How $100M Sell-Side Deals Really Get Done with Patrick Galleher

0:00All right, on today's episode, we interviewed Patrick Gallagher from Boxwood Partners, where we really did a deep dive into what does sales side brokers look like at a bigger level, right? The deals they're transacting are in that $100 million range, and really talk through, you know, how does a seller start to think about that? How does the broker start to approach a seller and what are some of the mechanics they start to put in place? And then ultimately, how does the transaction of that size get completed, right? How are they vetting the IOIs? How are they doing the management meetings? How are they really going through the whole process to get to the finish line? So, Casey, what was your new takeaways? Yeah, you know, forget, forget deal size for our listeners, right? You know, take that out of the box. You're, you are doing what a sales side broker does. You're talking to the seller and you're taking them through a process, right? You may not do massive management interviews, but all of these stages and steps are critical to get to a deal closing, right? Even talking about a quality of earnings, being able to peg and set a good valuation. So all of these things are

1:00part of the role. So I felt this takeaway of this call or this podcast was outstanding, answered a lot of questions for me in the process. And if you're an independent sponsor, this is a must listen, because this is a big part of what you're going to be doing every single day. Yeah, and the interesting thing, like Casey said, like, you know, people are doing these steps, but in this episode of really talk about what does it look like whenever these steps get institutionalized, how do you do them at a higher or more kind of focused level? And so lots of good nuggets on this one. Yeah, and I will tell you if you're listening and you are an operating partner or you're somebody that is interested in participating in some of these deals, you know, reach out to M&A launch pad and also to equity launch pad. We'd love the chat with you. Take it from there. Welcome to the M&A launch pad podcast with your host, Casey and Ferris with equity launch pad. On this podcast, you will get insights on acquiring investing in and selling profitable businesses in the lower to middle market, whether you're a business owner, investor or a spa entrepreneur at equity launch pad, we will provide you with the knowledge, guidance and capital to navigate the world of mergers and acquisitions. All right, guys, just take one second here real quick.

2:05When you're buying a business, ensuring the financial health of the company is critical, and that's where our quality of earnings partner comes in. Quality of earnings gives you confidence in the financials of the company that you're purchasing. It aims to protect your investment and ensure that you're stepping into a profitable business on date. Patrick of O'Connell Advisory Group is your dynamic quality of earnings partner. He's here to help you buy the right business on your timeline. Patrick's entire practice is focused on business acquisitions. Your niche is his niche. And over the past decade, Patrick's helped more than 200 buyers like yourself successfully purchase and operate enduring profitable businesses. In fact, Patrick's helped some listeners of the show. So if you're buying, looking for help with the quality of earnings, financial diligence, network capital, and more, head to O'ConnellAdvisorGroup.com or just click the link in the show notes. Hey, Patrick, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. No problem. So for listeners, Patrick, you want to give a little bit of your background about what you're doing. And more importantly, maybe share about where you're living right now. So, you know, we talked about that before and stuff. Yeah. Now, with, well, box reporters, we're at

3:08CellSide Investment Bank, headquartered in Jupiter, Florida. And we have offices in Richmond, Virginia, Charleston, and Jupiter. And then I, I live down in Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico. So commuting every week between the various offices. So for our listeners, you know, tell us a little bit about a CellSide broker. Like, what's the, you know, how do you work? How does that, you know, how does that benefit, you know, guys that are looking for companies and gals that are out there? What's the advantage? Well, we're typically hired by the, the family or the founder or the private equity group that holds the company at the moment. And then we run a very defined process over seven months to find the right private equity or strategic buyers for that company. So we run a two-bit process. We go to IOIs. Typically, we go out to about 350, 250 to 350 potential targets on the process. And then we narrow it down through indications of interest. And then we take

4:11the top eight of those and go to management meetings. And then we narrow it down to one LOI for the last 45 days of due diligence. So, so we equated to, it's an auction process. It gets the best valuation for our clients. But it also helps them, you know, it's kind of like speed dating towards the end with the management meetings. They get to meet great private equity groups and independent sponsors and, you know, figure out who they really want to go on this next part of the journey with to grow the company even further. So, so we really help them find the right partner and hopefully we can get everybody to the same valuation at the end of the day. So they get to choose the right partner at a really competitive valuation. So a few questions right off the bat, right? So, you know, it's funny because there's different things around indication of interest to a letter of intent, right? That indication of interest, I've always struggled with it, right? Because you're really just putting out what what you could potentially be. So in your advice,

