What I Learned From Buying a 7 Figure Food Distribution Business!

Summary

In this conversation, Mike Yarmo shares his journey from a corporate job to becoming an acquisition entrepreneur. He discusses the challenges he faced when acquiring a distressed business, the importance of due diligence, and the strategies he implemented to pivot the business successfully. Mike reflects on the sacrifices made during this journey, the lessons learned, and the eventual sale of the business, leading to his current role in investment banking.

Takeaways

Transitioning from a corporate job to entrepreneurship requires careful planning and networking.
Acquiring a distressed business can present unforeseen challenges that require quick adaptation.
Due diligence is crucial; understanding customer relationships can prevent future pitfalls.
Pivoting business strategy based on market needs can lead to successful outcomes.
Building a strong supply chain and exclusivity agreements can enhance profitability.
Personal sacrifices are often necessary in the pursuit of entrepreneurial success.
Learning from mistakes is a valuable part of the entrepreneurial journey.
Maintaining a focus on customer service is essential for business turnaround.
The sale of a business can be a strategic decision influenced by personal and professional goals.
Investment banking offers opportunities to leverage past experiences in M&A.

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Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:00.098)
Welcome to the top &A entrepreneurs today. My guest is Mike Yarmo. Mike bought a company 25 years old, doing 7 million at a 2X multiple. I'd say it's probably a distressed business and distressed seller at the time, but five years later, sold it for 5X multiple. Welcome to the show, Mike. John, pleasure to be here, Yeah, so we got to, I want to hear this story.

What were you doing before you decided to become an acquisition entrepreneur? So I think like probably a lot of people after they get out of school, they go find the best job that they possibly can, the typical nine to five. And I ended up landing in the food business. I worked for Starbucks at their corporate head office and their store development. And then I kind of backed myself into CPG working in.

for a big, one of these big food companies where I didn't necessarily come from money. So, kind of have to just grind out, get some notches on your belt in the corporate world before ever making it into the entrepreneurial world. And I had some great experiences kind of learning from some excellent operators and marketers at a big, food company.

And it was just a case where I got a pretty decent portfolio to manage and got a lot of great experience. And that kind of gave me access to some pretty cool people who were doing some acquisitions and said, hey, we like what you're doing in the corporate world. We like interacting with you and how you're kind of growing that particular portfolio.

Why don't you come and leave the corporate world, come and join us. You put a little bit of money in, we'll put a lot more money in, and you'll get some sweat equity and help us grow the sucker. What was that? Was that a fund or was a search fund or just a bunch of entrepreneurs that we need basically operators? Yeah, so a family office. A family office, okay. Who had a much larger exit.

Jon Stoddard (02:16.564)
a generation before and was sitting on a pile of cash looking at ways of deploying it. And they saw an opportunity in the particular market that they eventually pulled me into, which was kind of food adjacent. I had got access to them through my corporate job. And again, we kind of hit it off from just a working environment. And we had a very successful launch on a couple of major products from the big food company into their distribution channels out in the market.

They were on an acquisition spree and said, don't you come join us? You'll put the CEO hat on. We like how you manage projects and away we go. what did they say? What was the of the offer? We'll put more money in. Was it like five and 95 or you put in 20 and they'll put in 80 or what did that sound like? Yeah, you know, it was a case where, you know, I would be in a sizable minority.

position where I just took my savings and put it into a sizeable minority position. They still wanted me to put some skin in the game to keep me interested. If you're just kind of a job like the CEO role, that may not necessarily kind of link you to the job over the long term. And you can always issue warrants or stock options to staff that could vest in a future year as we're eventually.

It would worth something in a liquidity event, but we knew we would be in this business for at least the next three to five years. And they said, in order to keep you interested and keep you in the job, we like consistent managers and we like what you're doing. We would insist that you put in some cash into it and we'll have a best in schedule of increased ownership percentage as you kind of keep milestones and as you continue on your role.

which is pretty standard. Yeah, it's pretty standard. got it offered. I remember an investor offered me, hey, we'll give you. I brought the deal to him and he said, I'll give you 5%, but it can increase up to 50 % over a number of years if you hit these milestones. I was always super active on trying to build my network. My goal always was to enter an entrepreneurship. So I always.

Jon Stoddard (04:31.089)
you know, sitting in a corporate role, always had the eye that I was going to do it. I just didn't know how I was going to get there, again, not coming from a necessarily wealthy family. So I knew I was going to have to, you know, scrape, save and utilize my network to eventually jump into business ownership. So when I had met these folks, you know, I kind of primed the position that I'd be interested in doing something like this in the future when they finally were ready for me.

