E209: Building Bridges, Closing Deals: Mastering Rapport & Zero Down Strategies w/ Matt Bodnar

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello and welcome to the How2Exit Podcast. Today I'm here with Matt Bodnar. I am looking forward to this conversation. I consider you, much younger than me, but I think you're one of the rising stars in this space.

I see a lot of your ads going out. I've watched some of the content. I've seen you on some other shows. I've seen bits and pieces and highlight clips or, stuff where you've, you had another podcast that was fairly popular. Millions of downloads, fairly popular. So I think this is going to be a fun conversation.

I think there's a lot to learn from you here andthat's my goal. My goal on any podcast is I pick your brain. You talk 75 percent of the time, I talk 25 percent of the time. That's the goal. And, uh, so let's start off with letting everybody kind of know who you are. How did you get in this space? 

[00:00:42] Matt Bodnar: Yeah. Absolutely. So, going all the way back, when I was in college, you know, being a 19 year old idiot or whatever, at the time I thought, what's the coolest job I could think of. Which is at the time, again, I'm not making a value statement, but it ended up being, I thought wall street sounded really cool, right?

Like, you know, corporate Raiders and takeovers and all that stuff. So, I set my sights on working on Wall Street, ended up, working at Goldman Sachs out of college for a number of years. And, uh,that taught me some of the basics of kind of finance and deals and that sort of thing. And then, in 2011, I moved back to Nashville, which is where I'm from originally and, got involved in basically bought my first business shortly thereafter. Which at the time was sort of a, almost defunct IT service business that, basically couldn't make payroll.

And I came in, originally sort of structured a deal at the time, I was In my early mid twenties. I didn't really know even what seller financing and earnouts and some of this stuff really meant, but I effectively structured a seller finance deal to come and be like, Hey, I'll see if I can help you guys fix this thing.

So long story short, I ended up owning about 60 percent of the company at the end of the day. Ran the business for about six years. We did a couple of bolt on acquisitions through that strategy. And then eventually I fired myself as CEO. And, brought a guy in to run the business and because I realized, Hey, I'm okay at being a manager and an operator, but I'm much better at doing deals. And really focus my time and efforts full time on, on acquisitions and building a portfolio.

And so now I've got a holding company called Eidolon Capital, where I focus on lower middle market acquisitions. Typically classic blue collar, baby boomer type stuff. Very value oriented. I read one too many Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters. So, kind of skewed towards long term buy and hold, you know, in our current portfolio, we have a business that manufactures sinks.

We have a company that does pallet racking and industrial distribution. We've got a staffing business. That's sort of industrial staffing. Got a beauty products brand. Still have that IT business, um, which we also spun a software company out of eventually. It was a longer story, but, today I really focus on just buying companies in the lower middle market. And, it's always as you, as you know well, Ron, there's a lot of different adventures and stories and crazy stuff that can happen in that world.

And so I also like to talk about it and share stories and ideas and stuff and, have a good time doing it. 

[00:02:55] Ronald Skelton: Well, cool. After the show, just remind me to ask you about your sink business. So I've got a client that we're buying in cabinet, kitchen and bathroom cabinet makers and countertop installers and stuff. So there might be some synergies there. One of the things you said about, like,idolizing the Wall Street funny, the funny thing is, is when I got into the space, I had a, I was in the military. But when I came out of the, when I came out of the high school, I worked for my father. Was an entrepreneur for a while. And then to pay for college, I went into the military. And one of my military buddies, him and I got really into that kind of the Wall Street, like, we thought about going into that space. But we, our favorite show was, movie was Wall Street, remember that?

[00:03:29] Matt Bodnar: Great movie.

[00:03:30] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. So a funny thing was when I got into the space four, five years ago, I hadn't talked to him in probably six or eight years. We're still friends online. And we're still, I consider him a good friend. We're just both busy with life and have kids and stuff. And he had moved back to California and I was still in Oklahoma at the time.

I was like, I finally did. I'm getting into acquisitions and mergers. And then my first one went horribly, horribly wrong. I bought a really way too small before I got any mentoring and training. I just ran out and grabbed a very small pest control company. And learned a bunch of valuable lessons and went and, did this podcast and other stuff to make sure I don't do those mistakes again.

[00:04:01] Matt Bodnar: It's uh, yeah, it's always better to learn from other people's mistakes, but, it certainly hasn't prevented me from making myriad mistakes on my own as well. And like, I,I've said this several times, but I've definitely learned that. In most cases, my biggest headaches are usually my smallest deals, right?

And like the, the more deals I do, the more I just ratchet up my size of my acquisition criteria. And the pickier I get, cause right, you just keep accumulating these battle scars where it's like, okay, well, I don't want to do that anymore. Cause I, that was a huge pain in the butt. I don't want to deal with that.

Like, Hey, that's too small. Hey, I've been to that rodeo. And so, yeah, I, uh, I think that's, uh, unless you're really ready for it and you're planning on more so buying a job than buying a business. I think a lot of folks can fall into the trap of buying deals that are too small. So I can totally see that.

[00:04:51] Ronald Skelton: I agree, something you said earlier is you figured out what you really liked, which was doing deals and negotiating. Same thing I did in the first part of this business. I realized I don't want to be the operator. I don't want to pull 40, 60 hours a week. I'm not really great at doing the same thing over and over again.

And an operator has to create a system that's repeatable, right? I love to meet new people, have new conversations and solve new problems. So I stay on the negotiation side of things and getting deals done. And a lot of times I just play a role in other people's,you know, minority role in other people's projects so that, I can go in and help them grow, do their stuff.

I make some more money and, I don't, you know, I don't end up with a CEO title and an 80 hour work week.

[00:05:31] Matt Bodnar: Yep. Yeah. And I think we have a very similar philosophy there. It's like,I mean, I have kind of the, my holding company portfolio, but my goal is basically excluding maybe bolt ons for existing businesses. My goal is to do one good deal a year. And so, that, because I don't want to, I don't want to overload the system, right?

I mean, I could go from a bandwidth standpoint and just a deal making standpoint. I have the horsepower to go do, five, seven, 10 deals a year, but I would choke on those deals in the back end. They'd be exploding and, you know, be running around with my hair on fire. And so I don't want to overwhelm my kind of operating infrastructure, my oversight infrastructure.

And so, I similarly, like often will like JV with folks or sort of help them get a deal done, maybe sit on the board, get a minority equity piece of the deal. Just sort of an advisory standpoint because it's like, I love the deal part and if I can have a little piece of the pie, great, but like,and I still want to buy stuff for my, for my own portfolio too.

But, um, I can't do as many deals as I would want to do without either going and building some huge monstrosity, private equity entity, that's not really interesting to me or, choking on 10 deals a year that would be really hard to digest.