5:16when you're working with somebody on the indication of interest, and we don't really know what the multiples are going to be or values, or we've just done kind of the analysis, what is your advice on, because we do need to put an indication of interest to let people know, hey, we want to get it off. Are you thinking, is there an exclusivity in that indication of interest? Is there, then how do you assess like how will be your advice for somebody to an indication of interest to get to the seller? Yeah, so I mean, typically, you know, on our average deal, we get somewhere between 15 to 30 indications of interest, and we get them all in the same day. So you can see pretty quickly on whether a target slash investor buyer is thinking about this business at a five or six times multiple or 15 times multiple. So it gives us the opportunity to narrow the field and make sure our clients don't waste time. You know, if there's 10 guys, 10 firms thinking about this company at

6:1710 11 times EBITDA, there's no reason to sit down and meet with firms that are thinking about it at five and a half or six times. So it really just helps narrow the funnel down. So we put in the room the best possible partners, you know, who could hit the highest enterprise value at the end of the day for the LLI. So, you know, and, you know, we always ask to include management option pools. Some private equity firms always do 15 percent, some do 10 percent. It might not, you know, every client has a different thought process behind management incentive pools and whether they want to roll 20 percent forward or 40 percent forward. And so the IOI just gives us a good chance to narrow the field down based on what that private equity group typically typically looks for. Got it. So I make a couple questions just to help frame it for the listeners, right? What size deals are you typically looking at? And are your sellers looking for complete exits or are they more so looking

7:22for partial exits to grow, right? You mentioned kind of the allocation of, you know, pool for other executives, right? How does that come into play? Yeah, we hardly ever do a deal that's 100 percent. So, you know, most of our deals are, you know, our clients are rolling forward 15 to 40 percent into the new co-post transaction. So they're going to have a second bite of the Apple with the private equity group. You know, we spend a lot of time with our clients prior to going to market on trying to figure out what their objective is. You know, if it's a family that wants to retire and doesn't want any, you know, exposure going forward, that's a different type of process, different target lists than somebody who says they have three to five years to make that next run for the next, you know, next bite of the Apple. So we really kind of curate our target

8:23lists on each deal based on what our clients want to achieve. But yeah, so, you know, our average deals probably are clients rolling 20 percent of the enterprise value back into the deal and owning 30 to 40 percent. Got it. And what dollar size are these deals, though? Are they two million r-deals, 20 million r-deals, 100 million r-deals? What's kind of the average, you guys? Our average deal is right around 100 million. It's right around 100 million. So the stuff that's all, you know, because we like to say that we like to take it from family-owned to management lead, right, to then mature it to where it can have that bigger exit. And so you guys are already, essentially, really, you're, you're, you're already put, you're really private equity-slash post-private equity, right? Or it's already mature enough, 100 million dollars is big enough, has the backend, has the operational cloud, and it really is a investment and numbers game from there on. It's not, there's not a complete repositioning of an asset in that scenario, all right? Yeah. No, we, I would say probably 65 to 70 percent of our deals are found

9:28are family-owned and 30 percent are private equity-owned already. Got it. We're, we're doing sales side sports. So when you do the management, so I'm, let's just say I'm working with you. I'm going to roll in 30 percent of my equity into the new co, right? So then does the private equity firm you work with typically then go, yeah, we'll give 10 percent additional management pool, or do you typically kind of say, hey, where you're rolling in equity, how does that management pool typically get structured? Who's equity does it come out of? Is it usually coming out of the product? Yeah, that, how does that usually structure? Well, it would be dilutive to the post-co equity cap table. So, I mean, just take a hundred million dollar deal, for example. A hundred million dollar deal is going to be funded 50, 50 million of equity, 50 million of debt. I'm just using those for round numbers. So if, if you sold your business for a hundred million, own 40 percent post transaction, you're rolling, you're taking 80 million off the table. You're putting back 20 million, but the new equity table is only 50 million of equity, because you're using

