Alecia St. Germain 00:00
Hey, before we get into the episode, I want to tell you about something I'm trying called Podcast Club. Here's why. If you've been on social media, even at all lately, you might have noticed that everything is starting to sound and look the same. It's not about having real conversations anymore, it's about performing for the algorithm, and half of it sounds AI-generated. So I wanted to try something different. Podcast Club is like book club, but for this show. Once a week, we'll get together live on Zoom, and actually talk. What do you want to go deeper on? Where are you finding that you feel resistance, and how can you take what you've been listening to and actually apply it to your life. It's for women who listen to this podcast and want to be in real conversations with other women like them. If that's you, head to Conscious edge.com forward slash club, pick the days that work for you. I'll save your spot, and I can't wait to see you there with all of the trend right now around small businesses and the transfer of wealth, there's a big push towards buying businesses, so rather than going through the hassle of starting something out up that maybe you don't have proof of concept around, there's a lot of opportunity in the market that people are taking advantage of around buying businesses, including my partner in crime, Jonathan Dugger. So today I wanted to pick his brain and see what his experience was like buying a business more recently. So let's dive in. Hey. Hey, you leader, entrepreneur, business owner, solopreneur, whatever you call yourself, we know you're a visionary business builder, wealth seeker, looking to combine a passion for doing good with leading consciously. It's time to shift from a traditional focus of pure wealth accumulation to one that integrates well-being and fulfillment. You're here for a purpose, and it's time to shine your light. So, here we go. Welcome back to The Conscious Edge Podcast. I'm your host, Alecia St. Germain, founder of The Conscious Edge, where I help women entrepreneurs live a more enjoyable life. So, Jonathan, hi.
Jonathan Dugger 02:28
Hey there.
Alecia St. Germain 02:30
So, before we get into what you're doing around buying a business, if you are new here, we put these episodes out every single Tuesday, and it really comes from these behind the scenes conversations that Jonathan and I have been having for years, and it's every aspect of being a business owner, the personal things, the emotional things, the financial things, all the different ways that we are affected as entrepreneurs, and how we grow as entrepreneurs and what we learn in the process. So, if you enjoy today's episode, please make sure you take a moment, hit follow or subscribe, so that you know when the next episode is coming out. So, Jonathan, why did you start looking? Oh my gosh, I can always count on you to make it weird. Why did you decide to go looking for a business to buy? You start, you did a lot of your investing more into real estate investing in different types of real estate, but then switched over to business buying last year.
Jonathan Dugger 03:38
I've owned several businesses over the years, but never from a standpoint of searching one out or an intact model and analyzing it fully to determine if there's a good fit financially and logistically, and those types of things. So, as any of you that have invested in real estate the past four or five years, you recognize that it's gotten more challenging for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest challenges in the asset classes that I typically invest in is that the deal flow, the volume of available transaction or possibilities just dried up. I mean, it was really difficult to find something that made sense financially or from a time monetary and time investment standpoint. So it's actually been about two years that I first started looking at the idea of a small business or an intact business, and like you alluded to, this is a really unique time to be looking at businesses, because a lot of baby boomers are ready to retire, and they have very good businesses that have functioned for years and years effectively, and there have developed systems in a developed market that is translatable to. Somebody else, so somebody else could step in and take it over a business, and that was one of my goals, is to find something that already had an intact system and potentially even had leadership or directorship involved that wanted to stay on, because it's not always the case, but a lot of more mom and pop style businesses, they'll usually have one key employee or at least one key person that would like to stay there, stay as part of the process, and stay involved in that company. So it was really more of a looking for opportunity, or trying to create opportunity when I was having difficulty finding it in the paths that I had done more typically over the years.
Alecia St. Germain 05:40
Okay, how does one even start that process?
