E148: Building a Fun and Profitable Portfolio of B2B SaaS Companies with Kevin McArdle

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Welcome to the How2Exit podcast. I'm here with Kevin McArdle, who is the CEO of Big Band software. And we're going to talk about mergers and acquisitions today. Thank you for being on the show, Kevin. 

[00:00:10] Kevin McArdle: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Ronald. Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:13] Ronald Skelton: I always like to start with the origin story.the year long joke or the last, I guess, year and a half long joke now is, hey, you were born, and then now you ended up on a show about mergers and acquisitions.

[00:00:21] Can you give me the, fill in the gap between. Yeah, fill in the gaps there. 

[00:00:25] Kevin McArdle: Yeah, I like that. I'll maybe skip the school part, but then my professional career has been a winding path, which I'm happy with where I ended up. But I like sharing that because especially young people think that it's supposed to be a straight line.

[00:00:39] And rarely is that how most careers end up. So I went to school in college thinking I wanted to be a high school math teacher for the rest of my life. So I was a math and secondary ed major. And, I was a high school math teacher right out of college and realized I just didn't love it. And I needed to try something else, before I kind of got stuck in that career.

[00:01:00] And so I sort of fell backwards into a software company called Cerner, which is based in Kansas city where I grew up. And, it's an electronic medical record company. It's giant was recently acquired by Oracle. When I joined, it was 3000 people doing 300 million of revenue, which is a great big company, but got acquired for tens of billions, I believe.

[00:01:25] And so I was there for 15 years and got to see how great software companies were run from the inside. I learned sales operations. I managed dev teams, managed big client relationships, got to do just about every job that didn't involve writing code. And then, had the opportunity to step out of that and start acquiring businesses.

[00:01:49] I had some smaller financial backers and I wanted to, try something different. And so did that, and that was, successful. I acquired 45 businesses in seven years. Provide a good return to investors. And then, realize along the way that there was a bigger, better way to do things.

[00:02:08] So while acquiring and operating these businesses, I was also trying to study the M& A world. Wish your podcast would have existed back then. But I listened to other experts in the field and just got to thinking about what fit my personality and what I thought worked and, what doesn't really not work, it just wasn't what I wanted to do.

[00:02:29] For example, most private equity, you raise a fund. You,hold those assets for a little while, you try to improve them and then you've got to pay off the fund. Meaning you have to sell your best assets. And I know you're a real estate guy among other things, Ronald. So if you've got a great asset that's performing well, that's not the one you want to sell, right?

[00:02:48] You want to sell off the stuff that's not performing well. The timing of funds and, always having to be ready to flip a business, that's great. It works for some people, it just didn't fit my personality. I studied, folks like Constellation Software and Roper Technologies and Berkshire Hathaway and these groups.

[00:03:05] Just aggregate great businesses and they hold on to them for as long as possible. And so with big band software, that's how we're structured. It's not a fund. It's a SaaS holding company. We only acquire B2B SaaS businesses and myself, my team, our investors are all aligned around. Build a great portfolio with no expectation that we ever have to sell a business.

[00:03:30] So that's what we're building now with Big Band. 

[00:03:32] Ronald Skelton: That's a huge win. I actually know of a couple, I had a guest on here on the show in my line of doing media asset and within a week he sent me a, he said, not just me, he said he blasted everybody new, I guess, with a exit he needed to do.

[00:03:46] And I'm like, why would you sell this thing? It's very profitable. He's selling it at the peak too. I'm looking for things I can improve, but you know, so it was out of my bailiwick, as far as what I was looking for, but it was a great asset. And I'm thinking, why would he do that?

[00:03:57] And then I realized, he's PE backed, and he's owned (that back those investors.) Yeah, he's owned that for three and a half years. It's time. He probably has a four year or five year or three year to five year timeline with these guys and they expect liquidity. I don't want to do that.

[00:04:11] So that's why I call mine a holding company is I don't have intentions. I'll probably sell some of them, but my intentions is that, take these, grow these, keep these. And, if I actually, I'll exit the whole package at some point in the future. I'm 51 now, so maybe 10 years from now, I'll get bored with this, right?

[00:04:27] Kevin McArdle: Yeah. Even if at a portfolio level, I like to say buy and hold is our business strategy, it's not our religion. If it's the right thing for a particular business to sell it, I want to do that because I want to, not because I have to, because of fund timeline or I have to pay my investors back.

[00:04:44] For example, we buy a business for $10 million. And after a couple of years, we've got it marked at, we think it's worth 20 million, but somebody is willing to pay me 40. Yeah, we're going to have that conversation and I'm, I may be happy to part with that business for 40 million because they think it's worth more than I do.

[00:05:00] But the point is that you'd make the right decision for each portfolio company. At the right time you don't just liquidate everything because you have to pay investors back. That's what I wanted to build.

[00:05:10] Ronald Skelton: I did the same thing inside of the real estate had a piece of real estate, somebody called me up.

[00:05:13] So they wanted it. Like that's not for sale. And then when they offered me something I was like, yeah, it's for sale. It was a location. It was a perfect location. They just legalized something in Oklahoma and this was like right in the area where,it would be a great, it was acreage too.

[00:05:27] It had a few acres on it and they could put greenhouses on it and stuff like that. They're willing to pay way over market rate for it. And I was like, okay. Sold . 

[00:05:34] Kevin McArdle: Yeah, there you go. It's a great example of what I'm talking about. You just make the decision based on the business, not 'cause you have to sell it like your friend that you were talking about.

[00:05:42] Ronald Skelton: And it's the same thing goes with these, if your business, to some people, something you hold might be a strategic advantage for them to have, and they're going to pay you a premium over. You think it's worth 20 and they're willing to pay 40 because strategically it adds, 45, 50 to their bottom line.

[00:05:55] So why Big Band Software? Why that name? To me, it's Big Band Software. Big Band sounds like fun, and by looking at your website, that's kind of the vibe I get. Like, hey, you're going to try to take something that, I get the vibe, maybe I'm wrong, that you're going to take something that looks mundane and drag out a little pain from people and put a little life into it.

[00:06:15] Kevin McArdle: Yeah, that's part of the theory. And, yeah, I appreciate you saying it looks fun. It is. So when I had the chance to, take out a clean sheet of paper and map out what I wanted big band to be, there were requirements of the investors I wanted to work with and their time horizon, size of check, number of investors.

