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The Small Business Safari
Have you ever sat there and wondered "What am I doing here stuck in the concrete zoo of the corporate world?" Are you itching to get out? Chris Lalomia and his co-host Alan Wyatt traverse the jungle of entrepreneurship. Together they share their stories and help you explore the wild world of SCALING your business. With many years of owning their own small businesses, they love to give insight to the aspiring entrepreneur. So, are you ready to make the jump?
The Small Business Safari
[Revisiting] 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!
From the Zoo to Wild is a book for entrepreneurs passionate about home services, looking to move away from corporate jobs. Chris Lalomia, a former executive, shares his path, discoveries, and tools to succeed as a small business owner in home improvement retail. The book provides the mindset, habits, leadership style, and customer-oriented processes necessary to succeed as a small business owner in home services.
From the Zoo to Wild is a book for entrepreneurs passionate about home services, looking to move away from corporate jobs. Chris Lalomia, a former executive, shares his path, discoveries, and tools to succeed as a small business owner in home improvement retail. The book provides the mindset, habits, leadership style, and customer-oriented processes necessary to succeed as a small business owner in home services.
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 we 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 brought this up Do you have a? 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.
Speaker 1: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. You know bullshit, you know I'm smart and everybody else. 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 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've got to start doing it. And you've got to start doing it now if you want to exit the next three to four or the next two to three right.
Speaker 1: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 want to help you traverse through the levels of owning your own business that can get you bogged down and distract you from hitting 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 going to make this happen.
Speaker 1:Small Business Safari Get in here, let's lock in and listen quickly, everybody, because if you really want to 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 drunk at a boy. And since alan and I have both been both, uh we uh know that so again you're hurting our reputation to uh to get a law passed everybody.
Speaker 1:If you can think it up sober, you can think it up drunk it's a law. I think we're on to something, rob macklin. If you can think it up sober, you can think it up drunk, it's a law. I think we're on to 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?
Speaker 2:and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think people just pulled over just to wait.
Speaker 1:You know you should about you're at a red light right now and it turned green. You're like wait, what's he gonna talk about? Guys, I'm gonna talk about what everybody here wants. You want to start a business, you want to grow a business, but you know what you want to do 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 can put that down's why you stayed.
Speaker 1:That's why everybody's beeping at you from behind. Please 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 have said I'm a student driver and you drive by them. You're like 45 years old, you're like dude. 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?
Speaker 3: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 a firm called Skadden Arps. So we were doing with two major airlines of merge. We would handle things like that. So big, big deals. And then I went in-house and was general counsel of a bunch of different companies publicly traded companies but probably more importantly for a lot of your listeners a lot of private equity companies. 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 deputy general counsel of a public company. 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.
Speaker 1: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 just your company's desk, right, yeah, what makes it so hard to sell a company?
Speaker 3:Not being prepared to do so, not having the right structure, the organization, not listening to the right advisors. You know it's an art form to sell a business, and so anybody who 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 the space that you're in. Now. You hire me first because you need somebody to negotiate the deal with the 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.
Speaker 3: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, right 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.
Speaker 2:Brilliant that was it.
Speaker 1:I thought Alan was about to have this amazing hard-hitting, knock-your-socks-off question. He goes yeah, tough question, that's good.
Speaker 2:No, you know what the problem is. Rob is. Uh, 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.
Speaker 1:Ah, that was a good one. I've got a follow on. This can even better no really let's back up. You said structure, so, um, for a lot of our uh, 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? I break that down into three components.
Speaker 3:The first would be making sure that the structure of the business actually reflects your family's interest. You start a business and you've got a couple of kids I don't know, they're 8, 9, 9, and 10, something 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.
Speaker 3:And it's really easy to give your kids shares of a business that isn't worth anything, right? If you come back to me seven or eight or 10 or 12 years later, you're like oh the business is worth 30 million bucks and we go.
Speaker 3:We got some gift tax issues to deal with if you want to get this money in the hands of your kids, so so starting at that first, like 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 going to exit to a large company in a 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?
Speaker 3:equity we do things a certain way. We have gap accounting right, we have a, we have a cruel based accounting. 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've got to have a cruel based accounting, and so if you're in an industry, you know like.
Speaker 2:I do a ton of stuff in home improvement.