[00:06:37] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I think if my kids were a little bit older and there, you know, they weren't into, now they're getting into the basketball and soccer and stuff, and I don't want to miss a game, right? Maybe then I would, if I go back to that. I'm one of these guys, my son asked me, why don't you play video games with me very often?

I said, because I'm extremely competitive. If I touch your Xbox more than once, I'm going to have to, and I put, I grew up with the Atari, right? And Nintendo, I think was, my fancy system. I played those games until they zeroed out. And so then I broke the game. Till I like, not just high score until like it did game didn't know what to do.

So I'm a, I'm a little obsessive. So like, if I go into this, into this full hearted and really like do something, I want to be like, tiny acquisitions or the, the small, uh, the, uh, Warren Buffett of the, the lower middle market. And that would just take so much away, right.

From my kids getting to hang out with me and go, you know, their time. We all choose our own path inside of this. One of the things I see on your, content you put out and your ads and stuff, you talk about the zero down deal. A lot of people call those things fallacies. And I know as well as you do, it's not.

Let's talk about that. It's, it's because it's a marketing term, right? It's not zero down. The owner gets money. It's just not coming from you necessarily. They get money fromasset loans and just, there's so many ways to structure these deals. But, I think one of the biggest things that people don't get is, if you're not seeing deals that you can put together, that way you don't have enough deal flow.

So let's chat, let's chat about deal flow and what it takes to actually do creative deals andwhat that seller profile looks like, that's going to enable you to do these creative stuff, structure deals.

[00:08:14] Matt Bodnar: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think you hit on a couple of really like critical, critical points that I think a lot of people miss. And I'll give you, I'll give you a couple of case studies of zero down, like truly zero down deals and also zero out of pocket deals that I've done to give you a sense of like, they're definitely doable.

But the biggest thing that most people don't understand about doing deals without putting any capital in or zero down deals or whatever you want to call them, is that it's largely a function of pipeline. It's largely a function of how many deals you actually look at, right. Which is what you said a minute ago. If you look at two deals, or if you go to BizBuySell and peel out the first listing on there, that's not going to be a zero out of pocket deal, right?

I mean, maybe in some, maybe some 0. 1 percent probability that that's the case. If you look at 500 deals, which I literally looked at, I'll give you my stats. I, I, I'm like kind of weird about like tracking stuff. Like I'll give you my stats for like a year of deal making exactly how many deals I looked at spoiler alert.

It was 500. If you look at 500 deals,what are the odds that you're going to find one, two, three, four deals that are going to have a ridiculous deal structure, right? Or like have some really compelling economics or a real opportunity. They're much higher than if you're looking at three or four deals. And you think that, Hey, you can't do zero down. It definitely can't be done, but the work you have to put in to do the zero down deal is you have to do the dealflow work. And so, um, but just to give you the stats,I tracked over the course of a 12 month period, I tracked every deal I looked at. I tracked, even I keep this like sheet of paper on my desk.

I kind of crazy that has every conversation, every, what I would call deal conversation that I have. So it's like conversation with a seller, lender, attorney, whatever, on like sourcing, closing deals. Just to see like, to me, it's like a KPI.Am I putting in the inputs? Am I getting enough, just like calls in.

And I explicitly exclude note like text and emails don't count, right? It has to either be a meeting or a phone call for it to count. And so I tracked that over the course of a year and the stats where I looked at 500 deals and look, that could be pretty broad, right? It's like, maybe I, somebody emailed me a teaser and I was like, pass.

But I looked at 500 deals. I did a deep dive on a hundred of those deals. So I would consider a deep dive, like sign the SIM or sign the NDA, went through the SIM, talk to the broker. Some cases talking to the seller, you know what I mean? Doing some homework. And then I submitted an LOI on 20 of those deals.

And I'm like, the numbers are round. I looked at like 96 or something, right? I'm rounding these off, but like approximately, I submitted 20 LOIs. And I closed two deals.So basically from 500 to looked really seriously at a hundred, of those hundred, I submitted LOIs on 20 of them. And of those LOIs, I closed two deals.

So 10%, you know, 10 percent of the deals I submitted LOI on. And so, that's a lot of deals, right? Like if you're looking at, if you've looked at 10 deals so far, you got 490 to go potentially before you find a zero out of pocket deal. So to me, deal flow is really, really critical. But I mean, I'll give you, I'll give you a couple just case studies, examples or whatever, of some of the zero out of pocket deals that folks can do and that I've done.

So, a lot of it depends not only on pipeline, but it's also, once you have a pipeline, you're looking at a lot of stuff. What are you filtering for to find deals like this, right? But one of my favorite and easiest to do zero out of pocket deals, one, there, there are two kind of similar things.

There's a little bit of a different twist depending on which one you're doing. One is what I call a business giveaway. One is what I would call an Aqua Hire. So, uh,they're basically the same thesis, but you execute them a little bit differently. So I'll do the business giveaway first to give you an example.

A business giveaway, when we, when I had my IT services business that I was running, we came across a guy who owned a data center, right? And he basically said, hey, I no longer want to be in the data center business. He was making about $400, 000 a year in this data center. And he's like, Hey, I'm going a different direction.

Don't want to be in data center anymore. Like, is this something that's interesting to you guys? We negotiated a deal with him. That was, we basically paid him 10 percent of revenue of the data center clients that we got from him for three years. And that was it. And we took over his book of business. And we, we penciled the math out where it was like, once we took it over, we were, it was profitable for us to do that day one.

And for him, it was a headache. He didn't want to deal with these clients. He just wanted to go focus on his main business. And that was a distraction. And then he got paid and he got out of the headache that he was dealing with. So we solved his problem and we ended up buying 400 K of revenue for, you know, 40 grand a year, whatever, over three years, which we are wide on day one.

So that's a, that's a true zero down and zero out of pocket, right? We paid nothing and we gave him nothing at closing. We bought $400, 000 of revenue, right? Which is great. Aqua hire similar, but not exactly the same. So aqua hire, the thesis is basically if the owner of the business wants to stay, I think it's a great model that's really, really interesting. 

And typically for those deals. I look to find sole proprietors. And this one works, the business giveaway and also the aqua hire both work better if you're already in a space or you already own a business somewhere. So if you're an existing business owner, it's a much better strategy than taking over somebody's business as you stepping in and operating it, um,as like a new platform, right?

So the aqua hire strategy is basically, and I mean, I I'll tell you a story of a deal we did like this, but like, I see these deals constantly. Is somebody who's sole proprietor or very small company total, like, let's say less than five employees. Usually doing 250 to 500 K of revenue. And a business like that, a lot of times, if you've ever read E myth or Michael Gerber, you've got kind of the technician, the manager, the entrepreneur.