[00:06:34] There were individual people that I knew I wanted to work with. And then there were just sort of like cultural things that I wanted to be a part of the company. And I built my career on, treating people the right way and, not taking advantage of folks and things like that.

[00:06:48] Things that unfortunately are quite common in the m and a world, the private equity world, however you want to describe it. And one of the things I wrote down is I want it to be fun. And so when we were working on the brand, and I had all this with no, without the name.

[00:06:59] And I have two partners in the business, Chris and Jason that are on the website. If anybody wants to look at their backgrounds, but,we just started thinking about what do we want to call this? And, I had a couple of rules. We're not going to name it after a body of water like every other private equity firm does.

[00:07:13] We're not going to name it anything related to space because constellation is the biggest example of what we're trying to do. And I don't want to look like a follower. It can't be anybody's street that they grew up on because that's a cliche also. So we had a lot of things that we didn't want to do because at a basic level, we wanted to stand out and be different from what the most of the, and we are a software holding company. 

[00:07:35] I don't like, calling us a private equity firm because we're not. We do most everything different than P, but at its core, we are using private money to acquire private businesses. So technically that's what we are.

[00:07:47] And so with the brand and the name, we wanted to, in many ways, look the opposite of those firms and all those firms have boring websites that are all blue and green. And, doesn't look that fun. It looks like they've got a lot of smart people who know how to write graphs that go up into the right, but that's just not, what we wanted to be about.

[00:08:05] And, we started, uh circling around musical names because it's fun. And, a couple of us are musicians, though, not very good. And,it just clicked and was easy for us. And,I know you,you mentioned off camera that we were, you were into flipping websites back in the day.

[00:08:21] And a lot of great names are taken and, but big band, I was shocked to find out like it, it wasn't, it was there and we loved it. As we kept working on it and thinking about it, a big band is a bunch of musicians that are specialists in one thing or another coming together to make a sound that no one of them could create on their own.

[00:08:39] And that's kind of a description of a great company in a lot of ways too. And no matter what type of music people like, almost everybody I know loves some type of music. That music feel, that vibe just kind of makes people smile. And, in a perfect world that's what our business will do too.

[00:08:56] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things is I used to be a domainer. One of the guys I interviewed this last week, his CEO is the, founded SEDO or S E D O. I don't know how to pronounce it. Which was a, basically a parking site and a domain trading site sold years ago, but, I actually had a friend slash performance coach.

[00:09:14] We were chatting and we were talking about what I was going to name the holding company. And he's just do what everybody else does, pick your favorite color in the tree in your front yard. So it came this close to my holding company to be called blue Sequoia because I'm in the redwood forest.

[00:09:26] But it was, blue Sequoia was actually taken by the way. It was just one of those, so I choose something else. I chose, a mythical creature that it brings in wealth, it's called a Peixiu.

[00:09:36] It's a dragon looking lion that, I think it's a Chinese or Japanese culture they put in front of, in the Feng Shui. But media holding, but you know, it's still saying it's cliche, right? It's just one of those, it wasn't taken. It was kind of symbolic of some sense.

[00:09:50] And it wasn't blue Sequoia because after I thought about it deeply, I was like, ah. That's how a lot of these, your favorite color and the favorite thing.

[00:09:57] Kevin McArdle: At the end of the day, a name is a name, but like a website, a brand, a culture, a vibe, that's what people remember.

[00:10:05] And all that takes a lot of work and it, it doesn't matter what name you pick. The hard work is making it mean something to you and your team and the rest of the world. 

[00:10:13] Ronald Skelton: So let's take this show, I started this show cause I was looking at maybe becoming a broker. When I came out of the, real estate space becoming a business broker and then decide I just, the barrier to entry was so low. A buddy of mine bought a brokerage, and said, Hey, I'll just, make yourself a business card and call you a broker.

[00:10:33] And I was like, don't I have to take some licenses? This is Oklahoma. Some states have licensing, like Oklahoma has no licensing or anything. And I thought, oh man, that means that all the other guys in town have, may or may not have the, the credentials, that bought and sold things or anything.

[00:10:48] So let's talk about your investment thesis. I'm kind of curious out of the 45 or 50 companies you and your team have bought in the past. Was there a theme? Were they all software based?

[00:10:58] Were they roofing companies or heat and air and now you're in software? 

[00:11:01] Kevin McArdle: I mean, all tech, because that was my background. And then pretty quickly I started to focus on B2B SaaS, but in SaaS software as a service for those of your listeners who are in more of the plumbing and heating and air stuff, cause that was my background after being in tech for 15 years, that's what I understood.

[00:11:19] And, knew the economics of it, knew how to run a good software company. And and my partners both also worked in technology and software. And so our focus to answer your question, we're buying. Business to business software companies. From one to 10 million in annual revenue, we want them to be profitable and we want them to be growing.

[00:11:40] And beyond that, like we're industry agnostic. I'd love to be in a hundred industries in the next five years. and as long as it's a B2B profitable growing and in that size range, we're interested. 

[00:11:53] Ronald Skelton: Where are you located and does demographics come into play at all? 

[00:11:56] Kevin McArdle: I'm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One of my partners is in St.

[00:12:00] Paul,same metro area. And then our third partner is in Phoenix and, geography, it doesn't matter. It's just, it's easier to get to a deal that everybody likes if it's us based or certainly North American, we look at deals all over. We're open to an acquisition from anywhere in the world, but, if it's a stock sale or asset sale, that sort of impacts what's good for the buyer versus what's good for the seller.

[00:12:24] but we're, geography doesn't matter. I've worked in a remote context for most of my career. working with teams that are not in the same office as me just comes supernaturally and I'm, I'm more about like, where's the best business opportunity and not looking within a hundred miles of where I happen to live.

[00:12:40] Ronald Skelton: I always ask, cause some people are very interested in staying local and I should, I said demographics when it should have been geography. I'll acknowledge my, my slip up there. Yeah. The, is there any other characteristics of the business, so it's B2B, like there's all kinds of B2B plays, a lot of people think just B2B is CRM tools and, but there are tools inside of industries, there's, there's actually, B2B, so it's B2B.

[00:13:05] SAS companies that collect instrument data from machine shops and help report when things need to be repaired and track wear and tear, I know a guy that he sells sensors that go on machines that detect vibration and can tell the owners when they need to start changing that, just. 

[00:13:24] Kevin McArdle: We looked at a similar company.