Speaker 3:right now you get guys that will be on cash-based accounting and they'll say, well, my revenue is up 50% this year. Well, not really. What happened was you just booked a lot of orders and took a lot of deposits. Your revenue is not up. You have a lot of cash in the bank.
Speaker 1:Cash in the bank is fantastic, but your revenue is not All right, rob. That is hitting a little close to home. Yeah, all fantastic, but your revenue is not All right, rob. That is hitting a little close to home. No, I'm a cruel-based accounting, but I know what you mean. Yeah, hey, big boy, I'm up, up, up, up up. Have you seen it?
Speaker 2:Don't worry about that, it's coming Check's in the mail. That's a big one.
Speaker 3: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 who owns it. 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. That I'm doing because I'm working 90 hours a week. Well, a buyer is going to 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. So that's the big one.
Speaker 3:And then when you do go, backfill those positions, I'm going to tell you that the single biggest reason why, in my experience on the buy side, we walk away from deals, it's not having people that are credible to back you up. You've got to have the answer. If Bob gets hit by a bus, what happens to the company? And if the answer is, we don't know, I'm 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.
Speaker 3:The buyer hasn't bought a business, they've bought a gigantic liability.
Speaker 2:So the fact that Chris is never at work and always on vacation is actually really good for selling his company.
Speaker 3:Yes, honestly, yes, good job, chris, and you don't have to do anything, that's the best scenario.
Speaker 1:You mean like going to the Green Bay Lions game on Thursday? Rob?
Speaker 2:is encouraging you to do even less, even less. You should work less.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, I have to point out to the audience I need more advisors like Rob and less advisors like you.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I'm going to give you a piece of advice here, because you're patting yourself on the back that that was the 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 the muted us to flip me off and I'm like, why did you mute us? To just give me the finger, because I was gonna say you too at the same time yeah we're sitting here on zoom you're on mute.
Speaker 3:I'm watching you guys flip each other off. Like am I supposed to laugh at this? I'm not really sure if I'm on video no, no, I.
Speaker 2:I put you on mute because I was gonna tell you I was gonna tell I was like he just muted me to give me the finger.
Speaker 1:I did, yeah, okay, well, welcome to podcast land. You know what?
Speaker 1:We may be in the top 10%, but we're just not that good at it. 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 are doing everything. This is a big one. Because, uh, I'm actually uh looking at um, potentially purchasing a smaller business, and uh, he is coming to me tell me just how great everything is.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, yep, who does the sales I do. Who does the scheduling I do. Who does the estimating? Uh, that's still me, okay. Uh, 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, yo, 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, as a small business owner, if you're thinking of exiting, it's going to cost you a little bit on the on the upfront, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely Like it sounds like the guy you're looking at. He doesn't have a business, he has a job.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3: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 the value goes away. The value is all in her and I right People that know us. We do the work ourselves.
Speaker 2:We have that job. I have a separate company on the financing side. But that law firm there's no value to that firm because it's entirely us.
Speaker 3:And if you want to make a lot of money for yourself. 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 going to go on vacation, I'm never going to 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, your accounting is set up correctly.
Speaker 1:So, rob, you were saying you got to be able to build that business and do what you're doing. So again, how do you do that? And look at, because you're not making as much right. So how do you reconcile that one?
Speaker 3:You got to know what you're in it for honestly Are you in it for immediate cashflow 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 this for immediate cashflow. That's not a problem at all, just recognize.
Speaker 3:That's what you're doing and be okay with that and that's totally fine. But if you want to build a business long-term, what it means is you got to 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 dip in profitability now, but your revenues go up and you're not making 36% of $5 million, but you're making 20% of $30 million and that's way better.
Speaker 3:And you can sell that in the long term, but you're going to take a hit for sure and you have to be willing to commit to that, commit to the process, give up control and get the right people in that will actually run that business for you.
Speaker 2: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 do they bring in a banker?
