E203: Scaling to a Billion: Ross Turner on Raising Capital, Building High Performing Teams & More

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello and welcome to the How2Exit Podcast. Today I am here with Ross Turner. I think I started it on my own business name, How2Exit Podcast. I think I said how to X. And we're here today with Ross Turner. Ross man, I'm looking forward to this conversation.

You've done some incredible things over the, over your career. And especially in the last, you know, 12 to 18 months. You've got a really cool project. I heard about it on a seminar. You were doing a seminar, a short webinar, I guess you call it, on how you did what you did and we'll going to get into that. But, I thought, man I gotta get the story out there and let people know that this is possible. Here's a guy doing it.

Let's start off with your origin story kind of, the joke is always, Hey, you were born and you ended up on a show about mergers and acquisitions. How in the hell end up on my show? Could you fill out that little gap in between there?

[00:00:43] Ross Turner: Yeah, I can fill out that gap for you. I've had a very eclectic kind of professional career. I've always been in the digital marketing direct response space. I was like one of the original guys I've been in it since 2003, probably. I mean, my brother had a business in the UK, which we ran for up until 2013 end of, which was pretty successful.

We were doing multiple seven figures, but there was no kind of, we couldn't scale it. There was no scalability to the business for, for several reasons, the industry that we were in.And in the end, I was just burnt out, Ron. I said, I just gave the business to my brother. He's still running it. And I just sat, I remember this vividly.

I sat on my mom's sofa for like four weeks and I was like, well, what am I going to do? And serendipitously, how, how I've even ended up here, one of my mentors who I learned to write copy from Andre Chaperon, Auto Responder Madness. Great copywriter, great human being.He sent out an email on behalf of Steve Gray that was essentially looking for an intern and the email was, are you my next immediate? I read it and I knew Steve by reputation at the time, right. He'd, he'd, he runs blood pressure solutions. They've got $80 million a year. I was like, if I can work with Steve and I knew that he was one of the, premiere people that drives traffic, right? 

And the thing about being in this space is if you know how to write copy and offers, and if you know how to drive traffic, you don't ever have to work for anybody again. So my thought process was, if I can work for him for a year, then I can go and just basically write my own ticket and do my own thing. So I sent him all of my seven years worth of material.And he actually had a recruiter at the time who was recruiting, but then he phoned me.

And he said, listen, and he said, you are way too experienced to be an intern. I was going to pay someone $25, 000 a year up here in Dallas. So, but I've got a business partner and a business in Austin. He needs some help growing that business. So you, would you be up for it? So I'm Googling Austin. I'm like, obviously I've heard of Dallas, but I'm like, well, where's Austin?

So I look at it and I said, sure. So my, my thought process at the time was, right, I was just, I just turned 30. I just started seeing my girlfriend who is now my wife and she plays quite a big, large part in this story. I'd only been seeing her for a couple of weeks and I said, Hey, I'm, I'm going to go and move to America for a bit. 

Do you want to, do you want to come for a vacation? And she was like, okay. So she, she was, she's 10 years younger than me. So my wife was like 21 at the time. Uh, She came out with me and I was that, I was the fifth employee in that year. We did $2. 2 million that year. By the time I had left, we got out to 35 million. And I built teams of about 40 people in that business.

And that's kind of how I ended up in Austin. I ended up in Austin. I was kind of plugged into all the digital marketing scene. I kind of know everybody there is to know. Cause I,I soaked it up like a sponge. This was like where I wanted to be. I was meeting people who I'd followed and you know, all that kind of stuff.

And it kind of just grew from there. Like our, I fell in love with, with Austin, me and my wife, both did. Like, I don't think, I don't think we'll ever leave, to be honest.We are so settled here. And it was just, it was a wild journey. That first, like 90 days. We were, and to me, and to be completely frank and honest, we were, as we say in England, piss poor, right?

So we actually used 5, 000 pounds of my wife's uh, university tuition, as you'd say, to like, get us set up over here and it was wild. We had no furniture. We slept on the floor of our first apartment for the first night. But it's all these kind of learning, humbling, growing experiences that kind of shape you to kind of the man, like, the man that you end up becoming.

So we just fell in love with Austin. Company was great. I'm still very, very good friends with the owner of that business. Like he's essentially like my brother, him and the other guys really helped me out. We had a great support system here in Austin as well, which is very important. And without those, those people, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have been able to kind of stay here, I don't think.

[00:05:12] Ronald Skelton: I was gonna say, I don't think you could have picked a better place. I mean, if you think of all the, I've been all around the United States. I've lived in everywhere from Hawaii to Texas. I've been to Austin a few times. If you randomly landed in a place to the United States and you wanted to be in love with, you want to love it and stay there, Austin's one of the, you could have just, there's probably a thousand other cities you could have landed in and it would have been much worse.

[00:05:34] Ross Turner: For sure.

[00:05:36] Ronald Skelton: I think, I think Austin's probably one of my top 10. Maybe even my top five favorite places in the United States. 

[00:05:42] Ross Turner: So as we were kind of in Austin,and I'd left the back company and I'd started a couple of my own things and I ended up consulting for the group out of Carlsbad. So they flew me down to San Diego, La Jolla, like we were working on some pretty huge projects, one being Kylie Jenner.

So we were working on some of her stuff and they brought me in to kind of consult on that. And they wanted me to actually move to Carlsbad and like head up their team. And I said to my wife, I was like, so this is quite a great opportunity. Well, she was my girlfriend at the time, but I said, this is a great opportunity.

And she was, and she just said, no, I'm not, we're moving. We're moving to Austin. I'm not moving to California. Even though it's absolutely beautiful. The weather's great. But as you say, politics, but it's not great for business because of, yeah, taxed, double taxed. So we picked the right state.

[00:06:36] Ronald Skelton: Let's jump into, where you're at now? What are you working on right now? 'Cause that's, that's how you ended up on the show is I, you're working on something. I thought, well, that's really incredible what you're up to.

[00:06:45] Ross Turner: Yeah, we and we kind of touched on this a little bit off, off air. And it's an interest, it's an interesting story, right? This is 100 percent 100 percent true. Much like yourself, I've spent probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on education. And I said before that I bought Roland stuff. Paid 10, 000 for that, and I just couldn't couldn't make it work.