They taught me on the shoulder and said, we'll pull you out of the corporate world. Yeah. And were you married at the time? I was married, yes. Yeah. How did that conversation go? Hey, I'm going to go leave a comfortable 40, 70 hour a week job that pays the same amount every month and sends the kids to the dentist office and the lessons to go to an entrepreneurial position. You cool with that?

Let's just say I love my second wife. Who's now the mother of my two children. So let's just say there were some personal sacrifices that had to be made, not necessarily at the time, business ownership was not for everybody. have to. Can I ask you about that? Those personal sacrifices? just don't think people understand what they're like. Sometimes.

you have to sacrifice the people around you to replace those with people where you want to go, whatever's in your head. You know, if you're, if you're kind of maybe bootstrapping on your own time without any investors or creditors or staff or, know, all the stakeholders that are involved in the business, if you're going to go the and A route, you know, all that stuff comes with you. And that puts a lot of burden on, you know, the head of the ship.

I ended up working a lot of hours those first couple of years as I was trying to, and I'm sure we'll get into it, is to kind of take the company from what we didn't think was a distressed position, but ended up being a distressed position and kind of pivoting it. But that took a lot of hours out of my time. then unfortunately, it did cost me a marriage. I'm better off work today. I'm glad I did it. at the time, it was a difficult road.

Jon Stoddard (06:50.717)
Yeah, I'm sorry to hear. I was wide open. At least from my perspective, that may not be all your guests perspective, but at least from mine, that's how that... life happens, man. Sometimes you come up with your ambitions or aspirations. They don't jive with the person. They're new ones and they don't jive with the person that you married five, 10 years ago. It's just reality. Yeah. So back to this distressed situation.

How, when they presented it to you, how was it, was it a case of they were naive or they were intentionally hiding some things or what was it? Well, you know, the, you know, my partners were in the, in the distribution game. You know, this, this company was a food distributor. We ended up being coming into it, into the situation where it was still a profitable company.

the owner had owned it for 25 plus years. I know succession plan and really well, he had no kids. didn't have anybody number two wanted to take it over. He stopped whatever that, you know, nothing. So, know, so it really was an owner North of 60 probably thinking of retirement, but you know, really was just checking the lights every, every month and just going home. And really it was like letting a staff run the business. And, you know, when we, when we've, you know, found it, thought,

You know, this guy's running his business on a fax machine, know, with old DOS printers, still, he was, you know, even with this antiquated technology and, frankly, not a lot of energy into the company, he still profitable. you know, imagine what a bunch of capital and, you know, frankly, a smart guy, you know, would they perceive to be a smart guy come in and run the company do. I think we can really, you know, quite easily.

And what we found was is that a lot of the relationships who told us during our due diligence phase said, yeah, no problem. You guys take over the company. We'll be happy to order from you. We found that that created a whole set of dominoes that led us to have to pivot the business quite quickly. that they mean, they said that, but they weren't committed in some kind of contract agreement to keep buying selling from you.

Jon Stoddard (09:10.637)
Yeah, you know, what it signaled, what new ownership signal to the market was is that these, this is a new relationship with these customers and these customers were, you know, mainly, mainly bakeries and some grocery stores, what had been extremely long term relationships, which was which is what we're basically buying. What we didn't realize was that

that send the signal to every other person in this market to go in and try to fight for the business. But we've got a vulnerable situation here. We can undercut pretty easily and take the business. that's where our miss was, is that we thought we had the head shake during due diligence, but we didn't realize what kind of that domino effect through got through a competitive set could create a price war that we weren't preparing to fight at the time.

Did those competitive distributors, they sell the same products that you or comparable products that just replaced you on the shelf? Yeah, was a bakery distribution business where you're selling flour, sugar, yeast, oil, stuff like that. it's a commodity, right? Very commoditized product. Any idiot can go to a go get a pallet of sugar and go sell it into the market. And that's what we we found was competitive distributors who are in the market or

The owner's brother-in-law would go buy a pallet of sugar and sell it to his brother-in-law for 10 % cheaper than we were. We're like, we have the overhead and the stakeholders and the debt and now a new equity investment. We can't just start cutting our margins immediately. And said, is not the right market for us. So we're going to have to pivot and go find another way to utilize our assets.

