Summary

Ross Turner shares his journey from digital marketing to raising $235 Million for acquiring e-commerce companies. He started in direct response and grew a successful survivalist company before transitioning to direct response e-commerce. Ross emphasizes the importance of copywriting and driving traffic to generate revenue. He also discusses the value of paying for courses and finding the right business partner. Ross and his partner have created a roadmap to build a billion-dollar enterprise value company. They have secured support from investors and are expanding their business by opening new offices and exploring project financing and corporate bonds. Ross Turner shares his journey of navigating the e-commerce landscape and building a portfolio of successful companies. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the industry's language and terminology and the value of learning by doing. Ross discusses the scalability strategy his organization employs and the key pillars for driving profit in e-commerce businesses. He also highlights the significance of women leadership in achieving growth and success. Ross shares his long-term goals and exit strategy, aiming to sell the company for a billion or more and impact the underserved SME market. He emphasizes the importance of building the right team and cultural fit and preparing for potential challenges and black swan events. The 5 Books that Helped Ross Turner Raise $235 Million. 1. The Masters of Private Equity and Venture Capital: Management Lessons from the Pioneers of Private Investing 2. THE ENTREPRENEURIAL BIBLE TO VENTURE CAPITAL: Inside Secrets from the Leaders in the Startup Game 3. Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life 4. The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital: The Comprehensive Fundraising Handbook for Startup Founders 5. Secrets to Raising Capital: How to get the money you need for your business the fastest and easiest way possible

Takeaways

Transitioning from one industry to another requires learning new skills and understanding different markets.
Copywriting and driving traffic are essential skills for success in direct response e-commerce.
Paying for courses and investing in education can provide valuable knowledge and opportunities.
Finding the right business partner is crucial for building a successful company.
Raising capital for acquisitions involves strategic planning, partnerships, and securing support from investors.

 

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Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:01.644)
Ross Turner, welcome to Top M &A Entrepreneurs. How you doing?

Ross Turner (00:03.518)
I'm great. Thank you for having me. It's an honor and a privilege to be here. I'm great. How are you, John?

Jon Stoddard (00:10.828)
I'm good. And I just was on a webinar a week ago and I saw you raised a hundred million dollars to acquire e -commerce companies, one million to five million EBITDA. I want to talk to you about how you got there. Yeah.

Ross Turner (00:24.91)
Sure. So actually, last year, the cumulative total of capital committed was 235 million.

Jon Stoddard (00:35.564)
235 million now

Ross Turner (00:37.646)
Yeah, and I have zero background in finance. I'm not an investment banker. My background is not that, but I had to learn it very quickly over the last year and really understand what goes on in that world, how it works, how people think. And really, it's been an interesting journey for sure.

Jon Stoddard (01:01.74)
Yeah. So let's kind of rewind a little bit, like the hero's journey, you know, you're back on the, you know, you're Luke Skywalker on some planet like that's going nowhere. But you were, yeah, but you were, you've been in digital marketing for 20 years. So you've got that expertise of taking a company from X to XXX, whatever that was, right? Yeah.

Ross Turner (01:15.11)
I'm definitely not that.

Ross Turner (01:22.764)
Mm -hmm.

Ross Turner (01:29.92)
Correct, yeah. So I originally started out in direct response and digital in 2003? No, yeah, 2003. So 2003, me and my brother, back in the UK, we had a digital info product business, which we ran for seven years. We grew that to multiple seven figures.

Um, and really how this kind of whole journey started was at the end of 2013, I was fairly burnt out and I just gave the business to my brother. I just said, look, there's no scalability here. Like I've learned pretty much everything there is to learn. So I was writing all of the emails, all of the copy, all of the launch material, all of the webinars, everything. And essentially in the market that we were in, and I won't dive all yet because my brother's still running that business. Um,

there was no ability to scale it. Right? Like we couldn't, we couldn't scale it due to several, several restrictions that we had. Um, so I just gave him the business and I said, look, I'm burnt out. I need a bit of time away from it. Um, and I remember it very vividly actually. So I spent a month on my mom's sofa. I was like just turning 30. I was just like, what the hell am I going to do? And for a month I just sat there, just gave my brain a rest. I'd kind of had enough.

And then serendipitously, someone who I learned to write copy from, Andre Chaperone, incredible guy, auto respond the madness. He is a legendary copywriter. He actually sent out an email that said, are you my next Emilio? And that email was on behalf of his business partner, Steve Gray. Steve runs multiple eight figure supplement directors wants businesses online. He's like a premier, one of the premier guys who drives traffic.

Um, and I read his email and I was like, I can absolutely do this. And it was to be his intern. Right. So I reached out, I replied to the email and then I turned around and just said, here's everything I've done over the last seven years. He looked at the material and then he called me and he said, he said, look, you're far too experienced. I was going to pay an intern 25 grand to basically sit in my office and do all the grunt work. He said, but I have a business partner in Austin.

Ross Turner (03:57.71)
who needs some help running that business? Would you like to do that? So I Googled Austin, I was like, where the hell's Austin? I had no idea where it is. And I've lived here for 10 years now and I absolutely love it, right? Just south of England, so I was living in Kent. I was in a village called Charing, which is about, it's about an hour away from London. So it's a nice picturesque, garden of England kind of space.

Jon Stoddard (04:03.006)
you

Jon Stoddard (04:10.156)
Where were you living in England?

Ross Turner (04:27.502)
Um, and then I ended up, I would never forget this. So I ended up coming out here on the 4th of June, 2014. And that was it. I fell in love with it. I was the fifth employee in that year. And I knew, I was like, if I can, there's two things in the direct response and digital space, right? If you learn how to drive traffic and you know how to write copy, you can write your own ticket. Sky's the limit. Um, and I.

I got there, I was the fifth employee in, we did 2 .2 million that year. By the time I left, four years later, we were on a 35 million dollar run rate. That helped grow that team to about 40 people.

Jon Stoddard (05:06.764)
And this was, what kind of company was this? Is it an e -commerce? Survival. Oh, are we talking about Ryan Dice's digital marker supply? No.

Ross Turner (05:08.686)
Survival company. There was this end of the world preppers there. Yeah. No, it's not. It's not Ryan Dice's company. No. The company was called Ultimate Survival Strategies. There were several of these companies. Crisis Education was another one. Austin seemed to spawn a lot of survivalist companies. It was big, big, big business. Like I didn't realize how big until I actually started working for them.

Jon Stoddard (05:23.144)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (05:39.374)
for them and my, and my wife, my girlfriend at the time is now my wife. She was doing a master's degree in crime, terrorism and global securities. But she was over here with me, but she was bored. So I got her a job in customer service. So she would literally speak with angry middle -aged white guys all day long about their survival products that they bought, their survival food they bought. So that, yes, that opened up.

Jon Stoddard (06:04.756)
Preppers, yeah.

Ross Turner (06:09.294)
rise to kind of the digital and direct response.