I couldn't get it to click. And serendipitously, I was CEO of a supplement company, so I was doing that. And unfortunately, in 2021, my, my father passed away, he died.And I hadn't, I hadn't really had a relationship with my father. So I was surprised that he left me, small inheritance, it's twelve and a half thousand, 12 and a half thousand pounds. 

But at that time, because we were kind of in similar direct response groups, right, I ended up kind of building a friendship with Carl. We were just chatting and like, he gave me his number and I phoned him on a Sunday and I was just asking his advice and he was super, he was great with his time, right?

Like he gave me all of his time, advice, what I should be doing, stick to your lane, all this kind of stuff.And we kind of became friends. And then one of the things that I said to him was, I said, I said, I'm going to give you access to Roland's stuff. Have a look, see if there's anything in there that you think is interesting.

I said, one thing that they're doing incredibly well is they're doing this challenge. You guys should do that. I'm telling you it will crush it. So he did do the challenge and I ended up in a roundabout way, helping seven X their business.

So as we became more friendly and we were talking further, he was like, Hey, let me comp you in to dealmaker, which is now protege. And I said, I said, no, I said, don't do that. I said, cause if you caught me and I won't even look at it, I'll never use it. There's no value attached to it. So I sat down and I thought about it and I didn't tell my wife this at the time either, because, you know, I'd spent tons, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I took the $7, 000, which it was back then out of the inheritance I got from my late father. And kind of the rest is history. So I came into it, it was structured in a way that resonated with me. It was easy to progress, because they gamify it. One of the good things is they put people in teams. And they track all of your stuff to make sure that you're actually doing the work, right? The hardest part, I think, about all of this is just making a start.

Like, when you make, making the start, I think, people fear, kills more people than anything else. Right? The fear of failure, the fear of starting, the fear of what if. It literally takes people's lives, right. They're too scared to make a start. So back then, at that time in the business, everybody was having like a welcome call with Carl.

He'd had like a one on one welcome call with who and he was super patient. And like, he bugged me. I didn't really do anything for about six months. And he was patient, but he kept trying to bug me to get me on the phone. And I was like, all right, let's have this call. And, uh, it been about six month time period.

And then I turned around to him and I just said, yeah, I think I'm going to start buying digital direct response e commerce companies. I think Carl's funny. He was like, thank God for that. He said, the pennies finally dropped. That I've been waiting for you to come to this conclusion for ages. Then he turned around to me and said, let's partner. He said, I'll partner with you. So I was like, well, so I said, all right, let me think about it. So we partnered. And then he phones me on a Sunday. He's like, Hey, what are you up to? Can you jump on a zoom for 10 minutes? So I jumped on the zoom and he built out this model. Huge model. He's walking me through it. And he said, this is how we create a billion dollar enterprise valuation.

And things have changed obviously. It's pivoted slightly. It's actually, and I hate to say this cause I, you know, I don't want to sound like a douche bag, but with the model that we've now built, it's actually nearly a $2 billion enterprise value corporation.But he walked me through it and it was up to 16 deals over six years.

And as I was looking at it, like I know from running big teams and building big teams, the biggest thing that makes these rollups fail, is integration and operations, right? You have to have world class people to do that. The rest is fairly straightforward, but if you don't have that dialed in, it will fail.

It's just simple as that. So I said to him, I said, listen, let me think about it for a couple of days. I really need to think about it. To see if, if I think we can do this. So just because of the people that I have in my network and the industry I've been in, I kind of knew a lot of the key players. So I got some advice.

I was speaking to a bunch of people. I spoke to some operators and integrators. Cause we run our business on EOS, right? So we like, we're very fastidious with that. And a couple of days went by and I messaged him and I said, all right. I said, yeah, I think this is doable. And listen, I'll be honest, Ron, like when I first, when we first started doing this, the ego, it's like, Oh, billion dollar company, right?

Oh, wow. Amazing. That it was, it was all about that. That's kind of what turned it. But then Carl turned around and said, all right, we'll go and figure out how we make this work. And you'll know this being, being a marketer yourself, right? I didn't want to have a massively broad audience. Because the communication, the story, how we cross sell would be far too difficult.

So I needed one audience and essentially our project is we're just buying a massive customer base, right? Across six different pillars within, within the industry that we're in. So I, as we pull more research, cause Carl was like, go and figure out how we make this work, so he left that to me.And I quickly realized after about two weeks that women are the super buyers. 

They spend seven times more than men. They're stickier. They're a better customer. They're loyal. They share more. They control the house purse strings. So I was like, right, that's going to make it easier. One audience, 25 to 45. Now we're conscious of obviously the economy and kind of everything that's going on.

So we needed the project to also be recession proof. So we started pulling all of the information and then we quickly found that women in the health, wellness, and beauty space, it's been growing year on year, like 19 percent essentially. And it was, and it grew by 45 percent during COVID. So it's bulletproof, right. 

But then obviously we've got a bit of a problem, like as we're kind of building this narrative and I'm building the story and we'll kind of talk about that in a bit. Like I settled on the tagline, women own businesses for women, by women. But there's a bit of a problem. There's me and Carl, who are two middle aged white guys from England.

It doesn't really resonate with the story. So we had to figure out a way to essentially not just make this a story and narrative, but to, to verify it, make it real. And we kind of worked, worked that as soon as we get to $10 million of EBITDA. We then have enough runway to employ a full woman C 3. So, CEO, CMO, CFO, COO. All women.

And they're gonna drive that to the billion dollar market cap. And we just become shareholders then. So,we put together our first deck, and this is the first time I'd ever even thought about raising money. I don't come from this background. I don't know anybody in the industry. I haven't zero connections. And I don't really, didn't really know the lingo, right?

Like take every industry has its own vernacular and how they talk. And I had to learn it. Like it was learning on the job, right? I was neck deep in it at this point and I just learned by failing, right? Like I'm having communication, conversations, I'm being introduced to people and I'm kind of getting school along the way.

Like I'm lucky in the respect that I'm getting an MBA in business from Carl. As part of our kind of SEC filings, he had to disclose every single deal that he's worked on and he sent us the list. And I was like, Holy smokes. Like all the deals that he's done. So I get that element from him and I'm like, super grateful.

