like your revenue is not up, you have a lot of cash in the bank, did that?

Chris Lalomia: 8:39

hurt, Chris. The bank is fantastic, but your revenue is not up. All right, Rob, that is hitting a little close to home. Yeah, all right. No, I'm a cool based accounting, but you have to do what you need Like yeah, hey, big boy, I'm up, up, up, up up. Have you seen it? Well, don't worry about that, that's coming Check's in the mail.

Alan Wyatt: 8:56

Yeah, all right, that was good.

Rob Macklin: 8:58

That's a big one, look honestly. The other one is I've seen companies that are like man, I'm doing $10 million and I have a 38% profit margin and you're like, well, how in the hell are you doing that? And well, it's because the person knows that I'm like the head marketing person and I'm the head install guy and I'm a CFO and I've got all these positions in my business that aren't being filled. And I'm doing because I'm working 90 hours a week. Well, a buyer's gonna look at that and go I need to backfill all these positions and all of a sudden your profit margin drops precipitously because they can't expect you to run 90 hour weeks for the rest of your life and make a lot of money.

Rob Macklin: 9:36

So that's the big one. And then when you do go backfill those positions, I'm gonna tell you the single biggest reason why, in my experience on the buy side, we walk away from deals Just it's not having people that are credible to back you up, like you gotta have the answer until if Bob gets hit by a bus, what happens to the company? And if the answer is we don't know, not really sure Bob has everything, it's all in Bob's head, it's at Bob's desk, it's on Bob's computer and Bob's not there.

Rob Macklin: 10:07

The buyer hasn't bought a business. They've bought a gigantic liability.

Alan Wyatt: 10:11

So the fact that Chris is never at work and always on vacation is actually really good for selling his company.

Rob Macklin: 10:17

Yes, honestly. Yes, if you're like, if you're Good job, chris, and you don't have to do anything. That's the best scenario, like-.

Chris Lalomia: 10:26

You mean like going to the Green Bay Lions game on Thursday and then not so Rob is encouraging you to do even less, even less.

Alan Wyatt: 10:35

you should work less, by the way, I think-. I need more advisors like Rob and less advisors like you. Yeah well, I'm gonna give you a piece of advice here, because you're putting yourself on the back that that was a second good question and I gave a thumbs down because Rob made it a decent question, because of an excellent answer. But the funny thing was I put my thumb down and then Chris muted us to flip me off and I'm like, why did you mute us? To just give me the finger?

Chris Lalomia: 11:05

Because I was gonna say you too at the same time. Yeah, we're sitting here on Zoom.

Rob Macklin: 11:11

You're on mute. I'm watching you guys flip each other off and like, am I supposed to laugh?

Chris Lalomia: 11:14

at this.

Rob Macklin: 11:15

I'm not really sure if I'm on video.

Alan Wyatt: 11:19

No, I put you on mute because I was gonna tell I was like he just muted me to give me the finger. I did yeah, okay.

Chris Lalomia: 11:25

Well, welcome to podcast land. You know what we may be in the top 10% but we're just not that good at it, we're just not that good at it.

Chris Lalomia: 11:33

All right back to Rob Talking about structuring it. But back to the point. I think ownership, structure, financial understanding, make it easy for the company to understand If you were doing everything. This is a big one, because I'm actually looking at potentially purchasing a smaller business and he is coming to me telling me just how great everything is and I'm like, yep, who does the sales I do. Who does the scheduling I do. Who does the estimating? That's still me Okay. Who does the collecting? Well, I have a lady in the office but I usually do most of it and she does it. I'm like, okay, what does this lady do in the office? And he's like, yeah, yeah, but dude, I mean that revenue's there and I am netting big time money. I'm like, yeah, I'm netting little time money, but guess what, I've got people doing this, this, this, I got a sales team. So it's important. You know you don't make as much you think, right? I mean, as a small business owner, if you're thinking of exiting, it's gonna cost you a little bit on the upfront, right?

Rob Macklin: 12:32

Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like the guy you're looking at. He doesn't have a business, he has a job.

Chris Lalomia: 12:36

Yeah.

Rob Macklin: 12:38

And also I'm a lawyer. My wife and I have a law firm. The day that the two of us leave our own two-person law firm there's no value there Like the value goes away. The value is all in her and I right People that know us. We do the work ourselves we have that job.

Chris Lalomia: 12:51

You know I have a separate company on the financing side. But like that law firm there's no value to that firm because it's entirely us.

Rob Macklin: 12:57

And if you wanna make a lot of money for yourself, like the way that you do, that is to do all that work, but you're costing yourself a long-term value, because, ultimately, the long-term what a buyer wants is the ability to basically say you're gonna go on vacation? I'm never gonna see you again and this business will continue to run long. And the only way you do that is you structure it. You have people, you have processes. You're counting the setup correctly?

Chris Lalomia: 13:21

So, rob, you're saying you know you gotta be able to build that business and do what you're doing. So again, how do you do that? And look at you know, you know, cause you're not making as much right. So how do you reconcile that one?

Rob Macklin: 13:36

You gotta know what you're running for, honestly, are you in it for immediate cash flow or are you in it to actually build a business long-term? There's no right answer there. Right, it's totally fine to say I'm in this for immediate cash flow. That's not a problem at all, just recognize.

Alan Wyatt: 13:50

That's what you're doing.