Speaker 1:do you have what it takes to start your own business? Are you tired of the nine to five corporate job and ready to make that leap into entrepreneurship? Then you need to check out From the Zoo to the Wild, the new book by successful entrepreneur Chris Lalamia. This book is a unique perspective on the journey into the wild world of home services and delivering excellence in service while working in customers' homes. While working in customers homes, valamia shares his path to success in this industry, including proven customer relationship strategies, award-winning customer experience processes and a unique approach to training a team of service technicians to perform at the highest levels. Whether you're a small business trying to scale or a franchise, operation From the Zoo to the Wild will give you the mindset, habits, leadership style and customer-oriented processes to succeed as a small business owner in the home services space. So if you're ready to take control of your future, get your copy of From the Zoo to the Wild today available on.
Speaker 3:Amazon so I'm going to say bring in counsel sooner rather than later, and the reason I say that is the biggest hurdle 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, 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.
Speaker 3:I think, 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. 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 of earnings report, where you're going to get some independent accountants. They're 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.
Speaker 3: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, 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 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 tax collections we have to make. And you know we just converted to an S-corp, we want to convert back to a partnership, something like that. It may take a little bit longer but realistically, timeline you're ready to go.
Speaker 3:You can get it done in six to nine months pretty easily.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of work to get to that. Six to nine months of knowing. You've been through a lot of these. Actually, my data points are four or five guys that I know have done this. It's tough to get through it. Like you said, number one, you have to, you have to commit to doing it, and that's tough, it's. It sounds easy. It sounds, and I'll tell you that 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 ten? What is it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if you want to sell to 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 amortization before they're going to pay attention to you.
Speaker 1:There's a caveat there. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. 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. They're like. You know, it depends. You know if you have the great idea, but they're all talking about that. You know the facebook they're talking about the these one-offs and not the other 99.9 percent of us.
Speaker 2:Well, he said there was a caveat yeah, oh, you jumped in.
Speaker 1:Can I get off my soapbox? All right, I'm off my. I'll let rob more intelligent one talk to me okay I mean look to the facebook, yeah are there companies in silicon valley?
Speaker 3:that have no revenue in the 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. If you're smaller than that, you're going to have to sell to an existing strategic company. We'll call it a tuck-in right man. There's a basement remodeling company that covers all of Illinois except for East St Louis and you're a basement remodeling company in East St Louis, right man you plug in perfectly it fits exactly right.
Speaker 3: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 revenue and you're going to be relatively small and I wouldn't say, call it an 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.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't mean to slam business brokers, but they don't.
Speaker 3:They don't have to they don't operate at the same level.
Speaker 1:No, rob, I mean you're hitting on it and that's why you, 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 two million in revenue and, uh, you're doing like two 250 a year yourself. You're like, yeah, I'm gonna do that. No, man, slow down. 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, and he just hit on that great thing and that's called the multiple. Uh, rob, you want to get and he just hit on that great thing and that's called the multiple. Rob, you want to explain the multiple for most of us?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the multiple is a multiple of earnings or multiple of cashflow or multiple of EBITDA, typically meaning 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 for your business, roughly speaking. There are some ad backs and things like that, 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.
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 3:You'll hear some bankers call it. That's the country club price, right, so you can talk to your friends at the golf course oh, 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 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 multiple you're going to get. Because the cost of getting a deal done right.
Speaker 3: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 5% of the deal cost to get that deal done. So 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, five times multiple, on a million dollar company and they're going to spend a half a million dollars to get your deal done, they're not going to pay you as much.
Speaker 3:Number one Number two the bigger the company is, the easier it is to scale 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. It's a lot easier to find a $100 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 inorganically. So the multiple again is a. It's 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. It's just not. I mean size, size really does matter, I just literally just wrote this down.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 3:There you go, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: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, getting going, they're scaling business and you know, try getting going, they're scaling business. And you know I'm getting people reaching out on the podcast, talking to me a little bit and 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.
Speaker 1: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 going to go do this and you're like, well, do you have and Robert brought this up Do you have a?
Speaker 1: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. 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.
Speaker 1:And I was like you know bullshit. You know I'm smarter than everybody else, 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 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 and you've 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.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean put, put yourself on the buyer side, like if you just if you just got an inheritance of a million bucks, right, your, your, 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 I'm just even. At that point in time. I've literally made nothing else. And now I'm even and I got to work another two years to be averaging 250 grand a year or I could go down the job and go down the street.
Speaker 3:get the job as a salesman. I'm great at sales. I can be the sales manager for some of the company and make 400 grand a year right away. Why would I pay you for that business if it makes no sense? The only way you're going to make money for a business is 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 stripped away by hiring somebody else to take your place.
