The $250M M&A Blueprint with Top Entrepreneur Mathew Wainwright

 Summary

In this episode, Jon Stoddard interviews Matthew Wainwright, a young entrepreneur involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Matthew shares his journey into the M&A world, discussing his early career, partnership dynamics, negotiation strategies, and the importance of deal flow. He emphasizes the significance of targeting traditional industries for acquisition and outlines the financial structures involved in M&A. The conversation also touches on the acquisition process, negotiation tactics, and the future aspirations of building a sustainable business model in the M&A space.

Takeaways

Matthew started his entrepreneurial journey at a young age.
He believes in the importance of learning and growth in M&A.
Partnership dynamics play a crucial role in deal structuring.
Negotiation strategies are key to successful acquisitions.
Targeting traditional industries can yield valuable opportunities.
Funding structures often involve leverage buyouts.
Building a sustainable deal flow is essential for success.
Respecting the value built by business owners is important in negotiations.
The acquisition process can take 8 to 12 weeks if the owner is motivated.
Matthew aims to build a billion-dollar group through strategic acquisitions.

Watch the Interview

Transcript

Jon Stoddard (00:02.862)
Hi, welcome to the top &A Entrepreneurs podcast. I've got a guest, Matthew Wainwright. Matthew was a partner to Paul Seabridge and they do deals together. So Matthew, welcome. You're from Stain, right? Yep. Thank you very much, John. Very excited to join the conversation. Currently in spring. You're a very young guy too, like 23, 24? 23. Yeah. That's awesome.

You guys partner with Seabridge. Seabridge has done like what? 60 deals or something or? 65 right now, I believe at the time. Do you have any idea what that represents in dollar value or so? Yeah. So revenue wise, around 250 million. That's with own money. So it's not going external. Obviously you go for like bank borrowing, normal bank debt and so on. But yeah.

around 250 million in revenue. And we recently acquired UK salads to it. So that's going to add another 50. So I'm not sure whether that's going to go to 300 or even further. So salads and tulips, those is a produce or grocery or just farm. What is it? So it's pretty much lettuce, tomato, peppers. They're distributed all around Europe.

UK supermarkets need that kind of food and that kind of food in their supermarkets. yeah, where as UK sell this as an entity, we wholesale that over to the likes of Aldi. And we're trying to open accounts with Tesco. Not sure whether you guys. Yeah, that's in Europe. Yeah. Yeah. So they're super big supermarkets and supplying around 85 % of

the supply for Aldi in the UK and in Germany. So it's quite a lot of volumes, I guess. So let's go back how you got started in &A. you guys, from what I understand, you guys went to the same course together. What was that course that was from the big name guys? Yeah. So that was through Jeremy, Jeremy Harver.

Jon Stoddard (02:24.046)
I learned a lot. It was a great course to, especially really early in my career. I was like 19, 20 at the time. Thought I was a big boy now, so I wanted to do &A. And then realized that there's so much to learn. So that gave me a very good foundation on how to approach, I guess, the &A world from a newbie.

point of view. Well, let me ask you what were going through your head at 1920 and and said Matthew said, hey, I'm not going to go the traditional route, which is go to school and get a job. I want to go start businesses, buy businesses and work in a bar. Where did that thinking come from? I think from like an extremely young age, I was the typical guy trying to sell stuff at school. Very, very, very curious about business.

always thinking about like different ways of approaching different markets. Yeah, just very, very interested in business in general. I saw that the nine to five thing was gonna pretty much, yeah, not be my thing at all. Just because it wasn't the passion behind it. You weren't gonna be exploring new avenues. You weren't gonna have the freedom to make your own choices. Although, you know, as a business owner, you're...

quite restringent with other things, right? It may not be time, but it may be resources, it may be capacity to attract new people and so on. yeah, overall, I just couldn't think the nine to five thing could be an attractive way to move forward. Is that something that your parents instilled in you or you just offshoot of something different?

Everybody's read the Richard Branson stories. I think I've read three of Richard's books and everybody follows him. He's like, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He acquires businesses, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've always been a very big fan of Richard Branson. Lots of entrepreneurs in the UK and the US as well. I just really liked the adventure behind entrepreneurship. Personally, my dad went down the corporate route. So he went up to

Jon Stoddard (04:46.126)
through a company called Micro Semi, became the vice president there, saw the time restrictions and the location restrictions that a job gave him. And I saw that I didn't want that for myself. And then my mom is a teacher. So really the entrepreneurial thing has come more through myself and more through me than any external parties. Although my dad did.