He's becoming quickly one of my best friends, he's a great person.But he just let me get on with it, right. He's like, you'll learn more by failing. So I just went at it. And then we created our first deck. And if you see the first version compared to what our version looks like now, you'd laugh. You can tell it was created by two guys. It was all blue and masculine. And this never happens. And you know this, we pitched this again, this all started from, as corny or as cheesy as it sounds, this is how it happened. I literally looked through my phone book on my phone. I was like, who, who can help me if I tell them what I'm doing?

Who can like put me in touch with someone? And a good friend of mine who lives in Dallas, another English guy, Paul, like renowned trader, used to work on the life floor in London. He's done tons of acquisitions. He's raised a bunch of money. So I messaged him and said, Hey, like, this is our project. Do you know anyone who might be interested in it?

And he put me in touch with a family office in Dallas, and then me and Carl pitched him. I won't say his name because if he watches this, he might text me, but we pitched him three different times. And during those pitches, the first one, he was in his car. And I'm like, what? The second time he's in a coffee shop. And then the third time his kids run in and he cuts the call. So I'm like, is this some sort of power play? So I phoned up Paul and I said, Paul, is this, is this some power play? Like, I'm not feeling this at all if it is. You're like, no, no, no, it's fine. And, uh, we had an email 24 hours later. It was a one sentence email.

I think you guys are on to something, let's do it. So the deal back then was $10 million of equity because we worked it out. We knew about $50 million of buying power to get us to 10 million and then phase two. So it was 20 percent of the company for 10 million. They said I'm in. They showed us their, you know, proof of funds, capital commitments, contracts, boom, signed, done.

But then serendipitously what he did was, and I'll call him Dallas family office man, he's very smart. He's a very, he's a young guy. He's just turned 30.But he turned around a couple of other family offices, but what he did, which always stuck with me, was he spent $5 million of his own money to have access and get meetings with every top CEO, fund manager, fortune 500 company on the planet.

He paid him a hundred thousand dollars for a 15 minute meeting. Just to introduce himself and say, Hey, like my name's Dallas family office, man. I don't have anything for you right now, but I wanted to introduce myself. Is there any way that I can help you? And if I have something interesting in the future, can I pick up the phone? And he built a massive network. I'm talking like Saudi sovereign wealth funds. Like he showed me proof of funds for $55 billion from credit suites. Like that's how connected he was. And then he opened up his network of people and then he kind of put us in touch with company out of New York. They're called Global Emerging Markets, Gem, G E M and the managing director, Gregory Van Beek. Now me and Gregory and the team have since become friends, but Gregory cut his teeth in, the Russian capital markets. So he speaks fluent Russian. He's a very sharp, very dialed in guy. He's like, he's quite intimidating when you first meet him. And then we pitched him and again, this never happens, right?

We pitched him one time. I didn't know this prior to this, but he turned down 50 deals and he hadn't done a deal in three years. So we pitch him we're two thirds of the way through this. And he says, Guys, let me, let me stop you. He says, I absolutely love this. I love what you're doing. But he said, you need to stop saying females and start saying women.

So I have three daughters at home. And every time I say female, they tell me off. And he's like, I love this. He said, I think this is incredible. He said, how much do you want? So again, this is the only time I've ever been unprepared since then. So I burst, like blurted out. I was like, we want $150 million. So we laughed. Anyway, let me go away, speak to the management team and we'll see what we can do. So he came back about a week later term sheet for $125 million. And then from term sheet to contract that took about six months. And as the clock is ticking now, that's that contract's been signed for a year.

So the good thing about Global Emerging Markets is that we can access that money when we become a public listed company. But they have a vested interest in the growth of the company. So they're long only, right. And they can't do anything with their shares for five years. That's in the contract. So I have a vested interest in the growth of this business.

So when that happened, our capital call from the family office was December 2022, and I missed it. Unbeknownst to us, they were selling their family office to another family office. We're getting their money from LPs and they missed it. So me and Carl kind of had a decision at that point and we decided to pull it.

Well, I missed the capital call. You're not getting 20 percent of this business. We've signed a subscription facility with GEM. You know, We've got 125 million. We can probably leverage that to go and raise more money. So then we ended up obviously with the 100 percent of the business. And then what we, the deal that we had with that family office was, it was $10 million for 20%.

We'd give them a 30 percent redemption premium. So when we hit certain milestones, they get 3 million back on top of their cap.And then we were at a dealmaker event randomly. And if Wes listens to this, Hey Wes. He's the guy who kind of like started this next evolution. A big real estate guy, a really, really sharp investor. We'd signed the contract randomly at the event. So people like got to see it and literally popped in my inbox and I signed it on stage. Which is quite cool. And it just happened that way. And then Wes approached me and he's like, Hey, are you looking for investors in the business? And I was like, to be honest, I hadn't even really thought about it.

Like, I don't really want the hassle of dealing with individual investors. And then I went to speak to Carl and he said, why don't we just give these guys the same deal as the family office got? Like, but, but shorten it up. So he said, let's portion off 15 percent of the business. We'll sell it for a hundred thousand dollars a share in Topco in the equity.

We'll give them the redemption premium when we IPO. So you get your money plus your 130 back. Then we'll give you, then you keep your 1 percent equity all the way to the exit. Which at the time when we modeled out, you know, all things being equal and we know how, we know that things never go to plan, right?

But all things being equal, that's worth roughly around $10 million to these people. So obviously they'd seen the contract and then as we kind of started talking more and more about it, and again, you kind of, you know this, right? Like I, and I've sold this from Alex Hormozi.It's like, I wanted to create an offer that was, people would feel stupid to say no to.

So on top of that deal, I then also said, for those of you who come in to the seed round right now, I will roll you into my next nine future projects, equity on my money. And they were like, Oh, wait, what? I said, if you come in right now, then I'll roll you into the next nine. And that's kind of like how it kind of snowballed fairly quickly.

So we ended up raising about 1. 5. Me and Carl obviously put our own money into it as well. So we had about $2 million kind of like in the bank. And then when the deal got pulled by the family office, Carl was like, all right, well, let's go out and try and, raise this money. And here's the thing.

It took me about 60 ish days to realize that it's a much, much easier to raise $50 million, than it is to raise five or 10. Because the process is the same, right? The work is the same. The underwriting is the same, but for the guys writing these checks, there's not enough upside for them. So like when they're getting presented with all of these deals, they'd rather do the bigger deals with bigger upside and bigger fees. Than do a five to 10 million equity check.

