E188: Valsoft's Investment Partner Costa Tagalakis, Discusses Their Successful Acquisition Strategy

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello and welcome to the How2Exit Podcast. Today I'm here with Costa Tagalakis. Thank you for being here today. Will you say your name for me? So the audience gets it, right?

[00:00:08] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, of course. Thanks, thanks for having me, Ron. My name is Costa Tagalakis. I'm one of the investment partners at Valsoft Corp Canadian software acquirer.

[00:00:16] Ronald Skelton: Cool. So, yeah, it's like when I first started the show, the funny thing was, is I don't care if your name was John Smith. I butchered every single name out of nerves, but, yours is fairly unique. So I wanted you to say it to everybody. Let's just do what we always do in the show. Start off with your origin story. The company you're working for now has a tremendous track record of acquiring companies. We'll get a lot of that information out during the show, but kind of start off with who you are, how you got into this space, and then we're going to build up to, uh, the, the company.

[00:00:46] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, sure. That sounds great. So, my background, I actually grew up in an entrepreneurial family. So my dad was actually in the restaurant business, still is in the restaurant business. So that was really my first exposure to, you know, small, medium sized business.Seeing, the ups, the downs, the challenges, the fun times, in that business.

And, I grew up, from the age of, 10 or 11 years old, spending my summers working with him in the kitchen and working at the restaurant.Seeing the way you have to make decisions. And, really the things that matter to someone who owns their own business and, this was a family business actually started by my grandfather. 

So, second generation operator as well, right? So, Restaurant business was great. I really enjoyed it. My family, really enjoyed it as well, but at the same time, my parents always instilled at a young age, they wanted me to, go to university, get a degree, decide if that's really what I wanted to do or if I wanted to try something else and, ended up going to school.

I knew that I was really interested in business, just from the family background. That was something that, I knew from, uh, I would say probably high school. I didn't want to go into, engineering or the sciences or something like that. I felt like business hit more close to home or it was, or something, more aligned with my personality and what I liked.

So I ended up deciding to study finance, because I found it, intellectually stimulating. It was a fun topic. I like math. It was a good blend of business and math, which made a lot of sense for me. And then, graduated university, and figured, you know, and I have this degree.

Let me go find work with this degree and ended up working in investment banking in the bond market at a Canadian firm in Montreal, which was great experience. Definitely intellectually stimulating, but at the same time, it felt like it was lacking for me because it didn't have that entrepreneurial element.

Now, the great thing about going to university and schools, I met some of my best friends. One of my best friends, Joe, luckily enough, ended up being one of the very early hires at Valsoft. And so while I'm working on my other job, we're talking, I'm learning about Valsoft and, and, I hear the cool things that are happening. And aside from, an interesting opportunity to invest and grow, software companies, it just seemed like a great group of people who were having a great time and like, it was an adventure, right? And that really got me thinking and I said, you know what? I want to be part of this and that was 2018 and, you know, the rest is history.

[00:02:59] Ronald Skelton: So Valsoft is a serial acquisitions company. 

You guys have grown through acquisitions. I think you were saying beforehand, better than 90. acquisitions now. And, when did you start? When did our Valsoft start?

[00:03:15] Costa Tagalakis: So Valsoft was founded in 2015. Sam and Steph are 2 co founders, they had obviously studied, a lot of, the successful, public companies that have done, the public, Hold co model. Or, you know, some of the successful serial acquirers or, compounders. They studied, capital allocation and, read, dozens, if not hundreds of books on, business and investing.

And, they like the economics of software businesses. They saw it as an attractive space. They always you know, like technology investments. And so they said, let's try this out. See if we could acquire a software business. We'll focus on vertical market software, B to B niche B to B, software.

And let's see if we could acquire business do well with it. And if that works, we'll scale it up and we'll try to make other acquisitions with, the cash flow generated from the first one, right? And that was really the idea.

took about a year to do the first acquisition. and, you know, in 2016, we acquired Inquest, which was,and still is, uh, a hotel property management software based in, in Florida.

Great business. We were very fortunate and our founders always talk about it. They say, we were so lucky that Inquest was the first one because it was a great business. I don't want to say an easy acquisition or an easy integration, but, everything went right.

There wasn't any of those kind of wrenches thrown in things that could have kind of demoralize them and set them on a different path. And so it worked well. And at that point, they decided to start scaling up the team and, the following year, did two or three more acquisitions and then you know, following that 2018, that's when I joined.

We did about five acquisitions in 2018. And then, we've been gaining momentum, continuing to scale up and grow and invest in, in our M and A team, continuing to invest in, the value added,processes and playbooks that we're able to roll out at our companies and then continuing to grow internationally.

And today, you know, north of 90 acquisitions, I'd say half of them are U. S. based. Half of them are, Europe, UK, Australia based. And, we're really trying to set out and build a global presence.

[00:05:10] Ronald Skelton: So, and I see they're diverse, right? You have everything from, industrial kind of SaaS companies to, like you said, a hotel management, uh, software. Is there a common thread all of them? They're all software. They're all SaaS or what's the common threads that you look for?

[00:05:27] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. I'd say there's a few, so I'd say the majority of the businesses we've acquired, are typically founder operated businesses, right? So these are people,I've heard you kind of refer to them as accidental entrepreneurs a couple of times on the podcast and things like that.

They might have been, working in a hotel and the case of Inquest and said, there's a better way for me to do my job, or there's a way for me to automate or, you know, make my job more efficient. Let me go build a solution for that. And then that becomes something that they can now sell and they could build that business.

And, this is their life's painting, right? Like, this is their life's work. They don't just care about, making money. They care about, taking care of their employees. They care about taking care of their customers. These people are, oftentimes I would say pillars in their industry, right?

They're extremely well known, well regarded by the community that they serve. And, they're looking to sell a business to people who understand that right. A lot of us at Valsoft, we have that sort of entrepreneurial background or experience where, you know, I can, talk to a seller and say, you know what I get where you're looking for, because when the time comes one day, if it happens, the family business gets sold, I care a lot about, what's going to happen with it.

As much as we care about, you know what the money is going to look like because the financial picture is great. But you know what? That business has been there for, 60 years. We want to make sure that, you know, it's still a pillar in its community. And that, when we drive by, we could be proud that, we were part of that.

And that's what a lot of people are looking for. So I'd say that's kind of the,the personal side of it or the let's say the commonality from a personal side. From a business standpoint and from,business model standpoint the commonality is, these are always or all businesses that we've acquired that have, you know, a high mix of recurring revenue to total revenue.