When they ask you what you're doing, did they just say, you better get a job? Yeah, mean, definitely at the beginning. It did become a point where there was a lot of discussion happening, a lot of arguments, until you bring results home. Then it's good. It's like, OK, great.

You know, we're talking about Paul McCartney. Just imagine like, hey, dad, I want to be a musician. position. How are you going ever make money? McCartney's a billionaire, No, until you make it, right? Like until you start living for yourself, yeah, that then the talk starts to become reality. So Paul Seabridge now, did he get started before you and you joined him with him as partner? And how did that go?

Yeah, so Paul started a recruitment company. He started very young as well as an entrepreneur. I think it was like 21, 22. From then he started a recruitment company, sold that in 2010. And he started using that capital to acquire more and more businesses. Initially, I think over an eight year period, initially he started acquiring a business a year. So just one per year.

And then once he did the course on &A, that's when he pretty much when, yeah, monastically focused on acquiring more and more companies towards the rates that we currently have, which is 16 companies per year. is... You've already acquired 16 companies or the goal is 16 companies per year? So last year we acquired 16 companies and this year we're on track to do pretty much the same numbers.

Jon Stoddard (07:05.405)
wow. That's amazing. Now, so how does that deal set up? Like normally somebody's good at one thing, you know, the negotiation and another person's good at the, you know, deal, creating deal flow. What does that look like? Yeah, so this, when I started,

I thought I could do everything right. I thought you could do deal flow. can then negotiate and then you can create the deal structure. You can negotiate that deal structure and then you can close it and then operate it. So there's like so many different buckets. Yeah. There's so many different buckets that you need to learn. That's you ideally need a team of four to five working on &A within a firm, right? One doing the deal sourcing, one doing the negotiation and like prospecting.

Next one, structuring the deal and then closing operation. We're, personally, if you want to know, my focus is on the negotiation side of things and the deal structure side of things. We've got a person doing the deal flow that generates around 600 opportunities every single year right now. And then Paul will do the closing and then the operational side of things together with the management team of that company.

Do you guys, is it you guys working together and you know how your structure is as a 50 50 or 25 75 or what does that look like? In terms of equity, statewide. Yeah. Yeah. So I currently for every deal that I work in with Paul that I get introduced to, I would get 15 % equity, equity stake inside the company. And then it would be

kind of like spit between different partners from there. so you've got some other partners that are good at some of those buckets than others, right? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And then from there, if I were to, you know, source a deal, then I would get more, it depends on the value that you bring towards the deal the other day. So what do you find an affinity for or like doing sourcing the deals or negotiating or integration or what?

Jon Stoddard (09:21.037)
I personally love talking to business owners. love seeing where they're at. Sometimes you speak to 50 year olds that have built a hundred million euro or revenue business. Other times you speak to others that are looking to retire and move on to another venture. So it's extremely exciting to see where people are at in their business life cycle and what their experience has been building up that business. That's really, really exciting for me.

Now, do they, is there any pushback? mean, if you today, you're doing a lot of or phone calls. Like, what is a 23 year old, you know, asking me to buy my business for a hundred million? Where's that coming from? No. That, that, so that's a strange one. I've only had one person reference my age actually. So, and that was a UK, a broker in the U S who wanted kind of a Paul or Goran who's a

the other partner to join the call to make the offer. But apart from that, it's been okay. It's about your confidence, I believe. And I found it's about the way in which you pitch and the confidence that you've got. Nothing. How do you approach a business and you open that discussion with the executive, the owner? Yeah. Initially, we would send in an email. I would send an email.

or get introduced to him by email, take that to a Zoom call. Within the Zoom call, we would just try and create a bit of report. So try and generate the conversation, relationship, happening, getting to know each other. And then we would focus on kind of where he's at in the business lifecycle after I make my own introduction, and then take it from there really. It's very simple.

a script as you're saying the same thing to everybody. the key is when you're saying something, you are starting to identify, I want to sell Signal. So I've got my own pitch going on every single time I talk to business owners. So it's kind of like telling our story behind how we founded the business. So Paul.