And I banged my head against the brick wall for at least 60 days, right? We, I was having like meeting after meeting and Carl actually stayed in my house and we had a week of meetings, me and him. And we just got punched in the mouth. No, no. I was like, Oh my God. This is ridiculous. I was like, our thesis, our model, everything has been validated.

But we, we can't, we couldn't seem to, to kind of raise the capital we needed to get the 55, to get us to 10 million of EBITDA. And then same thing, right? Like I just used my network of people. And Devon, if she watches this, she's, She's the owner of Dark Horse Capital Partners. I'm about to be a partner in that business.

She opened up her network and literally I got to see behind the curtain of kind of how high level finance works. So one of the big things that, that we were very conscious of it was redundancy, right? After the family office kind of pulled out and from our standpoint, right, it's like the first time I've ever gone and raised any money.

We're building this relationship with the family office. They've shown me proof of funds. I've signed the contract, but then because of the first, my first rodeo, how much do I push them? Right? I was just kind of like, let them give them the leeway. I didn't want to, didn't want to piss them off. And they say, no, we're not doing this deal.

But for the second time around, we wanted redundancy. We didn't want one horse in the race. So when I, when we came to the realization, it's easier to get a bigger check. And again, and it was on another podcast I was on last week, someone made a great comment and said, it would be great to know the equity positions that they've given away, because as you know, startups, and even though this is a roll up, technically it's a startup, right?

Founders and owners give away like 80 percent of their equity, and then they end up working for nothing. Well, we'd already modeled that out, so we knew what we were willing to give and what we weren't. But then what we found out as we kind of courted all these different groups, it's also super easy to go and raise debt.

So at the end of 20, at the end of last year, 2023, it kind of took us like a full year to get everything ducks in a row. And at that point we added, we'd kind of, we know from experience or from basically living it, that guys who are kind of putting capital into these deals, they look at the team.

They're like, does this team have a track record of success? Does it have a track record of returning money back to investors? Do we think they can execute on this? So one of my key focuses and what I had to go and do was I had to go and build a world class advisory board, right? And then of course, as I'm talking about women owned businesses for women by women, I have to be very conscious of that.

So we have a full female legal team. We've got full female CPA team. We've added the original founder of Grubhub, Adam Burke, onto our board. He's had three publicly listed exits. We've added Crystal Carson, who's our head of capital markets.This week, I don't know if I could technically say this yet, but I have a verbal yes from the ex CMO Sephora to come on and be an advisor. 

And I've got two more prominent people. One, one is the mayor of Miami's wife. She wants to be on our board and I'll kind of talk about that in a minute. But we built that world class team. So when we started pitching these specific debt funds, like we have at the end of last year, we had four term sheets. Each for $55 million. 

And we looked at it and none of these term sheets were equity based, none. There's no, we're not giving away any equity. So the first one's project finance base. It's a 10 year term. 8 percent interest with a balloon at the end. So obviously we had to go through all the KYC, we had to go through underwriting, due diligence, you know what that is like.

So, we had the term sheet at the end of last year, and as it stands right now, we're at like, all the red line for the contracts are done. And that's ready to ink.And then the other group who we decided to go with in the end, two we said no to, but the other group, they, these guys created corporate bonds and they've been doing this since 95.

And I've seen the SEC filings, right? So we had to go and do bunch of due diligence. Verify everything. And they've done $8. 9 billion in bonds. So what they do is they back, in our case, it's $55 million. So they place $55 million into an escrow account that gets turned into a bond. The bond then gets sold into investors into Wall Street.

And then that bond also gets insured. So if anything happens, all the investors get their money back. And it's backed by cash. And like, I didn't know about any of this until I started getting into this world and I was like gobsmacked at how this actually really works and how it works at a big boy level. 

You know, as you kind of work in through each of these phases of the project, you don't really ever sit down and kind of think about where you've come from, what you've done or the ramifications of it. And I remember sitting there with my wife, and we were talking and I just said, I was like, look at the state of the world.

I said, look at the state of the economy. We're on the verge of world war three. Inflation is through the roof, house prices are through the roof. I said, people are throwing $110 million of debt at me. I'm like, no wonder the whole world is going to shit. So that was a huge, like a huge light bulb moment. 

And then again, it just kind of brought me back to thinking about 2008. And my mom, she, my mom has ran our own successful financial mortgage business for 30 years, nearly. And like everybody got killed during 2008 and kind of like our thought process and my thought processes have kind of gone down this road. Is that, if we look at the SME space, right, it's responsible for 80 percent of the world's GDP.

And it's the most underserved space on the planet. So with, with just going through this process and having access to these people and building relationships, right? Like I've been building relationships, all of these people, like our thought process and long term impact after this project, is, listen, now we're kind of in the inner circle. 

We will take as much money as we possibly can get from these people and we'll deploy it into the SME space. Do the deals that like, I think we've got about a billion dollars worth of deals that we could potentially fund. So that whole experience has kind of opened my eyes a little bit to what, to what it really takes first and foremost.

And secondly, how the game is played and then understanding those things. For example, it was about a year ago. So we were in New York, me, Carl, and some of the team. We flew into New York and we were having, like, we had about 18 meetings with investment banks. And one of the things that, one of the things that kind of, like I said, it's my superpower, I'm good with people. So we ended up going up to Aegis capital. They're like a small middle market, uh, IPO shop. And we come up, we get out of the lift and there's like six of them all in suits, all very stuffy, and one of them pulls out a business card. And he gives it to me. I said, guys, I said, it's 2023. Just give me your phone number. No wonder you guys are burning through so much money, wasting it on paper. And that just cut the ice, right? They all started laughing. And then that changed the tone of the conversation that we had with them. Like they were, they were really, what's the word, receptive to it.

They loved the project. They thought I was funny because I was, you know, joking around with them and trying to break the ice. And really we learned so much in a short space of time with this project that I think I spoke about this yesterday with Carl, cause we had a phone call. And I said, I think we've, the work we've done in 12, 14 months, is about five years worth of actual like education. Just by being out in the field and doing it.