So pretty predictable business model.Very strong customer relationships, strong retention, satisfied and happy customers. So, basically, they want to see you continue to win. They see you as a value technology partner. They want to see you continue to invest and build this business.

And that's really what we look for. We want to buy businesses where,this isn't,quote unquote horizontal solution that, could serve, 10 different industries and, doesn't know the intricacies of, of one in particular. We want to buy the businesses where, it's, for example, a workforce management solution, but it's tailored to, let's say a very specific niche, like, let's say cruise ships, for example.

And, they need to have certain, criteria in that sort of solution that, you know, is not covered,by another more horizontal solution. Like, that might be coming from a large horizontal player. So yeah, that's kind of the common thread, I would say.

[00:07:53] Ronald Skelton: So I noticed you said they're independently built and ran, kind of my, rephrase is the accidental entrepreneur. They just you know, they provide a solution. So does that mean you don't typically go after anything? It's got a big cap table, vc backed and raise capital and, and that route?

[00:08:12] Costa Tagalakis: So we do. We do buy it by a few businesses like that. I would say that,as we've gotten larger over time, and we've done more and more acquisitions, were coming across more and more of those opportunities. But a lot of times I think the businesses that we look at, the entrepreneur, the founders, they might still be running the business or,they might still be, involved in some capacity. Maybe not, you know the CEO, but maybe their head of sales or something like that. We've also done, you know a few corporate carve outs, which were great opportunities for us. Very good businesses.

They had really dedicated, motivated people. In those cases, I would say you had entrepreneurs, right? People who worked at a large corporate. Help build out this business unit. Maybe it wasn't getting the love and care within that, parent company that the business needed. And you know, we bought those businesses.

Given a new energy revitalize the team, been willing to invest, help them grow, help them really kind of flourish as a standalone company. And, today, some of those carve outs are some of our, Biggest success stories, right? Because we just gave that level of ownership to the team and that level of, decision making that allowed them to really kind of take off and, achieve, their vision ultimately.

[00:09:20] Ronald Skelton: Right. Now, does he, are you looking for businesses where the owner wants to exit? Or you are, most of these, the owner stays around and partakes in the ownership underneath you guys?

[00:09:31] Costa Tagalakis: I'd say I'd say it's a mix. I think the biggest thing is you have to be transparent, right? 

For us, we always say, we're a private company. We're flexible. We want to tailor a solution for you, right? We see ourselves as, we're selling a solution. What are we selling?

We're selling, a new home for your business. We're selling a new, outcome that you're looking for, right? And so if you tell me that, you know what, you want to sell. You want to be out within 90 days and you want to retire and play golf or head to the beach and, take it easy.

Be honest with us. Let us know. We'll work with you. We'll try to figure out a succession plan. Is there someone that's in the business that we can lean on? Or is there a management team we can lean on? Do we need to potentially look externally or, you know, bring on some talent? Or if you tell us that, you want to sell the business, but you want to stay on boardlet's talk about what that looks like and let's find a solution that's a win win for both sides.

[00:10:20] Ronald Skelton: I get it. That's cool. Most of the time when I ask that question amongst my guests, it's one or the other. 

Like, no, no, they have to stay. We're looking to, you know, grow. They get a second bite of the pie or what do you call it when we sell again, like PE firm style.

Or like, you know, no, we're only looking for people who are exiting, right? Well, usually it's one or the other. So it's good that you do a mix. 

You can custom, that's probably the only reason you're able to do. I was doing the math in my head and I don't want to do public math, but 2015 to 2000 now, we'll call it eight years going on nine years, right? 90 acquisitions.

90 acquisitions. And you started off with one and ramped it up. So that means that in the last few years, you've done more than 10 per year, right? How big is the team?

[00:11:01] Costa Tagalakis: So, so the M&A team itself is, is, probably right around 50 people.

[00:11:05] Ronald Skelton: Okay. That makes sense. 

[00:11:06] Costa Tagalakis: Today. So pretty, pretty sizable team. It's scaled up over time. 

We're organized as you know, call it five or six independent teams. So we all, we have that kind of healthy mix of collaboration and competition internally where, we want to see each other win.

And, that's one of the best things about our culture and our philosophy is that, we really are kind of, we see each other or we see ourselves as being, on a team on a mission, trying and win, right? But at the same time, you also want to be,doing well, right?

And you want to do well comparatively to others and hopefully thrive. So, so that's been fun.

[00:11:39] Ronald Skelton: So for those out there that have a business and they're wanting growth through acquisition, describe the teams. 

You have 50 people. You have five, six teams of eight to 10 people, right? 

How's that team laid out? Is like, you guys are all in one? You have somebody doing due diligence on the team? You have somebody doing introductions or you guys pass a deal along to different teams at different stages?

[00:11:59] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, I'd say that it's a pretty flat organization, right? We try not to have, you know, that, that sort of, functional, breakdown or kind of separation. 

Where, you get on the phone with Costa. Costa does the intro, signs and NDA with you, uh, funnels it along to, Bob. Bob does the diligence and then, passes it along to, let's say, kind of a nameless faceless decision maker and, you don't know, you don't know where you stand, right?

Usually when you're getting on the phone with someone from Valsoft,these are people that if they're not, a direct kind of decision maker with, the ability to underwrite and basically, cut a check ultimately, you're talking to someone who basically works directly with that person, right?

So, generally, I would say the way the team is set up, headed by an investment partner. So I'm an investment partner overseeing one of the teams. I have a team of call it 6 people that work with me. Each of those people is typically, you know, trying to basically build their own pipeline of opportunities.

They'll work on the diligence for those opportunities. They'll help kind of decide, is this a business that we want to acquire? Does it make sense? Does it have the characteristics that we like? We want to make sure that whenever we move forward with an offer, whenever we move forward to, you know, diligence or a letter of intent, we've had a very high level of confidence. that we want to move forward and that this is a good fit. 

So I'll usually get involved very early, if not from the first call, probably the second call, right? And at that point, that's kind of the way we're structured. So, so pretty flat. Everyone's pretty well rounded, pretty young team, I would say.

We, we have, you know, in that team,we're constantly trying and bring on, interns, new talent, trying and develop them. Have people growing. We've had some amazing success stories by doing that. And it's, you know, the great thing for us. And the thing that we love is that we've gotten to mold and kind of help shape people's way of thinking.