10:3350 million of debt. So you're owning 40 percent post-close for 20 million dollars of the 100 million dollar enterprise value. So you're taking 80 million off the table, and you still end up owning 40 percent of the company. So the 10 to 15 percent equity pool for management would equally dilute that 50 million cap table post-close. So you would get diluted by basically 10 to 15 percent of your 40 percent post-close. Got it. So everybody's just agreeing up front that, hey, we're going to do this transaction. We're rolling this much, and we're going to allocate X amount for executives, and everyone's just basically taking that dilution equally. For example, if you need to hire a new CFO, which happens quite a bit in a transaction, first time a company's had 50 million of of private credit fund debt, or most CFOs of a family-owned business haven't managed the

11:39covenants and the requirements of managing a 50 million dollar debt facility. So you might have to hire a new CFO that you put aside two or three percent of the option pool for them to as part of their package coming in. Got it. And so the question, what are some of the biggest mistakes your sellers make up front, or let's talk about two parts. What are some of their maybe biggest preconceived notions that are maybe inaccurate, and then from that, what are some of the bigger mistakes that you see commonly made? I think the biggest misconception is private equity is all about financial engineering and not about strategy and growth. So it's a private equity today, when I first got in this business back in 0607, there's a lot more about how can we grow this business first? How can we manufacture more EBITDA from this business? So cost-cutting,

12:40streamlining, margin productivity is much less important today, or much less in the forefront of the conversation, then is how are we going to grow the top line? What new product services, what new geographies can we go into to drive the revenue stream versus how can we cut costs and increase EBITDA? So I think most families or most founder owners think of big bad private equity, where most of the private equity firms nowadays are much more added value on growth for financial engineering. Yeah, and I'd echo that too. I think private equity gets a bad rap because the handful of big facing things that failed get a lot of visibility in its private equity, but the other 90% that transacted into just fine don't, right? And that's fortunate as part of the business. The movie Wall Street, and you look at all the movies around private equity,

13:41and those were all based on the early 90s, late 80s, private equity funds and firms, and the market really has changed quite a bit. And then maybe continue on. So that's the viscosity of notion. What about the bigger mistakes that your sellers are making? You know, we really want our clients once they're engaged to focus on the business and not focus on the transaction. So the biggest mistake they can make is counting their money before the transaction happens, taking their eye off the ball, and not focusing on continuing to do what they've done for the last 10, 15 years. And so, you know, if performance goes down during a transaction, you know, that's the worst thing that can happen to us. So we really try to do all the heavy lifting and make sure that our clients are free to run the business and focus on growth and,

14:41you know, maintaining their margins and cash flow versus focused on, you know, which conversation we had yesterday with which private equity group. So let's kind of go back to the capital stack. Yeah, as you're going through that process. So I want to sell for a hundred million, but the company also needs 20 million to grow, right? Or it needs money to grow. So we solve for the 100 million. How do you typically see the growth capital solve for in that as well? Does it typically dilute down everybody post-close if we have to bring in new equity? How do you typically see all that come together? If there's a true need for growth capital, you know, they're going to put a line of credit in place or, you know, the original debt facility would be a little smaller, and they'll have a line of credit put in place at close. So it's a non-delutive line of credit that's, you know, so your role over of 20 million might only be, you know, 20 percent or 30 percent to the post-close because a line of credit got put in place versus a full debt facility day one.