[00:32:00] Ronald Skelton: I totally agree. I had a startup. I don't want to talk too much about it because it miserably failed. But I had to the point where we created the software, I'll just say it. We created an online dating system. It was supposed to keep people honest inside of their, uh, profiles. 

That's called Honesty First. Started to get a little traction in the fact that we've had people signing up. Not a whole lot, but, I was raising capital to do the marketing. I'd already built the software. I'd already raised the money through angel investors and myself, my own money to do the investors. But when I went out to the VC firms and pitched them. Every pitch, I had to go back and go, what the hell is it?

Like they'd say things during those pitches. You know, what does the current cap table look like? What the hell is a cap table? I had to go back and, you know. You just nod and go, I'll get the answer to that. And it was like, you learn so fast because there's terminology and language and they'll, they'll ask questions.

You just, you don't even not only know the answer to the question, you don't know what they're asking until you go Google it, right. You don't want to hold on a second and Google in front of them. 

[00:32:53] Ross Turner: Oh yeah. I had a couple of instances in meetings like that.Like, I didn't have the answer and you feel stupid, right? Like I had, I had many of those experiences, but the thing is, I didn't,I didn't stop, like I carried on and carried on. I kind of learned from, from those mistakes and things that I didn't know.

And luckily, and you touched on this earlier, I did like a, I did a masterclass basically for people in Carl's space. Just to tell them, like, show them my background, right. I'm not anything special, by any sense of the imagination. Definitely you're not the smartest person in the room. I said, but, I will take consistent action and I'll learn from that.

And then I'll just continue to go, like I'll just keep showing up every single day. And then ultimately all of those singles ends up being a big runway, which is kind of where we are now with this business. Like we're right at the, we're at the ad cash and stir point for this business. And the three acquisitions we have on the table right now, one, we're going to close, I'd say latest end of April. 

Just waiting for the quality of earnings report to come through.Again, cash at close 5 million, 16. 5 million total consideration. So, and they're doing 6. 2 million in EBITDA. So it's just under a three times X that we're buying that business for. The other one, which I can't say too much about it, is huge, huge business.

They'll do 40 million a year.We'd be 11 other people to be the preferred buyer.So we're, we're trying to close that as soon as possible too. And then the final one, again, cause we, we had to like, I realized that my time would be super limited, right? And if I'm going out and I'm having to learn on the job and I'm having to raise all this money, I can't also be out there looking for deals.

So we actually built a deal team. We used a bit of AI and a couple of my partners, they built a deal team. And they brought us a deal three weeks ago. I won't say the name, but they are obviously within our remit. They do $40 million a year. 4 million of EBIT, and they spend zero money on marketing, nothing.

[00:35:03] Ronald Skelton: Wow.

[00:35:03] Ross Turner: So I was blown away by it. So those three businesses that we have right now, gets us to about 11. 5 in EBIT, and then that kind of gets us to the next phase. And again, it's like the next phase is things that I personally haven't gone through. So I'm going to have to lean on the advisory board and people in our immediate circle to, to really find these women C suite executives, because that's going to be key, right?

The first getting to phase one is fine. And then we need to, I need to get out of the way. But then who we put in these seats has to be like premium A players to drive it to the market cap.

[00:35:45] Ronald Skelton: I was going to ask you when did you start that? Because executive search can take anywhere from six months to 18 months to find a great executive. So that's just, uh, you know, it's statistical. So, you can beat that statistic, of course. But, uh,I was wondering when you guys were starting the process of like vetting potential, C Suite female or sorry women. Whatever they to be, 

[00:36:08] Ross Turner: Yeah, there we go. 

[00:36:09] Ronald Skelton: Whatever, whatever the current, I'm really horrible with all these new gender identity stuff. Whatever they want to be called. I'm good with it. 

I'll call you whatever, just tell me ahead of time so I don't get myself in trouble. That said, I just curious, you know, how, how early in the game. So you guys are starting to look at that now because you can see it on the horizon, you're going to need those people.

People ask me all the time, what are the top traits I need to be a great acquisition entrepreneur? And I always say, number one is the ability to build rapport with other people. And then I think you brought up the second one, which is the, uh, totally going blank here. Building rapport with people. And then, just the ability to make that connection and,

[00:36:47] Ross Turner: Building, yeah.

[00:36:48] Ronald Skelton: There's got to be a better word for it than tenacity, but the maybe there's not. The ability to take bumps and bruises and figure it out and keep going and keep going is it's, it's almost, I don't know another better word than the tenacity. 

[00:37:00] Ross Turner: So something or something that we coined here is patient persistence.

[00:37:06] Ronald Skelton: Patient persistence. Yeah, that's a, tenacity,

[00:37:10] Ross Turner: That's what we've coined here.

[00:37:11] Ronald Skelton: Tenacity may carry a little bit of, uh, uh,what you this word I'm looking for?Routing this or, a lot of people associate tenacity with kind of bold or whatever. But I'm just talking about the persistence, right? The ability to just persistently go after something and not give up and try a different angle and try a different angle, that's the key to this because it is absolutely a numbers game. 

[00:37:34] Ross Turner: It is. And you have to be able to pivot and have the ability to understand when things are not working and you have to change tact, right. Like we've had to pivot dozen or so times within this business as we kind of, as we complete one part of the process, and we move into the next part, something shifts.

It always does. So by being flexible and, and understanding the longer goal and kind of where we want to be, it allows us to adapt fairly quickly. I mean, there's so many things that I personally don't even know, right? Like if we're talking about, you know, be great to have a public in this company, but I've never been through that process before.

I don't know what that looks like. I can imagine it's probably one of the most stressful things in the world. And, ever since I embarked on this journey with Carl, this is probably aged me about 20 years. I'm only 25.

[00:38:25] Ronald Skelton: I interviewed a Dominic Wells again yesterday, and he took Onfolio public. And we've talked about that a little bit. There's some brutal stuff that happens that you just kind of have to have thick skin for the first couple of years you're public to. Any small cap, medium cap public company can kind of get bullied by the market.

They'll short you just for the sake of shorting you and then they'll say bad things about you to try to drive the thing down because they shorted you. There's games to play. If you wanted to meet him, I'd introduce you guys. Just because he's been through that realm. But yeah, I've never aspired to be the CEO or in control of a publicly traded company. And I'll tell you why, and I'll see what you, I want to know what your thought process is. I think that publicly traded companies is the one flaw that's in our capitalistic society here. And the reason I think there's a flaw inside of it is, just pick a name brand everybody knows, Hershey. 