Speaker 1:Man speaking of truth. Rob, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. 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 and 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 business is our 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.
Speaker 3:Which business did you invest in and why did you do that?
Speaker 2:Well, I've got a few kind of passive investments that I've made, but the one that I'm currently in is called One and Fund, so One and Fund is a finance company for the home improvement space so think of us as a multi-lender finance company.
Speaker 3:We've got a web platform we've developed we were just a few different shows.
Speaker 3:The web platform allows home improvement companies to come in platform, put in a single application and then, depending on the criteria of that consumer's application their 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 February of this year, myself and a couple of partners that you know. Honestly, one of the guys whose companies I sold kind of put myself put me together with his former finance manager and we kind of took this off and started it up and we think it's a really great solution for the space because you know, at the end of the day, the easiest way to increase your revenue is increase your closing percentage and for most home improvement companies, if you're not using financing, you're missing out on sales. And you may not even know that you're missing out on sales because if somebody doesn't have the money to pay for 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.
Speaker 3:Ah no, maybe not for me Some other time. 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 the home improvement space all of the biggest companies that I had are financing 50 plus percent of their deals 50 plus 50 plus.
Speaker 2:How quick is the approval process?
Speaker 3:uh, faster than I can say. Uh, I mean, it's, it's just a few seconds. Right, we've got. We've got apis and a bunch of lenders.
Speaker 1:Um, so those are basically happening instantaneously you didn't realize he was trained as a navy seal and then navy seal team eight. Would you ask that question right there, Right, which is uh, uh, uh, but that's how fast actually. And the reason I I brought that up is uh, I recently, just literally two days ago, just signed up with one in fund.
Speaker 3:Uh, I didn't even know that. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there you go. Not not only what's that? Of course, hair club for men definitely didn't get into that program, but I did join a one in fund and that's how I, I and that's I. I found out on the backside that you were part of the the deal. So tell me you. You brought that up 50%. You sold your businesses, 50% are 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.
Speaker 1: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. That'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.
Speaker 3:Let's do that um, so actually, strangely enough, I've got a buddy real good buddy who's a real estate agent, and we're looking at uh, we're looking at garage floor coating. Um, 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 an entirely like just it's not worth it. I would pay somebody money to do that, but no one will do that. But like, hey, if we're in real estate, when's the best time to do it? Right, when you're moving in and out of the house? So we're trying to come up with some linkage of 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 cutting.
Speaker 1:So that's one thing that I may be doing with him coming up soon.
Speaker 1: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 a college hunts, 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. Uh, al mishkoff, who has uh, franchised his idea and has actually sold it since. Um, he's one of the ones I referenced 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 um, although he does bitch a lot, he's the he's he has left his business in the last year. I've never heard he bitches all the time but he, he bitches so much about making all this money.
Speaker 1: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. What's he got better to do? He can listen to our podcast. You know he should and invite me back out to his golf course. Bastard al, get me out there. I got call, I got, I got golf course material. Now, five and a half six hey, I could be golf course.
Speaker 3:Exactly, you're missing some of the best golf in the world. In 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.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, that's why I've heard the same thing. We're going to get up there. So I am not a Lynx golfer 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 going to be able to play. I've got to figure out if I can pull that off.
Speaker 2:I might be able to help you flight your ball if you'd actually ever invite me to play golf with you in this country club.
Speaker 1:So I'm so glad you just brought that up because you're about to get invited, because we're going to the braves game right after this.
Speaker 2:Rob, 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 well, I want to give you a pass. I got to give her my license every single time. A lot is coming out right now.
Speaker 3:It looks like you guys have a complicated relationship.
Speaker 2:Well, we don't have to go therapy. We're excellent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in fact, our next guest is a couples therapist.
Speaker 3:I should have told you that I'm actually a Dodgers fan, so I'm a little.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm a little yeah, it's like the first year the Dodgers haven't had the best record in the NL and I'm a little bit upset about that. Well then, they can be the underdog.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, no, they should lose, but the.
Speaker 3:Bucks would agree that we hate the Astros and they cheated in the World Series from all the way, we're on board with that and it's all good.
Speaker 2:Now we're back Everybody.