Jon Stoddard (11:44.779)
sold this recruitment business and then he started, you know, acquire more and more companies and to what we are now. So we've acquired, you we've got a portfolio of companies, different industries and so on. And then from there, I would try and tell him, look, we partner with two types of business owners, those that are looking to exit their business and those that are looking for that additional growth engine that could come in organically. So that's the...

type of business that we focus on. So I'm pretty much trying to identify whether they want to grow or they want to sell. If they want to grow, we've got this partnership where we'll go 50-50 equity split wise on new acquisitions with the business owner himself, where he would bring the operational side of things and we would bring the capital resources, the diligence team, &A team to make that acquisition happen. then- acquisition on top of his business. Yep. Okay, gotcha.

All right. Do you bring in any marketing for organic growth or do you say, you know, lot of these companies are, well, you're to get, you know, maybe 10 or 15 at the most 30 % growth spending X amount of money or it's better allocation of capital if we just acquire a business and double the size in a year. Yeah. So pretty much both. We've got an equity stake inside a marketing company. So we're utilizing that.

pretty much just your business partner, Roland uses for, he brings in the marketing side of things to bump up the sales. We've got that already implemented if we wanted to. Sometimes what we found is that if you grow through sales, so like organically too much, then you tend to stretch yourself too thin on the working capital side of things. acquiring a new business is kind of a value.

Right. Yeah. So how does that structure look if you, you know, you, you come on it with a new business and it's a $50 million business. we'd like to acquire 50 % of it. Did you say, so on new acquisitions, yeah, to partner with the business owner. Yeah. It's a part with business owner and grow through and A. Yeah. And those new acquisitions would go 50 50 with the business owner and ourselves. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (14:09.343)
And the guy, the executive stays in that role for how long? For a couple of years. It depends on the market. there comes an offer and it makes sense for all parties, then we sell. When you find a good business that you see those two buying signals, either they want to stay on and grow or they want to exit out.

and you bring this package to Paul and Warren and your other guys and you just kind of sit around the table and go, hey, is this a deal we want to pursue or what? Yep. Yep. That's pretty much it. And then you guys now, Paul has a fund that he's created after selling that HR company a few years back or has that grown? So that's a great, extremely good question.

We're currently raising a fund right now to go after, to go and acquire companies in different industries, one of them being food and beverage. So that's going to be a hundred million Euro fund. And then the other deals that we're doing is through leverage buyouts. So sometimes we'll plug in some equity on our side, plus the debt that you're able to get out of the current assets of the business and give that from to the business owner and have some deferred consideration.

just to protect the goodwill that the owner has built over the years and for the best employee to not leave on day one, right? And the other day. So how do you structure when somebody comes in and goes, yeah, I'll sell it. I got a $25 million business. And are you looking for, you know, I'll come in and no money out of my pocket, your pocket, or are you going to put some kind of down payment and the rest is deferred compensation?

Are you asking me personally or Polentia? Both of you on both of your sides because you bring these deals to Polentia which is your fund now, right? Yep. through Polentia we'll look at so first of all the business owner has to have a realistic expectation. So a lot of business owners want a big payout on day one. That's something that we're not currently doing.

Jon Stoddard (16:34.061)
reason for it is, you know, at the SME level, the risk tends to be on the owner himself having a lot of the goodwill within the company. Hence why, you know, we tend to give normally around 50 % upfront and then 50 % deferred. In terms of out of our own pocket, we do leverage. So we do leverage buyouts. So we'll utilize no financial instruments like SBAs, normal bank debt.

through different banks in the UK where we've got a track record. We don't need to plug in the personal guarantee anymore. After you build a good foundation for yourself, banks wanna lend you money, right? That's how they make money. So after a while, once you get a good track record, we're able to leverage the business up and give that as an upfront payment to the business owner himself. And then we do kind of like plug in the deferred, yeah.