A lot of those people are really good at this, the craft or the technician, to use Michael Gerber's words, of what the business is, right? So if it's an I. T. business, they're really good technicians, but they're terrible at running a business and like paying their payroll taxes and, doing their accounting and all that kind of stuff.

And it's a huge pain in the butt, right? And they don't want to do sales. They don't want to do marketing. They just want to, they just want to, like, help people fix their computers. Or if it's marketing, they just want to do graphic design. They don't want to deal with all other stuff, but they've kind of wound in this thing where they're a sole proprietor and they're running a business and doing this.

And so what I've seen is like those people, it's often a very compelling value proposition to them to say, if your business is doing 300 K of revenue, you might be making, taking home what? 60 grand? 75 grand, right? Like maybe for super profitable, a little bit more than that. But to say to somebody like that, Hey, are you tired of doing your payroll and having to deal with accountants and doing your taxes and be constantly worrying about growing and, you know, all of these other headaches. We'll hire you on. Keep paying you 70 grand a year, whatever you're making. We'll give you a, some sort of commission structure on the customers you bring over.

If their business grows, you can make even more money. Come join us and you don't have to worry about any of that stuff anymore. And we'll take care of your clients. We'll bring your employees over if you have employees. And typically like we did a deal in our medical equipment business, we bought a company that was selling catheters. Sole proprietorship sales guy, doing like three, literally 300 K a year of revenue, exact same pitch.

He was a salesman, didn't want to deal with all the other stuff. He came over, happy as a lark, came and basically put him on salary for what he was making out of his business. And we instantly added 300 K of revenue to our, to our company. So, and I do a lot of,I'm pretty active in the agency world right now, which we talked a little bit about in the pre show.

I think it's a really fascinating sector where there's a lot going on. But I mean, I've, I can give you three stories of agency owners I've talked to in the last three or four months. One was a lady doing like three, 400 K of revenue. She wants to leave and go start a candle making business, but she doesn't want to leave her client's high and dry that she's had for, you know, for years and years and years.

Another one was a lady who, has like a degree in, I think it was like customer experience or something. She wants to go do something totally different, but again, she's had, she's been in business for 10 years and she's like, I'm so low to these clients. Like I'm waiting on somebody who can take care of them, but I don't want to leave them.

Those are perfect opportunities for the right business to say, Hey, I'll take them over. I'll give them a home. You go do your next thing. And we can pay you something too. That was a long answer, but, uh, those are a couple examples of real zero out of pocket deals that I've done, that you can do.

And it's really a function of pipeline. And then beyond that, it's also a function of understanding. And this is really underappreciated, but like, what is the seller want to accomplish, right? What are the goals? What are their pains? What are their needs? Because if you understand those things, you can help structure a deal that meets their needs.

And also can potentially be a deal that has little to no, upfront cash. There's lots of other ways to do zero down deals too, or zero out of pocket deals, but without, you know, going on a, another 10 minute, ted talk about it. Like that's my, that those are a couple examples of those real deals that can be done for $0 down.

[00:16:44] Ronald Skelton: Absolutely. The, you brought up a very good point. And we talk about this on the show. Even had a few whole shows about it. But, people ask me all the time, what are the top two or three skills they need to have to be in this space? Do they needed to go do an ETA program? Then they need to do that?

And I'm like, if, first thing I always ask is, do you have any operation experience? Because if you're wanting to be the CEO, you need to have some leadership experience or something. You don't want to cut your teeth on somebody else's, baby here. But other than that, my first thing is, is it's rapport, right? 

More than anything, like,I don't care if you can't read a financial balance sheet and an income statement, we could teach you that in an hour. I can give you a Udemy course or something and we can get you started. That's not a problem. The problem is if you can't connect with people and truly be interested in who they are, what they're trying to accomplish and help them get there, you're going to have a hard time in this space because that's more important to these small business owners, 85, 90 percent of the time than the check you're going to cut them. 

I've heard story after story after story where somebody want to deal with a lesser offer because they built a deeper rapport with the seller. It is almost more often. I would say probably 60 to 70 percent more often that the highest offer doesn't get the deal. It's the guy who has the best connection and the safest pair of hands for that business owner who gets the deal.

[00:18:03] Matt Bodnar: Totally. And I mean, that's part of our, I mean, you touched on earlier kind of being, taking the market position of Berkshire Hathaway, right? I mean, that's our, our approach is we try to intentionally differentiate ourselves from traditional private equity by building a deep relationship with the seller. Understanding what they want to accomplish and showing them, Hey, a future with us is, we're going to take care of your employees.

We're going to keep your name on the door. We're not going to gut the business and sell it again in three years. And we really want to, build a long term enterprise and we want to take care of the people that are here. And I think that resonates like there's a lot of sellers who care way more about legacy and taking care of their stakeholders and their people and their clients and their, their team, than they do about cashing out for the absolute top dollar.

And I, you know, I found that to be a really compelling, market position, I guess, for lack of a better term,that really helps us differentiate from folks. And the cornerstone of that is, I think two things. One you hit on it. We've both talked about it. Rapport is massive, right? People think, oh yeah, soft skills, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Rapport. Uh huh. I'm sure it's like, I'll, I'll tell you two stories of like how much I'll over, like I overinvest massively in rapport. So, like a little mini example, I was on a call, like a cold prospect call the other day, right? I do a lot of pro, like outbound. I booked somebody into my calendar from cold email.

Never met this guy in my life. Didn't know anything about him. We spent the first nine minutes of our, there's a 30 minute call, right? And I have a bunch of calls stacked back to back. So we like time is relatively precious. There's a lot to convey in that first 30 minutes. I spent the first nine minutes of that call talking about breakfast meat.

So he was from, he's from New Jersey. My wife's from Philly. And we like talked about, there's like a certain type of breakfast meat, then sort of South Jersey versus North Jersey. They have like different opinions on it. They call it a different name. It's called pork roll or Taylor ham, depending on where you're from.

Not that we need to get into that, but like, I spent nine minutes talking about breakfast meat with this guy, right? And like, that really helped cement the relationship. Because to me, that nine minutes is way more important than like grilling him about what was your 22 revenue and why was it 23 percent over this?

And what, you know what I mean? Like that stuff can come later but, the rapport is really essential. Another story of like an even more extreme example of this. My, my director of portfolio ops and I flew to, we flew to Detroit and we drove to Toledo, Ohio, a couple months ago. Kind of like last fall and, uh, we were looking at a plastic injection molding business. And, uh, interesting deal. It's off market, kind of connected with the seller, thought it looked compelling.