Yeah, and losing those accounts was did that happen immediately or did that happen over time? Like you would somebody would walk in one of your top salespeople and go, wow, you know, we just lost an account because yeah, yeah, we knew within the kind of the first three months that it was we're like, okay, we're going to have to rethink our business plan here and figure out a different way to go to market and utilize the trucks and the warehouse and staff and they

Jon Stoddard (11:17.323)
and the roots and supply relationships on how to go to market because this is not going to work for us. We knew pretty quickly that it was going to have to be a switch and sales started drying up because everybody who was ordering before started moving their business to cheaper distribution channels and got a little tight there for a bit. We just put money into the company and I certainly didn't have any more record in capital lines.

You just put all your money into the business and yeah, that's where the stress and strain came from. Yeah. Partners were willing to help us get extended credit lines with the bank, but that only went so far. When you start to have to clear through payroll and taxes and all the things that come from running a business.

cash got a little tight there pretty quickly. it was trial by fire for sure. Let me go back to the app and see absentee owner that kept stop basically pushing the business for new business. It's kind of like a shark. If you stop, you're going to die. What did you learn from that? there's some visible signs like, you're still using the fax machine and dot matrix printer. Clear signs that he goes like he hasn't touched technology.

or innovated, done anything. What did that tell you about like avoid this type of business or set it, recasting expectations about what we need to do to fix it fast? You know, there's a cool Twitter account called sweaty startup and he's, got to that down. What do mean by sweaty startup? Yeah. Chuck, he's a, he's a really big Twitter account. And he's, his philosophy is always go buy, go buy this, go compete with a business with a fax machine and,

you know, a dot matrix printer, we decided to buy one and figure to change it. And I would not I would not be scared away from a business like that. But, you know, where I think where, you know, my definite learning came from and I paid for it was just just to be a little more careful on, know, through the due diligence phase, especially when it comes to customer sets. Yeah. Who is responsible for the due diligence? I mean, you know,

Jon Stoddard (13:36.011)
you know, the folks that bought the company. I'm as guilty as anybody else on not not realizing how quickly the relationship changed after money exchange hands. I just, you know, learning to uncover. Don't be afraid to ask a question or uncover a stone. So at least you have expectations and mitigate that risk. Do you think there's anything you could have asked them that would have revealed that?

Well, you know, we would structure it and the ownership in a different way instead of, you know, all cash upfront, would have been some type of burnout. know, so if you're trying to buy a business that has long-term relationships in the other side, okay, prove it to me. know, give me a reason why to trust you that, you know, these long-term relationships will continue after you've gone off into the sunset and let us take the business over.

We would have much, I much rather would have structured it as some type of earn out or even even a better take back, but more likely in or now in this position that would have tied, you know, that previous owner in his relationships more to the future success of the company rather than to, you know, what he told us. But we were at the time for me believing, you know, and we did, we thought we did our due diligence. We could actually went and did interviews. Unlike the family office has never done this before. That's how they got rich.

Yeah, sure. It was, I would say, was maybe a bit too small for them to spend more time on it than than they would have. And they kind of trusted that, you know, we got confirmation from the top five customers, which was almost kind of an 80 20 type type model with with revenues. 20 percent of the customers were 80 percent of the revenue. Yeah, those, you know, those.

that, you know, having that as an earn out rather than just straight up cash and sending the owner off into the distance. I would have happily paid a little bit more to be get that get that certainty in the future. Yeah. Well, how was that talked about? That sounds like a pretty big risk of 80 percent of the business came for 20 percent of the customers. Did you guys talk about that a lot and say this concerns me or we shouldn't do this? Or, you know, if 20 percent of the 80 percent of the business comes 20 percent of customers.

Jon Stoddard (15:54.957)
and you're a sales guy or business development guy, you can fix that risk. Yeah, we again, we thought, know, these are this is reliable cash flow. We can get, you know, bank on it like a T bill. It's going to, you know, it's just going to be consistent and then we'll just get it and get out in the market and go go build a book of business. The you know, it's kind of kind of an enterprise sales role, but not really. You're still it's still a B2B role where you're still selling into, you know, major customers who will

do significant buys from you, but the switch cost is fairly low and often these guys will make a change quite quickly if they see a better mouse trap. my God. Well, the grocery stores or any bakeries or like that are pretty low margins. If I could say one or 2%, they'll do it. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So reality sets in, you've got a distressed business, owner not available anymore to turn that around. What do you guys do?