Speaker 1:We speak the same team. We need to talk about the seal team, all right. So we we've, uh, we've hit a lot of stuff, but and I did reference this but rob you, you got your start uh, I shouldn't say start, tell us how you ended up on, uh, seal team eight and what you did and all that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, so I came out of high school in the mid 90s, right right when the military was drawing down and uh, I had a couple friends from high school that had gone to flight school, got a couple of friends from 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 uh, cause there was no money. If you're like it's kind of strange to think about, but, like late nineties, there was no money for the military, everything was getting drawn down, so I kind of scrubbed my military plans
Speaker 1:but, after nine 11, I kind of got back into it and um.
Speaker 2:I had already I'd be, I'd been a lawyer at that point I'd gone to law school. Come out and discovered that the Navy had this really interesting program, what they call direct commission officer program.
Speaker 3:So if you're in certain specialties um they will allow you to sort of skip OCS officer, 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.
Speaker 3:MASH, I'm sure that's what Hawkeye and BJ, like were DCO officers right? They just like you just need to put on a uniform and then just go do your surgery thing, right. So the Navy had such a need for intel folks at the 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 down to the basement Like there's one guy swearing me in. It's like congratulations, you're now an officer in the United States Navy.
Speaker 2:And I'm like what do I do now?
Speaker 3:And he's like well, here's a temporary ID. Go up to Great Lakes Naval Base and tell them you need to buy a bunch of uniforms, like all right. 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 and you know, run around in the Marine Corps drill instructors. You know squirt wadding, you do pushups in the mud.
Speaker 2:How old were you at the time?
Speaker 3:I was 31. I was 31 at the time, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know we don't say this often, but, man, thank you for your service. You, you had a pull, you had a. You had a pull after 9-11. You could have stayed as a lawyer. You could have been out there just freaking, toning it, bringing home the big bucks, bringing home all the bad bunnies. I mean, um, did I say that wrong?
Speaker 1:you did damn it that was a little weird yeah, all right, so thank you for your tribute to the military yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you, but so so you go back. You went, 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. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I, you know, I did some basic, basic work in it, like if I want to do something under, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do something cool. So I going to do something under, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do something cool. So I found there was a unit at the office of 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, uh, meaning this, the senior, most seal in the navy. He had been enlisted, um, and stood this program up. Uh, pete Weichel is kind of an extraordinary guy and still is probably in his mid-60s and runs ultra marathons and all kinds of fun stuff like that. So he stood this program up and we sort of would stand up units of about 10 or 12 guys. We would then deploy and do a bunch of training. So I did that. So I did that, got to do a bunch of really cool training.
Speaker 3:Went to interrogation school for the defense intelligence agency ran, went to Blackwater, the actual facility. 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, we did that and you know I what I discovered that the single most, second most fun thing in life is shooting machine guns. I mean, and it's the only the only thing more fun than shooting machine guns, is shooting machine guns when the U S army or the U S government is paying for for ammunition, because it's really really easy to spend a lot of money really really fast if you got a buyer on ammo, but it's uh. So we did all kinds of fun stuff like that and we got it, I got attached to seal team eight we deployed to iraq.
Speaker 3:So it was there for half the basically, my summer vacation of 2008 was was in ir, iraq, and we worked a particular target set, which I can't specifically specify, but it was oh, that's cool. Yeah, basically my job was to find people.
Speaker 3:Okay, find the bad guys so that the SEALs could grab them and we did everything from interrogations on the back end to sitting I had a unit of about 25 people interrogations on the back end to sitting I had a unit of about 25 people we would send people on target. To you know, 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 of it out, bring it back.
Speaker 2:Analyze it, you know take all the data off computers, phones those sorts of things and uh and find, find the bad guys. So did you bring some of those skills of interrogation and tossing the room back to your practice in mergers?
Speaker 3:absolutely. Um, what's what's interesting about? What's actually fascinating is there's actually a fair bit of overlap between interrogations and and negotiations an interrogation at some point is really a negotiation, you're trying to convince somebody to tell you, you know what they don't want to tell you.
Speaker 3:And you've got to come up with a 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 three in the morning and somebody's had an N4 point in their face and they're a little. You know what's called shock right.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 3:You know they'll have defenses. 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 and 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.