And ultimately, they embody the same values that made us successful in 2015, because at that time there were many people who were trying to do what we're doing, and, they didn't make it, right. And I think there's something special in our DNA and special in our culture and the way we try to do business that I think has allowed us to be successful.

So it's fantastic when we're able to influence and help people kind of develop down that road.

[00:14:08] Ronald Skelton: So, let's just step back to the, yeah, upwards to 50 people that are out there going through all the sources, looking at off market and imagining both off market and on market deals. 

I'm imagining at 90 acquisitions at this stage, you have companies reaching out to you and saying, Hey, we've got something for you. Hey, we'd like to divest of this software. Are you interested? Or, I mean, At 90, I mean, this is, it's like a, it's a big small town, environment. The, mergers and acquisitions space. I think, we like to think we're big, but it's more of a small town mentality, meaning most people know each other.

So, you have to be having that reputation in the field now as, somebody that the investment banks and the brokers can take a, a SaaS company too.

[00:14:52] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, definitely. I'd say half our acquisitions have been, brokered, uh, processes, that had an advisor and investment banker or someone else representing them. 1 of the goals that we've had over time has been to make sure that, we get that recognition. Right. And so, not only are we doing outreach to people and, sellers and business owners directly, but we're also reaching out to people who are involved in the ecosystem saying, this is who we are, get to know us. If you think there's something that's a great fit for us, we'd love to be part of it and we'd love to, provide a great outcome.

And it's been paying off, right? I think in 2018, when I joined at the time, we had never done a brokered acquisition. And today, you know, we've done quite a few. So, it's been successful.

[00:15:32] Ronald Skelton: I get it. does the buy box, buy box is something we use, I don't know. It's kind of an internal thing. Some people use it now. 

It's your criteria of like this size, this number of employees, this type of software. Does that changed over time? And you guys have regular, with 50 acquisitions managers, you guys have regular meetings going. Okay, here's what we're looking for right now. 

How does that coordinated and what the current search is for?

[00:15:54] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. I'd say there's a few criteria that don't change at all, right? We're always looking for businesses that have, north of 90%, gross revenue retention. We're always, focusing on, on, vertical market software businesses or niche B2B software businesses, right?

That, that's kind of table stakes for us. But, a lot of the other ones, they have shifted over time in the sense, you know,if we acquired, a $10 million business, that would have probably been something like, 30%, 40 percent of Valsoft's revenue, right?

So there was a, to a certain extent, concentration risk. If that went wrong, it sinks the whole ship, right? Whereas today, we're a much larger organization, buying a business that's doing 10 million in revenue, that's something that we routinely do, right? So size, we're able to go a little bit higher.

Now it doesn't mean that we don't want to buy the smaller businesses. We definitely love buying, small businesses. We always say small is beautiful. You know, in vertical market software, oftentimes you'll find these great markets, these great segments, and, you might find, let's say businesses that are two to five million dollars in revenue, but they're fantastic businesses.

We love owning those ones. We love, building in those types of spaces and we've continued to do acquisitions like that throughout the years and this year is no exception to that. Geography used to be, the buy box was North America, right? Then it became North America and the UK.

Then it became North America, U. K. and Australia because, those are English speaking territories. Now, we own businesses in Italy, Spain, Germany. We're starting to look at Latin America. We're starting to look at other geographies that, five years ago, I didn't think I'd be getting on a plane and, flying to, let's say, Germany or something to meet a seller.

But, today that's something that we do. Right. So it's, that those are the types of things that shift.

[00:17:37] Ronald Skelton: It's interesting. So you got 90 different ones. Talk about, let's talk about, we'll probably circle back around to the acquisitions here in a second, but I'm just really curious about how do you integrate so fast, right? Cause a lot of articles are written in a lot of stories. Some probably myths and some probably true, that say, most acquisitions fail in the integration phase? 

[00:17:59] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, you know, I remember in school taking an M and a class, right? And, they tell you what?

Only 30 percent of acquisitions are creative, right? And all the other ones destroy value. And I mean, I think it's definitely true. And I think part of what allows you to be a successful acquirer, I think, is to know what you're good at. 

We're good at buying and operating vertical market software businesses. You know, B2C software. We have no idea. If we bought a B2C business, probably not the right move for us. It's probably going to be a mistake, right? Or maybe not a mistake, but you know, we're going to be having some trial and error for sure. 

If we bought a manufacturing business, we have no idea what we're doing there, right? We've never done that. But there's probably some, great people who could buy those businesses and are going to do really well with those types of businesses. So I think know the game you're playing and kind of stick to that.

And, if that's the case, I think already, having that discipline is going to help, uh, quite a bit. Now, when we talk about, the integration,it's evolved and iterated over time, right? At the start, we weren't buying that many businesses, right? We're buying, a small handful every year. Maybe, one a quarter or something like that.

And so we really took the time and really, learned the best practices, the playbooks and the strategies, in those cases to basically say, okay, when we buy a business, this is what we do. These are kind of the key things that we need to focus on. We need to make sure that, payroll is taken care of.

We need to make sure that customer communication and employee communication is taken care of. You get those two things wrong, I don't care what else you had planned, nothing's going to go right. So, we were able to kind of look at that and say, break it down and say, okay, you know what? We have our kind of three phase approach. 

Where, you know, in the first 30 days, these are the key milestones we need to hit. Just to kind of keep things running smoothly and not, disrupting the business that was, you know, we typically buy good businesses, not disrupting a good business. The next 60 days, you know, what, what are we going to do to make slight improvements to the process? Maybe putting in, certain tools or certain, processes, in a business that was maybe managed a little bit more informally, right? So that there's a little bit more visibility, a little bit more data to drive decision making.

And then, next kind of 90 days plus is, well, what are we going to do long term? How are we going to grow this business? How are we going to continue to invest in it? Whether that's organic, acquisitive, or anything else. So, really, because we started off slow, we really crystallized and formalized that process so that we understand, when we buy a business, what do we need to discover in diligence?

Or what do we need to know in diligence? Not in terms of, is this a business we want to buy or not? But in terms of, okay, this is what our integration plan needs to look like. This is what we need to incorporate and what we need to get done. Pre close to have a smooth process.

This is what we need to do post close. This is who we need to involve within the organization that we're acquiring, who we need to involve on the Valsoft side. And this is what we'll do to make sure that it goes smoothly. So, having done that, today, the operator, the M and A team works really closely hand in hand with our integration and operations team.