Jonathan Dugger 05:44
There's sort of old school and new school approaches to it, kind of like with real estate, and there are business brokers, just like in real estate, there are real estate brokers, transactional brokers, and so that was the where I started. No, I didn't start there initially, I've actually started using generic resources, like there's databases out there, just like searching the MLS for real estate or LoopNet, or are one of the commercial real estate databases. There are those for small businesses as well, and you can be very specific in what you look for, where you look for it, type of money it kicks off, if it's what do they call it, distant ownership possibility, there's a term for that, and I'm blanking on it, absentee ownership, but how you can even search by something fits absentee ownership model, and so I did some of that, and actually by doing that sort of generic searching and research, I found several businesses that looked like good fits, but never really got moved the ball past early stages of due diligence. I think I had two or three businesses under contract last year, or maybe end of 2024 but never really got beyond the early stages of due diligence on those, so went from there to working with a business broker who was sending me some targeted leads, but that was effective, like found narrow the list to probably five different businesses that were really good fits, and was pursuing them all in some form or fashion, or at least digging into all of them at the same time, but the one that we actually landed on, and you're going to hear me say we, I have a business partner, Kyle, who's based in St. Louis, where one of the business segments of our is located, and he and I were looking at things individually and looking at things together that made sense to work together as well, so we, I can't even remember, there was some inadvertent way I was looking at another business that the broker had sent me and came across this, the business word that we landed on, I think I was researching a market and found a listing for the business, and just called up the guy that was trying to sell it, and it was sort of the entryway, and didn't actually end up buying the one I called on, but bought in a different territory, the same business model, so it's one of those things where it's not always the specific leads to your course of action, but in the process of that specific thing, you may find other opportunities, just like with real estate, and that's actually something I think is important to mention, because there's probably a lot of real estate investors or people that have invested some in real estate that are listening to this. In my head originally, when I started looking at businesses, I made it a completely different thing, the way you analyze, the way you look for them, the kind of conversations you have, the way you finance, and it's not that's what I've learned, it's there's a lot of similarities. So my prior experience and prior learning translated a lot into buying and closing on this business, financing this business, and now running this business. So,
Alecia St. Germain 09:04
what I heard you say, what's.. how did you? Okay, because I have.. I hear of people. Okay, one of the things.. So, Cody Sanchez is a really big name that's out there for and promoting buying businesses, and she talks about buying a boring business, is like one of the things that I've heard her say, but I see oftentimes people who are out there looking to buy a business, they are so very specific about the kind of business that they want to buy. How did you approach deciding what you were looking for? Like, there's so many different kinds of businesses out there, like how would one figure out even where to focus, because what I see sometimes is I think people are like chasing maybe potential or what they think could happen, and it's not necessarily, let me just stop there, let me. Let you answer.
Jonathan Dugger 10:00
Okay. Okay. Well, I'm gonna want everybody to recognize that my parameters, my specifics are probably very different than a lot of people's, but my going in to anything, whether it was real estate or another type of investment or buying a business, top priority for me was to be able to keep at this stage of my life, keep my time freedom as much as possible. I don't mind working hard, I don't mind putting concerted effort into something if it's duration predictable, like if I can say I'm going to put six months into this and then I can hand it off to whatever, and it's still going to do, so I wanted something intact that had a system already in place that had the potential either with somebody I already knew or somebody that coming into the coming with the business that could be involved with it that was the subject matter expert on that business or wanted to be and that it had a fairly predictable financial path, which I say fairly predictable, because there's always the unpredictable nature of any sort of investment, and I also wanted it to be economically stable, something that I thought would be resource or adaptable to be able to fit economic fluctuations, because I even looked when I first started looking, I even looked at a lot of the e-commerce type businesses and things that you see tons of promo on social media about, and I'm not against some of those, I think some of those would work for some people, but I could not figure out, plus I'm not super techie, so that's probably part of that. I couldn't figure out the key piece of my parameters for buying was how to truly automate it, so I wasn't involved in it. To me, everything I looked at almost looked like day trading, which is awesome for some people, but that's something you've got to check on and babysit on a regular basis.
Alecia St. Germain 12:03
When you say
Jonathan Dugger 12:04
e-commerce, I was looking for
Alecia St. Germain 12:05
what kinds of businesses were you?
