I Went from Searcher to CEO and Now I'm Sharing My Top M&A Secrets!

 Summary

In this conversation, Jon Stoddard interviews Steve Divitkos, a seasoned entrepreneur and search fund investor. Steve shares his journey from private equity to becoming a search funder, detailing the intricacies of the search fund model, the challenges faced during the acquisition process, and the strategies implemented to grow Micro Dia. He reflects on the realities of entrepreneurship, the importance of mentorship, and the lessons learned throughout his career. Now transitioning into a search fund investor, Steve emphasizes the value of supporting aspiring entrepreneurs and the need for more individuals to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams.

Takeaways

Steve transitioned from private equity to search funds to focus deeply on a single business.
The search fund model allows entrepreneurs to acquire and operate businesses with investor support.
Investors in search funds are betting on the entrepreneur and the business model.
The search process typically takes 21 to 24 months, with many businesses evaluated.
Building a strong management team is crucial for business growth post-acquisition.
Entrepreneurship is often romanticized, but it comes with significant challenges.
Joining peer groups like EO can provide valuable support for CEOs.
Imposter syndrome is common among first-time CEOs, but mentorship can help.
The execution of business strategies often requires iteration and learning from mistakes.
Investing in search funds allows Steve to support the next generation of entrepreneurs.

 Watch the Interview

Transcript

Jon Stoddard (00:00.258)
Welcome the top &A entrepreneurs. Today my guest is Steve Divitkos. Steve is a founder of Minola Search Partners. And he's got a journey here because he was a search funder, bought a company, grew it, and then sold it. And now he's a search investor now. So welcome, Steve, how are you? I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me, John.

So I did read a little bit about you and you bought this company called Micro Dia software a few years back, but let's go back when you first started. What were you doing before you said, you know what, I'm gonna get into the search business. I'm gonna become a search funder. And why did you pick search funder? Why didn't you just go out and find a company and LDO it? Yeah, so coming straight out of undergrad, my background was actually in private equity.

I worked in PE, buying much larger businesses for a couple of years. And though I did enjoy that process, it eventually dawned on me that that was not what I was meant to do for the entirety of my career. I didn't love the context switching of private equity, which is to say, anytime that I felt I had learned enough to add value with respect to any

given company, would kind of move on to the next one. And instead of going not really deep and very wide, what I wanted to do is choose a single asset, a single company, a single area of focus and go incredibly deep on it. The second is that I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but in my younger years, I wasn't exactly sure what form that would take, whether that was something like a...

startup founder, joining an early stage company as a senior executive or buying my way into it. Eventually, once I came to learn about search funds and entrepreneurship through acquisition, it struck me as a really interesting bridge between where I had been as an investor and where I ultimately wanted to be as an operator, as an entrepreneur. And the idea that I could kind of...

Jon Stoddard (02:12.718)
use the skills that I had developed as an investor to kind of buy my way into that opportunity had never even struck me as possible. So when I learned more about entrepreneurship through acquisition, it struck me as a really elegant way to connect kind of my former self to what I hoped would be my future self at the time. Can you summarize what a search funder is? Now, most of us that have watched this channel have an idea of it because we have a presence on searchfundr.com.

you take a smaller percentage of the company, the private equity firm puts up the money, you do all the legwork to find the deal, and then they finance it, the purchase. In a way, yes. There's maybe a couple of adjustments I would add to that summary. So a search fund, as folks listening may know, is an investment vehicle that allows a single entrepreneur, in this case, me 10 years ago,

to purchase and subsequently operate a single privately held business. Now, typically, but not always, entrepreneurs are a little bit younger in their careers and don't have a lot of assets that they can put towards the purchase of these businesses. So they raise capital from investors in two stages, and it's typically not a single private equity firm. On average, it's comprised of 15 investors, whether they're individuals of a high net worth variety or other institutions.