What's the strategy to turn this around, basically? After firming up the balance sheet and saying, we're now in a situation where we have to pivot. When you firm up the balance sheet, did you go recapitalize or borrow some money or put it... Yeah. Some guarantees were put down with the bank in order to extend the credit line. Okay. They had an increased revolver to make sure we weren't strapped for payroll or rent or anything. Right. Okay.

so we can keep current. We took a step back and said, where are some pockets in the industry that are underutilized and not necessarily a competitive shark tank like selling a pallet of sugar, for example, and we stumbled onto the frozen market. And really that was a conversation with

hundred different chefs and food and beverage managers and grocery store operators and whatnot saying, you know, where's your biggest pain points with your distribution channels? And we found out more than often not that it was it was in the frozen frozen section for a variety of reasons. You know, number one is it's hard to find people in your warehouse who want to spend, you know, eight to 10 hours a day in a minus 18 degree Fahrenheit freezer.

Jon Stoddard (18:14.917)
So that was kind of the step one as to why a lot of frozen distribution companies are hard to come by. big guys, the GFSs and the CISCOs of the world, and I'm sure you've seen trucks. CISCOs, yeah, huge, huge. Not CISCO as the router business, the SYSCO. Every city across the continent has CISCO trucks running all over the place. So I'm sure you guys have seen one.

yeah, yeah, they they dedicate a very small portion of their warehouses and a very small portion of their trucks to frozen So what that means is they carry very limited skew sets. They turn a lot of suppliers away There's a lot of qualified suppliers out there who just can't get into many distribution channels And we we said our new our new strategy is we're going to be the freezer your freezer in the city. Mr. And Mrs. Chef

If you need something frozen and you can't get it from Cisco, we'll be your provider. me ask you where that idea, new revenue source came from. Did you create a culture and environment where it came from everybody from trucking to new business to sales? Or were you responsible for that? Well, ultimately I was responsible for it, but it was from my culture, my corporate...

culture. That's where, you know, having that experience and cutting my teeth and being able to ask questions and do market research. You know, because I ran a portfolio that launched products and we knew how to ask the right questions of the market and say, what do you want and where are the gaps? you know, for as much as a nine to five is mined in a lot of circles, it helped me at least and gave me the right training, you know, to be an entrepreneur.

So you had the right skill set to solve this problem. know, 20 years old, probably not the right time to be an entrepreneur, too green. But after three, four, five years of increasing responsibility in a corporate role where you kind of know what the right questions to ask, at least from a market research perspective, I knew how to go out there and ask the questions to the market as to what do you want and how can I help you? And again, we heard

Jon Stoddard (20:34.411)
We heard from the horse's mouth out there from the customers who are going to actually pay you that if I had more frozen options, frankly, a lot of restaurants use a lot of frozen frozen products. You know, it's there. They're there. Just like we see. I watch that Gordon Ramsay show all the time. Every time he goes to a kitchen goes, what the hell is this frozen? Yeah, exactly. You know, the high end restaurants, Le Bourdain Diner, French Laundry is not probably going to use frozen. But, you know, the typical.

you know restaurant you find on the corner of the main and Main and First Street has probably got lots of frozen products that just defrosts and uses as products, whether it's breads or fruits or vegetables or up and down the list. Especially for more southern states, where it's hard to store products. It's a great alternative for an industry that's quite difficult to operate in.

We basically tried to marry a whole bunch of frozen suppliers who couldn't get Cisco or GFS's time a day and tried to marry them with what the market was looking for. And that's where we started to see success. Yeah. How long did that take to solve that?

Yeah, it was, you know, we really started to try to get a book of business from the suppliers. We wanted to make sure if we were going out going out to the market that we could succeed. And, you know, so the first time a chef placed the order, we were there the next day with with with product. didn't want to, know, chefs and food members, managers and grocery store owners don't have a lot of time for you. And if you screw up, then they'll just go find the next guy. Yeah. When you go visit them, they're cooking like you're not going to be doing anything else. They can't really talk.

Yeah. So we knew we had, we knew that if we were going to do this, we're going to have to do it properly and set, set the stage with the, with the customer set that, you know, we've, we've, we've pivoted, we're a new business. We've got a new, a new set and we're ready to service you and let's nail down that first, first order to start building up some credibility in the market. So it was a lot of interviews and bring in that the right inventory. what, you know,

Jon Stoddard (22:42.249)
Not a lot, just a taste to start because obviously we had to manage our working capital, but just enough to start getting us the first, second, and third orders with chefs and other clients to start building up the credibility that we have pivoted and we can do this properly. What did the economics look like? Were they better on your side? Were there more margin, higher price points? What?