If you were, we talked about this, on the show I recorded the other day too. So this would be, if you're listening to back to back shows, you're going to hear the same conversation real quick. But from a different perspective, I want to hear your input on it. If you're Hershey and you're doing $2 billion a year, I don't know what their numbers are.

I'm just, I'm making the number up out of my head. So I don't know what they do. And you'd been doing that for the last 10 years. Should you be penalized for not growing? If you can produce a hundred million, even like a billion dollars a year, year after year, after year, after year. Can you be penalized for, should you be penalized and lose your job as a CEO, because you just maintain the status quo?

In my world is no, you're, you're running a hell of a machine. But in the current stock market and the current capitalistic way the stock market works, you'll lose your job because anybody that bought your stock today expects it to grow or they don't make any money.

[00:40:02] Ross Turner: And here's the thing. Like, if we look at, we look at the big four, right? The big four drivers, we've got Tesla, we've got Apple, we've got Facebook, we've got Google, sorry, five Amazon, right? Like these guys are growing just through acquisition. They are buying tons and tons of other companies, right? 

They kind of hit that, there's a ceiling and a plateau and level that they hit, right? Because you know, yes, you can release products every, every year, but you will hit some sort of ceiling. So how do you grow? Well, the quickest way to grow is just by acquiring. And if you look at their transactional history, they just acquire, acquire, acquire, acquire.

[00:40:39] Ronald Skelton: But if, and I agree. And I think 1 of the reasons why, if you look at that mid cap and large cap acquisitions, they have such a high failure rate on the integration is because they're almost required to acquire companies that may or may not be a perfect fit for the sake of growth. 

If you could take away, if investor sentiment would say, Hey, I would just love to have great stock, like our grandparents really love, at least, you know, the previous two generations before us, would love a stock that just produced great dividends every quarter and just paid, paid a regular income. A lot of people built their retirement off that. 

If that was still the sentiment, people were looking for companies that just did a great quarterly dividends, then you could be a company to just cranks out the same thing every year, every year. Because of this absolute need to grow, I think companies, mid cap and large cap companies are making acquisitions they may have not needed to,or probably even should have made because the culture fit wasn't there.

Or they're just the, there were red flags but they went ahead and did it because it added to their bottom line for the day and got them to the next quarter of growth and they got to keep their job as CEO because they proved that they grew to 20 percent quarter over quarter or whatever the number was because they bought that company.

[00:41:47] Ross Turner: I think, I think you're absolutely right there. Because the only thing that Wall Street cares about is the next quarterly numbers. So you have to validate, verify, and then show some sort of growth, right? Like if you're flat or you declined because there's hell to pay. And again, there's a lot of responsibility and liability that comes with being the CEO of a publicly listed company, right?

It's like, it's quite, it's quite a, it's a huge task. Obviously it's a feather in a professional cap, but it's not something that I ever want to be. No way.

[00:42:19] Ronald Skelton: If I ever get involved in another huge project like a 500 million, a billion dollar project, my goal would not be to take a public, but would be to grow something that would become an ESOP, right? You still have a decent exit. It's still valued at current market valuations. And it's sold to the employees and they get to run it.

And then you can maintain and it, there's so many tax advantages of that. It's insane, right? It becomes a tax, you know, a tax shelter for a lot of the income that's made, because of the way it's structured. That said, you can sell 80 percent of it and end up owning a 20 percent equity in a company that's run by its employees from that point forward.

And your, your model of running businesses, EOS, if you pair that with the guys that wrote the book called the Great Game of Business, and where they train people to be great employee owners, the combination is an amazing combination inside of a business. I just took on an advisory role for a roll up where I'm Uh, a partner in their, in their company. We're buying cabinet makingand kitchen and bathroom remodeling companies.

So that's what my time is now. But before that, you might even see in videos I was putting out where I was looking to buy companies who, for some reason or not, couldn't figure out the ESOP model. Maybe they didn't have enough time. Cause they didn't think their employees were quite ready to run it. But I was looking for companies that in the long run, the owner would like to see the employees own it.

But for some reason they need to sell now. Cause I was going to commit to them that I'll grow it into that. 

[00:43:42] Ross Turner: We like that, that model as well. Like we're big on, we're big on consistency, right? So like, when we come in and we take over a company, we don't want to change anything that they're doing well. Within this project, we've got like a five profit pillar mechanism that we have. So we go in, the first thing we do is implement that, make sure all five are done. And then we always look for internal talent, right?

Nobody knows the business better than the business owner or the executives that are running it. We like consistency. We like to hire up within, promote within. Um, and keep that continuity. And as you say, like, we'll give a portion of equity in that business to that person who's going to run it because then they've got skin in the game, right. Like they're more invested in it.

[00:44:29] Ronald Skelton: I will give you, uh, the kudos or the credit that with what you're building, I think in the current social economic environment and what the culture at, where the culture is now. Taking a, women ran or woman, woman,owned company public, would land really well and great. I think that the stock market would eat that up. I really do. 

[00:44:50] Ross Turner: They, they kind of already have. So one of the things that one of the, one of the things this year is we're actually going to be on the go on public TV show. We need to close on the three that we have on the table right now. Get us to a position where we've got at least half of the board, the half of the executive team identified, but then we're actually going to be on this show. So that's going to just raise the profile of it and also Matt, Miami being like a huge tech, the new tech hub. 

Like they're bringing in Apple, Amazon, they're really trying to drive digital, digital commerce. So venture Miami. Love what we're doing because we're putting money into female founders, right? And we're building a female founder C suite. They're backing us. So we're going to open an office in Miami early next month.

And then, and the mayor is having a welcome ceremony for the business. His wife wants to be on our board. So it's interesting times. And I think it's, again, it's, it's timing, right? Like it's timing. We've hit, our story is a great story. It's hit the political timing element and it's resonating with people.

So like if you hit those things and obviously the numbers look good and the thesis is validated, et cetera.