So you raise a small pool of capital, typically a couple hundred thousand bucks to help finance a two-year search for a company to acquire. Once you find that company, what those 15 investors on average get in return for financing that two-year search is the right of first refusal to ultimately help you write the equity check for that business. Now, again, at the time I had just graduated business school, so I had two years of student debt on me and no assets to speak of, including and especially cash.

So I was able to leverage the capital of my investor base to buy a single private company naturally without putting down any of my own money, which again, I didn't have at the time. And in a traditional search fund, what happens is the entrepreneur is able to earn his or her way into common equity ownership. So typically about a third of it is granted to the entrepreneur upon the consummation of the acquisition. A third of it tends to be time vested over a period of about four years.

Jon Stoddard (04:35.352)
And then the final third is based on the net IRR that you produce for your investors. The higher the return, the higher amount that you get of that third bucket. This is a proposition I'm grasping with trying to understand why would a private equity firm that wants to grow their money put in a CEO with no experience?

You know, it's such a good question. And I'm reminded of when I first, 10 years ago, when I was explaining to my mother graduating from Harvard Business School, what I was planning to do, she genuinely could not understand it. And I don't blame her in the slightest. She said to me, so hold on a second, you're asking people to give you money and you've never managed as much as a lemonade stand in your entire life. Nobody has ever reported to you, including like an administrative assistant.

don't know what company you're going to buy. don't even know what industry you're going to buy it in. And people are giving you money for this. My response was, yeah, basically. So the concept itself does sound a little bit crazy, but I guess a couple of things come to mind. The first is that the search fund model has been around since 1985, and there's been almost 500 of them that have successfully started and finished since then. The returns to the asset class, despite how crazy

it may sound on the surface are incredibly compelling. In fact, on average, the IRR for investors is in the mid 30s and the multiple of capital for those investors is above five times. That makes search funds a more performant asset class than private equity, private debt, infrastructure, public markets, and venture capital. Clearly, there's something here. The historical data makes that very true in a very black and white way.

As an investor, yes, you are taking a bet on a first-time CEO. And so a lot of the bet that you're taking, just like any form of entrepreneurship or any form of investment is based upon the entrepreneur himself or herself. But remember that investors are targeting a specific type of business. And that type of business is one that tends to lend itself rather well to a first-time CEO. So what do we mean by that?

Jon Stoddard (06:56.96)
relatively straightforward operating model, tendencies towards recurring revenues that that new CEO doesn't have to recreate the wheel each year, preference for sticky products and low customer return rates, preferences for companies that have a long operating history that are already profitable, that are already generating cash. So this is all to say that certain businesses operating in certain industries

do indeed lend themselves in a much more appropriate way to first-time CEOs than other businesses do. And those tend to be the types of businesses that search funds target. So it's taking out the jockey. It's the horse. Even with the jockey, take the risk assessment. It's the horse that wins this race.

Look, in a way, yes, in a way, no. I would suggest that in any form of investing, you're taking a bet on both the entrepreneur or maybe the management team more broadly, as well as the company and the industry. So if I were to contrast search investing to something like, let's say, venture capital investing. In early stage VC, the bet that the investor is taking is almost entirely on the founder, right? VCs value companies based on napkins and pitch decks in the absence of a product.

It's a freaking idea. So that is entirely a bet on the founder. In search, it's a bit different. Yes, you are absolutely taking a bet on the founder, but you have a very, very real business to look at. So it has product market fit. It has revenue. is generating cash. has dozens to hundreds to thousands of customers. So it is much less of a blind bet than something like VC would be, but you

as in any other form of investing, of course, the entrepreneur in question is a very, very material consideration. And I would suggest that many peers and colleagues and investors who have been in the search fund ecosystem for 30 years now often remark that the businesses that are bought after five to seven years, in some cases, barely resemble the businesses that are sold because it's very difficult to predict what the market will do, what the entrepreneur

Jon Stoddard (09:18.914)
we'll do with that business, what opportunities will present themselves. So certainly you're taking a bet on both, but this is a much more informed bet than something like venture capital would be. Right. So how long did that take you? You were given two years with this couple hundred thousand dollars. How long did, how many businesses did you go through? How long did it take? And what did that funnel look like? How many LOIs you put out there to get to term sheets? Yes. The search took me a year and eight months.

on average, the search tends to take 21 to 24 months across the entire search ecosystem. So two years is a pretty reasonable approximation for how long the search tends to take on average. you know, that was 10 years ago, so I don't have the stats at the top of mind, but suffice it to say that I looked at. You know, hundreds, if not thousands of businesses, obviously you can't look at a thousand businesses in a detailed way, but at a cursory level, certainly the number was very, very high.