You know, we were lucky, we were able to sign a lot of exclusivities with very healthy rebate programs from suppliers who were very hungry for distribution channels and getting into customers and getting their product out in the market. So margins increased substantially with our new supply chain. Obviously there's additional costs that go in from running freezer trucks as opposed to shelf-stable trucks or having...

you know, industrial sized freezers as opposed to, you know, running your warehouse at a, you know, normal temperature. And you also have to pay your staff a little bit more and have more staff on hand to rotate them in and out at a better clip. So they're not spending eight hours a day in a big industrial freezer. So there was definitely a lot more, more cost associated with it, but the increase in the margin and the, the deals were able to sign with suppliers more than offset it. made it,

you know, gave us the ability to grow and start to succeed. did these exclusives look like with these? Were they fisheries, kind of co-op fisheries or something? We started off in the, you know, really the breads and the dessert categories. High turnover products and good products, good margin products where, you know, again, if you're going, you know, if you order croissant off a restaurant menu, it's likely not made fresh in the back.

It's likely part baked, defrosted and cooked in the Rebens in three to five minutes. We started, we started off in the dessert category and just kind of grew from there. So we had a set of about 10 to 15 suppliers who were in that space. And we try to pick out a really good subset of products and just say to the chefs and the food beverage managers of the world, I'm like, if you guys need it, we will carry it. I don't care if it's one box or 100 boxes.

Jon Stoddard (24:51.949)
But we're going to kind of stick to this subset of suppliers so that we're optimizing our supply chain. I didn't want to have the supplier bring me one box. I obviously want to get pallets or truckloads. But anything on that list, Chef, I will carry for you, which was not what they were getting out of. You're your darndest to get new business,

It's not a, it's a dirty, it's hard business, it's dirty business. It's not tech. It's not, it wasn't fancy, but it kind of just kind of scraping and clawing our way back to profitability kind of case by case. Yeah. And when did that start turning the corner? What did, did that feel like? How long did take? Not, you know, let's say, you know, that process of going from a

position where we had increased our credit lines just to keep the lights on to pay. We've actually got a cash loan business here. I say we would have had about six months. That's great. That's a fast turnaround for a seven million dollar plus business. That's great. Yeah. But again, hard work, which is where I kind kind ran into my personal problems, which was, you know, working like a dog for a long period of time to try to turn the business around.

turnarounds can be exhilarating and it can be give you that ROI that you you can't get in many other asset classes. once you're able to kind of get through the other side and start cash flowing the business again and kind of maybe pull back and gain a little bit of work-life balance, we were working extremely hard. The transformation to where you are now to who you used to be and in the sacrifice you've made, do think it was worth it?

Absolutely. you know, today, today I'm a managing partner and equity owner and an investment bank in Toronto and Chicago and we're doing, you know, doing extremely well here. And it took, it took that, that experience to kind of set me and set me on the path. If I was to stay at my corporate job, might be some assistant vice president buried in, buried in some division today. But I took the, took the risk and it kind of went through.

Jon Stoddard (27:03.149)
Trial by fire, as I said, and I'm in a much better spot today than if I just stayed on on the safe course. Nice to hear. So you grew this over a five year period. Did you anything else happen that that even eclipses what it took to fix this or save this business? But then you sold it, decided to sell it. What what was the reason for that?

Well, you we did some smaller acquisitions and we're constantly on the hunt for for tack ons to try to, you know, start building a little more economies of scale, whether it was in the manufacturing space, in the frozen manufacturing space or, you know, other other guys who are going to the same existing customers, but maybe in a bit of a bit of a different space to try to decrease the kind of cost per mile. Sure. Just, you know, bring them in. How many of those did you make?

but two of them. Okay. So it was a case where we just, you know, we, and we looked at, we looked at tons, tons of businesses to try to try to acquire and either we didn't like it or we didn't think it was run well enough or we didn't feel it was, strategic enough for us. but we, you know, we looked at tons and tons of businesses to, try to acquire and got smarter as it, as we went along to again, more of that earn out type type phase rather than just straight up, straight up cash in this, in a space.

You know, we got burnt once, we didn't want to get burnt again. And we, you know, frankly just thought we, you know, it would be better in the hands of a larger strategic to kind of take it to the next level. wanted to, you know, personally, I want to start a family and I met my new wife and we were getting married and to be on the road to try to open up a bunch of new ciliary markets would have taken me away too long.

We got to, we grew to a point where it was interesting enough for somebody who wasn't, you know, for a larger strategic to snap us up and, thought it was the right time to do it, both from personally and professionally. Yeah. How big was that company that acquired it? I won't disclose the name, but not, not quite the Cisco size, but you know, a very large regional. Yeah. And you got it to, it was definitely clear. Did you start at a higher multiple or a five X was?