[00:46:01] Ronald Skelton: It always sets me back just a tiny bit, because if, anything that you couldn't do the counter of, there's something about it. So you couldn't go out and say, you know what, we're going to create a man, a white male, over 50 ran company. Well, no, there's, there's a million of those already. But if you went out and announced that and said, try to raise money and said, we're going to, our entire suite, suite's going to be men over the age of 50 that are, of Caucasian, or whatever, you know, or what the standard is. If you looked at the, if you looked at the top, a hundred companies out there, what their board of directors look like.It's starting to get better now, but over, over the last 50 years, you would see that that's the predominant thing. That would not land very well, right. 

And you, so this, this whole thing where you can say one thing, but not the other has always set me back a little bit. I always, there's some really cool clubs out there doing really cool things. But it's,It's all women ran. It was like, man, that's a really cool thing. It's too bad, but you can't do the same thing.

I remember I was a member for a while of the rotary clubs. And for most of history, rotary is all men. Now, when I joined, there were, women were allowed, but they still carried that stigma. This used to be a men's club, you know, and, uh, there was a little bit of hate, hate in the world for, Rotarians because that's what it used to be.

[00:47:09] Ross Turner: Change, change of the times, right? Sign of the times, sign of things are changing. I think I've read somewhere, or maybe as I was talking to Devin, but female funds were outperforming male funds by like 24 percent. And as much as, it doesn't pay me to say it, but I think to a certain extent, women are better leaders. They're more empathetic. They're prepared to listen more. They're better at conflict resolution. What we're lucky, kind of like within our organization, and I had to learn this very quickly and very harshly several years ago, that it's always best just to shut up and listen and let people express what they want to express.

Like we have, we've literally got no egos within this business. Like if somebody comes up with a better idea, great. Right? Like we, you know, we don't tolerate, we have like an energy, like an energy mandate within our organization, right? People need to be really bought into the project. They need to really love the vision and be rowing in the same direction.

Like we've had to remove and fire several people from the project because it was just the negativity around it would have a knock on effect. So. I think from, from a women's perspective and a women, and again, obviously I can't speak for women because I'm not one, but from kind of what I've seen, I think they, they make better, better business leaders.

[00:48:36] Ronald Skelton: I think that, I'm a big fan of the underdog. So whether it's women, minorities or whatever. I joke around, say I'm the whitest guy in my family. Everybody in my family is Native American. So I show up to an event they're like, who brought the white guy? So I'm a card carrying, uh, Cherokee, but I'm, I look like my mom and I, you know. So, my dad, if you ever see a picture of my dad, he's really dark skinned, Native American. 

That said, I'm a big fan of the underdog. I really am. I'll hands down help anybody who's an underdog. Whether it means minority female run, they have something to prove. If you give me five people and they all have equal resumes and the skill sets are the same as somebody has something to prove I want that guy. 

Because there's a different drive for somebody who has something to prove. And as a female or woman in a business, they have something to prove. At least they feel they do most of the time. I don't know that it should be true, but they do. They feel that way.

So then, there's, the drives there, right? And the, what's the word I'm looking for? Self entitlement, the ego that comes along with a lot of the people who don't have something to prove. Like they're, they, they, they're owed something. That just set so wrong with me. So that's one of the reasons I love, I love a good underdog.

I'll help, I'll help anybody out there who, is swimming upstream.

[00:49:49] Ross Turner: My, my biggest, my biggest turnoff is definitely entitlement. Come, come at me with that kind of attitude, I'm like, oh no. But yeah, I mean, we're in a, we're in a really, it's funny cause it's kind of like we're in such a good position within the business right now. And it also, it feels like the calm before the storm.

Like I know the next two weeks are going to be incredibly hectic.And then finalizing like the rest of the capital element and we're going through our Reg D process right now, because we, we need to have 300 shareholders to, as part of the SEC requirements, right? So we're just going to do a Reg D Class B shares, all that kind of stuff.

So we're going through that and it kind of is a little bit calm before the storm. And I know the rest of this year is, it's going to be pretty hectic. And it's stuff that I've never gone through before. So I'm going to be learning a whole bunch along the way. I'm pretty sure I'm going to make it ton of mistakes.But you know, like within, within any business, I guess you're only three or four bad decisions away from going bust, right. And sometimes we're in this business at different times of kind of where we are. It's felt like we've been an inch away from glory and an inch away from disaster.

That's kind of how it feels all the time.

[00:51:04] Ronald Skelton: There are parts of this industry, when I say this industry, or entrepreneurship to acquisition mergers and acquisitions, there's parts of it that are art and there's parts of their science. So you've already got the number, one of the things I think are art is rapport building and people skills.

As a true art you seem to have that down. That's one of the areas I love to do. And the second one, is,you know, the financials are science. I mean, you can do, be good at math and stuff. But the other one is, and it comes back to rapport and people skills, that integration isn't hard. And it's really understanding culture, understanding and listening to the people, figuring out what they want and what they change.

You know that, and you've got something here. The reason a lot of these big companies fail as that integration model, but you've already got the core basic skill, of that people skill and that listening. If you can just carry that through, I think you've got something.

[00:51:54] Ross Turner: Appreciate that. I think, that integration in the people, the people element gets lost on a lot of people, right? You've got to remember that business is about people. Whether it's customers, whether it's your employees, whether it's your investors, it's about people. So ultimately, you need to come across as like, you need to be likable.

Your project needs to make sense. Your business needs to make sense. But then you also actually have to give a shit about people. Like care about the people who work for you. Care about what they want. Because I think a lot of people get caught up in like employees working for me. I think if you look at the shift, more and more people are kind of quitting their jobs, they're doing their own thing.

Which makes it even more important to create an incredible culture within the organization that you're trying to build and actually care about people because they're going to drive, drive all of the shareholder value. They're going to drive the growth. It's not going to be me. I can't do it.

[00:52:53] Ronald Skelton: One of the reasons I love that ESOP model is I think the reason a lot of people are leaving the corporate world for their own gig, is they need a feel a sense of ownership. They need to feel a sense of control of their own future, their own destiny. Especially in uncertain financial times. I think that being an ESOP gives them some of that in the realm that they can see, especially if you train them well. I love the book, The Great Game of Business.

And those guys, they do training just like East, EOS does. They have people that come out and really affordable. I think it's group of, groups of four or six people under, it's under six figures. 

[00:53:21] Ross Turner: You have to send me, you have to send me a link to that please, Ron.