Jon Stoddard (06:12.908)
I have to tell you, I just remember about 10, and I think five years ago, I went through one of those funnels to get a $4 flashlight and then ended up spending like $300 through that freaking funnel.

Ross Turner (06:19.814)
Oh yeah. So what we did was when I first came into that business, we shifted our model very similar to a free plus shipping model.

Um, and it was a free book on the front end and we changed that complete model. I think I ended up selling a hundred thousand copies of this book, but really it was to drive people into our continuity, right? Like our cashflow was determined by our membership. And then I, I split tested and took when I came into the business, we were selling our newsletter for 1995. So we collected all the data, pulled it together and then I tested.

Jon Stoddard (06:31.372)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (06:57.306)
37, 47, 57, 67. And the attrition and drop off rate was the same. So I took it from 19 .95 a month to 67 a month. So like four extra business. And then we were driving so many people into that front end that our take rate on that subscription was 52%. So we grew that. We had like 1500 people on the newsletter when I turned up and we grew that to over 14 ,000.

Jon Stoddard (07:24.492)
And that was like a free plus shipping book that you'd upsell to the, Hey, just click here if you want the newsletter for 67 a year.

Ross Turner (07:26.734)
Yeah. Yeah. So how, so how we structured it was if they bought the book on the front end, we'd either depend on the product. We either offer them the same book for a dollar today, but they had to test drive our newsletter for 14 days. So we tested 30 days, 21 days, 14 days. Um, and then, and then it turned out that 14 days was the optimal kind of time.

And we just scaled back things over 14 ,000 subscribers. Way before that, yeah, it was way before that. We had our own internal team that were building all of our pages and stuff out for us. The guys today don't know how easy they've got it. But back in the day, it used to be a real effort to kind of pull these funnels together. We used Infusionsoft, one shopping cart, if you remember that. Like trying to get a one click up sell.

Jon Stoddard (08:01.644)
Yeah, this was way before the ClickFunnels, the FreePlus shipping, wasn't it? Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (08:23.288)
Yeah, yeah

Ross Turner (08:25.216)
flow and path was difficult. And we were, we were one of the first kind of guys to do that. And then I guess ever since then, I kind of left there around a couple of other businesses. One was in finance, it was like a financial services product. One was in again, back into supplements, health and fitness, direct response. And then really kind of stumbled onto stumbled onto onto call essentially, like how that kind of

relationship came about was we were both in similar direct response groups and we were friends. Because we're from like a similar part of the UK. We love football. You mean soccer? Yes. Yes, football. Yeah, we call it football.

Jon Stoddard (08:58.792)
When you say football we mean soccer, but it's not soccer. Football. Yeah. Here's a little fact. My dad was in the Air Force and my first sport I played was football in Germany. It soccer. It's soccer, not football.

Ross Turner (09:19.534)
Right. Oh, there you go. Yeah. It's soccer for you guys. Yeah. Um, so we, we kind of built up a relationship, had a friendship. We just chatted. Like I'd speak to him on the phone about a few things before we even kind of ever got into this. Um, and then I kind of helped him out. They were relaunching dealmaker wealth society. And I just, I guess I can say this on the podcast, but I'd spent $10 ,000 on Roland Frazier's Epic.

Jon Stoddard (09:25.356)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (09:50.03)
And I couldn't make any heads or tails of it. It was all over the place. There was no structure to it. I was like, I can't, I can't make this work. But I said to Carl, I said, one of the things that Roland and his team are doing exceptionally well as they're running this challenge. Said you should absolutely do that. So he, he, they went and mod, their team modeled it on, on that and, and it helped seven exit seven exit business. So he turned around and said, Hey, why don't you come into Prodigy? He said, I'll, I'll give you a free.

Jon Stoddard (09:53.194)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (10:05.644)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (10:19.726)
I'll comp you into it." And I said, no, no, no. I said, like, that's a mistake. If you give it to me for free, I'll probably never look at it. I said, let me pay for it. I'm happy to pay for it. And this is a complete true story. So a couple of years before that, unfortunately, my father passed away during COVID. And then he left me some inheritance. It was 12 ,000 pounds, which wasn't a lot. And I spent 7 ,000 of that on calls.

course. So paid for it, got in there, I spent a

Jon Stoddard (10:50.924)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (10:55.34)
I think that's critically important to make sure you did that because I've given away a lot of products and people, it's shelf -ware. I can go in and see how many people looked at it or even did any of the courses. Zero. It's shelf -ware. Yeah. You have to pay for it.

Ross Turner (11:09.07)
Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think I've read somewhere that 80 % of the people that buy courses and training never do anything with it anyway, which is kind of like blows my mind a little bit. But, um, but I went through his material and I liked the structure to it. They gamify it, right? So they force you into taking action, which is very important. Like, especially if you knew you need someone to guide you along the way and kind of show you the ropes, but it was a funny story. So.

Jon Stoddard (11:18.762)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (11:40.142)
Carl was super patient with me and back then when he kind of became part of the team, he'd have an individual one -on -one welcome call with you. And he kind of like bugged me about having this call and for about six months, I didn't really do anything with it. And I was under an R in. So he finally gets me on the call. And then I'm like, I think I should probably buy direct response e -commerce companies. And he said, he went,

Hallelujah. Thankfully, the penny has dropped. He said, I was waiting for you to say that. He was waiting for me to come to the table. And then he said, great. He said, why don't we partner on it? And I was like, I was like, I don't know. He said, like, just let me think about it. And I went away and I hadn't committed at that point to it. But then he kind of calls me on a Sunday and says, Hey, you free, can you jump on Zoom? So we jumped on a Zoom and he modeled out.

Jon Stoddard (12:12.178)
I was waiting for you to come to the door.

Ross Turner (12:36.558)
basically our roadmap to a billion dollar enterprise value company.

Jon Stoddard (12:42.156)
And he was just looking for you like a blank spot there in who's going to do this. And that was, well, he's probably tried it a couple of times, but you were the perfect.

Ross Turner (12:44.332)
It's just waiting for me.

Yeah, he's...

Ross Turner (12:53.996)
So one of the big things with Carl, what he said was, he said he's kicked himself back in the day. He got the opportunity to partner in a legal cannabis grow, which got sold for 120 million or something. And he turned it down. So now he's like, tries to partner with as many people as possible. So he showed this model to me and it was up to 16 deals over six years. And it was an enterprise value of 982 million.

Jon Stoddard (13:07.338)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (13:24.558)
So I looked at it, we got on Zoom, we were talking through it. And I said, all right. I said, let me think about it, right? Because the biggest thing, if you're doing a roll up is integration and operations, right? And being in this space, like you need, those things need to be tied down. You need to have world -class people doing that. And then secondarily, I thought, well, I don't want to just sell to men and women because the communication, the marketing, the conversation.

can be too difficult, right? And then we don't, too different. And then we don't get the economies of scale. We can't cross sell as much. So I went away and I thought about it. And I said to Carl, I was like, yeah, I think this is possible. I think this is doable. And I'll be honest, John, like originally when we first did this, it was kind of like, not an ego thing, but I saw the big number, right? And I was like, wow, a billion dollars, we can do this.