Jonathan Dugger 12:07
So e-commerce, meaning you virtual stores like virtual retail product. I'm trying to think, I looked at dozens of them, so most of them had some sort of retail element, and selling gadgets and gizmos, or because you can buy lots of in-tact stores that already have their distribution network, they have their vendor merchant relationships already in place, and it's basically plug and play. And that was attractive to me. It's like, you pay this company this amount of money, we'll buy it for you, we'll establish it, we'll keep it running, and we'll take this amount of money, it was really predictable on paper, but then when I had some of the meetings, I had some of the phone calls on those, and every one of them had a much higher level of day-to-day involvement than I wanted to be, and I didn't see any way to work yourself out of that without losing a whole lot of the money that you were bringing in, and that was one of my key parameters was, like, I said, I didn't mind six months a year of concerted effort to make sure I understood the system, had the right people in place for the system, but I wanted to work myself out of the system and still get paid. So,
Alecia St. Germain 13:13
what other types of business did you look at?
Jonathan Dugger 13:16
I looked at staffing companies, I looked at IT-related companies, wellness centers, wellness products.
Alecia St. Germain 13:26
What did you like, and what didn't work?
Jonathan Dugger 13:28
Oh goodness, everything. Also, well, one of my other parameters was it couldn't be something so far out of my range of experience and knowledge base that if the stuff hit the fan, I couldn't figure it out, that I couldn't, or call, I knew three people I could call up, and they can help me with it. So, I'll give you an example, though it's not really wheelhouse day to day, but I knew I could figure out. I looked, and actually was way down the path of purchasing a dumpster company, a haul off company. I have a pretty strong background in construction and development. I've worked with tons of folks that run those types of companies, and I saw it as something that could support businesses I already have. Who's the author that's the maybe the master millionaire, but he says if one of the greatest ways to build a business, to buy a business that supports your business, like if you already have a business, buy a business that I know who that is, I can't think of it right now. Anyway, so that's kind of where I went down that path that somebody outside looking in might say you're going to own a crash company or a haul off company. Why would you do that? But I did look at some things that were a stretch for me, like the IT companies, but the IT, like that, was a software company. The software they developed was that they had already had in place, and that they were marketing to people was a medical management software. Air, which I have used as a clinical practitioner, I've used that software, and I've also helped set up clinics that had to figure out their software needs, even though I'm not a techie guy, that's like, okay, we need it to do these five things, and so I could have those conversations with the developers, with the sales people, and that was another one that I looked at that Kyle and I actually looked at really closely, but in the end it was, I couldn't figure out how to work myself out of the primary leadership role in that business, because there was nobody intact that what really wanted that role, because it was the founder and the guy that was selling it, the owner, he and his wife co-teamly led the whole business, and what I figured out is that they weren't doing what they did on a day-to-day basis, the company would cease to exist. Got it. So I didn't want that level of where it's only me or it fizzles, you know. I got to be able to replace myself,
Alecia St. Germain 16:01
I asked that, because, yeah, you said you like you're in a little different space. A lot of my clients that are looking at businesses, they're looking to do a change in earned income, so what they currently do as earned income, they don't want to continue to keep doing as earned income, and so one of the things that we're kind of looking at is, can this business support replacing that income as part of, and then what is your role going to be? Is it, are you going to be active in that, or are you going to pull off as like an owner income? And I would say that, and not that's easy by any means, it's still, you're still a whole process, it's still parsing, kissing a lot of frogs to find the right fit, and all that, but there are more things out there that are geared more toward owner operator than the model I was looking for, so I was going through a lot of things that not a fit,
Jonathan Dugger 17:00
so that's for those folks that are looking to do that. Just take some encouragement that those are probably the most prevalent type of business right now that are on the market to sell, whether it's restaurant related or some sort of brick and mortar that's like esthetics or nail salon, or and that doesn't even mean you have to be the technical side, but most of those have an owner presence that's there and involved on a daily basis, so and I wasn't looking for that, at least long term,
Alecia St. Germain 17:34
didn't want to want to sit in the nail salon,
Jonathan Dugger 17:37
no, I want to be able to do whatever I need to do, and there are going to always going to be aspects of being an owner, right? I want to be able to do that in Italy, or on a mountaintop somewhere, or whatever.