15:46So it's either going to be diluted post-close or pre-closed. So there's no way to bring in that, you know, more capital. It's going to dilute you one way or the other. And so when do you start having those conversations with your sellers? Is this like all the stuff you do in the beginning? Yeah, I mean, day one. I mean, we sit down and try to design. You know, we spend a lot of time pre-engagement on making sure that we feel comfortable that we can get a transaction done that our sellers going to agree with, you know, based on our experience and knowledge of the markets and where the markets currently are. So, you know, we're not going to bring something to market that we don't believe we can get done at something that our sellers are going to be excited about. Well, I'm actually asking all these questions selfishly because I'm literally going through this process right now. And so these are all like this kind of stuff is, you know, you're obviously playing a poker game, right? There's a stage or there's a turn, there's a river,

16:48there's all that great, all whatever analogy you want to make on the deal making. And I think that front end really getting everybody in alignment on the front end is just mission critical, right? Because if you miss a step or something goes to the side, you're going to lose the deal. And so, do you pull the trigger on like a business valuation at any point for these guys in the process? Do your buyers typically wait to the end? How do you start laying out true multiples? Like where you kind of go, hey, this is a more of a market multiple that fits in there. Do you guys do that in your analysis? To structure our engagement, we think through valuation, but we do not do valuations with our clients. So we don't, you know, we put out, you know, we run the process and we get the market determines the value of where the deal is going to trade. So we want to make sure

17:52that we're comfortable, that we can get what our client expects, but we do not do any type of, you know, there's no pricing on any of our deals. I mean, if a private equity firm asks what, what, you know, I'm like, you just got to make sure you outbid the other 150 to 100 private equity firms that are taking a look at this. So it's, it's, yeah, we don't, we don't give any guidance to, to target your buyers on any of our transactions. Got it. And so, but, but if you, if you had a seller that was expecting a 20X and you know that's far from market, you're not moving forward on that transaction, are you? No, we're not taking on this client. Got it. So yeah, you're still, you're still to some extent, you're not necessarily giving them valuations, but you're giving them high level market guidance, just to make sure that everybody's in the right ballpark, right? Correct. We're, we're looking in what the, what the order of the possible is based on their current financials. And then all

18:55of our clients do a sell side quality earnings with a third party firm prior to us going to market with them. So, yeah, we know exactly what the buy side quality earnings going to find before we go to market. And we try to, you know, pitch and position around the good, bad, the ugly, in our Q of e before we go to market. And then also we have, I think, I think we have seven or eight team members at Boxwood who did quality of earnings at, at big four and, you know, mid tier accounting firms before coming in onto the bank inside. Yeah, and I think that is a critical, because, right, what is the true EBITDA? What are the quality of those earnings? I think knowing that before you go out to the market is critical, right? Because I would imagine that would kill the deal. If buy side does their Q of e and comes back and says, hey, you're off by three, four million here on revenue. What is this? And I

19:59can see that being a big hiccup in the process. Yeah, I mean, the reason why it's a standard practice now is private equity firms always found more EBITDA in their Q of e than investment banks were showing in the books because there was, you know, it just got caught up a lot of one-time expenses non-operational expenses that were in the EBITDA. And, you know, a 10 million EBITDA business was actually 12. And so the private equity firms, the buyers were getting the benefit of that where now we can actually see it on the front end and change our models and our financials in the books. Nice. And so when you, when someone wants to get on your customer list, right? So they say, hey, I want to be talked to about your deals. So let's talk about an independent sponsor because most of my listeners are either going to be an independent sponsor, or they're going to be, you know, a searcher, which is a different conversation on this conversation. So what do you guys look for in that independent sponsor for you guys to say, hey, yeah, we'll go down the road and put

21:03you on our list. It's a very high bar. I'll be honest. We need to have a really good relationship with the independent sponsor to get on our target list. We have to make sure they have lenders that are in their hip pocket that will support them on deals. We've done independent sponsor deals. So very successfully, but they were with independent sponsor firms that we knew very well, and knew their track record, or they spun out of larger funds. And they had, you know, really good support from the the private credit fund community on their on their on their group. So it's but it is much tougher for an independent sponsor to win a process per se just because when we narrowed down from IOI to management meetings, we really asked for a private, you know, we asked for lender commitment letters or soft commitment letters. We want to know that they've they've actually

22:10created their debt debts, their debt decks for their lenders. They've gotten, you know, buy in on the deal before they we invite them to manage the meetings. Because you guys are obviously trying to pick the right horse. It's a long process, right? And you don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole with someone that basically doesn't have their ducks in a row, right? And yeah, I think the other part of it too is you don't want to lose your sellers trust, right? And I think maybe the question that I have around this is, you know, what were scenarios where maybe you picked the wrong horse, right? And what what happened there? Right? What were some of the things that either you didn't catch or what happened with the potential buyer that ended up resulting in just a failed execution? Yeah, I mean, I mean, there's a couple examples in my 18 year history where, you know, private equity group independent sponsor got all the way to the end. And last second, they're, they're, their equity, their equity lead is bailed on. And, you know, the whole deal goes sideways.