[00:13:25] I can't really talk about details cause we're under NDA, but, yeah, like a combination of sensors that measure something and software that translates that to the user. other characteristics I would say, typically given the, so I mentioned one to 10 million in annual revenue, so we're, potentially flying below the radar of the big enterprise software that people are used to seeing, and that's fine.

[00:13:48] We love niche software. part of what I like about the holding company model is that we don't have to have a plan for, we're gonna sell this to Google in, five years, or we're gonna sell this to Atlassian in five years, which is a massive software company. For those that don't know, we're happy to own a niche software business, that can just exist on its own and we can grow it and help it be healthy and profitable and we don't have to look for that exit.

[00:14:15] And so that allows us to be. I would say more open to different businesses than other people might. And so it could be the most obscure niche you've ever heard of. and I love using examples of this, but you know, most deals were under, if I, you've described the niche too much, it might disclose, but one that I can share that was on an example of something that, I hadn't even really considered, even though like once, once you see it, it's there, we looked at a software company years ago.

[00:14:42] So we're long past the NDA. period that was automating the work of longshore men and women at, ports, right? historically there's somebody tracking what's coming off a ship. That's, moved from halfway around the world and they're using a clipboard. this software quite simply just turned that clipboard into, ones and zeros and digits.

[00:15:03] So that it was automated all kinds of benefits for both the ship, the, the user, the ports to just automate the whole process. And it was one of those things that like. I didn't even, I'd never, I don't know anybody that does that job. It's a job that sure. Now that I know, obviously it exists, but it wasn't something I thought of, but that type of like super niche software, the types of things that we love.

[00:15:26] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I find,I discover software tools and stuff. You just never thought people would create or didn't know they existed. I did a two year, leadership development program with a guy who was the CEO of a software company that their software, I'm probably going to butcher it. If Travis hears me, I don't mean to butcher your business, but they do, insurance, they make a connection between like insurance agents and insurance carriers and the underwriters and standardize the forms as often.

[00:15:51] He's actually there's no standardized set of forms and stuff. So he's actually lobbying and creating groups and helping create some standards in there, but their software helps make that connection between like when two insurance,Companies have to co pay on something or whatever the forms and stuff and the connection but, 

[00:16:08] Kevin McArdle: once you start looking into it, like most, every one of your users uses some type of software, whether it's on their smartphone or on their laptop, but once you start digging into it and really understand,in a, in my job, our, we look at. Literally hundreds of deals each month and try to pick the one or two that we are most excited about that.

[00:16:27] We want to work with the seller to like, see if we can find a deal. It is near infinite. The amount of software companies that are out there in the world, because every time where there's two businesses that have trouble talking to each other, that's an opportunity to create software to make it work.

[00:16:41] Every time there's somebody using a clipboard for anything, software opportunity, anybody that's still using. Excel or Google sheets in their workflow. That's an opportunity to build a software company. And so there are tens of thousands of software companies out there in the world that your users may not realize even exists.

[00:16:59] They may never hear about in their lifetime, but it's a great business because it's helping somebody do their job. Better, faster, more predictably, more profitably, and therefore it's a business that, big band would be excited to acquire. And the other exciting thing about our space is that it is so cheap to start a software company.

[00:17:20] Gone are the days where you need to raise venture capital just to get, servers in your basement to run your company. Amazon and AWS has made that super easy for everybody. And, Microsoft's got their version, et cetera. But, it is close to free to start a software company. So you still need a great idea.

[00:17:39] You still need grit. You still need hard work. You still need customers who are willing to pay you for that idea. But the barrier to entry is super low from a cost perspective. So thousands of new software companies are sprouting up literally every day, which is exciting for people like us. 

[00:17:55] Ronald Skelton: I remember in the early 2000s, I created an online dating site that cost me nearly all my money at that time.

[00:18:01] Yeah. Almost. That was, not just you, that's how it works. Yeah. and like I had 27, I think at the peak programmers, designers and stuff like that around the world, from anywhere from India to stuff. So that was a big. chunk of the cash that we spent, but also the big chunk of the cash was the servers.

[00:18:21] And,when my current wife now, when she met me, I had 13, one, you servers underneath the bed in my, apartment, like running off,the, like the, it was cheaper to get the,to get the internet connection at the house could back then. I don't even know what it is right now, but it was insane for a commercial.

[00:18:40] Bandwidth, like commercial bandwidth was 15 times what residential bandwidth was costing. So it was cheaper to get up, get the fat pipe, go into the house. And it was to get one, go into the office. So I built, I brought all the servers home one day and it ran faster, but it was like all the VPN software, all the clustering, all the tools and stuff like that, the, that ate up a lot of the funds too.

[00:19:03] So I can get that. That's all. And then. Like we did something small a year or two ago and I built it all on a WS on Amazon. And it was like, wow, this is you only pay for what you use the cycle as you turn inside. And that was pretty impressive how cheap it was. 

[00:19:17] Kevin McArdle: Cheap to get it started. Now they get you at the end, they're going to get paid, but, entrepreneurs today at least have that bit a little bit easier.

[00:19:23] Now the flip side of that is it's ultra competitive, right? Like I follow a lot of people online who, point out slash complain that, copycats are easy.

[00:19:32] Ronald Skelton: So we had a little bit of audio issue. We lost you at something, just a second ago. So I do believe we were, where were we? What were we talking about there? 

[00:19:41] Kevin McArdle: We were talking about how like the cost of launching a new business is way less than in the past.

[00:19:46] The flip side of that is that it might just be more competitive. So it's easy for people to copy an idea. and start a, copycat business. So it's not that entrepreneurship itself is easier these days, but the cost to entry, the cost to get started is lower, which I think is good.

[00:20:04] Ronald Skelton: No longer who has the best ideas, who has product market fit first, right?

[00:20:09] Kevin McArdle: Who has the most money, which I think is wonderful for the world and for entrepreneurship. And yeah, you still have to have a great idea. You have to be. It's more about execution. And so yeah, getting to product right team. Do you know how to run a business? Those are the, those are what we're competing with. Not who can raise the most money.

[00:20:30] Ronald Skelton: Okay, cool. So now does that make the pool of things you have to look through harder to I mean, you've got more and more to look through, but are there. I guess it's just diamonds in the rough, right? There's part of me that says it would be better if there was a little bit more barrier entry, because then you got fewer qualified candidates to look at, and then on the other side. Now you get to, like, how do you, the real trick I guess I'm looking for, and I'm kind of stumbling on how to say it, is how do you sort through all that, that haze, right?