And working the way down the funnel, I tended to be a bit more selective in terms of LOIs, which is to say that it took a lot for me to issue an LOI, which is not necessarily the path that a lot of searchers follow. There's different kind of approaches to this. I think I probably issued maybe four to eight IOIs.

which are less substantive than LOIs. There's nothing binding about it. Yeah. And in fact, there's very little binding about an LOI as well. But an IOI is kind of like the junior cousin of an LOI. But I think I probably issued, I don't know, one to three LOIs before ultimately the one that I signed got into exclusivity, finished diligence and was ultimately consummated.

Who helped you with the offer and the deal stack? Does the search fund do that? Yeah, it was a combination of myself leveraging my investors forever appropriate. But in terms of valuing the company, figuring out how to structure the transaction, putting the LOI together, frankly, it was mostly me leveraging the help of my investors whenever appropriate, which they were fortunately very willing and able to.

Jon Stoddard (11:37.495)
to do as well as a helpful legal counsel. I was fortunate enough to pair myself with a counselor who was very experienced in the search fund space, at least in Canada. And that team really helped me put together an LOI and a structure that we mutually thought made a lot of sense. So you, were there any hiccups in there that you almost got close to losing the deal or?

or some kind of new bits of information that they didn't reveal and goes, this is deal killer. You know, it's funny is as an acquisition entrepreneur myself and now as an investor, I would suggest that, you know, both in buying the business and selling the business in the average deal, there's probably like one to four instances in which the deal feels like it's about to fall apart. And if you don't have that in closing a deal, consider yourself wrong. Yeah.

Either something's wrong or you're very lucky. So the first thing that comes to mind with respect to buying the company is I had been working with about six, so we raised debt to finance the acquisition. I had worked with about six banks who all provided me with positive indications of interest. I got term sheets from all, I think it was six of them. Ultimately, I decided to sign one of the term sheets and go exclusive with let's call them bank A.

Two weeks prior to the closing of the contemplated transaction, Bank A came back to me and they said, hey Steve, we know we gave you this term sheet. We know you've been operating on the basis of this term sheet being true, but we just went to our credit group, which is the internal group in banks that approves these types of things. And they've actually completely changed the terms on us. So when I looked at the term, the new term sheet that I now had from Bank A,

I compared that against the term sheets that I had declined 30 to 60 days ago. Actually, Bank B now had the more favorable term sheet. Two weeks prior to closing, I called Bank B in a frenetic state and I said, hey, Bank A just retraded on me. Now, you are the leading horse in the race, but I haven't talked to you for 60 days and here's all the new stuff that's happened in the deal. Can you close in two weeks or not? That began

Jon Stoddard (13:56.823)
probably two of the most stressful and frantic weeks of my life. Thankfully, Bank B was indeed able to get up to speed and I've enjoyed a 10 year relationship with them as a result of that. And I'm now referring searchers to that bank because of my experience with them as an operator. But as I reflect back on closing the deal from a buyer standpoint, that was the time where I thought, boy, like this thing might not close.

or the deal did they finance? I think it was roughly 60 % equity, 40 % debt if memory serves me correct. Yeah, okay. So you got the business, micro-deal, you had a little celebration and then now you're CEO. And I'm reading what you wrote here is in that first five years, your equity value quadrupled, which is amazing. What did you do? Good question. I'm not sure what I did.