Jon Stoddard (13:56.588)
Two different messages, yeah.

Ross Turner (14:23.598)
It was about that initially. But then when I started pulling all the data and looking at everything that I'd kind of started to put together, I realized that women were the super buyers in our space. They spend seven times more than men. They control the purse strings. They're a better customer. They're stickier. They're just a super buyer. And then, because obviously we were coming into, what's this, 2022, we're looking at the recession, looking at the economy. We wanted something that was bulletproof, bombproof.

and that had continued to grow even during COVID. So we settled on women's health, wellness, and beauty products. It's been growing like 19 % year on year.

Jon Stoddard (15:02.412)
Yeah, yeah, they spend, they spend like 200 to $700 more than men do on beauty products, right? Yeah.

Ross Turner (15:08.462)
It's crazy, yeah. It's actually $1 ,700 more.

Jon Stoddard (15:12.717)
$1 ,700 more. I gotta adjust for inflation. Yeah. Like, Jesus. Yeah.

Ross Turner (15:14.19)
Which is crazy, right?

So I looked at that and the original deal was, you'll laugh, like if you saw our original deck, you could tell two men had put it together, right? It was like blue and masculine. And we covered all of the keynotes that you need to when obviously you put in a deck together like that. And you'll know this, this never happens, right? So we pitched it to a family office. Carl was like, if we get 10 million of equity, we can couple that with debt, earn out, sell the notes, all that good stuff. And that

gets us to our target. I was like, okay, so we pitched this to a family office in Dallas, and I won't name him. And we pitched it three times over three kind of separate calls. And we couldn't really get a sense of if he enjoyed it, understood it, liked the project. And then we had a random email at like midnight that said, you guys are onto something, let's do it. So we were like, that was odd. So.

Jon Stoddard (16:15.02)
So it was quick validation, but you didn't know whether, let me rewind just a tiny bit and the sticky situation of slicing up the pie. Like when you say partner, what is it 50 -50? Is it, what is it looking at? Yeah.

Ross Turner (16:17.974)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (16:23.702)
Mmm.

Ross Turner (16:27.214)
So, yeah, so the deal was $10 million for 20 % equity in the business, right? When we'd also give them a redemption premium on that money. So basically...

Jon Stoddard (16:39.372)
No, I'm sorry, I'm referring to Carl, you and Carl. Yeah. Oh, 50 -50, cool.

Ross Turner (16:42.318)
Oh, me and Carl. Yeah, that's 5050. Super simple 5050. We literally just said we'll split it down the middle. I have to say, Carl's the best business partner I've ever had ever. He he

Jon Stoddard (16:57.132)
Yeah, what is it about him that makes it the best?

Ross Turner (17:00.11)
He has a unique ability. Like when it comes to numbers and deal structure, I've never seen anything quite like it. Like he spent two hours on a whiteboard doing it in his head. Did a full pro forma. But he really understands people. So like he lets me and gives me the freedom to get on with it because he trusts me. And then I don't hassle him either. Like if there's specific things I need from him.

I say, Hey, Carl, I need this, this and this. And he just does it instantly. He also has obviously, you know, 31 years of M &A experience so he can bring things to the table that I haven't necessarily thought of. But yeah, we split it right down the middle 50 -50.

Jon Stoddard (17:43.884)
Yeah, by the way, I've done an interview with Carl talking about his HP M &A experience. So it's in my catalog if you want to go watch that. Yeah. Yeah.

Ross Turner (17:48.78)
Yeah.

I will, I will check that out. So yeah, it was an interesting story. So the family office, they were like, yep, we like this, we're in. Well, we had the contracts drawn up. We saw their capital commitments, their proof of funds, and then we had a timeline of execution for the capital call. And then what the family office did was they started opening up their connections to us.

And then that kind of led us down the road to the first big raise, right? And there's a company out of New York, an alternative investment group, they're called Global Emerging Markets, GEM. They're three high net worth individuals. And they say publicly they've announced that they have 3 billion AUM, but privately when we sat down and spoke with them, it's more like 11. So their model is they...

They are essentially, I think in old terminology, it's called a pipe on Wall Street. So when we become a publicly listed company, they have given us contractually, they're legally contractually obligated to buy $125 million worth of our shares. So they have to buy that. There's two good things about this company. One is they're long only, they can't short the stock ever, and they can't even do anything for it.

can't even do anything with it for five years. So they have a vested interest in the growth of the business. So we, we again, and you know this, this never happens, right? So we pitched Gregory Van Beek and I didn't know this at the time. They hadn't done a deal in three years. They turned down 50 deals and then we pitched him and I'm about two thirds of the way through this pitch and he stops me and he says, I absolutely love what you guys are doing here.

Ross Turner (19:46.51)
said that you have to do one thing. He said stop saying females, he said, and start saying women. He said, because I've got three daughters at home and every time I say female they tell me off. So.

Jon Stoddard (19:57.644)
That's a little tiny nuance, yeah.

Ross Turner (20:00.35)
Yeah. So he turned around and said, how much do you want? And this is the only time I've ever been unprepared for a meeting like this. It's never happened again. Carl was on the call. We were both on there. And I just blurted out 150 million. So he laughed and he said, all right, leave it with me. Let me come back. He came back kind of over the weekend and we settled on 125 and from term sheet to contract, it took about six months.

Jon Stoddard (20:08.844)
Was Carl with you? Or just you two? Yeah.

Ross Turner (20:29.614)
iron out all the red line and you know how that goes. Lawyers are...

Jon Stoddard (20:33.196)
Yeah. Now did you guys already have your, your corp, your 50 50 corporation in place, the holding company before you went? Yeah. That's yeah.

Ross Turner (20:37.87)
Yeah, that was already done here. So that was already in play. And then of course, now we've got a little bit of traction, right? We've got commitment from the family office. We've got $125 million facility when we become a public legacy company. We're away at the races. Unfortunately, what we didn't know at the time, which wasn't disclosed to us, the family office was selling their family office to another family office. They were getting their money from LPs.

And they missed the capital call. So me and Carl pulled the 20 % from them. We pulled it. We're like, no, because we'd signed our contract with global emerging. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they missed the capital call. Plus we've already signed this contract with Jim. So we're like, well, they're not bringing the money to the table. We pulled it. So we, so we pulled, pulled the deal and took the equity back and we're like, well, we'll just go and raise the money elsewhere. And that's kind of how it led me down this road.

Jon Stoddard (21:14.316)
That's your lead investor. Yeah.