Alecia St. Germain 17:48
Exactly, exactly. Okay, so then you found something by accident, and this is one of the things that I also see, is like, and it happens in real estate too. People get really specific about looking for a business or a building or whatever it is in one really specific way, and what I hear more often is that the better deals that you find are actually ones that you find in the process of looking, or that you come across by accident or because you saw an opportunity and you were brave enough to actually go talk to the owner or find the owner and so it's a lot of the things that people aren't willing to do
Jonathan Dugger 18:36
and also just that staying open to opportunity, because I can think back to real estate that just made me think of something really specific when you said that. So one of the things I used to do in real estate was I look for single family houses in the pre-foreclosure situation, and often those houses were, they hadn't gone back to the bank yet, but they were sitting there vacant, so I would target those houses, that was my goal, was to buy that house, figure out how to help that homeowner solve their or fix their situation by buying their house, but in doing that, I often had to go talk to the neighbor, knock on the door, and talk to the neighbor, and in Atlanta, I can think of three specific times in the Atlanta market where the three of the best deals I ever did in that city were not the house that I was going after. It was the house of the neighbor I talked to, like I went to the door and talked to the neighbors. So it was opportunity that presented itself as part of the process. So this business is definitely an outcome of that type of thing of it was part of the process and researching a market and researching an industry area and I came across something that was a good fit.
Alecia St. Germain 19:48
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, Vika, and also like talking to the managers that work there, like just I think about like when we went to mobile home parks and you talked to the community. To do park manager, and it's like you find all the things out just by talking to them to the people that work there, really. And I think people assume that they're not going to disclose that information. I'm like, "Oh no, FIFA loved give you the gossip.
Jonathan Dugger 20:16
Didn't you one time have a manager, park manager, that said, "You don't want to do business here, you should go down the street, or you should go work in that place down the street,
Alecia St. Germain 20:26
or maybe
Jonathan Dugger 20:27
it seems like our river,
Alecia St. Germain 20:29
yeah, no, always, but that's where all of my relationship started. It was really in talking to the people who are in the business, so I just want to offer that encouragement. Okay, so what did you end up buying?
Jonathan Dugger 20:49
All right, so now that everybody's curious, so we own a company, it's called Pure Air Enterprises, and it is a mold remediation, air quality improvement, odor control, and air quality testing company, but the part that was really in alignment, like I said, I wanted to bring some things to the table from my prior experience, or my value set, or my interests, so that I could maintain a level of interest and passion of what I was doing, and that one of the key pieces of this company is the product that's used to do this. It's a proprietary technology from a company called Pure Maintenance, and it uses an all natural combination of product that is people in pet safe? It's very healthy, and if you know anything about that traditional industry area, especially of mold remediation or like bacterial and virus sterilization, a lot of the product that's used to do that, sometimes even in very health sensitive settings like hospitals or daycares, or the product that's used to do those things, often are toxic. That's why you've got to stay away for two weeks, or whatever. And our product is not. It's it basically breaks down into hydrogen peroxide and vinegar, so it's a very, very safe product. But the other thing that was part of this is it was an intact system, and it's sort of unique. It's not a franchise, although this company does do franchises too. It was you basically license the technology that is proprietary in the way it's delivered, but the rest was complete autonomy. The only thing we're required to do is like in our marketing, we have to somewhere in our marketing say in little bead words, powered by pure maintenance, which is the tech, that's the process. So it was very in alignment with my focus on wellness and on holistic health, because this is something that causes a lot of people illnesses, mold. You may have heard the terminology sick house syndrome or sick business building syndrome, often that's related to air quality and often related to mold. So that was the first level of layer of interest. And then I started, we started digging into the company itself and the founder of the company, and it was like, okay, these people are quality people. These people have a mindset of truly helping others. And then I started reading testimonials of the customers, and I mean, I was reading about these people that had chronic illness, were taking 10 medications, and after their treatment to their home, they're off their medications, and their skin condition is healing for the first time in 20 years, and just things like that, and the more, and then the first will be honest, the first three or four I read, I was like, somebody's paid for some targeted market, this is some of those fake Google reviews, and then after about 300 of those similar types of reviews in 20 different markets across the US and in the UK and in Australia, like, okay, there's something legitimate to this, and then I started geeking out on the science of it, which I also love, and looking into the if the claims were legitimate and how they really worked,
Alecia St. Germain 24:18
so I have a question, then How important when we're thinking of you buying a business, but we're also thinking of maybe clients you've coached in business. How important do you think it is to have some level of like alignment, passion, or excitement, or some connection to what you're doing?