And you know, we flew out there and we get to this guy's office,and we rolled up, went into their, I'll call it a boardroom, but like, I mean, you've probably been in, you know, these manufacturing companies. Like this wasn't like a fancy boardroom that you would picture. And it was like super old school. But we went into their boardroom and we spent the first two hours and 15 minutes that we were there, we did not even touch on anything business related.

Like all we did, we talked about like fishing in Lake Michigan and his son got married recently and like,we were just like, like shooting the breeze and joking around and talking and then eventually like, Oh, I guess should we talk about business stuff? Sure. And so it's like that to me. I will, my, my general rule of thumb is I will almost never break a, uh, like if we're in a rapport building phase of a conversation, I'll almost never break rapport first. So like, if they want to keep talking about fishing, I'll keep talking about fishing. You know what I mean? Not that I'm a fisherman, but like, if they want to keep just like, Oh yeah. And tell me about your kids and what's going on here.

And like, Oh, have you ever been to this taco place? And you know what I mean? All this stuff, like I'll go as long as they go. Cause to me, that is way more valuable then any, anything else in the deal. Because if we have rapport, then we can navigate tough situations. If we have rapport, then we can come up with a deal structure that's workable for everybody. And that's much more interesting and creative. If we have rapport, it makes everything else 10 times easier. And if you don't, then you're basically, you're dead in the water. So I'm, I'm a huge fan of investing in rapport.

[00:22:03] Ronald Skelton: I am too. And I, one of the things I ask people at time when they come on our, cause we do a hangouts and stuffwith acquisition entrepreneurs twice a month. There's somebody telling me they're having a hard time getting deals. Like I've been at this for 12 months and I don't have any deals done.

Okay. What are you talking about? First, are you actually getting on the phone with people, right? Oh, no, I'm sending out email right now. You have to have real conversations, at least zoom calls, right? You gotta get it, you need, if you can't get to somebody in person, there's a lot more to it that in person.

There's a lot more, it's faster to easy and easier to build rapport, shaking somebody's hands, looking them in the eye in person that ever will be on zoom, but it can be done on zoom. We do it all the time now. The, 1st and foremost, are you having real conversations with somebody that you can see? Are you on a zoom call or something like that? And then the 2nd thing is, what do you guys talk about when you're on there? Well, I talk about like their business and their financials. I was like, that's why you're not getting anything done. Cause you're like every other call, especially if you're picking these deals up from Biz Buy Sell or some other brokerage site, they got 30 calls in the first month they had that listed and everybody did exactly what you're doing.

The people I see getting deals done are doing what you're doing. They're doing the rapport building, the guys I see doing 12 deals in the first, you know, three years of being in this space and then, whether it's contract or equity and partial deals or whatever, where they've advised on 20 and they're, they're, some of them are their own and they're helping some other people get done.

It's because they're really good at building rapport. And, so the second skill, I would say, inside, and it's part of that rapport building is a skill inside of rapport building that I refer to as active listening, right? It's really being able to shut down your own conversation in your head and just hearing what somebody says. I actually, here's a trick I do, and it might be useful for you.

A lot of times on zoom calls that we have more than one person, from our team that are on the zoom call with the owner. And if we do, somebody on that team is usually the dedicated listener, right? Their job, like my job, because I run a podcast and I'm, I talk to people all the time is usually facilitating the conversation.

Somebody's job in there is to make notes and send messages to like, I'm sitting here right now. If I had a camera behind me, you see there's four monitors in front of me, right? They can send a chat message and go, Hey, he looks distracted. Or, Hey,especially if they have multiple people on there. We have their zoom windows to see everybody. You know, we've had cases where somebody says when we asked, you know, when we got to the financials when the CEO started talking about the financials. Does anybody else see the CFO roll his eyes when he said that right?

So the dedicated listener picks up things that nobody else is there. Their job is to watch everybody's facial expressions, body expressions and listen for tonality shifts and changes and body posture changes and make notes of it.

But, um, it's important that you truly understand where somebody is trying to get. And that's the whole thing about active listening, rapport building, and all that is. It's not as often as most people think is they're not trying to get a big fat check.

That's not the problem they're trying to solve. The problem solve is they're trying to solve is they're done and in the business. And they need somebody that's going to take over and be safe with their customers and their employees. Or, they're trying to retire and they do need some money.

There's all, but it's usually not. Whatever, what you think their problem is, I would say, if you look at somebody talking for two minutes and you try to tell me what they're trying to solve, I'll tell you, you're absolutely wrong. Because they're, even if you asked them, what are you trying to solve? The first three times, two to three times they tell you that, if you come out and just directly ask it, it's going to, it's going to be a facade. 

[00:25:25] Matt Bodnar: Totally. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I agree. I think active listening is super, super critical. And the, to me that, that sort of sub piece of that, I love the idea of like micro expressions and stuff. I think that's really smart. But like that element of really trying to deeply understand, what do they want to do?

Like, why are they selling? And not just like, Oh, I'm selling cause I want to retire. You know what I mean? Or what it's like, what are the things that matter to them? And how can you, because if you understand that, then you can frame the whole offer around that. You know what I mean? And you can make the, make it about, Hey, this is a process where I'm going to help you get all the stuff that you want.

And if you're able to do that, right there's that old quote, which is like kind of cheesy, but it's like, you can have everything you want in life as long as you help another, another, what, enough other people get what they right. Um, and so,

[00:26:14] Ronald Skelton: That's Zig Ziglar, right? I think it was Zig Ziglar.

[00:26:17] Matt Bodnar: I think it's a Zig quote. But like, yeah, I mean that if you can do that, if you help them get what they want, and you find a structure where everybody wins, then it's, it's a great outcome.

And that's how you, that's like, I mean, maybe there's other ways to do deals, but like every deal I've ever done was done that way. Of like figuring out what the seller wanted, solving that for them. And then, having a deal structure that worked for both sides.

[00:26:39] Ronald Skelton: I'll put a disclaimer on here. This works until you have a cap table that has three or more investors in it or outside investors. Once you get three or three or more partners, I don't even talk to people. There's more than, usually for more than, if there's a third wheel, I'm, unless I know all three are on board, not interested. That's my absolute limit. Three is the limit. And then if you have outside investment investors, now we're not, we're now we're talking kind of the PE negotiation style where it is about numbers and it's, everything's changes. Like it's a totally different game. And there's, that's the cool thing about this space.

We talked about zero down deals, right? You talked about two or three different ways. I can probably pop off the top of my head about 15 different ways, right? One of my favorite things, I'm a prior real estate guy. Tell me you own real estate. Is that you want to get rid of with the deal? And I'll say, Hey, let's go, let's talk, right?