Ross Turner (21:36.046)
down this journey. Because what I did was, and it took me about, again, I'm not the smartest person in the room, so it took me about 90 days to figure this out. Right? Do you know how hard it is to raise 10 million than it is to raise 100? It's easier to, it's,

Jon Stoddard (21:54.828)
It's incredibly hard to get 50 ,000 from a credit investor. It's a lot easier to get 10 million from an institutional investor. Yeah.

Ross Turner (22:03.04)
100 checks from a 50 to 100 million up are much easier to get. And the reason is these institutions and groups don't want to deal with the one to 10 million size because the work's exactly the same and the upside isn't as much. So it's actually easier to go off the bigger chunks of capital. So one of the things that we learned when we were kind of going through this process, when the family office pulled out, is we wanted some redundancy.

So the way that we structured the company, we've got our holding code, which is econfolio at the top. And then underneath we've got individual SPVs where the capital is deployed into that individual SPV. And that's beholden to that organization and not the top code. So after I kind of spent 90 days banging my head against a brick wall wondering why I couldn't raise this 10 million, I started opening up conversations with people in my network.

who kind of turned me on to larger project financing, larger debt project funds, and basically some high level kind of middle market PE guys. And they walked me through it essentially. So we ended up going at the end of last year, we ended up with four term sheets, each for 55 million. And then we were like, well, let's pick two. Because if we pick two, we have 55 million in SPV one.

We have 55 million in SPV too. We'll go and do bigger deals. And then if and when we become publicly listed, we can access that capital. So we decided on two groups. One of the groups actually who we're speaking to at the moment is US Capital Global. If you've heard of them, they're huge. Yeah, they're huge. They like turned us around a term sheet within 24 hours. And they're like, let's go. We love it. We want to do this deal.

Jon Stoddard (23:47.084)
Yeah, they're out of San Francisco too. Yeah.

Ross Turner (23:57.678)
But strategically, we kind of, we didn't go with them at the tail end of last year. So we did two different models. One is project financing with a, with a large corporation. They're a private corporation. So it's a 10 year term interest only 8 % with a balloon at the end. So we had to obviously we had to go through extreme due diligence. We had to provide the pro forma, which supported the cashflow.

to pay off the balloon at the end. So that is right at the closing signing table right now, literally ready to ink that deal. And then we can draw down on that capital within a 90 day period. Then the second group that we used, which we...

Jon Stoddard (24:43.724)
Let me ask you about that. So these are the support letters that you get when you go to say like Quietly and go, hey, I love this $5 million EBITDA company you got in cosmetic industry. Okay, provide proof of funding. You go, hey, I got this US global support letter here up to 55 million. You good with that? We're good. Yeah.

Ross Turner (25:08.11)
Yep, that kind of how it works. Well, one of the groups who we're working with, they provided us with proof of funds, $100 million commitment letter, and also $655 million of cash in a landing account. So like, here you go. So that kind of like smooths over a lot of the conversations that we have, right? But being exposed to this kind of behind the scenes,

Jon Stoddard (25:26.252)
You

Jon Stoddard (25:32.042)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (25:37.358)
high level finance is quite terrifying really to be honest. It's terrifying to see how they do it. So one of the groups, like I said, one was project financing for 55 and the other group who we went with, they've been doing corporate bonds since 1995 and the principal in charge, and I've seen the SEC filings to back this up, he's done $8 .9 billion in bond raises. I was like, what? And so essentially what they do is,

They take, he takes $55 million of his own cash, puts it in an escrow account. So this back, this bond is backed by cash. It's then turned into a bond, then sent to an investment bank. They then sell it into Wall Street and then it's insured. So if anything goes wrong, the original investors get all of their money back.

Jon Stoddard (26:27.02)
Yeah, it's my friend used to do bonds for the state of Tucson, Tucson city. So it's, you know, they raised like $4 billion in bonds. You know, states don't default. They just refinance them and the paper moves on to somebody else. Yeah.

Ross Turner (26:34.622)
It's wild.

Ross Turner (26:40.526)
Exactly that. Yeah, it was crazy. Like when we were introduced to that, it's kind of like blown my mind. I was like, I can't believe this actually happened. So it's been an...

Jon Stoddard (26:50.636)
They just need to put, they need good opportunities to put their money to make what percent, yeah.

Ross Turner (26:56.37)
Yeah, they do. And again, I know it's crazy. The bond that we were doing was actually seven. So like, which is wild. But it's been an interesting journey up to this stage, right? It hasn't been without its fair share of challenges. We've had to pivot a lot. There's a couple of other like intrinsic nuances with this business. So we're just about to sign the warrants agreement.

Jon Stoddard (26:58.892)
8 %!

Ross Turner (27:25.774)
We're going to be on the GoInPublic TV show. So we're going to be on that.

Jon Stoddard (27:30.476)
Yeah, I know that guy. What's his name? Yeah, yeah, I'm first connections with him on LinkedIn. I know him for quite some time, yeah.

Ross Turner (27:32.332)
Darren Marble.

Ross Turner (27:37.614)
is really good guy, Daryl, really good guy. So we're gonna be on the show. We're also opening up an office in Miami because the mayor, Venture Miami, they're having a huge drive to bring global technology into Miami, right? They're trying to make it the new Silicon Valley. So.

Jon Stoddard (27:57.1)
A lot of big investment companies are moving down to Florida. It's a pro -business state as is Texas. Yeah.

Ross Turner (28:00.524)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (28:04.078)
Yep. So we're, um, so the mayor of Miami and his wife actually hosting us a welcome ceremony for the business. We're going to have the going public guys kind of film all of that. And then we're going to have like a 500 female founder, shark tank style pitch event. So there's a whole host of moving parts and this, this, this kind of businesses has got a lot of attention and traction on its own merit. And I'm trying to like slow the train down a little bit because now we have to.

get the companies into our model. We have to close on, there's two right now which we're looking to close on. And then we have to start looking at the full woman C -suite, right? So our role right now is just to get this company to $10 million of EBITDA and then we get the hell out of the way. So me and Kyle get out of the way, we just become shareholders. We employ a full woman C -suite and they drive that to the market cap of a billion.

Jon Stoddard (29:02.794)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (29:03.438)
And there's been some other things we've done in this business. We've, we've got like a, um, an international distribution agreement with open border, which has been massive for us. We're going to be the only e -commerce use case platform on mechanized AI. Think of chat, GTP, but these guys are five years ahead of that. So we're going to be the only e -commerce platform, um, CPG brand DTC on their platform.

So that's gonna drive shareholder value in multiples.

Jon Stoddard (29:35.916)
Let me ask you about the support from the investors. So you can go buy an e -commerce company for $5 million now, and it's debt that they're offering. Is there the warrants, have some kind of conversion mechanism when you go public that they can, yeah.

Ross Turner (29:52.014)
They can, yeah. So we've got, especially for the guy in public, I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to say it, but it's fine. So they wanted a max ceiling of 50 million valuation, but we needed a minimum ceiling because what we did was originally when the family office pulled out, we kind of opened it up to individual founders and friends.