the third consideration on a note, loan note, pretty much. And then from a bank or is it, how often is it a seller note versus a bank note? Or it depends on whatever the situation is. Yeah, it really depends. Yeah, interesting. And sometimes you'll use those assets as collateral for loans to also purchase the business, kind of the carve outs to also. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's very interesting. So you're working on a grocery business. Now, why did you, how did you find a grocery business? Because sometimes, you know, sometimes when you're saying, Hey, I want to go after IT businesses. That's all you do is you send mailers to IT business. You reach out LinkedIn, you do all that. But how did you come across a grocery? So that's, you know, the type of, it's not only groceries, but the type of companies that we go after tend to be traditional.

so anything that's not sexy, we'll look at, and by not sexy, mean, not, you know, not a FinTech or anything. Exactly. so we, you know, we're, see a lot of value in working with, owners that, as I said, maybe from the baby generation, they may be looking to retire. They've got a good business that, you know, supplies products to normal civilians that use it on a day, everyday basis.

Jon Stoddard (19:00.077)
And within that category, there's obviously fresh produce. There's, what else am I looking at right now? Insurance companies, taxi companies, transportation, construction. Yeah, so those are very different KPIs and whatever rings the bells. mean, how do you bring the expertise to either grow them or to say,

Or you just leave that in the back and say, okay, we're just going to acquire another insurance business to add on to your insurance business. Cause you don't need to be experts at growing your insurance by 30 % a year. Yeah. So one of the main things that I learned from Paul, like the, actually the main thing is he's a manager. He's not a business owner. So he'll put in, he'll like close the gaps where he doesn't have the knowledge with people that have the knowledge so that he's able to.

you know, spending time his time on closing more and more deals. And he just puts the expertise where it needs to be. so, you know, let's say that he's not, he's never going to know as much about insurance that someone that's been there for 20 years. Right. So we'll go and find someone that's been there for 20 years, give him some equity inside the business and then half that compensation. you know, all the alignment of interest happen, accordingly in a way.

You need to define somebody insurance. How do do that? You just go out like, well, he was a recruiter, right? was a recruiter. I answer my own question. exactly. Well, that's got a handy skill to have to find right people. Yeah. Yeah. And this is a really big question that I get everybody with a lot of the &A is like, do you get paid? Are you guys?

on it distribution of profits, you come on a salary or you know, there's a lot of people that get in the &A business and they acquire a business and they don't get they don't pay themselves anything. And then they go, well, I'm only going to get paid because we're going to increase the value of it I'll sell it in three years. Yeah, yeah, that so that's that's also a very good question. I mean, there's different ways in which we pay ourselves on day one, we'll pay ourselves a deal fee. So

Jon Stoddard (21:21.453)
Sometimes you're able to leverage more of the assets that you're going to give upfront. you like the difference between what you're able to leverage and what you're going to give the owner, you can take out as a deal fee. So as a compensation for yourself. So that's one. Then on the quarterly or annual basis, you're able to give yourself dividends. So on the shareholders agreement, we'll put in that we want to distribute a certain amount of dividends every single year to the shareholders.

on an equal basis, our number tends to be as high as possible, quite honestly. So we can go up to 80 % just because our thought process is, bidders are there to give us money, not to put money into. And then management fees. And then at the end of the day, where you make the big fat bell ring is at the end of the day when you exit, right?

So what is the end goal here? Are you guys going to acquire, I mean, you got 16 from last year, you're going to probably get 16 this year and it's, you know, the insurance, there's grocery, there's all kinds of stuff. And that portfolio as a bundle, because I have a little experience with private equity funds, they're going to say, well, gosh, this is, you know, really diverse set of companies and I don't have the skills and the management to...

the expert aids, each one of those. But you're doing 250 million in revenue. That's fantastic, right? Yeah. I think at the end of the day, our model is buy and build. So buy a company in certain industry and then plug in companies that make sense towards it in order to build a larger group. The end goal is to, and I was speaking to Paul the other day, is to try and build a billion euro, kind of like a billion dollar group.

and try and exit that over a three year period. So we do have the volume, but at the end of the day, it's about selling because that's when you make the capital, that's when you make the money. Big payouts with the double digit multiples. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. So that's gonna come down the line. We're starting to generate conversations with potential buyers as well.

Jon Stoddard (23:46.697)
And there's a lot of buyers that may not want the entire portfolio, but may want one company. So we've got another one that we're looking to sell to this other company. if your company's doing well, there's buyers out there. And if you're able to facilitate that exit or facilitate that buy-in from the buyer side, it's a lot easier, which is something that a lot of people don't tend to look into that are currently selling their business for the first time.