Rob Macklin: 13:51

And be okay with that and that's totally fine. But if you wanna build a business long-term, what it means is you gotta go hire somebody. You might have to give them a little bit of equity. You might have to pay more than you're comfortable paying you might take less in your own paycheck because you're hiring this great person. Now look ideally what happens is you bring in those folks, you put in the processes and long-term right. Maybe you take a different profitability now, but your revenues go up and you know you're not making 36% of $5 million, but you're making 20% of, you know, $30 million and that's way better.

Rob Macklin: 14:23

And you can sell that in a long-term, but you're gonna take it for sure and you have to be willing to commit to that. Commit to the process you know, give up control and get the right people in, that will actually run that business for you.

Alan Wyatt: 14:37

So in your typical small business scenario, somebody's thinking about exiting. Really, what's the timeline of I'm thinking about exiting before they really have set themselves up to be able to exit as well as they can? And at what point do they bring in counsel and at what point did they bring in a banker?

Rob Macklin: 14:57

So I'm going to say, bring in counsel sooner rather than later, and the reason I say that is the biggest turtle in selling a small business is actually making the decision to sell the small business, and so going and talking to a lawyer in particular is kind of a concrete first step where you're saying, yep, I've signed the engagement letter, I'm committed to it, like I'm actually going to do this, I'm actually going to go forward with this thing and then at that point in time, when you've gotten over that hurdle, you're maybe, I think.

Rob Macklin: 15:30

If you're going to do this right, my suggestion is you go talk to that lawyer and the lawyer finds you an investment banker and then the investment banker and the lawyer together will help you do. My recommendation in almost all cases is what's called a quality earnings report, where you're going to get some independent accountants that are going to come in and look at your financial statements and say to you a buyer will evaluate your financial statements in the following way A buyer will say your revenue that you think is $10 million is really $9.5 million because you're doing this thing wrong.

Rob Macklin: 16:05

Or, yeah, your profitability is overstated because you're only paying yourself $50,000 a year and in reality, someone in your position should be making $250,000 a year, and so that extra 200 grand is showing up as profit which you're pocketing, which is fantastic, but a buyer is going to have to replace you with somebody with more expensive asset.

Rob Macklin: 16:24

Those sorts of things. They're going to look at those and evaluate your financials from an independent perspective. That's absolutely critical. Now, if that QoV comes back and you're like, eh, there's not much to change, man, go forward and you could probably be sold, depending on the industry, in six months. You know, particularly if the industry is hot for private equity, six months is quite doable. If it's not, if you have some things to clean up, if you come in and say, well, man, we really need to do some estate planning and there's some taxing collections we have to make and we just converted to an S-Corp, we want to convert back to a partnership, something like that. Right, it may take a little bit longer.

Rob Macklin: 16:59

But realistically timeline you're ready to go. You can get it done in six to nine months pretty easily.

Chris Lalomia: 17:04

There's a lot of work to get to that. Six to nine months, knowing you've been through a lot of these and I actually my data points are four or five guys that I know have done this it's tough. I mean to get through it. Like you said, number one, you have to commit to doing it, and that's tough. It sounds easy, it's sound, and I tell you there are days when it sounds really easy for me buddy in the handyman remodeling business and then you're like get me the hell out of here. So, as you're looking at this and doing this for a lot of people, is there a number, revenue wise, that you need to be at before you start talking to a lawyer and an investment banker? Is it a million dollar company? Is it a five million? Is it 10? What is it?

Rob Macklin: 17:42

Yeah, so if you want to sell private equity, you're probably going to need somewhere between a million dollars and three million dollars of EBITDA, so earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and admonization before they're going to pay attention to you.

Chris Lalomia: 17:58

There's a caveat there.

Rob Macklin: 17:59

Oh, I'm sorry, Go ahead.

Chris Lalomia: 18:00

No, I think that's the big one. See, nobody's willing to ever put a number on it. And you finally did. See, when you talk with people, nobody will ever put a number on it. Like you know, it depends If you have the great idea. But they're all talking about that. You know the Facebook. They're talking about these one offs and not the other 99.9% of us.

Alan Wyatt: 18:19

Well, he said there was a caveat.

Rob Macklin: 18:21

Yeah.

Alan Wyatt: 18:22

Oh Can.

Chris Lalomia: 18:24

I get off my soapbox, all right, I'm off my soapbox, all right. Rob, more intelligent one, talk to me, okay.

Rob Macklin: 18:30

I mean, look to the face, point yeah.

Chris Lalomia: 18:33

Are there companies in Silicon Valley?

Rob Macklin: 18:34

that have no revenue and billion dollars. Absolutely, they're called unicorns. They call them unicorns for a reason, because there aren't that many of them. There's a handful right Look you can sell a company in that million to $3 million range as kind of an independent company to private equity. You know, if you're smaller than that you're going to have to sell to an existing strategic company as a. You know we'll call it a tuck in. Right, it's man.

Rob Macklin: 19:02

There's a basement remodeling company that covers all of Illinois except for East St Louis and you're a bad basement remodeling company in East St Louis, right and you plug in perfectly, it fits exactly right. That's exactly where you want to be, and those companies can be quite small. But quite honestly, you're not going to get a pretty big multiple of revenue and you're going to be relatively small and I wouldn't say called investment banker. You're going to be calling a business broker, which is a kind of like an investment banker but deals with much smaller businesses and not as sophisticated.