Look, think part of this is buying the right business. So in the case of micro dia, I often say that it had enough right with it and enough wrong with it. It had to have enough right with it to know that I could go in and make first time CEO mistakes and not risk the survival of the business. But it had to have enough wrong with it such that I could actually create value over a five to seven year time period.

So think what happened is, I think some of it was the business that we bought, which is to say that it had a very large and diversified customer base at the time. I think it was probably 350 or so customers at the time, none of whom represented more than 5 % of revenue. The company generated a very steady stream of recurring revenue with very, very low churn rates. So set it another way, less than 5 % of our customers churned or did not renew.

each year. So that provided me with a really interesting buffer and a really valuable buffer such that I knew I didn't have to kind of recreate the revenue wheel every year. I think we made a couple of changes in the business that probably ended up helping. The first is that like so many of these businesses, the company's internal sales and marketing operations were essentially non-existent. So we had to build those teams from scratch.

Jon Stoddard (16:24.333)
So we went from zero people in marketing and three people in sales at entry to, I don't know, maybe 15 people or so combined at exit. We built the management team from nothing. So the company had zero people in the management team when we bought, seven when we sold. Like so many of these small businesses, the founder was kind of happily wearing

let's say three or four hats that would otherwise need to be occupied by three to four other individuals. But he was able to do that because he had 30 years of experience in the industry. So he could simultaneously be the head of marketing and the head of sales and the head of product management and the head of development. But of course, when that founder exits, you need to replace those work streams with singular individuals.

And in our case, we had to build several departments from scratch. So the departments that we built from nothing included sales, marketing, finance and accounting, product management and customer success. And those are kind of like five almost prerequisite departments for any high performing software companies. So we had to build that out. Let me ask you about that. I'm not underestimating or overestimating you, I'm just trying to understand. I mean, you just said that...

you came out of college, how did you know that there had to be enough wrong with it? Because it's all about information arbitrage, right? You could see something in the opportunity where I need to do this, I need to build sales or I need to increase the number of customers. I need to increase the size of the purchase or I need to increase the frequency of purchases. How did you know to do that and focus on? Or did you just try a bunch of stuff and, you know, pragmatically some work, some didn't?

And you just kept moving forward. I think in all situations, it's a combination of both. So I think a good due diligence process can and should, and in my case did reveal areas in which the company could have improved. So for example, the company had clearly under invested in itself, tools, processes, teams, et cetera. Second, the company was growing pretty substantially in the absence of

Jon Stoddard (18:39.881)
internal sales and marketing. So at a high level, we kind of said, hey, if it's growing at X percent in the absence of both of these things, imagine how fast it could be growing if we actually did build out properly functioning sales and marketing groups. And to speak to your second point, which is, well, you try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Yes, we did eventually build the sales and marketing teams to very functional states, but it took a lot of iteration and a lot of mistakes. I had several hiring mistakes, the executive level.

the executives that I ended up kind of hiring and retaining, they made several hiring mistakes at the account executive and account manager and individual contributor level. So there was definitely a component where a good due diligence process yielded several insights where you kind of look at it with clear eyes and say, hey, you know, there are levers that we can pull here to improve it. But to your second point, you know, building these things from scratch is almost inevitably harder than every investment memo would have you believe. So even though the opportunity is there,

the execution is incredibly difficult. And yes, it requires a lot of iteration, a lot of mistakes, lots of fits and starts to ultimately get it to a high functioning state. Yeah, there's so many opportunities. You say, hey, I need to fix this area. Then all of a sudden you go investigate an area or method or opportunity to increase sales, let's say, or profits. You start focusing on it and it goes, that's not going to work.

That's not gonna work. And you just keep going until you find it. And I think I'll give you one kind of giant example of that. So I often say that even if you run the world's best due diligence process, I can almost promise you that within your first month of running your company, you will learn more about it than in the 12 months of due diligence that preceded it. That is the virtual guarantee. So to illustrate that with a real story.