So how long do you see the process normally taking with an acquisition? sending a mailer out to email to having that first conversation? It would be if it's email or LinkedIn, probably like two to three days. If it's mail, probably a week.

And then from the first conversation towards closing, if the business owner is motivated, it will take in between eight to 12 weeks from. And motivate, how did you define motivated? They're just sick and tired of managing all the bills and the people and everything else. Yeah, a hundred percent. So that's one sick and tired. They wanted to travel to another country and they've got this business here. They want to exit. Some of them just want to retire all the times.

Sadly enough, it's health issues. So some business owners have reached an age where they've got some health issues or they're young, but they have some issues going on and that prevents them from running the business effectively. And they want to exit and capitalize on their value, create it. And that's kind of three main reasons. Yeah. And then...

Does when you bring the deal package, you're kind of the in the bucket of like, like the deal flow. And then you bring it to Paul and Warren and, and you guys like, Hey, is this a green light or red thumb or should we make an offer on it? Yeah. once, you know, I kind of know now what is going to work and why it isn't just because of the experience that I've built. but at the beginning it was more of a, let, let me introduce you to deals and see what works, what doesn't.

Jon Stoddard (26:05.823)
Now you can get it. I can have a glance or game story on a company and I'll know whether it's going to work or not. that's nice. Who handles like the integration bucket or let me like this, but who handles the negotiation part of it saying, Hey, we think that's the valuation on this business for this grocery business to look at is X amount. And then, you know, the guy that's selling it thinks it's worth X.

times five, you know, and you're kind of way off. Who handles that negotiation part? So before we give the number, we give the reason why we got to that number. And we show data and facts as to how we got to that number. So we don't want to overpay, but we don't want to underpay. Right. Like in the middle point. Well, what do mean underpay, underpay being in it, it would be insulting to him or? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I mean, you want to respect what they've built over the years. Obviously there's some good offers out there and you want to capitalize on that. But overall, if we're going to come in cold and give an offer, we'll look at kind of medium multiples within that industry. It's a three multiple. You know, I'm not a guy that was quibbles between a three and a 3.2 because it's usually only a couple of months difference of cash flow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. sometimes you want a partner in this guy, if he's going to stay on, you want him as a partner, you want everybody's got to come away walking like, Hey, I feel like successful in this negotiation. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, you're never going to, you're not going to go very far if you don't do it when when deals, right? So we, yeah, we just reason it. We've got very good deal flow.

And if sometimes, you know, the business owner just says, yeah, I won 10 times. Well, you're going to pay me. Well, it was good to meet you. Let's shake hands and see in a couple months time, if you've had any offers. Yeah, this is funny because I just had this conversation with somebody who I mastermind on Facebook this morning. You know, the guy thinks it's worth this. This is the very first time anybody's offered him anything. Nice. It's just not motivated. He's you got to.

Jon Stoddard (28:27.853)
You know, he's going to go through this discovery process of figuring out, my God, somebody's just offering me money. Let me go find out on Google what my business is worth. And he's either going to say, well, wow, that's, it's not worth what I think it's worth. I'm going to just keep the business. Yeah. Clearly does he sell? my God. It's worth what the seller is. need to sell. That's, yeah, who doesn't happen. But they may come back around. You just got to have so many deals your deal flow. Yeah. It's, it's a long-term game.

I would say if you want to be successful in this game, give it five to 10 years. Just because, you know, when you start the conversations, that's when people start generating the interest about selling, then they have the expectations up here. Time goes through, they don't start generating offers. And at some point you meet their threshold and that's when the deal happens. Yeah. Do you guys have, does Paul and you have the same

deal team working with you as far as like attorneys and accountants? Is it the same people? Yep, same people and they work on a contingency basis. So we, you know, if the deal happens, then we'll get paid. If it doesn't happen, then we don't, anyone, no one gets paid. Yeah. So is it, is it an attorney or something that's licensed in, you know, Europe and Australia and England and

everywhere and United States or do they, is it? So, takes charge of that side of things. you know, I'd rather have the conversation with him before I conferred, but for each jurisdiction, we would have our own lawyers pretty much and the way in which we work with them would be same model at the end of the day, which is. When you guys, when you do a deal, you find a deal and this is, it's on your own, right?

you find a deal and they say, okay, this guy wants to sell and everybody gives it a green light. Do you create in the United States, we would create, let's say a holding company and a bunch of LLCs under that. How does that done in like UK and Spain and everywhere where you got Paul's in Australia right now, right? Yeah, pretty much the same, same way. We'll create like we've got a holding company and then we'll create SPVs we call them.