Cause I know what a lease back is. And I know that with the right buyer and right broker, I can get a premium on your real estate that you could never get as a seller. You as a seller can't commit to the new buyer that you'll be in that place for 15 years. I can't. So when he looks at his cap, you know what he wants for a commercial piece of real estate, when that buyer looks at that and says, who's going to be my tenant for the next two to three years? Like, Oh, you're selling the business.

You're going to get a discounted offer. I come in and say, look, I'll sign a 15 year lease on this. With a guaranteed increase every three years at a certain, like we'll, we'll negotiate and make sure it works for both parties. But I've seen that fund entire deals more than once. It's not, not only mine, but just,I haven't, I haven't pulled the trigger on my, on that for me, but I've seen a lot of the guests on here. And a lot of people I know in this space that would go out and buy a one or $2 million business and, fund the entire thing by the real estate that was sitting on there.

[00:28:17] Matt Bodnar: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I know I've never done, I mean, I've looked at a couple of deals where that was kind of the, the, would have been the financing mechanism. But similarly, like I know multiple people who've done a sale lease back deal where the sale lease back paid for the entire acquisition.And maybe even they had some extra money, like extra working capital or, you know, closing proceeds for themselves on top of that.

Especially if you're hunting around, which is a lot of where I'm looking for stuff in these set of like old school industrial, like a lot of companies from like the seventies own their land. And if you can find a way to do that, it can get really interesting to do some sale leaseback.

So, uh, that, yeah, as you, that's another, not necessarily $0 cash at closing, but zero out of pocket needed to close a deal type scenario. So

[00:28:57] Ronald Skelton: And there's like, there's dozens of those, right? There's, if they've got, they're heavy in assets or people loan you money against the assets there.

[00:29:03] Matt Bodnar: Same thing with ABL.

[00:29:04] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. A, you know,accounts receivable. All those different things are livable assets. So, anybody trying to say there's no such thing as, uh, no money down deals is like, well, yeah, like it's, it's not necessarily, it's a bad marketing phrase. 

A lot of times I say zero down because you're, you want to, don't want to limit yourself to zero down. It's zero, zero out of my pocket, right. 

[00:29:25] Matt Bodnar: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can do a deal that's a hundred percent cash at close. That's still zero out of your pocket. Right? Like, the last company I bought,we, it was a long story, but we bought the company out of receivership. The company was doing well, but like they had, the owners had kind of gotten into some trouble.

And we, because it was like a court mandated sale, we had to close in all cash. But I put $0 personally into that deal. So, I mean, it's totally possible. Even if you're, even if you're closing all cash, that doesn't mean you shouldn't look at creative structures, but I think there's also a tendency as you just hit on, like, there's a tendency for folks to try to get too creative.

And sometimes the simplest deal is just like, go get an SBA loan and make it happen. I mean, and there's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes you want to get creative. And to me, the typical strategy I'll have for underwriting something, which is kind of my, my rough rule of thumb and the more deal experience you have, the easier this gets to do. Is like, I can, now I can just look at a company's balance sheet or, a company's financials and five minutes, I can tell you how much I could borrow on that company.

You know what I mean? I can be like, okay, I could sell the land for this, or I could get, if it's this much inventory, this much receivables, I could get a $3 million loan for this thing or whatever, but like, just cause I've talked to hundreds of lenders and financed lots of different deals.

I mean, uh, just, I always start with look at the asset base, right? Inventory, FF& E, receivables, land, et cetera. And then figure out what can you get a loan for on that asset base? And then that's the starting offer, right? It's like, Hey, I'll give you, if I can get a $2$ million loan, it's 2 million to close.

And then we'll carry the rest. And if you,Underwrite 20 deals that way and, submit offers like one of those deals will probably close. And then you'll just have bought a company not for zero closing, but for zero out of pocket.

[00:31:04] Ronald Skelton: There's been some like the last week or so, a lot of people are popping up and saying, Hey, the silver tsunami is not going to happen. There's too many buyers in the space. And I don't think that's true either.

I think that, there's too many buyers trying to fight over the, too many lazy buyers is what, how I like to play it. I'm kind of being mean in that. They're all trying to fight over the broker listed deals on Biz Buy Sell. But if you're willing to go start conversations, and go talk to the off market deals and go talk to the business owners, there are enough businesses out there that you're, it's a numbers game still. You're still gotta, you gotta get your deal flow up and get your phone ringing and start ringing the phone of other people. 

[00:31:39] Matt Bodnar: I mean, and I also like the crazy thing to me, or the interesting thing to me about M&A that is a little different than real estate in a lot of cases is like, real estate's obviously seen a much more competition consolidation over the last, 10, 15 years. Setting aside the current rate environment, which is a whole different beast in the real estate market.

But like, to me, the difference in M and A, which I don't, I also, I agree with you that I don't agree with the premise that the silver tsunami won't happen, or there's, it's too competitive. Like you only need really one good business to be like to hit it out of the park. You know what I mean? You don't need to buy a portfolio of 50 companies, right?

Whereas if you're buying houses, like it's hard to sustain yourself off the rental income of a single house. Or even like a couple duplexes or whatever. Depending on obviously what you're renting them for and how you finance them and all that. But like,so you need to keep gobbling, gobbling, gobbling.

Like you buy one plumbing company, that's making 750 grand a year, and you put an SBA loan down, like you could after debt service be pulling down two or 300 grand. And you know, run that thing. I mean, I don't know about your experience, but in my experience, most of these businesses are crazy under optimized when you buy them too, right?

Like we bought a medical equipment company a couple of years ago that when we bought it, the entire business was operated on paper, like the carbon copy, you know what I mean? Fill it out. They didn't have any digital systems at all. The whole business was like, people would sit there, like a customer would come into be like, Hey, I need some catheters.

And they would be like, great, let me spend 15 minutes filling out a worksheet and then hand it to the other person. And that, you know what I mean? It was nuts. So the whole thing was on paper. The entire marketing budget was a TV commercial from 1993 that didn't have any products that they stocked in inventory. That they aired every single week on TV.

So it's like, let's digitize the business. Let's, stop paying for this TV ad and start investing in like paid media. And we grew revenue by like 30 percent by just taking the same ad spend and putting it in like Google ads, right? It's not rocket science. So if you bought a plumbing company and you did a, you know, half the time, I've bought multiple businesses that didn't even have websites.

I bought a company doing $10 million of revenue. No website, right? No sales team, nothing. So it's like you put in some basic systems and you can go a long way. And so this is, that comes back to like answering the question about the silver, the silver tsunami, because you only need one deal. And there's an insane amount of baby boomers out there, right? It's crazy because there's all the like,dad's got a, you know, dad's got a company that manufactures shelving. And the kid wants to be a Tik Tok influencer. You know what I mean? Shelving business. And so, somebody they're either going to close or they're going to get consolidated or somebody they would much rather sell toa 32 year old hungry entrepreneur.