Jonathan Dugger 24:40
For me personally, it's mandatory. There's got to be value alignment, and there's got to be an element of how do I provide service, how is this serving the greater good from the individual to society, sort of thing, and it doesn't have to be some sort of remarkable. Profound, changing the world by this huge sweeping changes, or whatever, but there's got to be some sort of alignment in that way. I would say my opinion is, and there's actually good research behind this too, that value alignment is one of the primary keys to success. So, if you're doing something, if you're running a business or supporting a business, and you're profiting from it, and there's some key dissonance with, in terms of who you are, there's going to be issues, whether it's your own personal health, whether it's not being able to stay motivated to do the things you need to do to run the business, whether it's keeping key employees, there's going to be some level of disconnect. I've seen it with my own eyes over and over again, and there's good, like I said, research out there to back that up. So, I think value alignment is huge. Now, sometimes you've got to dig through some layers. If it's a business that's, let's say it's not an industry area that you're super familiar with, so maybe you're not familiar with the tech, like me. I wasn't really familiar with the tech, but when I started getting to the people element, that's where my heart sang. That's where it's like, I, this is something I could do, this is something I could get excited about. And it was really interesting, because it laid out very, very quickly, so kind of discovered the whole thing in, let's say, early September, started working through the process with the parent company and with the licenses that we purchased, closed at the end of October, went to their national conference the first week of November, and was super validated that with a little bit of buyer's remorse and fear I was having was extinguished completely by going to that conference and hearing the testimonials and meeting like-minded people from all walks of life, from all over the country, all over the world, and then I left from there and went to Italy for six weeks, so it was like this really rapid progression of go, go, go, and then sit on this and think about it and plan, which I think actually worked out really well for me personally, and for I think for my partner too, and the folks we brought on to help, because we didn't force ourselves to try and ramp up really, really rapidly, we got our proverbial ducks in a row to really come out of the gate feeling empowered and feeling ready. We had consulted with our financial expert, Jen Zin. Jen,
Alecia St. Germain 27:33
I was actually going to say that one of the things I tell everyone is you need to hire Jen and sit down with her and have her go over the financials with you, and help you create some realistic projections, or someone like Jen. We love Jen, but
Jonathan Dugger 27:50
our Jen, yeah, we don't want to farm her out too much. No, she was actually vital on several of the businesses that we passed on, and she'll tell you, she says, I am not a business analyst, like that's not what I do, but I do understand financials, and so she would help us dig into financials, but even more powerful, like this example in the software company I mentioned, she gave us some really targeted questions to ask based on the financials and the due diligence work we had, she was kind of like there's some gaps here. Ask these questions, and when we did, was like, no, this is not making sense, this is not lining up. And she, so she helped us go ahead, and we were already at our bookkeeping system in place. We had our key people in place. We have a fellow that's named Andrew. He's our operations director. He takes all the calls coming in. He runs our CRM, our management system, it's called House Call Pro. It's like all the calls processes says through that, all the appointment setting processes through that, all the invoicing processes through that, and he is great at that stuff. So that's like his key role, and that was something I also, I knew I would not be great at it, and I did not want to do it. So it's like, okay, check that box, and he's awesome at it, and he's a huge part of the company and part of the process. Now we had a key tech that came with the company who's no longer with us, but he stayed long enough to get us running and to feel like we had a level of competency to carry on after he left, so those are key aspects that we, if we had really tried to hit the ground running and put pressure on ourselves, because we got to close this amount of business in this many days after startup, I think it would have been a very different picture.