Jon Stoddard (30:53.965)
So like little companies. we make the acquisitions through the SPVs because you want to protect kind of the holding company, right? You want to protect the different companies within the group. And you guys would just say, every time you bring a deal, it, you you know, I brought the deal. It's 15, 25%. You guys get 75 % et cetera. then you'd get it over again. Yeah. Exactly. Rinse and repeat.

Do you have any goals of saying I'd like more of the deal to get involved in other of the other buckets of expertise? Yeah, I mean, right now I don't have a I will want more deals, obviously, but right now my focus is more on learning and on adding value to companies. And as I personally, at least grow as an &A person.

Then I look to do my own deals. I look to partner up 50 50 with other people with Paul. That's kind of like the vision. I think I got a question. This is kind of personal, but yeah, what do you think your your worth? Like this is clickbait because everybody loves us. How much is your work changed? You know, Matt, were changed in the last two, three years working with Paul.

It's gone up. It's going up. Yeah, it's going up. Definitely. I would have to be extremely honest. I haven't capitalized on any of it. So the shareholder value is starting to build up. Yeah, it's like Warren Buffett. And if you look at this figure, mean, a millionaire at I think 50 years old, it's only between 60 and 80 has he become the multi-billionaire. Exactly.

and it's, yeah, it's, it's going up. It's good. I'd rather, I'd rather keep it for myself. No, no, I don't need a number on that. just, it's a, it's kind of a clickbait thing and we're like, this is one of the fastest ways to build wealth is acquiring a business with existing revenue. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, mean, it's super exciting because you talk to different business owners all day long. you get to try and like,

Jon Stoddard (33:18.477)
It's kind of like a game, right? You're like playing your game, you're trying to sell things, you get off the the offer accepted, then rejected, then like, shit, why did that happen? Why did that happen? Then you come back, you try and change your way of pitching. It's super, super exciting. So what's the kind of the craziest request from, sometimes a seller wants a very specific thing, like, hey man, I don't really care. I just want a boat or I just want to

great watch or something like that. Yeah. So there was this funny story where there was an engineering company. The owner was around 65. And I was sounding like, what, why do you want to sell? And he was like, I'm just fucking tired, mate. I was like, okay, okay. I just want to. And then after saying that, he was like, I just want to go on a caravan down to the south of Spain.

and enjoy myself over there. That's literally his own request. Yeah. You know, in the UK, like the weather tends to be quite, quite bad, to be honest. It's always raining and so on. So there's a lot of people that go down to the South of Spain where the weather is super nice. You get 25 degrees every single day. So that's what he wanted to do. And I was like, okay, let's try and create a deal structure that will give you that. Was it in monetary?

value like just cash or did you set them up with a place there and you know pay for the whole thing? Whoa I mean that's a good question. Let me give you an example. I had this buddy buying an engineering floor in Florida and he found out the woman selling who took over for her husband who died was a big lover of cats and I said you know he called me up and I said well put something on the offer well you're you know you will fund you know cat

lover farm or something, pay for that. know, empathetic, sympathetic way of like helping her out. That's funny request. That's an interesting one. got this other one was I have a buddy that made an offer on a chicken e-commerce company, huge business. He said, I'm only selling it to somebody that loves chickens. They got a lot of chickens.

Jon Stoddard (35:41.645)
And did he sell it or no? Because I don't love chickens that much. I love chickens that much. I love eating them. can tell you. have like eggs and stuff like that. Hey, look at Matthew. I know that we didn't have a lot of time here. How we doing on time? We're good. I've got five more minutes. So what do your parents think of what you're doing now? They're like, gosh.

my son, the Richard Branson of... Not yet, but I mean, they see I'm very focused on what I'm doing. I was back in the office at 1 a.m., back from the office at 1 a.m. yesterday, super, super focused on building a large thing over the next 10 to 15 years and try and set myself up for life pretty much.