That's like, Hey, I'm going to breathe life into this thing and take it to the next level. And then they're like, great. That sounds amazing. Let me sell my business to you instead of some, suit from New York that's going to like gut the company and fire half my staff.

[00:34:33] Ronald Skelton: I get it. I grew up a painter's son. My dad was an entrepreneur most of his life. He painted houses from the time I was 16 to the time I was 20 I ran his painting company. He handed it to me. And we, I grew it to the point we had three, three, full crews. Like,three houses with sometimes more, but there was always, always, always at least three crews out there painting. We do a hundred houses a year, at least. 

We were busy. We were doing high six figures, you know, or, you know, mid six figures in revenue. And, as a 16, 17 year old kid, I was making almost six figures and, my pay, like what I, was taxable income. But that said, uh, sometimes I wonder if I'd continue doing that, how big would that thing being now? If I bought other painting companies and other remodeling companies and ran it for 40 years. I have a good friend of mine, unfortunately, a couple, three years ago, he passed away of a heart attack in the middle of the night, but his dad tried to groom him for a multimillion dollar accounting type of job. 

And he developed, he just didn't want to do it. So he like, I'm bad at math. His whole life he had this mentality, like I'm horrible at math. He did okay. He was a crane operator inside of skyscrapers, right? Like, you know, they make, they make good cash. 

[00:35:39] Matt Bodnar: Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating. And both of those, I mean, I don't know how the, how those stories ended for either of those companies, but like, both of those are probably great candidates for an acquisition entrepreneur, right? Hey, you could probably do it. I don't know. Like, I'd be curious if you want to unpack the painting company's history, like what happened to it? Cause you,

[00:35:57] Ronald Skelton: I turned it back to my father when I joined the military at age 20. He ran it as a part time kind of, he, he downscaled the crews and, kept most of the relatives around. He just downscaled everything, kind of ran it until he passed. I mean, he passed early in life too at 60 with cancer.

[00:36:12] Matt Bodnar: I mean, well, the, I mean, even just taking that as an example, without going to the accounting business. Like, imagine if somebody had come to him, who was young, hungry, and they were like, Hey, I want to take over this business or, find a way for you to transition out. Like he basically did what I think a lot of these businesses are just going to end up doing is they just, sort of wind it down, wind it down.

And then, you know, poof, right? Like if somebody came and offered him some sort of like zero cash, earn out structure where they kind of earn into the business, own it, phase him out over time. And his legacy continues on,they buy a business that's doing almost a million dollars a year of revenue, right?

Like, easy deal to tee up for the right person. And, it's a better outcome for him than just winding the business down. Which is what a lot of this, like a lot of these sellers are facing down. And there's, I see so many people that I, I mean, I looked at deals on, I looked at a deal like couple of days ago.

It's like a rubber manufacturing business. These guys are doing $12 million a year of revenue. And like they, they're basically breaking even. And that's, they also own like, ironically, maybe there's a sale leaseback opportunity there, but like, they're not charging the business rent. And it's like, if you charge a business a market rate rent, like the business will be losing money.

I mean, losing like half a million dollars a year, probably. Cause they had a 75, 000 square foot warehouse or something. And that business has been around for a long time. It's like, those guys don't have an exit strat. Like they might just close down a $12 million business doing 12 million dollars. 

Because, there's nobody who wants to buy it. It's too complicated. It's too small. It's like, I looked at it. I was like, dude, I don't think I want to buy this thing. But like, maybe somebody who was more creative or was willing to get their hands dirty, could figure out a way to make that thing really interesting.

So, it's just crazy to me how many businesses are like unoptimized, no exit strategy, no succession plan. And those things are why zero down deals are possible. Because you find people who, what you're doing is you're solving somebody's problem. You're solving their succession problem, solving their exit problem.

You're giving their business a home. And it's like, it's something that's valuable. Like it's a real value to a seller, especially one who isn't prepared already. And so, I think there's, uh, like, I think there's a lot of opportunity for folks. And, to me, I still think the sellers massively outweigh the buyers.

And, there's going to be tons of companies that just never end up with a home and have to wind down like that. And it's sad, right? I mean, that's like part of the reason that I, that I, without going on like a moral crusade. Like, I think it's generally like, you know, I think you're doing a good thing if you buy a company and you keep everybody employed and like,build the business instead of just letting it die out, right?

I mean, if you look at the classic tale of like the, the company town and the plant closed down and then the town's dead in five years. You know what I mean? So, I think if you could be that person that could save the company town, like you're, you're creating value for tons of people. So,

[00:39:06] Ronald Skelton: I think the number two skill, like we talked about, like building rapport and active listening part of that, building that thing. I think the secondary skill inside of this is the ability to build a team. So you're looking at these companies and, being able to look at a company like that and go, I don't know if I want the rubber making, the rubber making company.

If you could look at something like, you know, you know what, I don't want this, but if they had this type of CFO, they could actually do, you know, that has a forensics ability to clean up their books and do some stuff.

And this type of, Chief Operating Officer that could understand lean manufacturing and really shape this up because they've never even looked at the lean manufacturing protocol. We might be able to turn this around. So I think the second skill on top of rapport building is looking at something and go, setting your own ego aside and going, you know what, this company needs this guy, this guy, and this guy to make it rock.

I may not be those guys, but now I can pencil in the job description of the three people I need. And then we can continue to have a conversation. That is a unique skill, that I think more acquisition entrepreneurs need to be able to develop fairly quickly. 

[00:40:05] Matt Bodnar: Yeah. And I think the other thing is kind of related to that, but not exactly the same is, a lot of acquisition entrepreneurs, you'll hear this narrative all the time, like work on the business, not in it. Which I think is very good advice generally. But I think you should work in it for a little while before you work on it.

And I think a lot of folks who, want to become an acquisition entrepreneur and they think, Hey, I'm just going to buy this company. I've never run a company before. I'm just going to put somebody in place as management and I'm just going to go to the beach. You know what I mean? That's definitely not how it goes, right?

Like the first company I bought, I ran it for six years. But we're replacing myself. And now because I've done that journey, I understand what I'm looking for. I know what I want to see. When I buy a business, like I want it to have a management team or we're going to be like immediately putting a president or something in place if they don't have anything like that.

But like, I'm, I, I'm able to approach it that way. Cause I, I've been through the journey. I think it's possible to do it just cold, but I think it's a lot harder than jumping. Then being at least willing to sort of say, Hey, I'm okay to kind of roll my sleeves up and be in the driver's seat of this thing first, you know, six months, 18 monthsand kind of get the pulse of it. And understand what's going on and really how the customers think and act. And how the cash flows flow through the business and that kind of stuff can really help you understand the business better and become a better owner, ultimately. 