Jon Stoddard (30:00.876)
No, I think Darren's already talked about it. I thought I saw a posting on it. Yeah.

Ross Turner (30:19.47)
And we raised like 1 .5 million, giving them a smaller, the same deal as a family office, but on a smaller scale. So we did that based on a $10 million pre -revenue valuation. So with the warrants, we have a minimum ceiling of 30 million. Because obviously what we don't want to happen is they come around, turn around and value the business at 2 .5 million, buy all the warrants and then we're left with nothing. So we're...

Jon Stoddard (30:45.726)
Nothing, yeah.

Ross Turner (30:46.254)
Yeah, so we've negotiated the minimum ceiling of 30 and the cap is 50. So that's that again, it's been super interesting to learn all of that. I've had to spend a lot of time. So so brand new. Yeah, I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Jon Stoddard (30:56.14)
Then this is all new to you, man. This is, do you have, was Carl the advisor like, Hey, look, I'm going to ask this questions like I've never heard it before. Cause I haven't. So please go slow with me. And, or do you have some other advisors you brought on to kind of lead you through this?

Ross Turner (31:09.486)
Mm -hmm. Sure.

Ross Turner (31:15.886)
So the short answer is, Carl was there in a supporting role, but he's just let me get on with it. He's even come back to me and said, I don't know how you've managed to do what you've done. He said, you're just smashing through walls. So I had to understand it from a baseline level myself anyway, which was kind of frustrating, right? I bought five books, I think. Yeah, five books, the first three that I read.

As you know, every single industry has its own language, right? Its own terminology, everything. The first three books, I was just like, oh my God. Then the final two, things started to click. And then it was just a case of like, you learn so much more by doing, right? So you just get in there and sure, you make mistakes. And I made the time, I do it regularly every day, but I keep picking up that knowledge and -

And now it's easy for me to go into these meetings and have conversations because I know what I'm talking about now. But Carl was there as a sounding board, as an advisor, but he just let me get on with it. He's just like, go.

Jon Stoddard (32:21.516)
Yeah. When you, I got to go back to that, the deck that you presented to these investors. I mean, their hurdle rate was seven to 8 % and you're talking about buying an e -commerce company that I'm pretty, I'm going to just guess like, Oh, we can get this to 15 to 30 % growth if we do a couple of things here. Cause I'm a drug marketing expert. Yeah.

Ross Turner (32:38.508)
Mm -hmm. Mm. Yeah, exactly that. And where we're playing, like the sweet spot that we're playing in, right? And we realized this very quickly. Now we actually don't want to look at anything that's doing less than 1 .5 million.

Jon Stoddard (32:54.464)
That even sounds small because it's barely going to move the needle unless you see like a tremendous like untapped potential.

Ross Turner (32:56.364)
Uh -huh.

Ross Turner (33:02.542)
Yeah, well, this is the thing. So we're in it. We've got the, what's the one I'm looking for? We've got kind of the space to really look at these deals. Like we looked at 200 deals last year. 99 % of them are just no, but the thing is what we do is generally between the 2 million to 8, 9 million EBITDA range, right? It's generally owner operated and they don't know what they don't know. It takes a completely different skill set, John.

to have a business that's doing nine, 10, 11 million a year to a run rate of 60 million. It's a completely different animal, right? You're right in the same space, but it's a completely different game. So one of the things that we have within our organization and we, we have trademarked it. It's called our PP5 scalability strategy. And it's five profit pillars that we put into a business. So when we've looked at these companies, they'll do one or two things really well.

Jon Stoddard (33:39.37)
Mm -hmm.

Ross Turner (34:00.846)
So like one will be like their expert marketers and they're driving all of their sales from Facebook, but they don't do any email. Whereas we come in and we do, again, like to blitzkrieg the DTC space, it's very simple, right? And I think people get drawn into all these other areas, but really there's three main distribution channels, Google, and that includes YouTube, Facebook, and then you have influencers.

and then you optimize and scale it. That is it, right? And then you add in additional things like phone support team, email. Email should be at least 40 % of your revenue, easily. Like one of the brands that we're going to require at the moment, they were doing 27 million top line, 6 .2 million EBIT, and they don't email. I'm like, well, uh -uh, they've got...

Jon Stoddard (34:54.764)
that they don't email.

Ross Turner (34:58.2)
600 ,000 people on their email list that don't email.

Jon Stoddard (35:01.708)
Yeah. And this offer, what they're selling for was an off market or on market.

Ross Turner (35:08.526)
It kind of came through a connection. It was on market, but it came through a third party and said, Hey, you guys want to look.

Jon Stoddard (35:15.18)
reasonable fair valuation.

Ross Turner (35:17.742)
So, I mean, we're under exclusive analyze, so I guess.

Jon Stoddard (35:22.156)
Here's the problem when you got a $235 million in bank, you have this problem with probably overpaying because you're moving on speed now, your momentum. Yeah.

Ross Turner (35:30.478)
Well, yeah. So the thing, the thing with us, it gives us, it gives us speed of speed to close, right? Speed of execution. It kind of puts us ahead of the curve, but more than that, we like, we want people vested and bought into our narrative, our project, right? Like one of the things we learned was that they have to be bought into the project or we don't really want that business, right? Because when you're acquiring multiple companies, you're going to have a ton of.

um, you know, a ton of different moving parts. So we're lucky in as much as we can, um, we can, we can go after these really high target value companies, but also see where the growth and the potential is. But again, we're under exclusive better wise, so I can tell you this, right? Like it doesn't really matter. So I will talk to.

Jon Stoddard (36:22.988)
Just keep it anonymized, whatever you do, because I don't want you an attorney to come back and go take this episode down.

Ross Turner (36:27.138)
No, no, no. So, and again, this is like insane deal. So they wanted 6 .2 million EBIT. We've got total consideration 16 .5 million. Cash at close five. The rest is all earn out. Sell a note and earn out.

Jon Stoddard (36:44.364)
Okay, earn out. And how did you structure that earn out? Was it like a top line revenue or profits? Because that's always kind of a stickler.

Ross Turner (36:49.802)
Profit It was done on profit. Yeah, so we're buying it just under three times even So Great deal. Yeah Yeah, and that gets us to 60 % of the way to listing because our goal is 10 million of EBIT We've already got six point two here and then two of the other deals that we've got on the table Can't I can't mention them, but one is and nearly a 20 year old

Jon Stoddard (36:58.444)
That's a deal. At a $6 million EBITDA company. Yes.

Ross Turner (37:19.822)
hair care company that are doing 40 million a year. And another one is a supplement business. And you're going to freak out at this. They're doing 40 million a year, 5 million in EBIT. They do zero paid advertising.