So they see that I'm working extremely hard and they like that, right? I'm also building a part-time business as well, which could be quite interesting for some of the audience, which is around generating deal flow for all the &A companies. So that's starting to build up. Tell us about it. What is it? What are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. what I found was that there's a lot of companies with like boutique companies that

know how to structure the deals, know how to operate those companies, but don't have the deal flow. And at the end of the day, if you don't have deal flow, you don't have a business. Yeah. We've got 900 members in our mastermind. That's the number one request is deal flow. A hundred percent. And that's what I do, what I'm doing right now for other firms. So boutiquetasks.com is the name of the, of the company.

So boutique as like boutique. And then tasks, assets, like tasks, things to do. Okay. I'll put that in the YouTube and all the links there. Definitely. Yeah, that would be awesome. And pretty much the only focus on scaling like private equity firms up through contacting decision makers in the markets in which they want to enter and generate a deal flow.

Jon Stoddard (38:10.655)
So I'm working with two other private equity firms on that, on that side, one in the US and the other one is in London. And the results are there. So if anyone is- You monthly fee to do that or- Yeah, whatever, very flexible in terms of what the price could be or how to structure that. It's normally a recurring revenue or recurring fee on a monthly basis to begin with.

as they see the results happening, we could do like lead by lead, or we could look at all the ways of structuring that. How often do you keep up in touch with people in your deal flow funnel? mean, you reach out with a letter or an email or LinkedIn, and then you put them in a CRM system and keep contact automatically, or is that just, hey, I need to contact to contact this guy that's in your deal and send him a...

So that's a really good question. I've got PipeDrive as a CRM. And PipeDrive is pretty much, you're able to look at your pipeline. get like, so initially we get two contacts. One is once we send out the request, they'll come back. If they come back, then we'll add it to PipeDrive. We'll have two kind of like messages sent out.

If they reply to that and we get on the call, then they're in like the book of call column. Once we get to the book of call, we'll put them into the NDA send, accounts received, then proposal stage. And then on the proposal, they'll either accept the proposal or they won't. Those that don't want to accept the proposal will add them to a revisit column. And we'll have six months, every six months, we'll send them a follow up saying, hey, would you be interested in

chatting through what we had a conversation about six months ago or not. And those that, it's about having consistent deal flow being on top of mind of those business owners. Is that now to build a pipeline for deal flow through you or is it like independent saying, do your own financing, do your own negotiation, integration, everything else?

Jon Stoddard (40:34.871)
Would that be through boutique tasks or through? Yeah, through the boutique task, would it kind of be a pipeline to you? And I'm not saying that's wrong or right. mean, Colin Fraser has Epic Group and he's got a thousand people sending them Deal Flow, which is fantastic. So if someone were to come in as a client, they would have their own pipeline and all the deals would be just for himself. If he wanted me to work on some of the deals, we could also do that.

But ideally kind of the situation would be to try and build up a pipeline for himself so they can have recurrent opportunities coming to this desk in a way. Yeah. Really way to get good at this is do more of it. mean, you can't have this like one deal coming every month and negotiate. It's just not enough. mean, just to give you an idea in order to close 16 companies, we're talking between Goran and I, which is kind of

It's kind of like our role within Opel Entia. We talk to around three new companies each every single day. Every single day. And how many people are you mailing, emailing, LinkedIning? Thousands. Thousands. day? Yeah. Not every day, like every week. Yeah. Week. Yeah. I believe it. And you're buying lists from wherever it is. InfoUSA or wherever the company is, you're mailing them and

Yeah. Interesting. Hey, I know we're out of time, Matthew. I really appreciate you taking your time to do this. Same with you. I've got a plug for this. If you guys like what you're hearing, please subscribe under the button below. Matthew, have a great day in Spain and a great workout the rest of the day. Yeah. Thank you, John. Hoping to connect with the audience. If you want to have a chat, very open to having a chat, discussing anything if anyone needs to.

from a young person's point of view or a more experienced one if they need someone like Paul to come into the conversations and so on. I gotta tell you, if you're gonna be on the planet for another 20 years, watch this guy, because he may be the next Richard Branson. Let's see. Let's see. All right. Thank you very much, Matthew. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Bye.