When we bought the business, we were selling software into five different end markets, transportation, insurance, financial services, healthcare, and education. When we bought the business, it was concentrated quite a bit in transportation logistics. And we said, hey, to add value, we're gonna diversify away from transportation. It's cyclical, it's low margin, it's slow moving. We don't like it. We're gonna create value by diversifying away from transportation. And we have too many eggs in that basket.

Jon Stoddard (21:04.781)
Within our first 18 months, we did the complete opposite. We fired over 25 % of our customer base who were not in the transportation market. And we focused the entire company on transportation logistics exclusively. That was a scary decision to make. That also was probably the best decision that we had made as a board and as operators over seven years of ownership. So I say that to illustrate that

one can and should run the best due diligence process that they can. But one must be prepared to be surprised either positively or negatively once you get within the four walls of the company, because the amount that you learn is staggering and in many cases is almost impossible to predict from the outside looking in. Yeah. Surprising counterintuitive to your initial thoughts like get rid of transportation. No, we're going to double down on transportation. Yeah. was about it. was 180 degrees different from what we thought.

going in. yeah, I say that story to suggest that, you know, stuff happens. So you're in it, you're running it. Is it everything you thought you wanted to do as a CEO and being an entrepreneur when you were searching for it? Or was it different?

I mean, at the risk of fence-sitting is probably a little bit of both. I think I'll probably lean more towards it being different than it being kind of exactly what I had envisioned. And there's a couple of reasons why. The first is that, and I say this very frequently and very unapologetically, nobody knows what it's like to be an entrepreneur or CEO unless you have been one, full stop.

I had never been an entrepreneur or a CEO. So I learned an incredible amount about what it's actually like to run a small business. I would suggest that most people from the outside looking in tend to glorify or romanticize entrepreneurship and leadership. Once you have sat in the CEO's chair, you tend to almost snicker at those that glorify it or romanticize it. There are very, very rewarding and fulfilling parts of it

Jon Stoddard (23:18.135)
but it's also damn hard. It is very, very hard. So a couple of things that come to mind. Number one is the phrase that we've all heard, it's lonely at the top. That exists for a reason. And hiring more people in my experience doesn't really alleviate that. In fact, the bigger my company got, in some ways the lonelier I felt as the CEO of the business. The second is that as a,

type A overly ambitious overachiever. I think I over-indexed on the professional side of my life and neglected the personal side of my life, whether it's physical health, mental health, family, friends, balance, et cetera. Eventually I came to pay a pretty big toll. And if I could do it again, I would certainly take a more balanced approach. What's unique to buying an existing company as opposed to

starting one from scratch and many acquisition entrepreneurs may say something similar is that in some instances, it kind of takes a while for it to feel like your own company. I would suggest that for my first probably two years, maybe even longer, it kind of felt like I was just running somebody else's company. And the reason why is that even though this was an otherwise successful business, there was a lot of stuff to change, a lot of...

lot of things to do. And I remember telling my wife and describing it as follows, said, it feels like I'm spending two years trying to untie a knot that it took somebody else 20 years to tie. Now, eventually, we kind of did all that stuff. And eventually, it absolutely felt like my own business. But I'd say in the first couple of years, it was a bit more challenging. And then that

Last thing I would say is again, particularly in the early years, again, we'll go back to where we started our conversation, the seeming ridiculousness of the search fund concept that this inexperienced young person can actually go in and do this thing. I think how that tends to manifest psychologically is in something called imposter syndrome, something a lot of acquisition entrepreneurs feel. I certainly felt it. And that can be a tough thing for an inexperienced person to deal with. So...

Jon Stoddard (25:35.009)
you thankfully with the support of my board, my investors, maybe, you we dealt with all this stuff. But this is, you know, we're starting to encroach upon the territory of, you know, what being an entrepreneur is really like and the stuff that tends to not be discussed terribly frequently in our ecosystem. Yeah. Did you find your way to a peer group? Were the private equity, were they good mentors or did you have a personal mentor?