Speaker 3:It's not the guy that you knew spoke English, but the guy that you didn't know spoke English got kind of difficult with, but yeah, so it's, it's, it's a lot of applicable skills, because it really is. He doesn't know negotiation, it's learning information and coming up with an argument as to why the other guys wants to do should do what you're telling them to do.
Speaker 1:You're an arch? Yeah, he's a bad ass, jock, and I know he is a bad ass. That's awesome. How many years were you in?
Speaker 3:Eight years total in the reserves and that that my active deployment was for a year. So when I wasn't actively deployed I did Intel work. That ranged from doing analysis of other folks' interrogation work to writing grandiose strategic papers on military functionality in Eastern European countries and things like that. And you're like 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.
Speaker 1:So you're a Dodgers fan? Where did you go? To law school? University of Chicago, right, but you were from the West Coast originally.
Speaker 3:Yeah, grew up in LA, went to UCLA and got into Chicago Law School, which is one of the top kind of few in the country. And went off there and met my wife at law school. We were in the same class and she's from Joliet and a Cubs fan.
Speaker 2:And yeah, we're off the races, so do you have to go through serious negotiations on who does dishes and things like that?
Speaker 3:We make the kids do it, so it's actually quite we're very much aligned on oh I love alignment.
Speaker 1:All right, so back to interrogation techniques. How old are your kids?
Speaker 3:they are 15 and 16 perfect.
Speaker 1:So is waterboarding part of your tactics, because maybe I missed that with my 20? Only for the kids just because, they deserve it because they deserve it.
Speaker 3:On that note, yeah, oh my God, it is fun though having the kids both kids being the kids of lawyers is kind of a pain in the ass sometimes.
Speaker 2:I can imagine, man, they throw it right back in your face, don't they?
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, the problem is not when they make a bad argument. It's when they make a good argument, I have to come up with a reason as to why it's still a bad argument.
Speaker 1:it's as they 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.
Speaker 3:That's why usually my end penny, 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 your checking account. I could just I can go on my phone and it's no longer there yeah, I yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, actually, you know, back in the yeah, I guess I did do that one, uh, 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. Let's make it even tougher um talking about that one. Yeah, you know I'm. I've been trying since he was in middle school. The kid's a senior at the University of Georgia studying for the LSATs. Just hit his target score, by the way.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:He just texted me yesterday Very excited about that, getting ready to do that. Yeah, he's got big plans, but yeah, I might actually have him talk with you.
Speaker 3:I don't know. There were definitely two kinds of kids at law school. Like students at law school. There was maybe a third of the class who, like, knew they always wanted to be lawyers. They knew case law going in and, like I got to law school, I couldn't even name probably the three Supreme court justices. So I was in the other class of like. I somehow ended up in law school Cause I wasn't sure what else to do.
Speaker 1:Well, no, well, no, it's pretty good man, ucl at university of chicago, and so I do know university of chicago is a very, very good school and that's uh, depending on his lsat scores, where he's going to set his targets. People keep asking where does he want to go, and he won't tell anybody until he gets his number.
Speaker 3:Uh, hopefully he does. We, we used to wear uh, we used to wear shirts. Got the university of chicago law school and it said hell does freeze over slogan that's awesome, rob.
Speaker 1:This has been amazing For anybody again just thinking about business. People don't give you the straight scoop. You talk to people, we do a lot of networking and everybody does the. 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 me all day long. And they're like yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: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 many times I've heard that. I'm like, son, you only have a million and a half in revenue. 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, you better go back and re-listen to this sucker, because Rob's giving it to you?
Speaker 2: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 know, and so then they give you that vague answer, but you talk to somebody like Rob who knows.
Speaker 1:And you're going to get an answer. 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.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you can get me at Macklin Law LLC or you can go to One and Fund as well. So One and Fund. I'm still actively involved in Macklin Law, myself and my wife. Honestly, we thought about building a website, but we have so many clients that we haven't gotten around to yet.
Speaker 2:But you know so, if you give me One and Fund.
Speaker 3:I can help you out there. All right home services people.
Speaker 1:Don't listen to Macklin when it comes to marketing. Right, we're gonna go get get law advice from him, but when it comes to marketing, you gotta have your freaking website up, son I mean, yes, it's bad.
Speaker 3:I I I fully acknowledge this is the shoemakers. Kids don't do what I do at all no, this is awesome, dude.