[00:21:01] There's gotta be a haze of, there's a million software companies out there that are almost on the cusp, but you know, they should be on your radar, but how do you start filtering through those?

[00:21:10] Kevin McArdle: I'll tell you a couple of different ways I think about it. If you compare it to owning a car, which is an easy comparison that people don't understand, like in some ways, it's do we really need a hundred companies?

[00:21:21] And you, especially if you look outside of the United States where you and I happen to live, there's hundreds of car companies. And each one of those has a dozen models going back 20 years that are probably still drivable. And it's like this, it's too much choice. But then when you go to a big dealer.

[00:21:36] You want that choice because you want something that fits perfectly the type of car you need for you and or your family, what your person is, what you like, and so I think of that in terms of businesses, yeah, our job might be easier if there were only 10 companies for me to look at in a given month, but I'd rather have the choice and I'd rather look at two, 300.

[00:21:57] And be able to narrow it down to what I'm most excited about. And so it does make our job a little bit more difficult, but,and there is a bit of haze and kind of looking for the needle in the haystack. But, our criteria is pretty wide open. We're not focused on a specific industry or sector.

[00:22:16] B2B SaaS is a big universe, as I already described. Then, okay, are you profitable? That narrows the universe a great deal. Are you growing? That narrows the universe. Are you between one and ten million dollars in annual revenue? That narrows the universe. And it's still a big universe, but it allows us to focus and it allows us to be great at evaluating those types of businesses.

[00:22:39] And me and my partners have been doing this for, combined, three decades. And none of us is that old. I'm saying like, we've all been in the business for a long time. And so we've gotten pretty good at realizing what's a good business that we want to spend some time and energy on.

[00:22:54] Or what's something that maybe isn't good for us right now, but we can follow the seller and say, look, you're not as profitable as we would like to see. And so let's stay in touch and in six months, let's check in and see where your profitability is there. So again, back to being a holding company, we've got a lot

[00:23:17] forever. We might not buy the business, but we have the luxury of saying Hey, check back in six months, check back in a year. And our answer might be different.

[00:23:28] Ronald Skelton: So now that we've covered some of that, what about what is the culture you're looking for? Is there a cultural type of environment in the company? And then, once we cover that, are there absolutely red flags?

[00:23:38] Okay, if this is just something I don't want to be. Every business, every industry has, cultural type of things that happens. I know the tech industry does. I came from the dot com area, right? Where, I worked at insight. com and it was in its heyday. And,we had slides that went from the first floor to the second floor and we had a beer trucks that showed up every other Friday and we'd have, keggers outside.

[00:23:57] And, but, what are some of the cultures you're okay with? And what do you, what are you looking for as far as company fit for, does culture matter? Does the, like the development environment matter? 

[00:24:08] Kevin McArdle: Culture matters a great deal to me. And yeah, I'm never worked at a place with a slide. Big fan of beers at work, but actually I think culture is way beyond things like that.

[00:24:18] It's what, how do we treat each other. What behaviors are acceptable and rewarded and incentivized and what behaviors are not acceptable. And I think the culture that really matters is more important than, beer and snacks at the office. I sort of was brought up rearwise in a work hard, play hard culture.

[00:24:37] I like to inject that into my business. I like to say we take our business very seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. it's important that we do a good job for ourselves and for our investors and for the people that are, just enough to sell us there, but I treat that as a big responsibility to take care of that business and be a good steward of that business.

[00:24:59] But, we're not brain surgeons. If I have a bad day, nobody dies. I just like to remind myself and anybody else in the tech world,don't get an overinflated view of yourself or what you're doing, no matter how big the business in the tech world, if it goes away.

[00:25:13] Something else will replace it. And yeah, the culture is very important to me and it boils down to just how do we treat one another? And,I'm a big fan of life work balance. I put it in that order, with purpose at work. It's not, it should not be as important as whatever we have going on outside of work.

[00:25:33] And if you kind of start with that premise in mind, it tends to put things into perspective. Like how important is it that this thing get done today. There are things that, it's important and there's times where we have to run a hundred miles an hour, but those should be balanced with times that we're not running that fast.

[00:25:48] Now, when it comes to buying a business, like it's a great thing if the person we're buying from has that same attitude, cause that's going to be a natural fit. Cultures are all different. Even if people kind of say the same things as I've just said, you really work with people to understand what the culture of their business is.

[00:26:07] And a lot of times you don't know until you, you're in it, you own it. And in our sense, what the culture really is behind the scenes, because everybody wants to put, a nice,spit and polish on their business when they're ready to sell it. And then once, once you own it, you see what's really going on behind the scenes.

[00:26:21] And One of the things that I have learned the hard way that may be helpful for your audience, whether they're selling a business or they're an intermediary, or they're buying a business is that businesses take on the personality of their owner for better and for worse, right? So if an owner is super disorganized and fly by the seat of their pants.

[00:26:43] You can bet that's how the company runs. And that might not be a bad thing, depending on who they are, that the other culture aspects of their business, if their team thrives in that environment, that might work for them, but as a buyer, you got to know what you're getting for somebody who's like very type A, very dialed in, everything's documented.

[00:27:01] No decision is rash. Their business is going to take on that personality as well. And that's neither good nor bad. It's just, you need to know what you're signing up for. And a lot of what we do at band is try to understand sellers, understand them as people, not just what are they trying to get out of the transaction, but how did they build their business?

[00:27:23] What is their origin story? Like you like to say, what were the good and bad parts of growing their business? Why are they trying to sell right now? Cause that helps us understand them as people, which then in turn helps us in a, non obvious way, it helps us understand their business.

[00:27:38] Ronald Skelton: Culture is important. Work life balance is important. I get it. Startups are startups and you got to put in the hours, but, that's the real reason I asked it. If I've seen something where, like for you, like you were talking about what is somebody hyper organized or somebody by the seat of their pants in a software environment, I'd want to see very well documented code, very well tested code and, which is not me by nature.

[00:28:02] If I write something, I always joke around and say I'm a functional programmer. And anybody who looks at that go, Oh, you write C. And I was like, no, I write the code until it does as it functions to do exactly what I want. And then I'm done with it. And, which means it doesn't work for anybody but me because it only works for my use case.

[00:28:16] I'm not a good one. That said, if you're looking at something to acquire something, there are certain things that have to be in play. How critical is it for you guys that the, like what's the word I like for a product market fit? If a customer, a company can be profitable and only have two customers. They can be growing and have two customers because the customers are needing, needing more and more basically.