Chris Lalomia: 19:34

I mean, I don't mean to slam business brokers, but they're just they don't operate at the same level.

Chris Lalomia: 19:38

I mean you're hitting on it and that's why when you, when you're talking to our audience and everybody's listening to this, you know it. A lot of people this is the first time you're listening to this stuff and you think, oh, I'm going to sell my business. Oh, I've heard this thing's called private equity and venture capital and it sounds so sexy. And yeah, and you find out your business, you're pulling in two million in revenue and you're doing like two, two, 50 a year yourself. You're like, yeah, I'm going to do that no man slow down.

Chris Lalomia: 20:03

listen to what Rob's saying. At a certain size, this makes sense. However, a lot of the same steps can happen. You have to do a lot of those same things if you want to get any hit. Just hit on that great thing and that's called the multiple. Rob, you want to explain the multiple for most of us.

Rob Macklin: 20:20

Yeah, so the multiple is is a multiple of earnings or multiple of cash flow or multiple of EBITDA, typically meaning it's, you know if you're, if you're making a million dollars a year in profit and you're going to get a five times multiple. You're going to get paid $5 million of your business, roughly speaking. There's some add backs and things like that, but but think about it in that way that multiple is really just a rule of thumb around the value of your business because, at the end of the day, what a buyer's looking at is hey.

Rob Macklin: 20:50

I'm going to pay you $5 million for your business today. How much money am I going to make in the future? How fast am I going to get that money back? So the multiple is kind of an easy way to compare companies. It's not the be all, end all and some you'll hear some bankers call it.

Rob Macklin: 21:04

That's the country club price. Right, so you can talk to your friends. The golf course I got six. I got six and a half. I did better than you but at the end of the day, right, it's just. It's just a rule of thumb because, kind of, if you think about it in investment, it's just, I give you money today and I get money back in the future and like how fast I get my money back in the future. What the riskiness of getting my money back in the future is is really what it is and that the multiple is way to do that. But what I will say is is a rule of thumb the bigger your business is, the bigger the multiple you're going to get.

Rob Macklin: 21:36

Because the cost of getting a deal done right Private equity firm is going to come in and I'm not some people are going to think I'm exaggerating Private equity is going to come in and buy a $10 million, spend $10 million in a company. They may spend a half a million dollars in professional fees to get that deal done right. So they're spending. You know they're spending 5% of the deal cost to get that deal done. It's going to cost them exactly the same amount of money to get a $20 million deal done. So they're going to pay you less and less and less. So if you're going to come in with a $5 million deal you know five times multiple at a million dollar company and they're going to spend a half a million dollars to get your deal done, like they're not going to pay you as much. You know number one. Number two the bigger the company is, the easier it is to scale.

Rob Macklin: 22:21

And a bigger company can be what's called a platform for a private equity company. So if you think about it from the perspective of, hey, new private equity companies just raised a fund of $500 million that they need to spend, like it's a lot easier to find a hundred million deal than it is to find $25 million deals. They just got to do less work, so they're going to pay more for those bigger deals. They're going to pay more for those bigger deals because it's less work and also because they can then go start having that $100 million company, go and buy a bunch of $5 million companies and kind of build up a business that way in organically. So the multiple again is a rule of thumb, but the most common mistake that people use is assuming that the multiple is the same for every business in a given industry and in reality it's just not. I mean, size really does matter and it's-.

Chris Lalomia: 23:15

You know what? I just literally just wrote this down. I got to find a great title for it, and I think the answer is size does matter if you want to sell your goods. Yep, there you go.

Rob Macklin: 23:25

That's exactly right.

Chris Lalomia: 23:27

So again, you hit a lot of that. And that's where people come and talk to me smaller than me a little bit, you know, try to get and go in their scale and business. And you know I'm getting people reaching out on the podcast, talking to me a little bit. We may be doing a million a year, maybe we're doing $500,000 a year, but you know, even if you're doing a million, you're thinking, yeah, I'm putting $500 in my pocket and the first number is no, you're not. I mean, if you think you are, you're really not, not in the home services business, especially Too much to serve. And so when you talk about multiple, they think you know what. I got it. And so I'm going to go do this and you're like, well, do you have and Robert, you brought this up Do you have a job or do you have a business? Right, and then his job, he just brought up numbers, guys, and I'm going to tell you right now, your job is not five or six multiple, it is three at best and most likely two to two and a half. You got to hear that because nobody's willing.

Chris Lalomia: 24:21

I finally had somebody finally cough it up and say that to me. Until you build your business, chris, nobody's going to pay you more than three. And I was like you know bullshit. You know I'm smarter than everybody else, so I'm going to figure this thing out and you know what. He's right and you know what. That's what you got to think about. So everybody thinks your business is worth way more than it is. Rob's laying out the skinny. I don't care if you're a 10 to 50 million dollar business and if you're a one to five. It's the same stories, man. You guys think your business is worth way more than it is and you have not really built the structure that you want to to get there and you got to start doing it. And you got to start doing it now. If you want to exit the next three to four or the next two to three, right.

Rob Macklin: 24:59

Yeah, I mean, put yourself on the buyer side, like if you just got an inheritance of a million bucks, right, and your third uncle died and you ended up with a million bucks. And there's some dude down the street who's got this basement waterproofing company and he's like, yeah, I'm working at it full time and I'm making $500,000 a year. Why don't you buy this business from me? Are you going to go? Yeah, here's a million bucks and I'm going to spend two years working my butt off to make that $500,000. Now, now I'm just even at that point in time, right, I've literally made nothing else. And now I'm even and I got to work like another two years to be averaging $250,000 a year.