23:15And, you know, if there are fond of, we've committed capital, it wouldn't have happened. So it's, so, you know, it just as a, as a, as a banker, we just need to make sure that the independent sponsor has LP, you know, LP commitment and, you know, lenders, you know, it just adds another element of risk to the deal where you don't have that with a committed fund. So kind of going back into the front end of the conversation, right? Because I think a lot of our listeners are meeting with sellers there having these conversations on the front end. And, and I am, I follow a consultive selling process, right? I'm more of a wanting them to know that, hey, I'm playing, I'm playing poker with my cards up. I want to walk you through because I might be going, most of these guys is the first time they've ever sold their business, right? These are not repeat sellers. They've built a family business or they've got a legacy and that stuff. So in your sales process on the front end, how long are you guys spending with the sellers in order to, before you go to market? What's typically your

24:17average? And then what do you, what are all those stages you're going through with them to educate them on what they're up against? Yeah, I would say it all depends. I mean, you know, most of our clients are either repeat private equity groups that have used us multiple times or, you know, coming through referral from a former client. So, you know, I would say 20% of our clients we've been talking to for two or three years prior to engaging. You know, another 30, 40% are referrals where, you know, somebody they know in the industry used us and they've been told, you know, just call boxwood and use them. Probably another 20% are, you know, deals that we're pitching against two or three other investment banks that, you know, companies have already decided to go to market and then the rest are private equity groups that have already used us. So it's, so it's really, there's a, there's a pretty broad spectrum on how clients come to boxwood. You know, it's, it's

25:24definitely three or four routes that that people get here. So we spend a lot of time with them before educating them on what the process looks like. And then I engage with you, right? So then you've got to, to get ready to go to market, to do this stuff. What is y'all's typical go-to-market process and time for him? Sellside QV is first two to three weeks, usually two or three to four weeks, but together the, the teaser and the, and the sim where then we're in the market for six to eight weeks, I.O.I's management meetings and then the L.I. phase and then usually 45 to 60 days of due diligence. So usually works out to about six and a half, seven months. Yeah, not a short process. And then maybe on the, on the buy side, how do buyers come to you as well, right? Like, are you guys out there specifically trying to match buyer specific deals? Is it, you know, just working your existing database? How do you guys go about the buy side? Well, I mean, we, yeah, we narrow down, we only go to 150 to 350 buyers on each deal. So we,

26:32we have, you know, a fairly substantial target list of private equity and strategic buyers by sector. And then we, you know, kind of curate the target list for each deal based on size, sector, majority, minority, you know, whatever, you know, whatever type of deal we're trying to curate. Nice. And I imagine you guys have a nice marketing team that puts all that data together once you, once you collect all the, the, the data room and all of those documents. I imagine you guys put together buyers like a rustic feel to it. All right. They don't want it too polished. No, no, it's, it's, I mean, we do have great data rooms, but it's all the bankers doing, I mean, it's all the, you know, analysts associated to be, I mean, it's our, it's our team putting you all that together. We don't have a marketing team of boxing. Got it. So let me ask you one question then before we kind of come up on time. You know, what's maybe a couple of deals that you guys transacted? Maybe, you know, what industry were they in, things like that? And on that same vote,

27:32on that same vein, which is maybe you have an example of one that just spurred a lot more interest than you guys were expecting. And, you know, kind of just how that multiple maybe you guys went in thinking it'd be a seven and I'm transacting out of 12. And what made that so attractive? Okay. I mean, that's a, yeah. Got a lot of those. But, you know, one in Texas, well, you guys are the best sellers on the industry. So I'm sure you do. Yeah, one, one, one, one, one deal in Texas was Parker products. It was a food ingredient manufacturer out of Fort Worth. They were the original creators of the, of got what's the ice cream cone dumbbell ice cream cone or that's ice cream and blue belt. They did, they did some ingredients for blue belt. But they were food ingredient coming out of Fort Worth. And we had a massive amount of indications of interest on that deal. Great management meetings. We were going through that process building a new facility in Fort Worth. At the time, the Riverside company