Jon Stoddard (37:31.752)
Yeah, no, I've heard of that before. I got another buddy kind of doing it on a lower level and he's like, he told me he's bought this, I don't know what kind of protein powder it was, but it was amazing profits. Like just throwing off cash. Yeah.

Ross Turner (37:48.206)
Crazy, yeah. And again, it's like infinite scalability, right? Like you're literally only limited to your cash in, cash out, and how big you can scale these things. So it...

Jon Stoddard (38:01.772)
Yeah. Are these in the United States or are they international? It doesn't matter. Yeah.

Ross Turner (38:05.56)
Yeah, they're all US. One of the brands is actually international. So it's primarily US, but it's also in Europe as well, because we're going to be going there anyway. Doesn't matter. Yeah. But primarily USA based businesses for sure.

Jon Stoddard (38:16.364)
It doesn't matter. Right. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (38:22.796)
Yeah. And then you, what you, you buy these and that's, that's where you're at. And your intention is to install, I was just almost going to say female, but women leadership. How do you find women leadership to that are, and I didn't say you can't, I'm just saying that can take a company from 40 million to a hundred million.

Ross Turner (38:31.694)
Mm -hmm, yeah.

Ross Turner (38:43.31)
Yep. So again, that's going to be a learning curve for us, right? Like these are the things that I don't know, but our board. So we've got a world -class advisory board. One of our advisors, Adam Burke, Adam, if you're listening to this, he's the original founder of Grubhub. And he's had three publicly listed companies and exits. Finding high level C -suite executives is like his wheelhouse. We've also got.

Jon Stoddard (38:49.932)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (39:11.246)
Crystal Carson, she's like head of our capital markets because she can have conversations I can't have. I'm not a woman, but she can actively go out and speak to people. And it's people who are interested in this project that we really want to magnetize ourselves to. Another lady who's, if all goes well, she'll be joining our board on Monday is the ex CMO of Sephora, Connie Young. Like, so all of these very high level executives. And again, we're just going to have to,

Jon Stoddard (39:35.466)
Yeah, yeah.

Ross Turner (39:41.262)
go through the process. Like we run our company on EOS, right? And our implementer is a lady called Monica Justice, and she has managed $3 billion of basically retail products. She's got huge experience in this space. So she's coming in to run the EOS for each of these companies.

Jon Stoddard (40:06.476)
Yeah, let me ask you about that. Why did you do that and say, hey, we're just going to put women CEOs in these spots versus, I mean, there's a bigger inventory of, you know, men that's run billion dollar companies. Yeah.

Ross Turner (40:16.174)
Because the narrative, there is, but the reality of it is the narrative and how we're positioned the story is women -owned businesses for women, by women, right? And they all have a unique.

Jon Stoddard (40:27.628)
Yeah. And that was the, on the deck that you proposition to see. And then how much do you think they said this? Well, we love, we love making money, but we also want to do good or right or equitable. What do they call it? Yeah.

Ross Turner (40:31.118)
Mm -hmm.

Ross Turner (40:43.918)
Yeah, it's impactful, right? Like, it's like EPG. So one of the big things that was really important to us as we were kind of going through this, obviously, me and Carl are two middle -aged white guys from England. So the narrative doesn't really stack up, right? So when people look at it, we've got like a full female legal team, full female finance team. We've got four really high level

Jon Stoddard (40:46.668)
Yeah, impactful. Okay.

Ross Turner (41:13.144)
women female advisors. And then really, it's kind of like we're guided by them as to kind of where we go for our our C -suite executives. Because really, like, my goal right now is to get us to 10 million Avivadar and get out of the way, offer infrastructure and support, and then look at like the overall global picture. But really, it's to get out of their way and let them let them run it. And the thing...

Jon Stoddard (41:38.892)
Yeah, and do they own have any ownership in the SPVs?

Ross Turner (41:42.446)
They, so we've kind of, so we have given equity to some of our advisors, right? In the top co, there will be some equity, but between us and the attorneys, we're kind of like, we're doing like a vested equity period. So if they come in, there's like a 90 day to 180 day window where they have to validate the KPIs. Then they participate in a profit share up to a certain KPI.

and then equity kicks in. So one of the lessons that we learned very quickly was I wanted to kind of obviously the best team I possibly could. And again, you know, I make mistakes and I did, I ended up giving equity up to someone who really shouldn't have had it. And then we had to terminate that and it was a whole thing. So the legal team have said, this is probably the best structure. And I kind of kind of go with them. Our in -house counsel James is...

on our board of directors. I've known him since I was 18 and living in London. I used to live with his sister and her boyfriend. So that's how long I've known him. And he's a 25 year corporate M &A attorney. So he's keeping us on the straight and narrow and making sure that everything we do is 100 % locked in.

Jon Stoddard (43:01.484)
Yeah. And is this, what's the long -term goal of the business is, is it buy and hold forever? And Warren Buffett talks about that. I've hold him forever, but he allocates capital. That's his job, right? If there's a better IRR, he's going to go for it. He'll sell a company to go for it. Yeah.

Ross Turner (43:16.204)
Mm -hmm.

Honestly, honestly, honestly, John, I don't think I'll ever do this again. It's been one of the most, it's been one of the most challenging, stressful, it's probably taken 10 years off my life. I'm only 26. But really like we had a very strategic plan when we started this, started doing this.

Jon Stoddard (43:32.3)
Oh, wow.

I get it. Yeah, I get it. Yeah

Ross Turner (43:48.334)
And really we've got a five year plan. We want to sell it. Our goal is to sell it for a billion or more to either private or, or on the public market. Like we want to get it publicly listed and then just exit, exit this. NASDAQ. Yeah. Yeah. NASDAQ. And Carl said two very important things to me, which really stuck in my mind. And as I was getting down the cap raising side of things and, and kind of really dig into it.

Jon Stoddard (44:01.196)
Was that NASDAQ or New York Stock? NASDAQ?

Ross Turner (44:16.684)
digging into the weeds of that kind of industry, right? And listen, I've got to be honest, I don't particularly enjoy it. I think it's a cesspit filled with cretins, but needs must, right?

Jon Stoddard (44:30.092)
Cause it's all about money, it's numbers, right? It's just, yeah.

Ross Turner (44:32.558)
They're just all shady, right? Like they try and change deals at the 11th hour. They're very predatory. A lot of them are, which is the nature of the beast, right? It's like kill or be killed. But two things that costed to me, and it's always stuck with me, is one, the money is in the money. I was like, that is interesting. And then the other one is,

Jon Stoddard (44:55.532)
Okay, did you explain it or did you have to go think about it? The money's in the money.

Ross Turner (44:59.182)
No, the money's in the money. Like here's the thing, nobody wants, if we're being completely honest, nobody wants to own and run a business, right? People want the benefit of the business. They want freedom, financial freedom, time freedom, right? So when I say I don't think I'll ever do this again, I'm on the other side of the money. I'm literally in the process now of GPing like a huge.