Jon Stoddard (29:26.997)
They were a strategic buyer and they need to get that. it's not necessarily the case today in 2022 that a strategic buyer will pay the same amount as a financial buyer. They're about equivalent. But when we sold the company in 2018, was financial buyers were definitely on the hunt and willing to pay an extreme premium on EBITDA for enterprise value for company.

We got lucky. got over or an EBITDA level that kind of justified a higher multiple. know, it's when you kind of cross certain thresholds, half a million, a million, five million, you get to a point where you get more larger and strategic who are willing to pay. That's not necessarily dilutive to their. could make their money back in a week if the product or the tuck in fits. Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but.

Large, large, strategic are likely trading for 10 to 15 multiple. You know, so you they don't they never want acquisitions to be dilutive to their to their earnings per share to their existing shareholders. So, you know, kind of kind of work backwards from where they're training to see, you know, what kind of valuations you can you can garner. But, you know, as you get to a point in size where it makes more sense for them to acquire it, it's not it moves the needle for them, but it's still not dilutive. Then then you start to understand where where that range is.

Yeah. Well, why would it be a concern that it's dilutive? I mean, if it's a great product that could, you know, some product lines you purchase could be billion dollar products in the future. Yeah. So, know, existing shareholders, you know, whether they put a lot of capital to the business or not, are very reluctant to to be diluted down and less of a less of a business. They might they may lose board seats. They might lose voting rights.

There's a bunch of different reasons why they try to make. Yeah, that's a power. Yeah. You know, it's they obviously likely have their shareholders, the stakeholders that they have to represent. They want to show that they're getting into the deal as well. Yeah. How was your relationship with the family office over that five year period? Yeah, I mean, was it great? Were they helpful? They, you know, little heated at times or friction?

Jon Stoddard (31:46.997)
Or what was it? Yeah, sure. Like any long term relationship, you have your ups and downs, but we're still friendly today and we're still conversing them on a regular basis. in my investment banking position now, I show them new deals to look at when something I think fits their box. Yeah. So what are you doing now? You're in investment banking. So are you looking for companies and help them sell or are you acquiring yourself?

What we do, we're doing both. So it's either off our own balance sheet or primarily, know, we're &A or balance sheet restructuring investment bankers. Well, if you've got a company to sell, you know, we'll represent you to a strategic or to a high quality private equity company and help you get, you know, structure the deal accordingly to help do what I did for myself and get you the best deal possible. You know, again, I've had

I learned by my own mistakes, which is probably better than going to a certain business school and just learning off a piece of paper and through a test. So I learned through my own mistakes and my own stupidity as to what not to do. So I feel that makes me a lot smarter investment banker now than if I had just come out of school and started doing this. Yeah. mean, success kind of hides a lot of red flags if everything goes great for you. And I don't know a lot of people who just

have had perfect success all their life. But usually it's a trial by fire. There's this case that you're incident in this scenario that requires 100 % of your energy and time to solve it because you're in it. And you did it and you're transformed by that. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't trade my ups and downs for anything. It wasn't a straight line up. It was definitely ups and downs. there are some days where I

I went home and I was just exhausted and could hardly get my head off pillow the next morning. when you realize you've got a lot of people kind of relying on you, just pull yourself up and get back out there and find another day. So what kind of thoughts go through your head? The moments like, just want to quit. I want to quit. It's too much. It's too much sacrifice. What do you tell yourself?

Jon Stoddard (34:09.485)
Well, you know, I was bound by a partnership agreement to basically say, get your ass out of bed, buddy. Go out, out, you know, fight in another day. So you'll get another account. Yeah, I want to get a suit. I didn't want to get sued. That was for sure. But, know, it's you just kind of you've got to fight through that and just realize that there are more people than just just yourself that are relying on your expertise and your efforts to.

to provide them a likelihood. had up to 20 plus employees who relied on the paycheck that was generated from our efforts and with the value that we provided on the market to feed their families. And that's definitely a motivation to get out there and keep fighting. Yeah. My point was, is you're no longer trying to serve your own ego. You're actually in the service of others because they're dependent upon what happens and what you do.

Yeah. Mike, that was a fantastic story and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do that. you're welcome. No problem. So folks, if you like this episode, make sure you like and hit the bell button below to get more episodes. So thank you so much, Mike, for being on the episode. My pleasure. Take care.

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