They're involved pre closing. They have a say, in what we do, right? They challenge us to make sure that we're checking our boxes and we're not just trying to kind of get deals done to get deals done. But really that you know what we're buying, is going to be a business that we can add value to that company and, it adds value to us, right?

It has to be the right fit. And I think by having that disciplined approach,it's made our integrations, I don't want to say easy, but definitely easier than they could be.

[00:21:24] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. And then what ends up being, you have, do you have 90s decentralized brands out there? Or do you, yeah, so all the brands remain, right?

[00:21:36] Costa Tagalakis: Exactly.

[00:21:37] Ronald Skelton: And then what gets centralized? Do you guys have a centralized marketing team?

Or is there still independent marketing for every single one? Do you centralize any of the core services of each one of these companies?

[00:21:48] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. So, so we try to keep as much decentralized as we can, right? Because I think having that decentralization, having that ownership that really allows the businesses to thrive and to be successful and to do,their best work. Now, there's certain things that, businesses of a certain size just can't afford. Or that they're getting through third party contractors. Or that, they might be overspending on as a function of their size, just because, you can't hire, necessarily, you know, a partial, finance team that does all the functions you need.

So we have, some centralized services, that help our businesses, you know, HR, payroll,finance,legal. Things that the businesses typically might have been relying on kind of external,partners or advisors to provide. Aside from that, we try to create and invest in, new initiatives and new ideas that we think could benefit our businesses. A great example is we actually built and launched a payments company, a payment processor, about a year and a half ago. We saw an opportunity for integrated payments and some of our businesses didn't make sense for, any one individual business to become a payment processor, but we figured, let's try this out.

Let's see if we can do it. And now we're integrating to, I would say a number of our businesses already, and that's becoming a great growth area. So they're able to offer, better value, better service, better experience to their customers. Generates, more profits and cash flow that we're able to reinvest in the growth of the company and reinvest in, future acquisitions organic initiatives.

[00:23:11] Ronald Skelton: Interesting. For a company who's bought 90 companies, it's interesting that you chose to build an integrated payment system as opposed to run out and buy a company that already has integrated payment and then, retool it to do what you needed to do, right?

[00:23:29] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, well, the great thing I'd say is that, fundamentally,our leadership team and our founding team are builders, right? 

They've built businesses. We have sister companies we built and, you know, we see Valsoft not as necessarily, an investment fund or something like that, right?

It's a business that we're building. So, when we looked at it and said, we want to do this thing or this idea, that buy versus build definitely was something that, that came up. But at the time we said, to build it in the shape that we wanted or to find it in the shape we want, will be probably hard.

So let's actually go out and try it, right? And, if it doesn't work out, it's an experiment that failed and, we learned a lesson and we'll be better next time. But, thankfully it was a, it was one that worked out.

[00:24:08] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, it's, people ask me, like, you have a show about mergers and acquisitions, but yet you're building this, building that. 

It's like, I typically still build when I can't find something out there to do what I want, right?

[00:24:18] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, exactly.

[00:24:20] Ronald Skelton: That said, and sometimes what I want so expensive, I have to build it. Right. If you're, that's the question I was going to ask. Like any payment processor that could do everything you needed, was probably a billion dollar purchase. So, not going to run out and buy stripe and integrate them. Um, let's talk about, what is the average day for you look like?

How do you spend most of your time on the phones with potential sellers? Do you source in deals? What is your job look like on a day to day basis?

[00:24:48] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. Great question. Definitely a tough question to answer. Because I feel like no day is necessarily the same. So definitely there's, a good amount of time spent doing outreach, reaching out to companies that we think are a good fit for us and we'd love to get on the phone. Taking calls with the companies that answered us.

Evaluating opportunities when the conversations gotten to a point where they've actually shared data. Spending time doing diligence as well as, thinking through, the investment thesis and the idea behind making an acquisition. But there's also, I would say, probably half my time is spent, on a combination of things.

So one is, developing people, right? My, I work very closely with my team. I try to invest a good amount of time and I hope I do a good job of it, in trying to develop them and help them become better professionals and experts at what they do. And that's both my direct team and direct reports, but also, people within the organization that I work with.

Whether it's a colleague who's operating businesses. Whether it's someone who's working on the integration side,or someone in the finance team. Where, we're maybe collaborating and trying to help each other understand, why did we make certain decisions in the deal process?

Why did we go about doing things a certain way? So I'd say a good amount of time is spent doing things like that. The rest of it, I would say, probably, 30, 30 percent of my time,probably is following existing businesses we own. So speaking to management,reviewing the financials, trying and understand what are we doing from a strategic point of view going forward. Mapping out the industry or evaluating the industry to see, you know, how are we positioned?

Are we happy with what we're doing with that business? Do we want to change something? Do we want to make an acquisition that could potentially help us? Do we want to potentially make an organic investment that could help us? So really, there's a misconception I think that some people have that, you know, we do the deal, we're off and on to the next one.

Yes, we are often on to the next one to a certain extent, as deal people. We like doing deals, right? It's fun. 

But at the same time, we're owning these businesses for the next, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, hopefully, right? If not beyond that. And so the hope is that, we're buying great businesses, we're following them so that we understand, what worked well. So that we know to kind of think about it, for future opportunities.

But we're also trying to add value because we learn a lot about these businesses in this process. And we can take a different perspective and, really compliment the people who are running the business on a day to day basis. So I'd say that's a high level of, of what a day to day looks like.

Aside from that, you know, there's a fair amount of travel, visiting companies. I think nothing beats a face to face meeting where you get to kind of sit down, have a coffee, have dinner, have lunch, something, and, just kind of get to know each other. Trade shows are usually pretty good as well, to get to know more about the industry too.

[00:27:25] Ronald Skelton: Wow. So yeah, that's a lot of people would consider that a little old school these days. Going to sit down and do face to face for software acquisitions. I see it and hear it talked about, but it's usually at the last stage, right? You, you've met on Zoom. You've, you've analyzed the business.

You've done the due diligence. You're going to sign some paperwork. Better go shake the guy's hand and walk around. If they have an office, walk around it. If they have, key employees, meet a couple or whatever towards the end. So you're saying, during earlier during the process, once you think it's a good fit, you go fly out and meet them?

[00:27:56] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, well, typically, we might meet a seller, you know, multiple times. We might even invite them to our office as well, right? If that's something they're up for. 