Alecia St. Germain 29:39
You think it's important in that transition period to give yourself a comfortable runway before you have that expectation.
Jonathan Dugger 29:47
Yes, I think having some self-compassion and compassion for those that are part of your process and giving yourself the grace of time.
Alecia St. Germain 29:59
Yeah.
Jonathan Dugger 30:00
There's okay, I'm going, I've got to figure out how to fund this, so I have at least three months of runway to get to a place where we're closing some business, or six months, or whatever it is, financially prepare for it too, but it's more of a mental thing, which could lead into another podcast of removing the expectation, often artificial expectation of instant success. If we aren't seeing this level of growth by month three, then we're doing something wrong, and that's not necessarily true. It's like, here are the things we're doing, here's how we're growing, here's what we're learning. As long as there's forward momentum, as long as you're marking things off your list and getting to the places where there's key people and key elements to grow the business, that's what's important. Now, if you stay in that, where you're constantly trying to herd cats or realign your ducks, then you're probably not going to get to a place of effectiveness, or you're going to burn out, but we removed the expectations. It was somewhat forced upon us, because I already had this trip in place, like I was heading out of the country, regardless. And not that Kyle and Andrew continued to, and our tech, Bob, at the time, continued to plug away, and they were doing some kind of carrying over a book of business that was already in place, but we weren't forcing growth. It's like, okay, we're still learning who our customer is, what our product really does, who we can help and benefit the most, like we were figuring those things out because it was a little looked a little different for us than the previous owners,
Alecia St. Germain 31:43
so what was the most unex like what blindsided you or was unexpected in the process? Because there's always going to be things that you didn't anticipate.
Jonathan Dugger 31:54
There's a lot. I mean, I can, that list is pretty, pretty long. Some had more impact than others. I will tell you one, just because I was dealing with it this morning, that I didn't expect it to be so challenging, and it has been very challenging from a terms of using time, two things actually, one has been figuring out banking process and like where money needs to go and how it needs to flow in a timely manner, and I thought, okay, everything's electronic and digital these days, those disconnects are going to be few and far between. Well, I was wrong, and part of that has to do with my lack of knowledge of certain key processes in the banking industry, and certain things like laws related around things with the Treasury Department and different things like that. The other thing was not asking the right questions on the front end with our system, like I assumed that every aspect related to banking that we would need, I could do mobilely, I could do from my phone or remotely, and not with the system we set up. So just yesterday we started replacing systems already with ones that meet our needs better, so some of that is I should say that's not necessarily a negative thing. There's always a learn by doing aspect of entrepreneurism, of small business, of anything we do, and this was one of those things. This was a little growing pain that we had and had to figure out along the way, another thing that was super interesting to me, that's still I'm still trying to figure out this, because I'm fascinated to know one of our key customers that, who we thought would be our key customers, we thought would be real estate agents and real estate brokerages, and we were told by other licensees, other business owners that have been the case for them, that has not been the case for us, and we don't know if it's market specific. It, we, I'm putting on myself a little bit that I haven't done a good enough job creating value for these folks, because a lot of agents, first of all, a lot of agents, if you've worked with those data agents, you know this, and I'm not saying this in a derogatory way. It just is the state of affairs. A lot of real estate agents do it part time. They treat it more like a hobby than a career. And so those folks, if you're doing anything that kind of messes up the little process they have in place, they don't even want to hear about it. That's going to add more time, that's more effort, that may be more money. I don't have a proven, it's no, there's no proof of concept that it's going to work for me. So we're still working that out, and I think at some point they will be our primary customer, but because we had been told that, and we thought that too. Plus, Kyle and I both come from real estate investment backgrounds, so we're like, okay, that's a natural fit. We have a huge network in among that, so we spent a lot of time and effort, him especially initially, and it got very