[00:28:38] So is there a deeper criteria that, okay, this has to be a broader fix than, you call it, there's a risk factor to that, right? 

[00:28:46] Kevin McArdle: Yeah, sure. We've got a long, long list of buying criteria that involve customer concentration, which is sort of our term for what you're describing. How often do customers churn?

[00:28:56] You could be growing and profitable because you gain more customers each month, than you lose. But if you're losing too many customers, eventually you're going to, you're going to plateau it. So that's something we say, you could spend weeks and months looking at a business and trying to comb over everything.

[00:29:11] I described kind of our biggest filters so that somebody listening might be like, I fit those filters. 5 million and profitable and growing. Maybe I'll give Kevin a call, but yeah, like we analyze every aspect of a business because profitable there's like healthy profitability and there's like unhealthy profitability.

[00:29:29] We look at all those things and that's why, you go from couple hundred businesses per month that we see for the first time down to one or two that we're the most interested in. And as a seller of a business, I'm picturing, picturing somebody listening to this thing, like I'm that seat of my pants person.

[00:29:46] And I like making decisions on the fly and it does that mean that my business is less sellable? No, it's just, you gotta know what a buyer is going to be looking for. You're right. A buyer wants to have things well documented, you know what's going on, you know that there's a process, the team understands the process so that, the revenue and the profits are transferable to somebody else. And I have learned and I'm talking to myself when I say businesses take on the personality of their founder.

[00:30:13] One of the things that I'm not great at is like deep, deep details, but guess who is my partner, Jason. 

[00:30:20] So if you're the person who's seated their pants and not great at, thinking through decisions, you have somebody on your team that is, can counterbalance you and maybe, document the things, do the pros and cons, pull together a bunch of ideas before you just make a call.

[00:30:34] And so I like to think like we, if somebody has built a great business, kudos to that, however, they built it and nobody that's an entrepreneur that has built a successful business should look in the mirror and say, there's something wrong with me. And I should have done it a different way, or I wish I was different.

[00:30:50] If you've done it, you're in the top 1 percent of, the business world. And so you should pat yourself on the back. Just be aware if you're going to sell that business or when you inevitably sell that business, because that's what happens to almost every business in the world. This is what buyers are going to want to understand.

[00:31:07] And so the more that you can think through these things in advance. The more you can shore up the things that are maybe less strong about your business, that buyers are going to want to be strong, the more successful your outcome will be. And you want to, I believe you want to start doing that years before you think you're going to be ready to sell the business because many of these things take years to execute properly.

[00:31:32] For example, if I realize like I'm a. See to my pants type of person, I want an operator to balance me out, it's good. It might be take a long time to find that person going to take a long time to train that person. And that person might not work out. And we're talking months, years before I might feel like, okay, I've checked that box that a buyer is going to be looking at and I'm onto the next thing.

[00:31:53] And there's dozens of things that any seller could be thinking about and working on as they prepare for an exit. And so I just like to encourage people, get started on that stuff early years before you think you want to sell a business because all of those things that you might do to make a business more attractive to a buyer.

[00:32:12] Also makes your business better and easier to run and more attractive to people that want to come work for you. And the thing that a lot of people like daydream about, that's why they listen to your podcast. that's why they call people like us. But, having a great business to sell also means you have a great business to run.

[00:32:30] And so doing the work to get prepared is useful, even if you're years away from when you think you might want to sell. 

[00:32:38] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I'm definitely that seat of the pants type of guy, right? I need operators around. I don't like doing the same thing twice. I just, usually I joke around and tease people.

[00:32:46] It's like if I could get somebody to show up at the right time of the day, I'd outsource brushing my teeth. Like it's something that's repetitive.

[00:32:51] Kevin McArdle: What we know who you are. And I like lean into your strengths, right?

[00:32:54] If that's not your strength, that's something else is. And you, you hire somebody else to fill that gap. And so that there's a thousand ways that you can run a business. I think we all owe it to ourselves and our business to look at who we are. Think about what our strengths are, focus on those and try to find somebody else to fill in the weaknesses that we all inevitably have.

[00:33:15] Ronald Skelton: I think a great problem solvers are probably two to 3 percent of the planet. And then great operators are probably still only three to 5 percent of the planet.

[00:33:23] And so to match them up, I'm still looking right. In this space, anyway, in my real estate space, I had a great operator, I could go out and solve problems. We did some really complex real estate transactions. We did shorts, negotiated short sales and bottom as investors, really complicated.

[00:33:37] That said, I had somebody that, was really good and organized who could call the banks every day, negotiate and call banks every day and have teams of people project managed all the different negotiations that were going on. Sometimes 30, 40, 50 negotiations at a time.

[00:33:51] Kevin McArdle: I don't know if percentages you said are right or wrong. I haven't thought of it.

[00:33:54] But if the one, if 1 to 2 percent are, call it visionary problem solvers and, you 5 are operators. You also have the challenge of those two people have to get along and gel with one another.

[00:34:04] Cause you, each could be great in their own domain, but if they're not great together. It's not going to work. That's why, that's one of a thousand reasons why this is hard. Entrepreneurship is hard. Leadership is hard. Hiring is hard. And, if you can. And make it work, you've accomplished something incredible.

[00:34:24] Ronald Skelton: And I can tell you out of all the people I've interviewed and all the people, even before I got into this space, I had a habit of really getting to know business owners and how their business worked. I went to all the business networking things and I'm just fascinated by it. But an entrepreneur for most of my life, if a business was doing more than 5 million a year, I could almost find the visionary and the entrepreneur and every single one of them.

[00:34:44] I can't think of a single case where somebody was doing more than 5 million a year in revenue, where I couldn't identify inside of the company fairly quickly. Who was the visionary? Basically who had all the cool ideas and solve problems.

[00:34:56] And then who was the person that reigned them in and kept them on focus and kept the profitable side of things going and kept them from being too distracted. Almost every case. And a lot of times that, it'd be the operator, it was what I call them. It could be, there's other titles for it. But, the operator, is the person who's really organized, keeping the thing on track.

[00:35:14] It could be anywhere from the office manager, To 

[00:35:17] It doesn't 

[00:35:17] Kevin McArdle: have to be somebody with a fancy title. 

[00:35:19] Ronald Skelton: No, you'd be surprised who it is. Like it could be like a lead engineer of some sort, but he just kind of has his fingers and everything and keeps everybody on track and that's just their nature. 