Speaker 1: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? All right, let's do this. Number one, rob, what is a great book you would recommend for our audience?
Speaker 3:Probably everyone's expecting some big, significant thing, but I'm going to go.
Speaker 1:Hitchhiker's Guide 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.
Speaker 3:I love. I love the use of language Douglas Adams has, and and honestly, I think everyone wants to come up with some like really significant book and like now if I'm going to read like I read enough heavy stuff, all the time. If I'm going to read, I'm going to read something spot.
Speaker 1:That's a great point. You know what and you got to do that because you pick up stuff all the time. Just get to have some fun, all right. Second question what is the favorite feature of your home?
Speaker 3:We redid our basement about a year ago and we put in a wine wall. So on the back end, why aren't you?
Speaker 2:sitting in front of that, rob's.
Speaker 3:I'm at the office now. It looks like it's a mug shot.
Speaker 1:By the way, if you bring a kid, I'll come back, he does, all right. All right, then I do. We got to go there, all right.
Speaker 3:Favorite wine there is a winery called tenue story to do to torsiano uh out of tuscany that they make a barolo that is I think, spectacular, and a part of that is because I've been to that winery in tuscany and it's kind of hard to not love a place that you've been.
Speaker 1:Right, I agree, when you go, it makes it so much better. I've been to Napa Valley. Now I'm on 16 trips, so every Sorry.
Speaker 3:Every time I go to Napa, we come back with four more wine clubs and six cases of wine. And all of a sudden you're like I can't, I just don't drink that much and your average bottle that you drink.
Speaker 3:The daily average has just gone up right I used to care for two buck chuck and now I'm at like 42 buck yeah yeah, during during covid, my wife and I went, my daughter and I went to costco. 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. He's like, yes, that's fantastic because we're no longer drinking like $50 and $60 and $70 a bottle of wine every night. Nice, $12 bottles of wine, that actually work too.
Speaker 1:Wine wall 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?
Speaker 3: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 stop talking like, don't keep chatting with me, just let me go about my day outstanding.
Speaker 1:There it is that's going on the wall, so when, when I meet rob in person I hope to 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 shut up. All right, that's awesome, all right. Last question give us a diy nightmare story being being in construction. I love it. I want to hear about that. We love fire, dismemberment, maybe floods, maybe locusts. Emergency services had to be called.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, I was going to go with the story of why you should not learn how to do your own plumbing at 9 pm, the night before you and your wife leave on a trip somewhere.
Speaker 2:That's a good one.
Speaker 3:I tried to. I tried to, let's go with that. Uh, first time we were like we're going to new orleans the next day or something. 10 am flat the next day. And she's like, why do you put the jar ahead? And 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 like cut the tubing and put the new. This little house did it.
Speaker 3:I. I didn't understand about the like you got to put the fireproof like 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 water all the way around the back end of the joint. So I turned the water back on. I ended up having, you know, not only charred drywall, but it flooded at the same time, which was fantastic so we had to shut the water down to the entire house.
Speaker 3:For like the week we're in new orleans before I could come back and hire somebody competent to fix it oh, my god, all right, I'm gonna give you two things in that one one.
Speaker 1:Um, I have the own. I have in my own, I have the thing called the Moen flow valve so I can turn my my phone off. I'm going to turn the water 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 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.
Speaker 3:Exactly so there's. There's nothing more depressing than like the second trip to home depot at nine o'clock at night, like you've already been once, and you screwed it up somehow and you got to go back again at nine o'clock.
Speaker 1:That's that's why I tell people in my business. So 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. Didn't, it didn't happen to us, thank God, but they had to. Yeah, somebody had a. Somebody not me had to face flash, uh, some brick, and he did it. And you do it with a big propane heater and you, uh, you fire it up and you get the taro thing.
Speaker 1:And he didn't know that the brick behind it had not been, uh, insulated, and he hit the drywall and the whole house went on fire oh 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 Tinder. Oh God, it was brutal, yeah. So 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.
Speaker 1:But rob can do a lot of stuff, my friends. He can interrogate you, 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 mountaintop of success, get out of here, make that big exit and go ahead and have that big daddy, let's go wine drinking party. You know, I'm saying let's go do that. All right, we're out of here. We gotta go bye cheers.
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