28:38came in and won the deal. And, I mean, but I can't even remember at this point how many allies we had, but it might have been triple figures. The level of interest we had in that deal. But yeah, we've had some great deals on Texas. Stuart Hose and Pike, we did out of Fort Worth. That was a great deal. We ended up selling that to Clayton Doobler and Rice. You know, tons of interest in that deal much higher multiple than we expected. So, so yeah, so we've got, you know, quite a few deals. Junk King went for, you know, 50% premium to what we expected. So, you know, junk hauling business. Junk King. I don't know what that is. Junk King, you know, we sold junk luggers and junk King. So they junk King comes into your house and clears out all the junk and throws it away for you. And that was owned by Northwest equity partners. Very cool. But yeah, all very cool deals.

29:43And I guess maybe just to put a bow on it, the ones that really gained attraction were they bought because of strategic growth. You know, strategic again, I roll in or was it that they had a clear path to continued growth. And that's what attracted the buyers. I would say 80% of our deals are about strategic growth versus, you know, some type of tying. But we do sell quite a few franchise ores to groups that own multiple franchise ores. So KKR has a roll up out of Waco, Texas called Naverly. We've done a lot of their add on franchise ores into their into their group. So those would be more strategic, but they've been able to grow a majority those quite well after after the deals have been done. My last question. Give us a give us a snapshot of a management meeting. Like what's a what is a well done management meeting where that you go, wow, that was well done. Yeah, it's a conversation. So our management meetings are three

30:48hours long. First 30 to 45 minutes is the private equity group or strategic buyer explaining why their their money is greener than other people's money that they're trying to explain why their hundred million dollars is better than the other guys hundred million dollars. And then the next two hours and 15 minutes is really just a conversation. We always prepare a management presentation deck. You know, I call it a management conversation referral guide. It's really, you know, if we're flipping pages in that deck during the meeting, it's a really bad meeting. We really want it just to be a free flowing conversation between the two parties and we want to we give all of our clients kind of a pre a predefined list of questions. They should be asking that potential investor slash buyer during the management meeting. So we try to turn it around by the end of our client actually driving the conversation and asking things about,

31:50you know, what's their operating cadence? Do they like weekly calls? Do they like quarterly board meetings? Do they want monthly meetings? You know, you know, it's it's really about our client finding the right partner to take it from a hundred million to five hundred million. And you know, that's not always the highest bidder. That's not always the highest valuation. That might be, you know, someone at 90 million versus 100 million, but you know, we've had many deals go to the second or third highest bidder because they bought into their their partnership more than others. And it's all the managers there is it's typically like all management or any every situation. Everyone's different. So sometimes just just just CEO shows up and are the owner or is it man? I would say typically we always want, you know, at least three of the management team in the meeting, but, you know, we've had management meetings with, you know, six seven on our side

32:50and six or seven plus the lenders on the other side. So, you know, we've had rooms full of 16 to 18 people in demand. Wow, so the lenders. We don't know the lenders ever speak. The lenders are enlisting a lot of mode, even if they're. And are that in person or those teams? I mean, I feel like it's very much a you wanted in person, but I'm just curious kind of at that point in time where the level commitment is. We we pushed it in person. So if if a if a if a private making a group or a buyer is not willing to fly out to do an in person meeting, they're they're not going to get a man. Yeah, yeah, they're they're they're out. So if they're not serious enough to fit in their schedule and get out to and we do them all on the same week or, you know, 10 days. So we keep everyone on a very defined timeline to make sure that we keep the competitive tension and the and the process on time. So nice. And so then as a seller, you just have to make sure to free up that week and then you can get back to focusing on your business, right? So