Jon Stoddard (45:09.13)
Nobody.

Ross Turner (45:28.398)
five co -pool of funds from across the globe. So I don't want to be buying any more companies. I don't want to be having to help in the structure and the management. I just want to be portion of the money and I can deploy that. So I don't have any of that responsibility. I just deploy it. So he said the money's in the money and that resonated with me. But here's the thing. You have to kind of go through those evolutions of...

Jon Stoddard (45:45.386)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (45:55.086)
of your career. Like it's very important that I'm doing this right now because I'm seeing every element of this business, but I wouldn't want to do this again. I don't think I don't. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe.

Jon Stoddard (46:05.388)
Yeah. Yeah. Here's what there's two things going to happen. So I, I understand what you're saying with the monies and the money, because if you've ever done a startup in Silicon Valley, you go through this process, you pivot three or four times, you, you're on the precipice of financial clap a number of times, and you have a, you raise the money on the 11th hour, almost falling apart. And then you have an exit.

Ross Turner (46:16.364)
No.

Jon Stoddard (46:35.308)
And there's no way you want to do that again. You just won't go through that. Like the money's in the money. And if you do this, the money's going to come to you. It's going to be attracted to you to, Hey, is this your, at some point it goes like, Hey, this future Ross Turner, is he the guy? Right? I'm going to put my money behind Ross Turner. The next Ross Turner. Yeah.

Ross Turner (46:38.99)
Yeah, it's -

Ross Turner (46:53.678)
Exactly. And the guys, especially when we were going out hunting down capital, like all they look at is the executive team, right? Do they have a track record? Do they have a track record of returning money to investors? Do we believe they can execute on the plan? That's essential, yeah. And it's funny, if funny, you were talking about that before.

Jon Stoddard (47:15.02)
Yeah.

Ross Turner (47:20.398)
You literally right now, we're like an inch away from glory or an inch away from disaster. And it is that fine balance. And that's just the reality of it. Right? Like we're juggling all of these things. Two, three poor decisions can absolutely tank it. And that's just the reality. And it's like the world that we're living in. And it, yeah. And listen, I mean, I've enjoyed it. There's been times where I wanted to bash my head against the desk.

But here's the thing, I kept coming back. I've kept coming back every single day. And there was a time in the summer last year, me and Carl had, because Carl stayed at my house. He's actually coming to my house next week. But we had a week's worth of meetings and we got smacked in the mouth every day for a week. But we kept coming back and we kept coming back and we learned and we tweaked. And we're now at the stage now where we're like, right, okay, we've figured this out. Let's go and execute on it.

and then let's see what's next. I think someone asked me this question because we had an event and I was speaking at the event and they said, like, where do you see yourself in like three to five years? And I said, the biggest thing for me is I want to sell everything. So like sell the company. If I'm co -GP in this other fund, like sell that. But also impact is a big thing, right? So if we look at the SMEs,

It's responsible for what is it 80 % of the global GDP and it's the most underserved market on the planet. So if you go back and look at 2008 when Wall Street absolutely rinsed the globe, who had to pay for it? It's the general public in the small SMEs. So my thought processes has always been like I'll take as much money, like now I've seen behind the curtain, I'll take as much money as I possibly can from.

And then we'll just go and deploy it into all of these deals in the SME space. Like think of the impact, think of the jobs, think of the revenue, think of the impact it has on other people's lives. Like it baffles me that it's still not that served a market. Like I just, it blows my mind.

Jon Stoddard (49:34.092)
Yeah, it's big of this, pretty big tax base too, where the government gets this tax base. Yeah. What was some of those pivots you talked about that really changed direction where you were going and that like smack right into wall. I got a pivot. Yeah.

Ross Turner (49:37.838)
Yeah, it is, yeah.

Ross Turner (49:49.89)
Yeah, so the first one obviously was when the family office missed the capital call. We were like, all right. But again, it was kind of.

Jon Stoddard (49:55.276)
Oh, yeah.

He didn't tell you about that like hey man, I'm committing capital to you. Oh, I forgot to mention we're selling the family off

Ross Turner (50:03.95)
Yeah, he didn't. He didn't. He didn't. We, we've butted hair. I still actually speak to him. Um, but we've butted heads a lot on it. I wasn't very impressed with how, how he handled himself. Um, but again, absolutely. Yeah. Um, so it was kind of like a bittersweet moment. We'd signed the 125 million commitment from Jem. We were like, this is amazing. But then we missed the capital call and then.

Jon Stoddard (50:17.196)
probably fortuitous about what may happen in the future.

Ross Turner (50:32.694)
You know, we'd had deals lined up ready to close. So those deals fell through. Um, so we had to pivot then. And then really like, I wouldn't say it was a quarter of dead time, but I had to learn very quickly that going after $10 million was kind of stupid. I need to go after the bigger check sizes. So then that was the other pivot, um, to, to kind of look at that. And then, and then when I realized that that was possible,

We kind of sat down as a team and a board and then said, well, why can't we go and raise another 55 and just do bigger deals? Right? Like, let's just go and do bigger deals. It gets us to where we want to be quicker. You know, you know, capital was like throwing fuel on the fire. Right. It's just like, it just, it doesn't always help, but generally it's like throwing fuel on the fire. It gives you, it gives you, it gives you options. Um, so those were the kind of the two.

Jon Stoddard (51:19.404)
It doesn't always help, but yeah.

Ross Turner (51:29.518)
major pivots and another one was in terms of the team and operational infrastructure that we've got in place. We've had to like fire a couple of people and really we changed our, and again, I don't want to sound too woo woo here, but kind of at the stage in my professional career where back in the day I'd want the most capable, smartest people working on the project. Whereas this one where like people need to really

buy into it, they need to believe in it, and they need to be rowing in the same direction as us and have the same sort of ethics and energy, right? So we tried to bring in a couple of people that just wasn't a cultural fit and that ended up being a bit of a problem. So that was another big pivot. Like when we realized that, here's the thing, you can basically train anybody to do anything, right? You can teach them to do pretty much anything, but...

You know, you can't teach morals, ethics, standards, like that comes from internal. So I'd rather have.

Jon Stoddard (52:31.308)
That only comes out later in a point of heat or under the crucible, like what your ethics looks like or what kind of person you are.

Ross Turner (52:43.694)
Exactly. Yeah. And those are the things that we've had to navigate, right. And as well as raising the capital, dealing with all the institutional elements, then we're also looking at deals and having seller calls. Like before I came on the podcast, we had a seller call today and I brought like all of the team onto it, all the advisors, everything. And like we just happened to navigate and juggle all of that. So there's a lot and our team is not.

There's about 10 of us actually so it's a fairly decent sized team. But yeah, we've had to learn a lot. And like I said, I'm not the smartest person in the room. So I've had to take my licks.