So, we'll typically go out, similar instead of having a call,we might say, we'll have that call and, this seems like an interesting opportunity or fit. And, for whatever reason, if we happen to be in the area, which we might be, let's actually connect in person and spend some time together, right?

And, you really learn a lot more about the business and about the person you're dealing with when you actually do that. The other thing is that, we'll typically go during the diligence process, visit the company on site, spend some time together, really dive into it because I mean, we could spend, we try to move fast, right?

We did, 50 acquisitions in the last 2 years. We want to get these acquisitions done efficiently. You could spend a month, having calls, looking at data, sitting there and kind of trying and like analyze, everything into, into oblivion. And, you still don't understand the business, but you could spend, an hour sitting with someone and talking to them and saying, explain it to me.

I'm your customer. Why do I buy from you? And you'll suddenly, the light bulb moment hits and, you know, you can't necessarily do that on teams or zoom or something like that.

[00:29:01] Ronald Skelton: Interesting. So do you take a team with you? Is it a one or two people that go out there? I know you said you had teams of eight to 10. Like how many people fly out and swarm one of these businesses you're looking to acquire?

[00:29:13] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. Normally, it's funny because, we also see it as kind of a training opportunity, right? Or we also see it as an opportunity for you to develop. 

And when I joined Valsoft, I traveled a lot with, with Steph, our Co Founder. We were working together and, we were probably doing, one or two trips a month together.

And, you obviously build a great bond, a great relationship. I got to learn about the company. I got to learn about his philosophy. I got to learn so many things besides work, like life lessons and things like that, that, those super valuable experience for me. So, for us, we like doing that because it's, it's a great opportunity, not just to meet people, but also internally to help people become the best version of themselves. So we'll typically try to keep it, pretty tight, like two or three people. Because I think if you go a whole group of eight people, one, like you said, you're swarming the sellers. It's a little bit awkward. But two, you're not going to get as much of that tight collaboration.

Now, the way the team's structured, we try to, everyone's kind of working on different opportunities, so everyone's kind of getting their turn. It's not like, it's one over the other. It's just, you know, on different opportunities.

[00:30:11] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. So, I'm just trying to capture this. You said 50 in the last two years. That's incredible. And what does it look like in the future? Is that the pace you want to keep? You're going to expand it. you think it needs to be slowed down a little bit? 

[00:30:26] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think it's obviously been, great pace. I think we'd obviously love to continue on a similar pace. But for us, I'd say, the difference between us and maybe some other parties and I could be wrong on this, like the way we're structured is, you know, we're gonna do the best deals or the best acquisitions that we can do, right?

If there's a lot of great opportunities in the market and we find a lot of great companies that fit our criteria. And that these are people we want to do deals with and it makes a lot of sense, we're gonna make those acquisitions. And if, conditions change or gets to a point where we feel like, we're not seeing the opportunities that are a good fit for us, we might do a little, maybe a few less, right?

The big thing for us is that, we're primarily bootstrapped. So we're investing the profits of the businesses that, that we own. So we need to run things efficiently. We need to be the better operators we can be. The better acquirers we can be. The more we're able to do.

And so I think that's really the kind of synergy that you kind of see in the model. Is that, we're not, let's say, driven necessarily by outside factors as much as maybe some other parties in the sense that, you know, we're not looking at it saying, we're buying, for the most part, we're doing these acquisitions.

And I would say, when I say for the most part, I think almost all our acquisitions, we haven't really used any leverage in them, right? So these are cash acquisitions with cash on hand. So for us, it's not a matter of, looking at it and saying, interest rates are at an attractive level or unattractive level.

And so that's going to dictate what we can do. It's really going to be, you know, if we could run our businesses better and more efficiently, well, then we have a lot more confidence and you know what we're able to pay for businesses and what we're able to do in terms of acquisition volume and speed and pace.

And that's really the way I think we think about it. So for us, thankfully, things have been really positive and working well. We're very happy with, um, you know, call it the last two years,we kind of stress tested Valsoft in, in terms of, having done a lot of acquisitions in a pretty short period of time.

My colleagues on the integration team probably don't like us that much, because we, uh, we did stress test them. Let me put it this way, they all came in bunches, the acquisitions, but you know, nothing broke. The businesses are running really well. We're really happy with the outcome.

And so I think, we've proven the model. I think we've proven that we can continue to move at a fast pace.

[00:32:36] Ronald Skelton: You have anybody that looks at all the businesses and look for cross sales, upsells, synergies, things that can be like, for instance, probably every customer of every client is like, we've got 90 companies. They have probably tens of thousands of customers amongst them, right? Every one of those customers, since it's all B2B, most of those places probably need payroll or, you said payment solutions.

Now you have a payment solution. Do they all know they can upsell those or like can bring it up? Or is there any cross selling, upselling that goes on?

[00:33:07] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. So, so we definitely do look at that. If I take the perspective of within a vertical where, you have maybe more businesses within a particular vertical and, there's maybe more of a fit between their products and there's really that kind of tight cross sell opportunity. Typically those businesses are gonna be, those businesses are likely to have been acquired probably by the same person. 

So they might have,a vision and a strategy that they'll share with the operations team, and they'll make the introductions and they'll try to push for that. And we've been really good at, fostering that collaborative environment where business leaders from different companies are going to see, Hey, I see that you have a product that's a great fit. 

I'm integrating into your competitor. It makes a lot more sense if I integrate into you since we're, sister companies and let's both win, right? And they've done really well doing that. What you're describing, the more kind of generalized kind of upsell opportunity.

So payments is the first example, that we've, we've touched on. But definitely I think we've recognized that's an opportunity for us to build on. And we're starting to look for more and more of it. It's, I would say it's pretty early days in that regard, but definitely, I think there's, as we've gained the scale, we've been able to show that it is something to put some effort into.

[00:34:13] Ronald Skelton: I think what I would be interested in, if I was, owning your company or running a company, something similar. 

I'd be interested in creating some type of matrix where I looked at like, here's all of our customers, across all 90 platforms. So it'd be a fairly in depth database. Here's all the things those companies typically buy, right? And then put checks marks where they bought our stuff that we, in areas we do it right? 

You have a little checkbox going. Yeah. They use, HR software. We own three HR software companies, but these 500 don't use, they, they use two of our products, but they don't use our HR software. And then there's some type of effort to go, Hey, you're already using X and Y, we got Z over here that would tie, tie in really well with those. So I, I'm a process guy. I'm a problem solver type of guy. And the first thing I would look at is, boosting the sales across everybody by looking at all the, okay, the toughest thing to do is get a customer, right? Well, once you have one, he kept him. None of these guys probably had those same customer for years.