Rob Macklin: 25:35

Or I could go down the job and go down the street, get the job as a you know sale. I'm great at sales. I could be the sales manager for some of the company and make $400,000 a year right away. Why would I pay you for that business? It makes no sense. The only way you're going to make money for a business if somebody can actually go hire someone else to take over your job, and as soon as that happens, that profitability that you think you have just gets tripped away by hiring somebody else to take your place.

Chris Lalomia: 25:57

Man speaking the truth. Rob, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. This is, if you're not getting value out of this one man, you're blowing it, because this has been stuff that's been eye opening for me. I've been at it for 15 and a half years and I was very naive at year five and I would say, at 15 and a half years I'm still naive, but I'm learning and I've learned with everybody you know, as we do this is that our businesses are business, but growing it and figuring out what you want to do. If you want an exit strategy, you got to figure that out. So, rob, as you, as you have worked with other businesses, you've also invested in some. So let's talk for a minute, let's switch gears a little bit. Which business did you invest in and why did you do that?

Rob Macklin: 26:40

Well, I've got a few kind of passive investments that I've made, but the one that I'm currently in is called called One and Fund, so One and Fund is a finance company for the improvement space.

Chris Lalomia: 26:52

So think of us as a is a multi lender finance company.

Rob Macklin: 26:55

We've got a web platform we've developed we were just a few different shows. The web platform allows home improvement companies to come in to platform, put in a single application and then, depending on the criteria of that consumer's application, a credit score, dti, all that fun stuff. Right, we go to multiple lenders and we find the best lender that's most likely to approve it, and that's really the crux of it. So we started that in in February of this year, myself and a couple of partners that you know. Honestly, one of one of the guys whose companies I sold kind of put myself, put me together with his former finance manager.

Rob Macklin: 27:30

And we kind of took this off and started it up and we think it's a really great, you know solution for the space, because you know, at the end of the day, the easiest way to increase your revenues, increase your closing percentage and for most home improvement companies, if you're not using financing, you're just missing out on sales and you may even know that. You may not even know that you're missing out on sales, because if somebody doesn't have the money to pay up your project, they're not going to tell you they don't have the money to pay for the project. They're just going to go. Ah no, maybe not for me some of the time.

Rob Macklin: 27:59

Call me back later, but if you can offer, financing that's a big deal and what I'll tell you is having sold now double-digit companies in home improvement space. All of the biggest companies that I had are financing 50 plus percent of their deals 50 plus 50 plus.

Alan Wyatt: 28:17

How quick is the approval process?

Rob Macklin: 28:21

Faster than I can say. I mean, it's just a few seconds, right, we've got. We've got APIs and a bunch of lenders, so those are basically happening.

Chris Lalomia: 28:31

You didn't realize. He was trained as a Navy SEAL and then Navy SEAL teams. Hey, would you ask that question right there, right, which is ah, ah, ah, ah. But that's how fast Actually, and the reason I brought that up is I recently, just literally two days ago, just signed up with One in Fund.

Rob Macklin: 28:48

Oh I, didn't even know that. That's fantastic.

Chris Lalomia: 28:50

Yeah. So there you go. Not only hey, what's that? Of course, here, club for Men definitely didn't get into that program, but I did join at One in Fund and that's how I um, I and that's I found out on the backside that you were part of the deal. So tell me, you brought that up 50 percent. You sold your businesses 50 percent or financing out there. So you clearly looked at that deal and went you know what I'm going to put my you know my money from my dead uncle in that one to use it live.

Chris Lalomia: 29:19

Yeah exactly you missed that one, but don't worry about it. Okay, you'll catch up in a minute. Thank you, so so you like that one, you like that model. It's what's going on. What else do you like in the space? What else have you said? Hey man, I think these guys are really on something. Let's go do that.

Rob Macklin: 29:36

So actually, strangely enough, I've got a buddy real good buddy who's a real estate agent and we're looking at, we're looking at garage floor coding. So for the sole, for the sole reason that you know it's an interesting model. But from my perspective I would love to do my garage. But the prospect of cleaning out everything in my garage Is it entirely like, just it's not worth it If I would pay somebody money to do that. But no one will do that. But like, hey, if we're real estate, when's the best time to do it? Right, when you're moving in, out of the house. So we're trying to come up with some linkage of you know, doing it in connection with real estate. Because, hey, when the place is empty, that seems like a really good time to actually put down a garage floor coding.

Chris Lalomia: 30:15

So that's one thing that I may be doing with him coming up soon.

Chris Lalomia: 30:18

I love that and I'll tell you, for those who have been listening to the podcast and probably you've missed some of these episodes we've had college chunks moving junk and simply organized here in Atlanta, Heather Rogers we've had them on there and they would clean it out for you. And then we've also had granite garage floors, Al Mishkov, who has franchised his idea and has actually sold it since. He's one of the ones I reference in the five that I know and how he sold his business. That was his exit strategy, I think he. I think he did it well. I mean, he didn't tell me all the numbers, but although he does bitch a lot, he is the he's he has left his business in the last year I've never heard of. He bitches all the time but he he bitches so much about making those money?