[00:35:28] But they're there. They're almost every one of them. There's somebody there and there's, and I think companies, you can buy a company, put a great operator in and it'll run great for a long time, but I think in order for a company to really grow and thrive, you need both. You need the visionary and you need the operator.

[00:35:43] Kevin McArdle: I'm sure I'm telling you something that, what your listeners might not have heard of this, but Gino Wickman writes a lot about that. He's the creator of EOS and the book that describes that he calls them visionary integrator, what you're calling visionary operator, rocket fuel talks a lot about that and that's helped me in my business.

[00:36:01] And I think, any business owner ought to read. Traction, which is, I think is seminal book and then rocket fuel about this pairing and figure out which one you are and if, whichever one you are, like try to find the other one to pair with yourself. Cause I think the data bears out what you have found just in your conversations that most big successful businesses have that pair. 

[00:36:22] Ronald Skelton: I scored on, they have a test that you can do. I scored like 85 to 90 on the visionary side and way low on the other side. But, and I put a lot of people through that test and I have still yet to find my, like a great, most people that are really entrepreneurs score high on the visionary.

[00:36:38] So I've been having a, I've been having a rough time. I run business networking groups all the time. And one of the things when I find somebody I kind of click with, I like working with this guy. I say, could you do this for me?

[00:36:47] And they don't know why, right? They don't know why I'm having them. Hey, could you do this? Can you do this assessment? I'm always looking for somebody who's just comes back as a rocket integrator. Just like a rock star on that other side and I've interviewed them.

[00:36:58] The other one I interviewed the team that does the great game of business. I don't if you've ever read that book. They've acquired 60 or 80 companies by this, but, I love that and they work together really well. The great game of business and EOS or can pair up and work together.

[00:37:11] So that's my game plan is EOS and great game of business. And eventually even doing a ESOP, an employee owned, ownership program type of thing. Let's dive into, right now we're kind of at that point where we've talked about what you guys looking for, what you're acquiring, what's your time scale?

[00:37:27] Like you're looking to acquire one in the next, 12 months or you like six months?

[00:37:32] Kevin McArdle: As we're recording here in august of 23 we launched in march of this year. So the company's existed since december 1st to 22 Launched publicly in march. We have one business that should close by the end of the month we've got a couple others under letter of intent and so I mentioned our our buying criteria is a little bit smaller businesses, but we want to do so with a very high volume so like we're prepared and, ready to scale to the point where we can do 10 to 15 acquisitions per year.

[00:38:04] It might take us a little while to get to that scale, but yeah, like it's a, it, the business was built to do one a month, but we don't have to, And so that timetable of like acquisitions, we want to be. very high volume, very predictable. we've done this, I said between me and my partners 50 times.

[00:38:20] So that can, that creates a good experience for the seller. We know what to do. We know how to treat them. We know how to take over the business so that they have a great experience and we are able to do it at a very high volume. And then, for the, for my holding company itself, the timetable is, there isn't one it's potentially infinite.

[00:38:39] I'm in my forties, I'm prepared to do this for the next 20 to 30 years. our teams all signed up for something similar, life happens and there's no guarantee that we'll all be around for that long, but right. we're building this to be an enduring. Company, just like the guys and girls that run great game of business, that, that business will be around for generations.

[00:38:59] And that's what I'm aspiring to build 

[00:39:01] Ronald Skelton: with big band. I think one thing we did miss is operator, the CEO, you're looking for companies where the CEO wants to stay, go, does it matter? Can you work with both? 

[00:39:10] Kevin McArdle: Yeah, we can work with both. we're set up to, my job is to pair great businesses with great operators, because I find when, especially,independent bootstrapped software entrepreneur.

[00:39:20] So like we talked about what do we love? One thing that we don't love is venture backed companies because a, they're probably not profitable. Cause that's how venture capitalists tend to grow businesses. So they don't find their way to our doorstep, but if they do, it's rarely a fit. So when we're acquiring a business, it's probably from a bootstrapper, an independent entrepreneur.

[00:39:40] And when they're ready to sell, I, in my experience, they're just ready to walk away and that's fine. We've got an army of people that we have on speed dial that we can pair with great businesses and it becomes sort of a match making thing. Who's the right operator that we know that can take over this particular business in this particular industry.

[00:39:58] Now, in some cases, the seller might want to stick around because they've got more gas in the tank. I want to give themselves a nice payday, but they're willing to keep going and we can work with that too. So really. it's a custom model based on what the seller wants to accomplish.

[00:40:14] And if what they want to accomplish matches with what we want to accomplish, then we'll 

[00:40:17] Ronald Skelton: figure it out. Okay. the other question I have on that is, so there, stay versus go, does it, is it important, on like the number of employees that the company has or anything like that, or they're, it's just.

[00:40:29] It doesn't matter as long as it's built out right, because I've seen some of these, I've seen some of these, software tools and stuff, and you'd be surprised at how many of these 1 million to 10 million dollar companies are really lean, like they're done with. Yeah, I, yeah, I wouldn't be, 

[00:40:42] Kevin McArdle: but I'm sure your listeners would be.

[00:40:44] I'll give 

[00:40:44] Ronald Skelton: you a specific example of million dollar companies out there run on three people. 

[00:40:51] Kevin McArdle: one of the most famous, I think Instagram, when they got purchased by Facebook for a billion dollars, had 12 employees. That's an outlier for a hundred different reasons, but a specific one in my experience, we bought a business that was doing two and a half million a year in revenue and growing on their way to five without a sweat.

[00:41:11] Run by a single human being. So he wrote all the code. He answered all the customer support questions. He wrote all the content for his website and it was an amazing business now, super fragile because if that guy got hit by a bus, the business goes up in smoke, but no, that's one of the wonderful things.

[00:41:30] It can scale really big without necessarily needing an army of people. So to answer your question, team size is not. It is not an, a, an important, criteria that we decide to buy our business or not. if the business is built with the right team size, I don't care if it's one person or 50, one is almost never a good idea, but if it's, if it's, if they've got the right team set up to grow the business, the way that they want to do.

[00:41:55] Then we're happy to take on teams big and small and wherever they are. we talked about remote work. Like I don't care how they've built the business. If the business is healthy, we're 

[00:42:05] Ronald Skelton: interested. What about tech stack? Is tech stack important to you guys? It's important 

[00:42:10] Kevin McArdle: that the tech stack be.

[00:42:12] Healthy and current, but I don't care what language it's written in, what operating system they're using. as long as it's something where, it's not so incredibly obscure that you can't find engineers to work on it. we're, that's another one. Like one of the things I love about our business, like that is not important.