Now they trust that person, right? I've got software, you know, companies. The reason I'm using this as a company, there's one where, the tool we're using right now is one of the tools I use that I really liked it.

I'm really innovated. They bought this company. And I'm like, why am I paying this third company, third party company that I just really don't care for much. I've been saying, I'm going to change it for the last year when there's a solution for a company that, you know, and I'm in mergers and acquisitions.

I should support that. And, uh, we're getting used to it a little bit. I'm just curious, do you guys do that metrics? Do you take a look at, okay, here's, even if it's the 80, 20, here's the most profitable customers of each one of the main players here. And here's all the other stuff that those customers, those particular customers use. And we could fill those gaps too.

[00:35:54] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, it's, it's definitely becoming more and more something that we focus on, today, versus two years ago or three years ago.

Where we were much earlier in the process. I think for us, the natural kind of course that it was, make sure that our core businesses is operating effectively and that we have, we've obviously, implemented the model right and that we're able to be successful doing the core things right.

And now this is kind of that next step of growth or that next opportunity that we can build on. And it's funny because the way you described it, that's exactly the way we kind of think about it within a business. So, you know, if you have one of our portfolio companies or investment companies that we own, let's say that they have, I don't know, five products. We're looking at it saying, okay, do you have five products and you have 30 percent penetration on this one. Well, we want to get that to 100 because, every customer could be using it. So they should be using it. Let's push that, that the sales efforts there. So it makes a lot of sense for sure.

[00:36:48] Ronald Skelton: Do you do any mergers amongst them inside of these? Where you merge, like you buy three products and like, look, these three are, they're in the same vertical there, they have the same customer base, they don't really compete. They benefit each other. We should con, consolidate them into a one. Do you do any consolidation at this stage?

[00:37:05] Costa Tagalakis: I would say, not really. It's a pretty, you know, loose approach because I think for us, one of the key things that we see is that there's a lot of loyalty to these businesses. And that's why we buy them. Because they have really sticky customer relationships.

And if you take things and you say, if we bought,I'll give you an example, we have two businesses in the practice management space, XLDent and Mac Practice. Let's say we bought, XLDent first, and then we bought Mac Practice. And then we merge 'em together and we said, we're rebranding the whole thing as XL Dent.

I bet a lot of those MacPractice customers would probably want to leave, or they might not be, necessarily pleased because they picked MacPractice. They knew about, probably XLDent, right? And they chose to be a customer of MacPractice. So for us, instead, the way we've treated it is, the leadership teams of those businesses will collaborate. They'll talk, they'll, they'll explore new feature ideas.

They'll try to find ways where they can help each other do better and kind of being more competitive in the market versus the third party competition. But ultimately, we don't want to cause customers to have to say, you know what, I have to rethink this relationship because, you know what?

The company changed right or something like that. So I say that's really the way we've looked at it. In a couple of cases we've bought, like a reseller of a business that we had. So maybe we had like a geographic based reseller. And this was basically just a way of us now controlling our distribution and we've merged that into the parent company.

But that's really like,I would say a minor situation.

[00:38:33] Ronald Skelton: It's interesting if, if you own three different businesses in a single vertical, it's very likely, a lot of the customers evaluated one or more of your, your holdings. Thought they were competitors to each other and they chose A over B for particular reasons. And I can see where if you merged them, you go, wait a second, we didn't want B because of X, Y, Z.

And you're going to, now we're going to be forced with those features or that, those, that team or whatever it was that made them choose one or the other. So I get that. And I was just curious as to,the different,I think people overplay the synergies and mergers and acquisitions. Like the consolidating and the merger.

So I was curious if you, how cautious you were before you started smooshing things together to save some money on accounting, because now you have one accounting team instead of two. So,

[00:39:17] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah,I agree with that. I think synergies,that's where you can get into trouble with an acquisition. 

Because, they're harder to realize than you think. And I think, we prefer the surprise ones where, we didn't model in or we didn't think about a synergy.

And actually, there is something there. That's great. It's a nice, positive surprise. It's kind of the cherry on top. But we don't want to have,baked in synergies to have things work out. 

[00:39:39] Ronald Skelton: Do you see, do you have competing interest amongst the 90s? So you have, like, you just thought you had two in the med space. 

They're competing, but they help each other out.

How do they not end up, like, end up trying to cannibalize each other's customer base on, you know, is that, just something that happens if it happens or?

[00:39:56] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. So I'd say in this, in this case, in particular, slightly different segments of the market. One's a Mac based product. The other one's a windows based. So, the hardware choice of the customer kind of decides who's going to win that sale. So it's kind of like, they're more complimentary in a sense, because if someone says, you know what, I don't want to buy Mac hardware, it's too expensive.

Well, have you heard of our sister company, XL Dent? Let's try to close them there, right? But, we have some businesses that are, we're competitors in certain markets and,we're okay with that, right? I mean, at the same time, the businesses are run independently.

They have, if they have separate leadership, which, more often than not, they do, those leaders are making the best and most rational decision. But,they're not making a decision, okay, we're going to slash prices because we need to like, beat our sister company or something like that.

They're making the decision they would have made as a standalone company. And I think that's kind of the key to it is that because they're decentralized, because we continue to run them, they own their PNL. The profitability they generate is going to dictate to a certain extent their ability to grow, and invest and, do other things. They're going to have to make the right decisionfor Valsoft overall, right? And that's worked well so far.

[00:41:05] Ronald Skelton: Do any of your acquisitions acquire, like, so if I am a software company, you acquire me, and then I find something that, you know, instead of building up all my competitors are doing this other feature. And instead of building it out, I know a good acquisition target where I can buy it, bring it in and be pretty easy to integrate that, that, that line to, to your, any of your acquisition holdings, do they acquire other companies?

[00:41:29] Costa Tagalakis: So it's, uh, I would say it's a relatively small percentage of the acquisitions we've done are relatively small percentage of what we do, but we definitely encourage it. And I think it's definitely,something that we've, hopefully tried to kind of instill in the team is, think about that buy versus build decision.