Chris Lalomia: 31:00

Don't take it personally. Oh, Al's not listening to this because he's done, done and more done. He's on the retirement path. It's better to do. You can listen to our podcast. You know he should invite you back out to his golf course. Bastard Al, get me out there. I got called, I got golf course material. Now Five and a half six hey, I could be golf course.

Rob Macklin: 31:18

So exactly, you're missing some of the best golf in the world of Wisconsin right now I mean from where I live in middle Wisconsin. We have six of the top 100 courses in the US I can get to.

Chris Lalomia: 31:28

Yeah, right, that's why I've heard the same thing. We're going to get up there. So I am not a links golfer. Are you a links golfer? I love links golf. Oh, I hit a ball too high, way too high and way too far right and way too far left. And right now we're in scramble season here in Atlanta because the fall has hit and I've been invited to like four scrambles over four weeks and I was like, yeah, and I'm sponsoring one of them. We're doing the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta sponsorship coming up, which is thrilling, but I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to play. I gotta figure out if I can pull that off.

Alan Wyatt: 32:00

That might be able to help you fight your ball if you'd actually ever invite me to play golf with you in this country club.

Chris Lalomia: 32:05

So I'm so glad you just brought that up, alan, because you're about to get invited, because we're going to the Braves game right after this.

Alan Wyatt: 32:09

So, ron, we've been doing this for two years. I've known Chris for what? 12 years, and he lives in a gated golf course community. Have I ever played golf with Chris? No, Do I have my own pass to get in? No, actually, the security guard at the gate knows me. She's like why won't he give you a pass? I gotta give her my license every single time. A lot is coming out right now, but let's think you guys have a complicated relationship.

Rob Macklin: 32:29

Well, we don't have to go therapy.

Alan Wyatt: 32:31

We're reacting.

Chris Lalomia: 32:32

Yeah, in fact, our next guest is a couple of therapists.

Rob Macklin: 32:36

Now I should have told you that I am actually Dodgers fan, so I'm a little, yeah, great. Like the first year the Dodgers haven't had the best record in the NL and I'm a little bit upset about that.

Chris Lalomia: 32:44

Well then they can be the underdog. Yeah Well, no, they should lose, but but that's.

Rob Macklin: 32:50

I was going to agree that we hate the Astros and they cheated in the World Series from a little bit.

Alan Wyatt: 32:53

We're on board, all right, and it's all. Now we're back Everybody.

Chris Lalomia: 32:56

we're back on the same team.

Alan Wyatt: 32:57

We're the same team. We need to talk about the SEAL team.

Chris Lalomia: 33:02

All right. So we've we've hit a lot of stuff, but and I did reference this, but, rob, you, you got your start, I shouldn't say start. Tell us how you ended up on SEAL team eight and what you did, and all that yeah.

Rob Macklin: 33:15

So I came out of high school in the mid 90s, right Right when the military was drawing down and I had a couple of friends from high school that had gone to flight school, got a couple of friends of college excuse me, but I graduated gone to flight school at Pensacola, florida, and the Navy had allowed them to fly approximately 15 hours in nine months and because there was no money. If you're like, it's kind of strange to think about, but like I remember that late, late 90s there was no money for the military Everything was getting drawn down, so I kind of scrubbed my military plans.

Alan Wyatt: 33:43

But, after 9, 11, I kind of got back into it and I had already I'd been, I'd been a lawyer at that point again.

Rob Macklin: 33:50

Law school come out and discovered that the Navy had this really interesting program, what they call direct commission officer program. So if you're in certain specialties they will allow you to sort of skip OCS Officer Candidate School and just immediately become an officer, so it's typically for like you know doctors, or you know if you ever watch the TV show MASH, I'm sure that's what Hawkeye and BJ like were DCO officers, right? They just like you, just put on a uniform and then just go do your surgery, right?

Rob Macklin: 34:18

So the Navy had such a need for Intel folks at the time, because we went from like counting battleships or counting aircraft carriers to like finding human beings in the middle of a desert, quite literally, that they started collecting all this, these Intel guys, and so they had this Intel program, DCO program. I went and did that and literally I went to Lamont, Illinois I believe it was in the recruiter's office and once my paperwork came through I go out of the basement like there's one guy swearing me in. It's like congratulations, you're now an officer in the United States Navy.

Chris Lalomia: 34:49

And I'm like what do I do now?

Rob Macklin: 34:51

And he's like well, here's the temporary ID. Go up to Great Lakes Naval Base and tell them you need to buy a bunch of uniforms, like all right so that's what I did. So I bought a bunch of uniforms, I went through some sort of basic Intel training. I got to go to Pensacola, florida, for two weeks as opposed to 12.

Chris Lalomia: 35:08

And run around in the Marine Corps drill instructors squirt-wadding.

Rob Macklin: 35:12

You do push-ups in the mud.

Alan Wyatt: 35:14

How old were you at the time?

Rob Macklin: 35:15

I was 31. I was 31 at the time, yeah.

Chris Lalomia: 35:20

You know we don't say this often, but, man, thank you for your service. You had a pull. You had a pull after 9-11. You could have stayed as a lawyer. You could have gone out there just fricking, toning it, bringing home the big bucks, bringing home all the bad bunnies. I mean, did I say that wrong?

Alan Wyatt: 35:37

You did Damn it.

Rob Macklin: 35:37

That was a little weird. All right, so Thank you for your tribute to the military.