Jon Stoddard (53:21.74)
Well, I think you're humble and you're curious. So I think that helps a long way. If you just stay curious about this, you can go at the speed of learning. Like you can, you know, I think the ego, if the ego gets in and goes, I already know this mistakes will happen. Yeah.

Ross Turner (53:28.946)
official

Ross Turner (53:36.014)
Oh yeah. I think, um, and, uh, and, uh, one of the big, like one of my, my big kind of skill sets or superpowers, if you will, is I really, I'm really good at understanding people and what they respond to. And I learned a long time ago to listen a lot more than you speak. Like I, I am wrong all of the time. Ask my wife, she'll tell you I'm wrong. I am wrong all, all of the time. Yeah, there we go.

Jon Stoddard (54:01.484)
My wife knows your wife. My wife, don't ya?

Ross Turner (54:05.454)
But I've got no problem with being wrong, right? I like to not think that I know it all. I think anybody who does that is a bit of a fool and they're going to suffer for it. So those are my two big things. I listen very well and I'm conscious of what people's needs are and where their skill set is. And that's been part of the success that we've had with this project so far.

Jon Stoddard (54:33.42)
Let me ask you about, are you still working on Carl Allen's team? Because raising capital and not yet buying and searching for doesn't generate revenue to pay the bills. What does that look like? Yeah.

Ross Turner (54:46.542)
Yeah, so obviously we raised capital initially from our original investors. So we've got OPEX cost within the business anyway.

Jon Stoddard (54:55.02)
So that's GNA. You need, yeah, admin cost. Yeah.

Ross Turner (54:57.838)
Yeah, so we have a monthly cash burn that's going on in the company right now. But like I said, we're going to close on our first major acquisition probably in around, I'd say three weeks. And then that gets us to 62 % of the way to our target. And then the rest is just a case of lining them up and knocking them off.

Jon Stoddard (55:20.012)
Yeah. So when you say you need the seller to stay on, are we talking about kind of like a private equity structure where you buy 60 % they're keeping 30 % or something?

Ross Turner (55:29.646)
We, so we don't, we don't force that, right? What we'd like to do is we like to basically tell the founders and the owners that we want to give you two capital events, right? We want to buy your business for what it's currently worth market like fair market value. And then we're going to turn it into a best in class business. We're going to get the economies of scale and the multiples arbitrage by being part of a bigger group.

Then if you roll a portion of that deal into the top code, when we sell that, you get a second capital event. So that's kind of what we'd like to do. And then our kind of goal is to have the female founder owners to be the creative, non -exec director, essentially. So we say, Hey, what's your vision? What's your massive vision for this business? They have none of the financial responsibility because they've already been paid out. So their decisions are not based on.

Oh, well, we need to do this. We need to do that. It's based on purely where they see the growth of their business. And here's the thing. Nobody knows their business like that themselves, right? Like we don't. There's things that they know that we would never know. So we try and.

Jon Stoddard (56:41.58)
Yeah, there's, there's a, I was like, don't be so arrogant buying a business. There's a lot of times these people that run this business for 10 years. Hey, we tried that, didn't work. You know, why didn't work? Don't be so arrogant and come in and go, I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go do that. I go do that. Well, it didn't work. Yeah.

Ross Turner (56:57.07)
Exactly that. We're big on continuity as well. Don't fix anything that's not broken. We just want to implement our five profit pillars and then we want to give them the creative freedom to say, right, where should this brand go? They'll act independently, right? And then all things being equal, they get two capital events at the end.

Jon Stoddard (57:24.076)
Yeah. And as you said, there's a new dictionary in this industry, second bite of the apple. Yeah.

Ross Turner (57:30.702)
Exactly that, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (57:32.428)
Yeah. Well, that's a fantastic story. And I wish you the best of success with this first acquisition and moving forward this. Cause like, yeah, like I got like, where, where did this go? You go, Oh my God, these are big numbers, much more than I've ever seen. Where, where did you go? Like we can do this.

Ross Turner (57:53.646)
Yeah, I was, like I said at the start, I really needed to logically think if it was feasible from an integrations and operations standpoint. And if it was, then where do we kind of play? And the numbers, like when you're in it and you're working in it, you don't really think about what you're doing, right? You're just like next, next, next, next. And then Christmas last year, excuse me.

Jon Stoddard (58:03.244)
Uh -huh.

Ross Turner (58:20.814)
I got to spend 20 days in Australia, my sister lives out there. So there was me, my wife, my sister and my mum. And like for the first time in about 14 months, I sat down and was just like, holy smokes, look at what we've done. Like I was actually able to take stock and say, we've done an incredible job here and enjoy that moment, that brief moment. But yeah, it's been a wild, wild ride. And.

It's by no means over yet either.

Jon Stoddard (58:52.14)
No, no, you're just starting. People are depending on you.

Ross Turner (58:53.87)
I know that's the thing, that's the thing. And we're just getting started, right? Like it's exciting, it's scary, it's stressful, it's daunting. It's all of those things wrapped up into one, but I wouldn't change it at all. I wouldn't change it. I'm loving it.

Jon Stoddard (58:58.829)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (59:07.34)
Yeah, I got a question preparing for Black Swan events, like how you two, Carl, work together. Like what's in place if something like this happens?

Ross Turner (59:22.382)
That's a good question. I think like we've tried to look at all possible downside eventualities, right? Like what could, how would this ultimately fail? And our kind of, you know, we're going to be bullish on the project anyway, but Carl's like, listen, the only way this fails is if Putin starts firing nukes and the whole world shuts down. He's like, it's got too much momentum.

And I think one of the key things is, though, John, as well, it's being very selective about the acquisitions, our first few acquisitions that get dropped into the group. That's the springboard for either success or failure. Right. So we've learned a lot of lessons, speaking to a lot of P middle market guys as well, taking a lot of their lessons that they've shared with us and just being very mindful. Right. Like if it does.

To us, if it's not a hell yes, then it's a no. Like I said, we looked at hundreds of deals and 99 % of them were.

Jon Stoddard (01:00:31.276)
Do you have ideas, you know, familiar with Constellation out of Canada? The guy gives authority to the business units that make their own acquisitions. He doesn't even say yes or no one anymore. It's just the business units makes the acquisitions. Yeah.

Ross Turner (01:00:45.358)
That's incredible. Yeah, I would love to. I think it's important to have your hands around doing something for the first time. You want to be involved in every kind of element. Yeah, but I mean in the future, like I said earlier on, the money's in the money. Some people are just going to be doing deals and I won't have to be running it. I'll be on the other side of the fence.

Jon Stoddard (01:00:55.02)
Yeah, you just want the experience. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (01:01:05.42)
Yeah.

I want to make money with my money. Ross Turner, thanks for being on the show. Really, really appreciate it.

Ross Turner (01:01:13.324)
Thank you so much John, really appreciate it, really enjoyed it. Thanks buddy.

Jon Stoddard (01:01:16.62)
Yeah. All right. Hold on one second. So it's got.