Yeah, so a couple of things. The first thing is in 2015, which is my second year of operation, I joined EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization. YPO or the Young Presidents Organization is a very, very similar concept. That was very, very valuable to me. And I'm still a member today, you know, however many years later. That is a CEO peer group where you meet with the same group of small business CEOs every month.

and you talk about your problems, your opportunities, your challenges, et cetera. Second, my board and my investors were very helpful. Every time that I called them, they enthusiastically picked up the phone and helped me think through all sorts of problems and opportunities. I would suggest that my biggest regret is not getting a CEO coach. I wish that I got one. I didn't. And if I could do it all over again, I would get one early. And now all of the CEOs with whom I work

It is a strong suggestion that I make pretty early in the process. Yeah, makes sense. I mean, if you look at these professional golfers, tennis players, you name it, they have their own coach. Coaches plural. That's right. That's right. So you decided to sell something about that was the right timing. And now you're transitioned into a search fund investor. What was that process and how does that feel?

doing this. Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of like a full circle moment. It is kind of it's the last hat that I have not yet worn in the ecosystem as someone who's, you know, search for bought, operated, sold, and now now investing. So this the circle is closed, I suppose. You know, it was interesting, I exited in September 2020. So this was still pretty early in COVID.

Jon Stoddard (28:00.629)
Yeah, depends on how you look at the glass, whether it's half full or half empty. My exit did not look in any way, or form what I thought it would have looked like in the seven years in which I had been dreaming about it. I was thinking vacations and dinners out and, you know, all these kinds of things. But of course, we couldn't travel, we couldn't even go to a restaurant to celebrate closing because at least where I'm from, everything was closed down. So I say that to suggest that

I had a lot of time to think, because candidly there wasn't much else to do given the lockdowns. And I guess that was kind of a blessing in disguise because I got the opportunity to be extremely thoughtful about what I wanted to do next. And what kept coming back to me is how do I use my experience as an entrepreneur and CEO to make the lives of other entrepreneurs and CEOs easier in some way?

Because like I said, this is a damn hard journey and anybody who says otherwise, I'd love to meet them because I probably have a lot to learn from them. So I thought of a bunch of stuff. Could I be a CEO coach myself? Could I be like a board member for hire? Could I be like a consultant? But none of those things resonated with me because at the risk of using a sports analogy, I wasn't wearing the same jersey as the entrepreneur. And that was incredibly important to me.

The best way that I could think of to wear the same Jersey as the entrepreneur and be on the same team and kind of be in the trenches with them is to put my money where my mouth is, which is invest in it personally. So being an investor was always something that resonated with me to align my interest with the CEOs and entrepreneurs. I love kind of playing like a coach oriented role and frankly, using all the mistakes that I made to ensure that

the next generation of entrepreneurs doesn't have to necessarily make those same types of mistakes. Let me ask you about those lessons. mean, obviously there were some learnings early on. goes, gosh, I just didn't have that, that you're going to incorporate now because they were absent. What were those? my God, how much time do you have? Just give me the top three or five. I mean, there's an enormous number of lessons just off the top of my head.

Jon Stoddard (30:20.749)
and I'll speak more in line with kind of a traditional search fund context. The first is that I spent too much time trying to impress my board and my investors and not enough time genuinely trying to utilize them for their help and experience. So the lesson there is as a CEO, don't be afraid to be vulnerable and ask for help when you need it because everybody does need it.

The second is that I thought that as an entrepreneur and as a CEO and as like a hard charging person, I thought I had to have all the answers myself, which of course is impossible and nobody does. And I thought that I was kind of in this alone and that turns out to not be the case. So things like CEO coaches, things like CEO peer groups, things like therapists, these are the things that I didn't take advantage of then that I'm taking advantage of now.

that helped me understand that even though entrepreneurship can very much feel like a lonely journey, it doesn't mean that you have to be alone. And there is a difference between the concept of being lonely and the concept of being alone.