Chris Lalomia: 35:43

Thank you. But so you decided to go back in, go into the military after not being in it. So, wow, thank you. Well done, let's go back into what you did.

Rob Macklin: 35:55

So I did some basic work and if I want to do something under it, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do something cool.

Rob Macklin: 36:01

So I found there was a unit at the Austin Naval Intelligence which was responsible for basically staffing or backfilling intel slots for the Navy SEALs. It was actually run by a fellow named Captain Pete Weichel who at the time was the bullfrog, meaning the senior, most SEAL in the Navy. He had been enlisted and stood this program up. Pete Weichel is kind of an extraordinary guy and still is probably in his mid-60s and runs ultramarathons and all kinds of fun stuff like that. So he stood this program up and we would stand up to units of about 10 or 12 guys. We would then deploy and do a bunch of training. So I did that, got to do a bunch of really cool training, went to interrogation school for the Defense Intelligence and the Air Force, went to Blackwater, the actual facility.

Rob Macklin: 36:52

So they did some contracting but they started out really as just a school for people to go learn how to shoot and drive cars and in very inappropriate ways and blow things up in a very I don't want to say totally controlled environment, but a fun environment. And so we did that and what I discovered? That the second most fun thing in life is shooting machine guns and it's the only thing more fun than shooting machine guns. It's shooting machine guns when the US Army or the US government is paying for ammunition, because it's really really easy to spend a lot of money really really fast if you've got a fire on him, but it's so. We did all kinds of fun stuff like that.

Alan Wyatt: 37:35

And I got attached to.

Rob Macklin: 37:35

SEAL, team 8, and we deployed to Iraq. So I was there for half the basically, my summer vacation of 2008 was in Iraq and we worked a particular target set, which I can't specifically specify, but it was no, it's cool, yeah, basically I got to find people, find the bad guys so that the SEALs could grab

Rob Macklin: 37:56

them and we did everything from interrogations on the back end to sitting. I had a unit of about 25 people. We would send people on target to interrogate folks on target what's called tactical site exploitation, which basically is military slang for toss the room. Like you, grab all the fun stuff, pull all the stuff, bring it back, analyze it take all the data off computers, phones, those sorts of things.

Alan Wyatt: 38:24

And find the bad guys. So did you bring some of those skills of interrogation and tossing the room back to your practice?

Rob Macklin: 38:31

in mergers. Absolutely. What's interesting, about what's actually fascinating is there's actually a fair bit of overlap between interrogations and negotiations. And interrogation at some point is really a negotiation, you're trying to convince somebody to tell you what they don't want to tell you and you've got to come up with the reason why they're going to tell you those things. Now sometimes it's kind of easy because they've just been pulled out of bed at 3 in the morning and somebody's had an N4 point in their face and they're a little what's called shock right.

Chris Lalomia: 39:03

They don't really know what's going on, but once they've had a chance to kind of collect themselves and actually pull it together they'll have defenses.

Rob Macklin: 39:13

It's like oh, this is the reason why I did this and I did that, and you're confronting them with evidence. As you go along, you're trying to break down those defenses. It's always a little bit harder because they speak Arabic and you don't, so you're trying to do this through a translator which makes it sometimes a lot more interesting, although, the ones that were really hardcore actually spoke English, and those were always the ones you'd have to be particularly careful about.

Rob Macklin: 39:33

It's not the guy that you knew spoke English, but the guy that you didn't know spoke English. That got kind of difficult with, but yeah, so it's a lot of applicable skills, because it really is. He doesn't know negotiation, it's learning information. And come on couple of arguments to why the other guys wants to do should do what you're telling him to do.

Chris Lalomia: 39:51

You're an R? Yeah, he's a badass shock and off yeah, I know he has a badass. That's awesome. How many years were you in?

Rob Macklin: 39:58

eight years total in the reserves and that that my active deployment was for a year. So when I wasn't actively deployed, we I did an intel work that ranged from Doing analysis of other folks, interrogation work, to writing grandiose strategic papers on, you know, military, military functionality, eastern European countries and things like that. You're like that's you know. One of them was sort of directly comparable to being a lawyer is read a bunch of stuff and write a paper about it, which isn't as exciting as it sounds.

Chris Lalomia: 40:29

But so you're a Dodgers fan. Where'd you go to law school?

Rob Macklin: 40:33

You ever see Chicago, right where you were from the West Coast originally group yeah grew up in LA, went to UCLA and got into your Chicago law school, which is one of the top kind of few in the country, and and I went off there and met my wife at law school. We're in the same class and she's from Joliet and it comes fan and you have to go through serious negotiations on who does dishes and things like that.

Alan Wyatt: 41:00

Yeah.

Rob Macklin: 41:01

We make kids do it, so it's actually quite very much aligned on.

Chris Lalomia: 41:06

Well, I love alignment. All right, so back to interrogation techniques. How old are your kids?

Rob Macklin: 41:10

They're 15 and 16 perfect.

Chris Lalomia: 41:13

So is waterboarding part of your tactics, because maybe I missed that with my 23?

Alan Wyatt: 41:20

They deserve it.

Rob Macklin: 41:24

Yeah, oh my god, oh it is fun though having the kids both kids be the kids of lawyers is, is kind of a pain in the ass, sometimes like I can imagine man throw it right back in your face, don't they? Yeah Well, the problem is not when they make a bag argument, it's when they make a good argument.

Alan Wyatt: 41:39

Mm-hmm.