[00:42:30] I don't care if it's good and current and you're. there's not a mountain of technical debt that we have to deal with. Like we're interested. 

[00:42:38] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I've actually come across a few where,got really interested in the site and figured out it was built on a proprietary home built content management system.

[00:42:45] And if you know anything, the audience, not but if the audience do anything about moving a website from one tech stack to another, they understand that you change. And this site was getting 90 to a hundred thousand page views per month. And. Decent user base and stuff like that.

[00:43:00] All that SEO had 3, 000, 2, 800, 3, 000 backlinks across different, high quality size. All that dies. If you do that migration wrong, you don't get those super high risk. You don't get that link tree correctly. It's all high risk. they're moving it now and then we're going to reevaluate.

[00:43:14] Cause he's, he already had it scheduled to move. We're going to reevaluate it at the end of the move. And the company moved from their proprietor system to WordPress a couple of times already. I don't think they're going to mess it up. But I,I backed off when he said that yeah, we'll wait until that moves done.

[00:43:28] And I'll see how the links go. nothing like buying something that has 3000 broken backlinks and all your traffic's gone. So the, so the reason I asked about tech stack is that there's some prior. Developers I've decided are one of two natures. They either want to be like, they're kind of the nature where they just use common tools and they find something that works and they work it, or they think everything else is broken unless they wrote it and they build their own content management systems and their own development environments.

[00:43:55] And, I have another friend who, he had a software company. I think it's shut down now, but you know, he built everything himself from the ground up his, his own. Like he didn't use MySQL, he didn't use Oracle, he didn't use anything like that. He built his own database structure and his own development environment.

[00:44:09] And then he built websites on top of it. And he like, you'd have to train every employee that came in how to use his tools. And I was like, why? yeah. That's 

[00:44:17] Kevin McArdle: more efficient than hiring that person. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I get, there's,it's probably a good reason to do it, but, I think the healthier way to build and.

[00:44:27] Scale and more importantly, sell or as importantly, sell a business is you want it to be transferable to somebody else. And if you're the only human in the world that knows how the code works, that's not transferable. So yeah, using off the shelf tools, open source tools, just like common databases, common code language is absolutely the right thing to do.

[00:44:47] and so going back to that conversation about What I call annual exit planning, your friend, if he's thinking, okay, I'm not ready to sell the business, but what if I were in five years? And if a business owner really like starts asking themselves the questions that a buyer is going to ask, that's probably going to be uncovered and okay, or go talk to a few people that buy businesses, not like you're committing yourself to sell, but just.

[00:45:14] Have the initial conversation and see what questions they ask. And I bet every one of them would ask about the tech stack and throw up a red flag if it's a custom homegrown tech stack. then your friend could say, okay, if I want to sell this business in five years, what do I need to do today to get myself migrated to something that's a little bit more off the shelf, easier to find developers, common tools that everybody can understand.

[00:45:39] and therefore his business is more and he's going to get a higher valuation when he's ready to sell it. 

[00:45:45] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I've run into two or three of these where they're totally built. They built everything in house and, like I have a bad taste where I just know if you did too, the reason I have a bad taste for is I come.

[00:45:55] When I, my first job out of the military is working for Lockheed Martin, one of our first jobs was to move the U 2 spy plane mission planning system from VAC's computers. Solaris machines, which if you know anything about, Unix and Linux and stuff that exists, Solaris is gone now too. So they had to like, that was when I was there when I, at some point they had to move it again.

[00:46:15] yeah. So it's, I'm sure it's run on some form of BSD or Linux or something now, because who's out there that runs a Unix based system, right? In 

[00:46:24] Kevin McArdle: my experience, the U. S. government is not great about being on current tools, 

[00:46:30] Ronald Skelton: but we built a, I can't say too much because everything was so classified.

[00:46:33] We built a. Firewall system that was so it was a lot of it was security through obscurity. It was an operating system that I think we might've been the only person using on the planet. So if you don't like the OS itself was called digital MLS plus. which is if you know what, do you know what Solaris was?

[00:46:49] Unix? I remember the name, but yeah, that's about it. So Unix was a commercial version by Sun Microsystems that was done, Solaris was their operating system. They had an operating system that sat on top of that called Trusted Solaris, which basically allowed, the compartmentation of classified or, proprietary data.

[00:47:07] So you could say these packets on the data or these zeros and ones on the hard driver, confidential and more important than these. And it would wrap them and encrypt them in different ways. so the operating system itself can control that trust Solaris. digital had one called digital multi level security system plus, right?

[00:47:27] And, so we built an entire firewall system based off of that. And it turned around, I had to port it over to trusted Solaris, cause Digital Limitless Plus went away. They sold that software to a company called Panther or something, and then it went totally away. And then cause Compaq Digital did their thing.

[00:47:44] And, but I'm saying that the tech stack matters because if you're on something that very few people. Even if it's probably sold in commercial,like those were if the, if the, if it's proprietary and used only by the companies that sell it, and it's not got good, stable footing and eventually goes away.

[00:48:02] Then you're that's a red flag for sure. It's a big red flag. It's a big, it's a huge expense to port that stuff over. you're also spending 

[00:48:08] Kevin McArdle: time and energy and developer, time and money to maintain your homegrown software when you could be creating, features and new products for your customers.

[00:48:19] So that's another reason why I think it's just good advice to stay away from homegrown stuff whenever 

[00:48:24] Ronald Skelton: possible. these two weren't even homegrown, right? This was like digital compact, right? But no, I mean, your friend that, 

[00:48:29] Kevin McArdle: you said, created a, custom, content management 

[00:48:33] Ronald Skelton: system, things like that.

[00:48:34] It wasn't even one. I mean, I've run, I can think of four different times I've run into people where they built all their own tools, and I was like, why? it was, if you really dig into it, it turns out it was like their college, like their master's project. And they just built a company based on it later on.

[00:48:49] they were showing off to a professor at some point, like what it boils down to most of the time, I think, but, they were showing off to a professor at one say, here's what I can do. And then the next thing I know, they've got this whole thing built off of it. But I was taking it a step above saying there are commercial platforms out there that the companies are not on good standing, good.

[00:49:06] Yeah. Still a technical risk, 

[00:49:08] Kevin McArdle: even if you paid for it. Yeah, totally agree. 