33:51all right. Yeah, all right. We're going to jump over to our rocket round Patrick. I mean, first off, I could talk to you for hours about this stuff. It's fascinating. And we're all that we're going to trip down a Puerto Rico and trust me, in case you and I can find time to come down there. Yes, we can do it. We can do it. We can do it as well. Kind of that's more. Nah, just great stuff. And so all right. So we're going to jump into our rocket round in for our listeners. This is where we ask our guests three important questions. I'll throw out the first one. What do you like to do in your free time? I am. I hear I play a lot of golf. So it's I played in college, played a little bit after college. But yeah, I still. My dad is a golf pro. So golf is a big part of me. That's awesome. Got it. And Casey can bring his daughter. She's on her way. So next question. Most memorable moment in your business journey. So it would probably be one year out of college after I stopped trying to play golf for a living. I had a meeting with Yahoo and ended up cutting a deal with Yahoo back when they had 36 employees

34:56and ended up managing some of their Edgar filing web pages and putting together a service around that. So that was pretty instrumental when I was 24, 23, 24 years old, you know, finding Yahoo out there with a very nascent stage and being able to agree a deal. I can ask now because as a tech guy, so what you you did what for Yahoo, you were basically cut a deal to to do their Edgar filings just for you. So we we hosted pages in Europe and the US around their 10Ks, 10Qs, same. Oh, I got you. Very cool. I'm on Yahoo Finance. And I did we did the same thing with NASDAQ and barons, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Hons of Blossom, Invest Your in France. Yeah, so it was and then in 99 we launched webcasting. So I competed with Mark Cuban in the webcasting

35:56space. Yeah, so it's so kind of that and then did one public in in July of 2000 over in London and became the youngest CEO in the London Stock Exchange. Wow, very cool. And then you sold everything immediately before the cotton cotton boom just to make sure you avoided that, right? I did not, you know, at 29, you're not quite enough to do that. I can't push my chips back in and expecting it to. So bought five other companies with all the cash and then ended up buying the company back in06 with a private equity group and then got fired after a certain couple, probably six, nine months and then started boxing. So very cool. It was it was a pretty pretty amazing track from, you know, 1995 to 2007. And it's a great experience to start my career. So I've only really had two, you know, two, two roles that and then and boxwood. Pretty amazing.

37:02Pretty amazing. All right. Last question. What is your favorite tool or resource? You know, obviously chat, you know, AI now is incredible. I mean, it's, you know, we're using AI more and more every day. I think it helps all of our team members get smarter on deals and you know, you got to you got to double check everything. It's still a little walkie, but you know, six months from now, it's going to be even better than it was last month. And you know, if if if you're in the deal market and then doing M&A and you're not using AI to make yourself smarter and to accelerate learning, you're missing a trick. It's going to be the most useful tool that's come across in, you know, I mean, it reminds me a lot about 99, 2000. You know, I'm one of the few guys in the market that's old enough to remember pets.com and some of the things that kind of took off and fizzled, but AI really seems to

38:08every aspect of AI seems like it's really coming through in a way that's going to make a huge change the more I'm using it every day. So I'm learning as I go, but it's exciting stuff. No, I agree. Patrick, how can listeners get holding you? The best way is to visit boxwoodpartners.com, which is our website. And I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn or, you know, just shoot us an email and, you know, we'd love to connect with anyone thinking about, you know, starving an exit process in the next year or two. And, you know, love to help, help where we can. Absolutely. Look, thank you so much for being here. This was, I think that selfishly, I think this was more for me than anybody else, but hey, it was outstanding, great information and perfect timing for us on these questions. So I appreciate it. Appreciate it guys. Thanks for having me. You too. Appreciate it. I'm a great day. Thank you for listening to the M&A Launchpad podcast. If you've enjoyed today's podcast and would like to support us, please leave us a rating

39:08and a review after you listen. If you're looking for guidance on your next business acquisition or sale, capital to support your next business transaction or to invest in a private equity opportunity, visit equity launchpad.com to learn more and to connect with our team. If you know of an individual, you would be a great guest for the show. Head over to equity launchpad.com or slash nominate where you'll have the chance to refer yourself or someone else to be a guest on our show. I'm Casey Mentshu and I look forward to talking with you next week.