Rob Macklin: 41:40

I have to come up with a reason as to why it's still a bad argument.

Chris Lalomia: 41:43

It's and you get older and smarter, it's harder and harder. All right, how many times you can put your hands? How many times you go? Because I'm your dad. That's why.

Rob Macklin: 41:52

That's why usually my end any, or now it's because I have control of your bank account right, yeah, well, I can just you know, you know the money. You thought you had her checking account. I could just. I can go on my phone and it's no longer there.

Chris Lalomia: 42:03

Yeah, I, yeah. Well, actually, you know back in the yeah, I guess I did do that one because that phone can get turned off right now that that did end that one. Yeah, my son was on the debate team. That made it tough and he wants to be a lawyer. It's making it even tougher. Yeah, you know, I'm trying. I've been trying since he's in middle school. The kids Senior University of Georgia studying for the LSAS, just hit his target score, by the way. Nice, he just texted me yesterday Very excited about that, getting ready to do that. Yeah, he's got, he's got big plans. But yeah, I might actually talk with you.

Rob Macklin: 42:40

I don't know. Yeah, there are definitely two kinds of kids at law school. Like students at law school there was maybe a third of the class he like knew they always wanted to be lawyers, the new case law going in and like I got to law school I couldn't even name Probably the three Supreme Court just says so. I was in the other class of like I somehow ended up in law school. I wasn't sure what else to do.

Chris Lalomia: 42:59

Yeah, well, no, it's pretty good man. Ucla, university of Chicago, and so I do know University of Chicago is a very, very good school and that's, depending on his LSAS scores, where he's gonna set his targets. People keep asking Where'd you want to go, and he won't tell anybody until he gets his number.

Rob Macklin: 43:14

Hopefully does we used to wear. We used to wear shirts. You know Chicago law school and it said hell does freeze over Sluggin that's awesome, rob.

Chris Lalomia: 43:25

This has been amazing for anybody again just thinking about business. People don't give you the straight scoop. You know, you talk to people you like. We do a lot of networking and everybody does that. It depends and as an entrepreneur which, rob, clearly has a lot of that in him and then also took time to take out time and do service for our country we hear one, we don't hear three. Right, we hear, oh, five, six, you know, five, six, multiple. You know what I heard of another guy he's got 17 multiple in his business. Oh, yeah, you know, that's me, that's been all day long. And they're like yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Lalomia: 43:57

And then everybody takes that multiple and says, well, how much you making? Oh, dude, I'm clearing like five, five hundred. I mean I can't tell you how much time I've heard that. I'm like son, you only have a million and a half in revenue, right? I mean, are you seriously talking to me right now? You know I might know a little bit about business. I mean stop, stop lying. And so finally somebody can tell you the scoop. And that's the way it's got to go down, because nobody will talk numbers with you, because they're afraid to give you this. And you're still hearing it and if you heard the wrong numbers, yeah you better. You better go back and re-listen to the sucker, because Rob's giving it to you?

Alan Wyatt: 44:29

Well, it goes down to who are you asking for their opinion? And sometimes people don't know, but they want to act like they don't act like they know, and so then they give you that vague answer, but you talk to somebody like Rob, who knows and you're gonna get an answer.

Chris Lalomia: 44:41

Yeah, this has been solid, rob. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge. So, Rob, you're a passive investor in one fund, but how can we find you out there in the wild world? Maybe I want to be selling my business?

Rob Macklin: 44:56

Yeah, so you can give me a Macklin law LLC, or you could go to one and fund as well. So one on fun. I'm still actively involved in. Macklin law, myself and my wife, honestly, we thought about building a website that we have have so many clients that we haven't gotten around to yet but you know, so it's If you give me one, and fun we can. I can help you out there.

Chris Lalomia: 45:19

So all right, home service One website and don't listen to Macklin when it comes to network, to marketing. We're gonna go get get law advice from him. When it comes to marketing, you gotta have your frickin website up, son.

Rob Macklin: 45:32

I mean, yes, it's bad. I, I fully know this is the shoemaker's kids. Don't do what I do.

Chris Lalomia: 45:39

Now, this is awesome, dude. This has been awesome, all right. Well, we got to go with our final four questions before we rock and roll. You ready to go? Absolutely? Let's do this. Number one, rob. What is a great book you would recommend for our audience?

Rob Macklin: 45:52

Um, probably everyone's expecting some big, significant thing, but I'm gonna go hit trackers.

Chris Lalomia: 45:57

Hit checkers guy to the galaxy is my favorite book of all time. Whoa, oh wow, that's a great pull. I haven't heard that one. Yeah, so ever it's.

Rob Macklin: 46:05

I love. I love the use of language. Devil's Adams hasn't and honestly, I think. Everyone wants to come up with some like really significant book and like now if. I'm gonna read like I read enough heavy stuff, all the time I'm gonna read something spot.

Chris Lalomia: 46:19

That's a great point. You know what, and you got to do that because you pick up stuff all the time. It just get to have some fun, all right. Second question what is the favorite feature of your home?

Rob Macklin: 46:28

Oh, we redid our basement about a year ago and we put in a wine wall. So on the back end, where are you?

Alan Wyatt: 46:36

sitting in front of that.

Rob Macklin: 46:38

Rob's. I bet the office I should, I should look like it's a mugshot, by the way. Can I'll come back.