[00:53:27] Ronald Skelton: I will, I'll introduce you to the guy that runs their training. It's Steve. I interviewed him on the show here, but I'll introduce you.

I'll make an introduction on, uh, introduction on LinkedIn. But, uh, it's a great way to people to understand where they're at in the business and how they contribute to the business. It's a fairly popular book that was out, but now they've actually acquired over 60 companies themselves, implementing their own model.

And they do a lot of turnarounds in low margin companies. You call it a, when you take use auto parts and you fix them, make them new again, what's the word I'm looking for? 

Ross Turner: Refurbished. Yeah.

[00:53:58] Ronald Skelton: Refurbish things from turbos or whatever. So these things have profit margins of one, two, 3 percent of the, over the entire company.

So they have to run really efficiently. So they, The Great Game of Business is, they've gamified that they've taught everybody in the company, all the employees, what their day to day tasks due to the bottom line, how to read a balance sheet, how to read a financial statement. And what, when they come in and they make that widget, what does that do to that balance sheet?

What does that do to the financial statement? And everybody gets that. And, uh, there's a book out there wrote and then they have a training system, but I think that coupled with EOS and that coupled with, being potentially being an ESOP or a publicly traded company even, is one heck of a catalyst. And you might be able to overcome that need people have to have a, a sense of control over their own destiny in their own future and want to leave and create their own thing.

The entrepreneurs are going to be entrepreneurs. You're never going to put me in a cage and have me work long term in a company for more than a couple of years, right? I'm going to break out and do my own thing. You're probably the same way. Some people are just naturally entrepreneur. They got, they have the desire to create.

[00:55:00] Ross Turner: I will say one thing just kind of before we, before we kind of wrap this up. One of the big things in terms of like culture that we have in here is we, especially within our space, right? We don't believe in a five day workweek. It's four days, Monday to Thursday, because we want our people to be recharged, enjoy their time away. There's no need to work a five day workweek in the business that we're in. It's just unnecessary.

[00:55:26] Ronald Skelton: I got it. Well, we are past the hour now, so let's just do this. How do people reach out to you if they want to work with you or want to hear more about this? Or, uh, if they're, there's family offices listening or whatever, and they want to get involved. They want to follow your story. What's the best way for people to follow along with what you're doing?

[00:55:44] Ross Turner: Really, I'm not, I'm not really a big social media guy. I've got an Instagram account, which has one post on it from my wife. But you can,you can reach out to me on Instagram and it's I am Ross W. Turner. And also on LinkedIn, it's the same. I am Ross W. Turner on LinkedIn. 

[00:56:01] Ronald Skelton: Is anybody on your team going to like carry the story and share the story as it grows through, through one of the, do you have somebody on the team that's going to build a social media profile and let people

[00:56:10] Ross Turner: Yeah, we, so we will. Yeah. It's like, so phase two is part of the move to Miami, the female founders pitch, which we're going to do. We have a full social media team and like, they're going to,

[00:56:22] Ronald Skelton: Well, you're going to be on a TV show. So they're going to do that for you if you don't. 

[00:56:26] Ross Turner: Yeah, well, yeah, I will be on that. So me and Carl will both be on that. So that's going to be a bit strange because I'm not really a limelight kind of guy, but you know, it's a good experience. 

[00:56:37] Ronald Skelton: But, uh, no, I do appreciate having you here today. This was brilliantly enlightening. It was fun, a fun conversation. If somebody had, could walk away with two or three takeaways and that's all they could remember from the show, what would you want them to remember?

[00:56:50] Ross Turner: It's one big thing. Learn to be really, really good with people. That will take you much further in life and business than anything else. Skills can be learned, right? There's an art and a science and a nuance to be really good with people. And I'll give, I'll just give a quick example before we wrap this up.

You can kind of buy your way into these rooms and I alluded it before. So you can, you can go on mentor pass, right? And pay $500 to have a meeting with someone prominent. This is what 90 percent of the other people do. They get on the call and they go, how can you help me? Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me on a hammer with these people. 

What I do beforehand is, I'll go and see what they've been up to. Say, for example, I've set a meeting with you, Ron, and you and your family have been to Hawaii. I'll start the conversation with, Hey, Ron, I just see that you come back from Hawaii. Me and my wife had been a plan. I'm going there for our wedding anniversary.

What was it like? What did you do? So they're already opening up, having that conversation. And then I start the conversation with, like, what problems are you having right now, and is there anything you need help with that I can help you? And that just changes the conversation. So instead of it's like, what can you do for me?

I'm actually interested in that person. And one of the big things that I've done, that we've done is, we never make that first meeting transactional. We never do that. We're like, let's, do we like each other? Because not all money's created equal, right? Like it's just not. So if I wouldn't have you in my house, have a beer with you, go for dinner with you, then I certainly don't want to do business with you.

And I certainly do not want your money. No way. So by being good with people, and really like understanding that, it will take you so far in life.

[00:58:36] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I am 100 percent on board with that. Rapport is the top thing. I tell acquisition, acquisition entrepreneurs all the time. Even the team I'm on now is like, look, our first call has nothing to do, we're never going to talk about numbers. We're not going to try to figure out where they're, financially, like what do you want to sell your business for?

That's not the question. The question is what, what problems you have right now? What are you trying to accomplish? Right. I have a sense of humor that can ask questions that a lot of other people can't. One of my favorite things to do is like, out of all the people you can be chatting with today on the phone, why would you be on a call with somebody who buys and sells businesses?

What is it you're wanting to do? My goal isn't to buy your business and get the best deal I got. My goal is to figure out where you're trying to go and help you get there. And if that happens to be me buying it, that's great. And if it doesn't, I probably, with my network and the people I know, I probably know the right guy.

So let's have a conversation of more around, what you built. What's cool about it? What's the struggles within it? Why you built it? And then where are you trying to get to? what's your goal here? And if I can help you achieve that goal, that's awesome. That's what I want to do.

[00:59:35] Ross Turner: I love that. That's very powerful. 

[00:59:37] Ronald Skelton: I appreciate you. Uh, I think we can call that a show. You have any final words you,

[00:59:41] Ross Turner: I think we can. I think we ran over. Appreciate you, Ron. Thanks for having me. 

[00:59:45] Ronald Skelton: Awesome.