[00:49:11] Ronald Skelton: WordPress is ingrained in everybody. It's got 40 percent of the internet right now. But I think what's another content management system simulate? Was it Drupal? Like I wouldn't look, if I see a website on something like that, like how long is that going to be around?

[00:49:23] How stable it is? I start analyzing, do I need to port that over to something that's more WordPress or just,MySQL and HTML or whatever, You would, I would need to get it off of there. cause I don't know enough about it, but I was just trying to think. It doesn't have to be so proprietary in house if it's, if the tech stack was, either really dated or on something that could go away, that, that would be a concern, right?

[00:49:48] Kevin McArdle: Yeah. You want the tech stack to be stable and supportable. And, we don't want to be spending money on upgrading database instances. We want to be building features and products for customers. So other than just one, one of the, a number of things that could, make a business less desirable to, to buy for 

[00:50:04] Ronald Skelton: us.

[00:50:05] Cool. I think we beat this one in the ground a little bit. let's go one more step forward here. what's your dream business? I feel if you can on a, on your whiteboard, if you drew out exactly what you're looking for, I know they don't always exist, but,they're doing 5 million MRR.

[00:50:18] They have a customer base of X. I mean, is there a dream like, okay, here's our anchor company. We can really build something off of X, Y, and Z. if we found that. Yeah. I mean, I guess 

[00:50:28] Kevin McArdle: the opposite of the red flags that we look for, from technical perspective, it's solid on, on common tools that are, lots of people know how to build, 

[00:50:36] top end of our zone doing 10 million a year and annual recurring revenue, and if that business was, 30 to 40 percent margins, so like we can either reinvest and help it grow faster, or we know it's going to just be super profitable. one thing you mentioned, does the owner want to stick around or not?

[00:50:53] It becomes really compelling when the owner knows they want to step away, but they've been grooming a number two person, they've been developing their, whether it's the operator or whomever to be that next CEO, that's compelling for us because even though we're great at, finding great operators to plug into a business.

[00:51:12] Nobody's better to operate something than the person that's been in that business before. So that's pretty interesting, low churn, no customer concentration, say no customer accounts for more than 2 percent of the revenue that becomes pretty compelling. And if it's in a, it's a business in an industry that is easy for us to understand, right?

[00:51:31] So call it, selling to dentist's offices or doctor's offices. Any one of us has had that experience and we know kind of how that workflow works. it's not a red flag. It's not something we walk away from, but when we do find those niche industries, an example that I'm going to pull out of thin air, this isn't something we're under NDA with, but if it's software for a dog walking service, like I have a dog, I don't use a dog walking service.

[00:51:54] So I need to understand that a little bit more. so the dream business is one that's Big, growing, profitable, has the team. They could benefit from our expertise and ownership. And it's in a, and it's in a universe that we don't have to think hard to understand those are some of those like dream businesses and by the way, that also makes it really attractive to.

[00:52:15] A hundred other people that would like to buy that business. And so that might get expensive, but, yeah, that's the type of thing that, that I would love to 

[00:52:22] Ronald Skelton: see. That's interesting. when you thought about dog walking, the first place I went would be like cyclical businesses where in certain economies, they do really well and other economies, they might struggle.

[00:52:30] And the thing that came to my mind would be like oil and gas, like exploration, software tools and stuff like that. I. Certain markets, those things are rocking and, there's a lot of exploration done, new drilling is done all the time and the software that's required, there's a lot of software and tools that go into that space, and from all kinds of aspects.

[00:52:47] Yeah. 

[00:52:47] Kevin McArdle: If I'm, if I was in the oil and gas and I would be excited about software that the people doing the exploration. Use because if people are always exploring and the extraction is a little bit more of an easier one for folks to understand in terms of seasonality, I've got a very good friend who has a business that makes all their money during the holiday season in America.

[00:53:09] So like they lose money for 10 months of the year and then November through December, they make all their money that. Is not my style that terrifies me. I want something that's like super steady and boring, predictable month by month. And so that's another one of those things that's, on the dream business list.

[00:53:27] Ronald Skelton: I grew up in a painting remodeling business. I get that. Like when it's cold outside, a lot of people would just paint inside when it's cold outside. unless the house has power and heat, you can't even paint new builds on the, when the temperature drops and like in Oklahoma, like the temperature drops below.

[00:53:40] Back then, this was the 80s and 90s, when I was young and my dad owned a painting company and I was running it with him, temperature drops below 50, you shouldn't paint the wall, the paint can't dry into the wall, it just won't happen until off later. A lot of people like You'll see pictures of people, they would paint a house on like the whole inside wall, the sheet of paint is like drooping down and sagging.

[00:53:59] And I was like, that's okay. That's probably because either it was 110 in the house and the paint dried before it got into the pores, or it was 45 in the house or, and it got 30 at night and it froze before it got into the pores of that. I had to paint and they had, it has a cure rate that has to be able to bond and stuff.

[00:54:14] And, so it was very cyclical, there's certain times of year, you just couldn't do anything unless you found the raised condition where somebody had an empty house that was heated that, X, Y, Z, you were pretty much off during certain times of the year. I can get that. I, how do people get ahold of you?

[00:54:28] we've talked a lot about what are you looking for? what's your investment thesis is, what is the best way for people to get in contact with you, work with you and build a relationship with you? 

[00:54:39] Kevin McArdle: Yeah, three ways. So first my platform of choice, for communicating about my business and with other business owners is Twitter, which I'm never going to call it what Elon wants to call it now.

[00:54:50] I'm calling it Twitter. And so my handle is Kevin underscore McArdle and McArdle only has one C. People can find me on LinkedIn, search Kevin McArdle, big band, and easy to find me. And then finally our website, big band software. com. Sign up for our newsletter. We try to put out great content.

[00:55:08] It comes out first of the month, every month, guaranteed. We share what we know. We share articles and links from other smart people around the internet. We share, job opportunities will share, acquisition announcements and, podcast episodes from our podcast and so on and so forth. I would love any of your listeners that are at all interested in Big Band to find me on one of those three channels.

[00:55:31] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. I want to thank you for being here today. It was fun. We had a few technical difficulties, but, for those that are listening, if you see a few glitches, we're going to edit them all out, but you might see us pop or move or a little thing. It's great to have a few technical glitches there, but it was a blast, man.

[00:55:43] I thank you for being here today. 

[00:55:45] Kevin McArdle: Yeah. It was my pleasure. I really appreciate it. I'm glad you had me on. 

[00:55:48] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. We'll call that a show.