If you know how, what an operator should be paying attention to.

[00:41:26] Ronald Skelton: That's taught in a lot of these, mentoring programs. Just buy it and put an operator in. So one of the friends, it seemed fishy to me when I first got into the space and I, luckily for me, I have a really good friend who, just recently passed law school. So now, you know, as soon as he takes the bar, he's an attorney.

So I don't know when they're, he's got his JD, but he hasn't passed the bar yet. But fortunately for me, him and his soon to be ex wife, that's another story altogether. They owned a staffing firm for years. So I just got them on the phone one day. I said, what is the executive search timeframe? Now they've, they placed high end, like engineers, but they kept looking into getting into the executive search.

I knew they had done the research. And they said minimum six months, maximum or an average 18 months. That's the industry average to replace a CEO or C level employee with a good one. So my rule of thumb is if you can't get in there and run that thing yourself, for six months to 18 months, willing to drive, fly there, live there and run it, at least for the first six months until you've got a good GM or someone, a general manager or somebody that can, you can manage remotely.

You'd better be able to be on site. You probably shouldn't be messing with these things. And cause you're putting a lot, especially on things where your personal guarantee, and you did that SBA loan. Now you've been, you've used every asset you had in the world to guarantee this business. And I, I promise you they will, if you get in the, in the rears with them, they'll force you to sell. 

A young a young lady in her 20s bought a really cool three, four million dollar company. Industry changed on her a little bit, and now she can't cover her debt. The SBA is forcing her to sell, to cover the loan.

So it's a forced sale. They basically said, sell or file, you know, we're working, gonna have to start seizing assets. So understand that if you buy these and you don't, and I don't think it was any fault of her own other than, she had indicators that the seller was malicious, before she closed and that should have been a red flag.

[00:43:14] Matt Bodnar: Interesting.

[00:43:14] Ronald Skelton: Meaning that the sell, the seller ended up violating the non compete and created a competing company.

And, two or three of the top employees that were with her went off and tried to create their own employee cause they were trying to buy it. And he didn't tell, he didn't tell her that she had C level employees trying to buy the company. So the day she stepped in there, I was like, we're just going to go do this on our own. So, cause they weren't under the same NDA. 

But, that said, you know, just understand that you signed these personal guarantees, you better be able to operate it, right.I just think that's a fallacy. A lot of people think I'm going to buy it and stick a good operator in. Yeah, that's a great goal.

But understand you're going to be the operator on, off and on throughout the life of that business. Six months here, 18 months there, will you find the right person? Somebody has a heart attack, stroke, or God forbid, just quits on you, right? Who's going to run it then? And, uh, it's, it's overlooked by that mentality. It's like, I'm going to buy something, stick an operator in.

[00:44:08] Matt Bodnar: Yep, totally agree. And I mean, that story that cautionary tale you just shared too, is a good example of, why I think it's important to have a decent amount of seller financing. That may have not have, may not have bailed out that deal and may it may have made an impact, but like,you have 20%, 30%, whatever the purchase price held as a seller note, that's a balloon, especially. You use that to claw back or, shrink down your liabilities, or it's a, it's a way to at least have some recourse against stuff like that happening that's outside of your control.Maybe the seller, didn't disclose or whatever, you want to have some means of, of coming back at them.

[00:44:44] Ronald Skelton: So to, to fill in the loop to anybody out there that's OCD and wondering what happened to the accounting firm, he did sell to a private equity or strategic purchaser. The only reason I know is like I said, it's a friend of mine's father. I still, I'm friends with him on LinkedIn. I see him still writing for it and it's under a different name. So it was either a strategic purchase or a, uh, you know. 

So anyway, so it did sell, eventually. But, uh, it wasn't the son, the son unfortunately passed away of a heart attack, but the, the father did sell it off. But, uh, you know, it, it doesn't always happen that way. There was nothing I could do. The owner passed away of a heart attack. They had, I want to say 27 trucks and, it was commercial electric, electrical. They did mostly big commercial buildings and stuff. They did some residential, but usually high end homes that had, special electrical needs or whatever. So they mostly do commercial stuff. 

So, real quick, what is your, what is your search right now? I know you help some other people do deals and stuff. What is your current, what I call,buyer's box or something?

Is there, is there a certain buying criteria that you, you like? And what do you recommend if somebody is, everybody I've ever talked to has a different method on how they tell people to develop their own buyer's box. So what's your thought on that process? Like buyer box is like what it is you should buy, right? Okay.

[00:45:56] Matt Bodnar: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my, my buy box,I'll tell you my current buy-, you want my buy box? Or like how I got to my buy box? Cause they're not necessarily the same thing.

[00:46:03] Ronald Skelton: Tell us both because I think it's, it's interesting because I know my current one wasn't the one I started with either. As a matter of fact I spent six months looking at coffee manufacturing companies thinking I wanted to be in that space because I could turn them into subscription models.

[00:46:15] Matt Bodnar: All right. I'll tell you, I'll tell you both. So my, my, my buy box is pretty simple. So I'm looking for companies, I'm based in Nashville. So Southeast based generally. About 1 to 5 million of EBITDA is kind of the sweet spot. I won't really go lower than that. Really prefer 2 million or more EBITDA, but I'll look it's up with one.

Maybe go a little bit bigger than that, but that's kind of the strike zone. Typically looking for family founder owned businesses, um, industry agnostic. So I'll look at really any industry. But you know, with a focus around, uh, kind of what we talked about, right? Like I'm looking for folks who don't necessarily want to sell to some big private equity firm.

I'm not interested in being the highest bid at a 40 person auction. I'm looking for companies that want to find a home and somebody to take care of their business. And you know, that's how we have kind of a diversified portfolio of stuff that we've come across. And our goal is to, uh, hold these businesses for the long term and, and continue to operate them.

Obviously, we'll sell things if, if we get a ridiculous offer. We feel like it's the right strategic timing in the market or whatever. But we typically want to hold, you know, in perpetuity. And so I'm really looking for often ends up being kind of manufacturing, industrial services, general business services, that kind of stuff.

But those are broadly the areas that I'm, that I'm currently the most active or most interested. How I got there, I read too much Warren Buffett, right? So I basically, I said, Hey, I want to buy, I want to buy longterm enduring businesses. I want to buy them, in a way where they're not super expensive.

And you know, I don't want to like one of my, my IT business, we actually spun a software company out of it. And when I first started wanting to do additional acquisitions and we bought another software business into that software company as well. I was like, Hey, I want to go buy software companies because I love software.