Another kind of major lesson, and this is probably consistent across so many small business CEOs, is the concept of working in the business versus working on the business. As a CEO, there is a never-ending vortex of issues that will suck you in if you're not careful, and they are all in the business issues. But as a CEO,

what you are uniquely good at doing, or at least what you should be uniquely good at doing is working on the business. And so finding ways, and there's hundreds of ways to do it, to either ignore or delay or delegate things that you are not uniquely good at, but ultimately have to get done so that you can create the bandwidth to do the things that you are uniquely good at, which tend to be on the business types of things. So those are, I mean, those are a couple lessons among literally hundreds that come to mind.

Jon Stoddard (32:26.583)
So where are you now? So have you deployed capital to a couple of search funders and they're looking? you got some businesses that you're ready to close on? What's the, what does that look like? Yeah. So the fund is called Mineola Search Partners. It is quite new. It was founded this year.

We have invested in a handful of search funds thus far. We're hopeful to close on our first underlying operating company next week. So fingers crossed. We invest in traditional search funds as well as equity gaps that tend to present themselves in traditional search as well as self-funded search. So to the extent that you're just an individual who hasn't raised capital but is out there looking to buy a business and you need to raise some external capital to help finance that.

we invest in those as well. And that actually describes the deal that we're hopeful will close in the next week or so. So essentially all forms of search I'm investing in. Yeah. What kind of company is that? The software company or offline or what? It is not a software company. It's in the healthcare space. I'm often asked, given my background in software, do I invest only in software? The answer is no. Kind of in my inbox right now is an absolute hodgepodge of industries.

from all over the North American landscape. So I take a pretty industry agnostic approach to investing. Yeah. What's the best advice you ever received doing this that stayed with you for the last 10, 15 years? The best advice I've ever received. That is a very difficult question. This will probably sound kind of corny, but it's like quite literally staring at me in the face. I have a quote.

hanging in my office. I don't know if it's as advice as much as it is a reminder. it's the man in the arena quote by theater Roosevelt. I love that quote. Yeah. Many of your listeners have heard of it. I, you know, I don't know if that's advice, but I guess it's framed on my wall for a reason. It essentially says that look, win or lose, success or failure. If you're in the arena, bleeding, sweating, crying, trying your best.

Jon Stoddard (34:46.729)
at least you know that you're giving it your all. And I often tend to differentiate between a boxer and a boxing commentator. know, a boxing commentator might be able to speak very intelligently about strategy and execution, but try to drop them in the ring and see what happens. So I think all of, I think that just the simple fact that one is in the ring, trying, fighting, failing, learning,

That is.

That is something to be deeply proud of whether there's a financial success or otherwise. So I don't know if it's a lesson, but I think it's incredibly important. think the world needs more entrepreneurs. I think the world needs more people who are trying to do right by communities and customers and employees and the legacies of founders. And I applaud anybody who...

is putting out a shingle and trying to build their entrepreneurial dream and using these creative ways to do it. I don't know if it's advice as much as it is like a hell yes vote of confidence for everybody pursuing the entrepreneurial path. Yeah, no, there's wisdom in that. So I upload this to search funder. What kind of plug? mean, you can make a plug right now for your fund, direct them towards you. Look, instead of making a

I'll just kind of speak factually. You know, I've been in the search fund ecosystem for over a decade now. The great news for all prospective searchers out there is that there's a lot of good investors in our ecosystem. There's a lot of great investors in our ecosystem. I'm to do my best to ensure that I'm part of that group. I am going to let my reputation speak for me. So instead of trying to plug myself, I would encourage anybody to speak to

Jon Stoddard (36:43.583)
either any of my investors in MicroDia or any of the searchers in whom I've already invested to ask about what it's like to work with me. And as I said at the beginning, nobody knows what it's like to be an entrepreneur CEO unless you have been one and I have been one. And I have already done everything that a prospective acquisition entrepreneur is attempting to do. So I know what it's like. And I hope that that experience

will be valuable in the eyes of people who are looking to raise money to help them realize their own entrepreneurial dreams. Steve, thank you for sharing your entrepreneurial journey there. We appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. All right, take care. Thank you.