Chris Lalomia: 46:45

He does All right. All right, then, do we got to go there? All right, favorite wine.

Rob Macklin: 46:51

There is a winery called Tududutorciano out of Tuscany that they make a Barolo that is. I think spectacular, and part of that is because I've been to that winery in Tuscany and it's kind of hard to like, not love a place that you've been so I agree.

Chris Lalomia: 47:08

I agree, we go up makes it so much better. I've been in Napa Valley. Now I'm on 16 trips.

Rob Macklin: 47:15

So every time we go to Napa we come back with like four more wine clubs and six cases of wine and all of a sudden you're like I can't drink that much.

Chris Lalomia: 47:23

And your average bottle that you drink. The daily average has just gone up, right I? Used to drink two buck chuck and I'm like 42 buck chuck yeah.

Rob Macklin: 47:31

Yeah, during COVID, my wife and I went, my daughter and I went to Costco and I came back with like two cases of wine and my daughter K because my wife had this. Daddy bought $400 with the wine, but he bought two cases is like yes, that's fantastic because we're no longer drink like 50 and 60 and $70 of wine every night. Like nice all the bottles of wine that actually work to Wine wall.

Chris Lalomia: 47:53

love that. Okay, let's go. So we are really into customer service because we're kind of customer service freaks. So what is the customer service pet peeve of yours when you're out there and you're the customer?

Rob Macklin: 48:06

So, I'm going to preface this by saying at the end of the day, I don't really like people that much. So if you keep talking to me after you've already answered my question, like if I ask you a question, answer the question and stop talking like. Don't keep chatting with me, just let me go about my day.

Alan Wyatt: 48:23

Outstanding. There it is, that's going on the wall.

Chris Lalomia: 48:27

No, when I meet Robin person I hoped one day do that I was going to remember. I'm going to talk to him and I'm going to walk away really quickly because if I keep talking to him, I don't like you, I'm like shit. All right, that's awesome, all right. Last question so this is just a DIY nightmare story being in construction. I love it. I want to hear about this. We love fire, dismemberment, maybe floods, maybe locusts emergency services had to be called.

Rob Macklin: 48:51

Okay, well, I was going to go with the story of why you should not learn how to do your plumbing at 9 pm, the night before you and your wife leave on a trip somewhere.

Alan Wyatt: 49:01

That's a good one. That's a good one. Oh, do tell.

Chris Lalomia: 49:04

I tried to change the shower head.

Rob Macklin: 49:07

First time we were going to New Orleans the next day or something, 10 am flat off the next day and she's like why do you put the shower head in? I'm like, well, I've seen Bob Vila do it. It doesn't seem like that hard to pull the old one off and cut the tubing and put the new. This old house did it. I didn't understand about the. You had to put the fireproof cloth behind the other side so you don't burn the drywall, as you're like you've cut the hole open and now you've got the cloth. So I ended up charring a fair bit of drywall and I got so afraid that I was going to burn the house down that I didn't actually get the solder all the way around the back end of the joint. So when I turned the water back on, I ended up having not only char drywall but I flooded the same time, which was fantastic.

Rob Macklin: 49:49

So we had to shut the water down to the entire house for like the week where it more cleansed, before I could come back and hire somebody competent to fix it.

Chris Lalomia: 49:56

Oh, my God. All right, I'm going to give you two things on that one. One I have the own. I have in my own house. I have the thing called the Moen Flow Valve so I can turn my phone off. I can turn it off to my house from my phone, and that has saved me for that same exact trip. We had a. My cartridge went in my tub. The night before we were going to fly out as a family for a week and I went. You know what I can fix it? Sure, I mean, I could go to Home Depot at 9.30 at night. Sure, or I could just turn the water off and go hey, everybody, we're going to shower when we get there, exactly.

Rob Macklin: 50:28

So that's very good. There's nothing more depressing than like the second trip to Home Depot at 9 o'clock at night Like you've already been once and you screwed it up somehow and you got to go back again at 9 o'clock.

Chris Lalomia: 50:37

That's why I tell people in my business I've got 15 handymen that run around Atlanta and I said you can either do the four trips to Depot yourself or you can pay us, we'll come there and take it and we'll have it all taken care of. And guess what? You get your Saturday and your Sunday back and you don't have to go do all this. You're reminding me of one story too. I had a. It didn't happen to us, thank God, but they had to flash. I don't know if you guys know about flashing, but we had to.

Chris Lalomia: 51:03

Somebody had somebody, not me had to face flash some brick. And he did it. And you do it with a big propane heater and you fire it up and you get the taro thing. And he didn't know that the brick behind it had not been insulated and he hit the drywall and the whole house went on fire. Oh yeah, it was brutal, I mean, and he didn't know it until it was, you know again, especially in a roof in Atlanta at like 98 degrees, and it was outside in the middle of July. So the whole house went up like tender. Oh God, it was brutal, yeah.

Chris Lalomia: 51:34

So there's another thing you don't want to do on your own. But even if Bob Vila can do it, sometimes you just might not be able to. All right, let's go. But Rob, rob can do a lot of stuff, my friends. He can interrogate you, he can waterboard you, he can also help you sell your own business and also help you and guide you to where you want to be when you get going up that mountain top of success. Get out of here, make that big exit and go ahead and have that big daddy, let's go wine drink and party. You know what I'm saying? Let's go do that. All right, we're out of here, we're going to go, we're going to go, we're going to go.