And, you know, we're your M and A partners to help you execute that now. The team going out and identifying, Hey, there's a product that we can buy and kind of integrated into us. And, that's going to make us better. That's a relatively small piece. What we have seen more of is, give you an example, we're in the aviation space. It's a vertical we like. Been in there for a little while. The management team and the leadership team of that business, they attend, a number of trade shows. They know a number of parties. And if an aviation business is for sale, oftentimes they'll know about it. Either because they speak to the founders and they speak to, those people directly. 

And, they'll let us know and pull us into the conversation. And then we'll be able to havean approach and try to, make an acquisition happen. Or they might be approached because, you know, Valsoft is not seen in some corners of the market as a natural buyer, but you know, our investment,in our aviation business is seen as one, right?

And so we'll get the opportunity that way. And in those cases, we've done quite a few acquisitions where, probably the doors weren't open to us if we hadn't proven that we're already in the space or that we already know how to operate a certain vertical. And, as we enter a vertical, we do find that we get more success.

Because, you know, people see us as, okay, well, you know what, you have a business in the space that I know that's successful, that I respect. You know what, I could trust you. You know what, I don't want to be the science experiment and find out if you know what you're doing in the aviation vertical. But you know what, you've done a really good job with, ComSoft, one of our businesses for the last, call it four years.

You know what? Yeah, let's, let's talk now. Now it makes sense. Cause I, I think you guys know what you're doing.

[00:43:13] Ronald Skelton: So, in the PE world, it typically, the owners don't get a hundred percent bought out, they get, 60, 70, something percent bought out. And then they get a second bite when you're sell. Since you're a long term hold company, you're a hold co and looking to hold these for 10, 20, 30 years, are you buying a hundred percent of the companies?

[00:43:28] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, we generally buy 100 percent of the companies. We can be creative because like I said, we're private. We could think about different structures, and if someone came to us and we found a fantastic business and they said, look, I need to retain 10%, or I'm not selling and it checks every box.

And it's, the perfect acquisition for us. Don't get me wrong, I think we'll probably think about it. We'll probably discuss it and we'll try to find a creative solution. But I'd say, the majority of our acquisitions are 100 percent but we do try to, you know, especially if someone's staying on board, we try to incentivize them, whether it's in the form of, upside, like an earn out in the deal structure. Whether it's in the form of, compensation structure as a leader of a business unit.

Making sure that you know you're aligned with us and, benefit, frankly, from the hard work that you're going to have to do.

[00:44:13] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. So I've asked a lot of questions. What do you think, what have I missed here? What are the things I should be asking? What do you,

[00:44:21] Costa Tagalakis: You know, it's, you're putting me on the spot now. I didn't know I had to prepare some questions for you, but, no, honestly, this is this has been a great conversation. I'd say, probably one question that, I often get or that comes up is, what should a seller know before they start having a conversation with Valsoft?

And I'd say the thing that I you know, try to typically tell sellers is you know, be transparent, right? And what do I mean by that? Well, there's there's kind of I guess three areas that I would cover. So the first is you know, be transparent with us in terms of telling us what you want. You know, if you want, you want to sell the business you want to stick around for you know, two years, so that you can kind of transition out and not kind of have a jarring change in, your life situation.

And then you want to kind of exit and, hand it off to your right hand person, and that's really your vision, let us know and let's try to figure that out, right? If you wanna, sell and stay on board and you want to go out and acquire businesses and you want us to help you with that journey.

That's amazing. We love that. Let us know. So I'd say the first thing is, be transparent in terms of, you know, what you're looking for, because the only way we could, come up with a solution that's going to be the best fit for you is if we understand what you're looking for.

The second thing I'd say is, I'd say, we've been very successful in the sense that, we learn a lot about these businesses before we, go and go into, let's say, the late stages of an acquisition. But I'd say be transparent, show the business as it is, right?

Don't try to put it in a super positive light. Don't try to put in a super negative light, just tell us what it is. And if we're the right buyer, we're going to find a way around. We're going to find, uh, a solution to make it happen. If we're not the right buyer, it's in your interest to find out sooner rather than later, right?

So I'd say that's the second side of transparency. And the third side is, when we're buying a business, chances are a lot of sellers, they're typically a little bit more concerned. They don't want the staff to know. They want to kind of keep it close to the chest. Be transparent and involve, the right people in the process.

It's going to make things go a lot smoother. It's going to allow the buyer to prepare for the integration so that it's less jarring, less of a shock. It'll probably allow you to mitigate some of the risks that you potentially are trying to avoid as well. You don't want your staff to get scared or spooked by an acquisition and potentially, leave or, or, be nervous.

But if you tell them, look, I'm thinking of exiting the business or I'm thinking of, finding a new home for the business. We're going to be speaking to a couple of parties. You guys are important to me. I want to make sure that you're aware of, that I'm gonna be looking out for you as well throughout the process.

And I want you guys to be involved in it. That's been probably the best thing that, that some businesses, you know, and some business owners have done to make a process go smoothly. So I'd say that's probably,the biggest message I would have to, to people thinking about, dealing either with Valsoft or with anyone else, to be honest.

[00:46:57] Ronald Skelton: So I come from a tech industry background, defense contracting, big data centers, that type of stuff. 

One of the things that a lot of people don't know about that, that, that industry is tech workers tend to move around and not what I like to jokingly call hives. Like, which for instance, a good group of probably three or four of the same people worked for me at four different companies, maybe even five. 

So they started with me at one point. I moved to another company. It was, I had an opening. I wouldn't see, I knew who I wanted because they've done it for me in the past. I wouldn't see where they were, right. And I offered to bring them with me. So when an owner wants to exit, do you look at like, one of the things I would do out of due diligence is okay, the owner wants to exit. 

I want to look at the, who's on his LinkedIn page working for him. There's 10 people there. I want to look at the last 10 jobs of all 10 people and see how many of those 10 people work for him in the last three companies. Cause they're probably going to leave within the first 24 months, if he leaves. 

They're going to go wherever he is, or at least they're going to try. And you can put paperwork in place and say, you can't recruit, you can't take and that type of stuff. But human nature is human nature. At some point, they're going to want to go where they're comfortable and where they thrive. And a lot of times that's with their old boss or old manager, right?

[00:48:09] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, I'd say, we don't want to put handcuffs on people, right? 

I think that's the biggest thing. If you want to go somewhere else, go for it. We wish you the best. We hope you're successful. And, you know, that's fantastic. If you want to stay along for the ride, if you think that, you can build a fantastic career at Valsoft, we'd love to have you and we'd love to see you grow with us.