It's like one of the best business model that exists, right. But what I, you know, what, what you know very quickly, if you do anything in software, it's like software companies are crazy expensive. And I mean, they trade for five times revenue. I mean, it's kind of all over the place. It could be two, three times revenue.

It could be 10 times revenue. Which is massive. And so you can't do a lot of these creative deal structures are way, way, way, way harder to do for a software company, right? Cause if you need to come up with, 10 times revenue or even five times revenue might be like 30 times EBITDA, you know what I mean?

Or a lot of them burn and don't have any EBITDA. So it's like, you're not going to be doing a leverage buyout. You're not going to be doing some sort of asset based deal. You're not going to be doing a sale lease back where you sell them their warehouse back. So to, to have deals that are more attractively priced, I typically play in the manufacturing space, and it's all about buying them at the right price, holding them long term for cashflow and hopefully they're, uh, enduring businesses that aren't, you know, are hard to disrupt. 

So like, if you're manufacturing some industrial component, hopefully maybe AI can enhance your business, but hopefully it's not going to vanish overnight. If you're fabricating componentry for, for like the domestic power grid, hopefully that stuff is like relatively enduring. So, uh, that's sort of how I structure my buy box. 

[00:48:59] Ronald Skelton: I really think there's a space here in this industry to, just really look at things and optimize things differently because you're talking about the medical supply company. I had an opportunity to chat with the medical supply company in the first part of this, and I really wanted to work with the guy.

Funny thing was, is when he got on the phone with me, he's like, I don't know why that guy told you it was a referral. Because I don't know why he told you I wanted to sell this business. I would never sell this business. This is my cash cow. And uh, I was like, okay, so talk, it goes, but I am curious about what you're doing and everything.

So we chatted for probably an hour or two. And turns out he's a retired fire chief. He has a medical supply shop and he only sells to fire and ambulances. And he basically everything in his medical supply goes into a fire truck or an ambulance, right? So that's all he does. So there's no wheelchairs or walkers.

Basically, if it, if it doesn't go inside of a fire rescue or an ambulance, ambulatory business or something, the emergency room. Like a triage type of thing, he just doesn't carry it. And, he was doing, I want to say two and a half, 3$ million a year revenue. A six figure high, six figure and a mid six figures profit.

But he's only doing like six cities. He's in Oklahoma. He did Tulsa of course, right? He did Oklahoma city. I think he went to Kansas city, Missouri and Kansas city, Kansas. Like basically if you could get there and back in an hour and a half, two hours, he was working with that. But he didn't do anything online.

He didn't do anything else. And, uh, I was like, there was just so much and he didn't hit any of the small towns and he has a small ambulatory services or anything like that. He just went and got four or five of the big contracts from these bigger towns and that was comfortable. He hit his comfort zone.

So, uh, that said,there's a lot of those companies out there. You look at them and go, you know what? With a little bit of marketing and a little bit of salesmanship, this could be doing two X, three X what it does now. Like he had room in his pocket. Even had room in the warehouse he was using. He wasn't at capacity anywhere. 

[00:50:53] Matt Bodnar: Tons of low hanging fruit in a lot of these, these baby boomer businesses and these blue collar, it's kind of industrial ask distribution businesses, et cetera. Tons of low hanging fruit.

[00:51:02] Ronald Skelton: He had two sales rep. They were both retired firemen and they only wanted to work eight or ten hours a week themselves, right? So he had no, like, but nobody was working full time in this thing at all. So, uh, yeah, if you really, if you took it serious, like, what could you do if you really seriously went after this.

That said, uh, there's a lot of those businesses out there, so there's a huge opportunity here. How do people find you, work with you, get your material? Because I know you put a lot of information out there. I know,like, I see, I, I was teaching you beforehand. I was like, I see your ads everywhere.

That's 'cause I, I, I clicked on one once and it's following me. You're doing a really good job online 'cause they follow me around. So if I'm on Facebook, I see something from you. If I, you know, which is good. But, uh, how does somebody like reach out to you? What is the best way to either bring a deal to you that you might be interested in? Or, just kind of be on your newsletter and see what you're doing and kind of, participate with you. Maybe even do a deal with you at some point.

[00:51:52] Matt Bodnar: Yeah, absolutely. The easiest way to find me is, is my newsletter. So it's just mattbodnar. com. You can find my newsletter right there and sign up for it. And, I personally respond to every single email that I get. So if you sign up and send me an email, I'll, I'll write back. It'll just be little old me.

And you know, folks, send me deals on there. But I mean, I talk about all kinds of inside baseball, how I find deals, how I source them, go through tons of different sourcing methodologies, financing, case studies, and deal reviews and that kind of thing. So, if anybody wants to dig in deeper, my newsletter is, uh, packed full of tons of insights and strategies and,ways to talk about doing deals.

[00:52:28] Ronald Skelton: And I should have said this before the show started in our pre interview. It's always, always, always okay on our show to have a pitch or something. Do you have a course or anything like that? That people can do and learn or? We're still,

[00:52:38] Matt Bodnar: I don't yet. I'm potentially R and D'ing a course. So it hasn't gone live. We have, we don't have anything yet, but if you're, if you're on the newsletter, we have a wait list for if we launch a course in the future. So,

[00:52:49] Ronald Skelton: I just, I should have told you that ahead of time. It's always okay. As a matter of fact, I encourage you, like if you were still active in your podcast, we would promote your podcast too. I know that's kind of your side passion now. But I am a big fan and blue ocean strategies here. And anything you've got out there that people can work with you.

That's why you're here. You're out here to tell people who you are, what you're doing. And you would like, you'd like some really cool people to work beside you. Cause this is a team project, right? I appreciate it. Do you have, if, let's leave with this. We always, this is one of my favorite things to do at the end.

If somebody can only remember one or two things from the show, what would be the takeaways? What would you want people to, to know you for and to work on to be successful in this space?

[00:53:26] Matt Bodnar: I would say the biggest takeaway would be get on the phone and talk to sellers. And listen to them and build rapport with them. That's what the, that's the game. It's not crunching fancy numbers and, and hardball negotiating tactics and all that stuff. It's getting on the phone, talking to probably more people than you think you need to talk to, right?

Sellers, lenders, capital sources. And it's just a lot of conversations, but that's how you do deals. Is you've got to talk to people. And if you, if you're not doing that, then it's going to be really hard to get a deal across the finish line.

[00:54:00] Ronald Skelton: Absolutely. Well, I'll make sure you all your contact information's in the show notes so people can find it. Thank you for being here today, Matt. And we'll call that a show.

[00:54:06] Matt Bodnar: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Ron. Great conversation. Love to hear what you're up to and, uh, and talk about some, some fun, uh, things in the life of doing deals.