And I mean, I'm really proud to say that a lot of the leaders across Valsoft and across the business, they're people who have come through acquisition. One of our operating partners will actually a few of our operating partners, they were people who worked in businesses we acquired and now, they're overseeing, portfolios of, 10, 15 businesses, right?

They've gotten the opportunity to grow throughout the organization. They've gotten the chance to do more, but they decided and, we didn't force them. We didn't make them sign a contract that they had to stay. We didn't do anything like that. We said, look, this is who we are.

If you like our culture, fantastic. And, that self selection, I think, got us some fantastic people. And I think, giving people that opportunity to say, you know what, if it's not for you, it's not for you. Go for it. I think that's, that's fair.

[00:49:09] Ronald Skelton: I think the tech industry has a unique advantage. 

And that a lot of people who start tech jobs and all the people I know that have created tech companies, software companies, software as a service, they did it with a problem solution mentality. They seen a problem. They knew they could solve it. And I've interviewed quite a few. And it comes down to if you ask them why they sold or like I built it to the point where I knew where I could get it and I don't like doing all the other stuff. I just want to solve problems in the industry.

I know a guy right now. He owns a B2B service in the insurance industry. He writes software for insurance, big insurance brokerages. And, he's like, I really kind of don't like all the business side of it. And, he's like, he was considering selling for a little while there.

I haven't talked to, chatted with him for in a bit. But, It was mainly because, I just want to write, write software and solve problems and make, make the software better, make the industry better. There's all this other stuff is almost a distraction. So I think there's a lot of that, a lot more of that in this particular industry where the owner wants to stay at Ron and improve his product and improve the solutions he's providing to his customer base.

He just doesn't want to care about finance. He doesn't want to care about PNL or anything like that. He just wants to create the best product possible. And the, especially if they came from a software engineering background or a, a hardcore tech background, the rest of this is kind of foreign currency to them.

Like they just don't know what to do with the colorful money that's flying in or out. So, I think there's a strategic advantage to the vertical you guys show software. I'm wondering if that would be true in some of the other spaces, maybe not so much.But maybe in some, some spaces it would, right.Where the owner will want to stay around and be a part of. So if you guys had to get out of software, is there another vertical you would, I'm not necessarily just software, but if you had to get out of just exactly what you're doing now, where would you expand?

[00:51:00] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah, so, it's a funny question. So I didn't talk about it, but you know, we're part of a broader group, right? 

So our shareholders and founders actually, built and invested in a few other companies. So we have a sister company called Valstone, which basically buysintegrated systems.

So businesses are selling software, hardware services, consumables, primarily focused on the industrial space. And that's been a great vertical and a great market for us as well. And we actually, that was a spin out of Valsoft and because we identified that there's a certain breed of business that doesn't really fit the Valsoft world necessarily.

But looks like a fantastic business and has a lot of the other things that we like. And that's a business that, that's been doing quite well. So I think that's a nice market as well. Then we have a sister company called Valnet, that basically,similar acquisitive model, but they basically buy websites.

Screen Rant is a brand you might have heard of. It's a pretty big one, but basically it's like a movie review website. And so they'll typically optimize those,create YouTube channels, improve their web presence, improve the content,and grow those businesses. So, let's say our founders have been pretty, pretty busy and have had a few other ideas that they've done well.

And, it's always had that kind of buy and build, philosophy behind it. So I'd say that's the easy answer. 

[00:52:16] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I like that. 

[00:52:16] Costa Tagalakis: But I'll probably- 

[00:52:17] Ronald Skelton: Already, the answer is we're already doing it and we've got, two or three sister companies that are doing it. 

So the one that made the most sense in my top of my head, which is like, you're talking about integrated, I was thinking a lot of just software solutions out there, especially in the industrial space. They kind of, software solutions can lend to, industrial devices.

I know a company that started off with software and then they ended up, they were measuring vibration and stuff on the equipment, but they were a third party buying, buying the actual measurement devices and it just didn't make sense.

So now they integrated in. They sell the devices with their software on it. And,they can tell you, if you know if a machine needs maintenance because it changed, within a day of things starting to change. Like a big lave starts vibrating differently and you can record it. 

They do it for like they put those reading devices on things like piping, like, high pressure pipes, right?

It measures the temperature of them, measures the vibration of them, measures all this different stuff. And they can say, hey, something's going wrong. They can do early detection and, just by looking at standard deviation. So, that's the one that made the most sense is, you've got all these software solutions that sometimes the software lends to. I've got to have the right hardware to go with it.

And sell it as a solution, so I like that.

[00:53:25] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:27] Ronald Skelton: How do people find you? So we're at the top of the hour. 

We spent an hour already, just kind of time flew by. How do people find you, work with you guys if they have a software solution? Or reach out to you, if they just kind of want to learn from you. And,be part of what you're doing. 

[00:53:42] Costa Tagalakis: Yeah. No, that's great. My email is available on our website, Valsoftcorp. com. So feel free to drop me an email and happy to chat. Could reach me on LinkedIn as well. Costa Tagalakis on there as well. Other than that, we're doing more and more in terms of sharing, sharing insights and things like that.

So if people want to kind of read some of that, visiting our website and seeing what we're posting on LinkedIn is a great place to start.

[00:54:05] Ronald Skelton: You said, like, said that like anybody on this planet would know how to spell your last name. 

Well put it in the show notes for you. There'll be a link to his LinkedIn right in the show notes. You don't have to try to,how to learn how to spell, uh, his last name. They get mine all the time, right?

They always, they give me an extra E, right? It's Ron Skelton and I get Ron Skeleton all the time. And,it's like, so I, it was, let's not confuse people. It'll be in the show notes. If you look, if you're looking to reach out, I'll make sure your contact information is there. Thank you for being here today.

I've learned a lot. I'm sure our guests, I mean, our audience will learn too. You kind of are, at the pinnacle where a lot of these guys want to grow up to be right there. They're doing their first, second or third acquisition. And I think we're going to, we're going to make a business out of acquiring these.

And I've only met a couple of companies doing what you're doing. And successful at it. And like, some of them are around 50 years and that's the reason they've got 80 companies or whatever. But you guys have been around such a short time frame. I'd be interested in, you know, talking to you again,in six months or a year and see how it's going. 

Yeah, I'd love that. Looking forward to the next time. This has been great, Ron. We really appreciate the time and the questions and the interest.

Okay. We'll call that a show and I'll wrap it up.