frustrating and very disheartening, because it just was not working out the way we thought. So we had a conversation. I think I was still in Italy, because he was hit running into a lot of walls, and it's getting frustrated. I think I was still in Italy when we had this conversation. But we were like, you know, what, let's remove that pressure that this is our key referral source, this is our key customer to go after for referrals, let's change gears, let's focus on something else, and let's just do it for two weeks, let's pick some other targets and do that for two weeks, and just see, let's test, learn by doing life is a laboratory, and so we started doing that, and we have a couple of now key relationships that are direct referral sources, where we, what we do is a very good companion with what another company does. For instance, we have a company that is a foundation repair and crawl space encapsulation company, and they install sump pumps and things like that. Well, 90% of the time, the environments they're in have mold, and they've tried to do that business themselves, and they have done it some. They don't want to be doing it, and they didn't feel like they were effective at it, and they saw our tech, and they're like, we want to work with you. We want to figure out where, and one of those companies, actually, we are now part of their system, so we don't even - not only do we not find the customer, we don't have to try and spend money and time generating that lead. It's not a lead, because it's a direct sell to this customer that they have done for us. We just show up and do our job, and they handle the billing, we show up our job, and they pay us. So I want to create
Alecia St. Germain 36:28
that kind of 1000s
Jonathan Dugger 36:29
more, yeah, 1000s more relationships like that.
Alecia St. Germain 36:32
Yeah, that's really cool. That is very cool. And out of those, if you believe that everything's happening for you, right? Like, sometimes those challenges make you get more creative, and so they're actually a gift in some ways in disguise. Okay, so then as we wrap up, like, how are things going now, and what is your, like, what's the plan going forward.
Jonathan Dugger 37:02
Well, we're, we've just passed our six month mark, and we are in that stage of, like, I said, we just are establishing an additional system, so we're at that place of assessing and reassessing and trying to tweak the enhance the system, and we're also to that place of, we're busy enough now that we really got to start looking at how we're going to handle growth, which is really exciting, so because so we'll be hiring probably a few new techs here very shortly, and then we've also just another area stepping outside of my comfort zone, but we've been involved in a couple of different trade shows as sponsors, and we were actually, we're a sponsor in the Route 66 is having its 100th, I think it's 100th year or 250th year, an anniversary, a big anniversary, and we were part of a parade in Springfield a couple weeks ago, which was really fun, but we're doing things that are putting this more in the public eye, both on social media and being interviewed by news outlets and things like that, so that's really frightening, but also really cool.
Alecia St. Germain 38:12
It's a good thing you've been practicing on a podcast to be more public.
Jonathan Dugger 38:15
No, I know. Thank you, Alecia, forcing me to do this.
Alecia St. Germain 38:20
Any final words, any final advice that you would want to bestow upon our listeners around buying a business?
Jonathan Dugger 38:28
Don't put so much pressure on yourself and your team to perform like everybody else does. Now, I put this in a lot of different parameters, but what's especially true in this, and I can recognize this. It's a good place to start, like the advice with working with real estate agents, that was good advice, and I think it is still good advice. It just didn't work for us, like it might have worked for some other people. So, instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole, we decided to shift gears, and that has really worked for us, that has served us better. So you may start in a place that you think is going to work, and it doesn't. Never be afraid to let go of that, or move on to try something different, even if it's not what everybody else is doing, even it's not what the industry standard is. Something that works for you could be completely different than what works for somebody else, and probably will be, so just have some, some self-compassion, have some grace to give yourself some leeway to do things differently on your own timeline.
Alecia St. Germain 39:32
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience. I know that it will be valuable for a lot of people who are contemplating buying a business, and or in the process, or have recently bought a business, maybe give them permission to do things a little bit differently. So, with all of that being said, we're going to wrap this up. Sending you so much love.
Jonathan Dugger 39:51
Be well, everybody.
Alecia St. Germain 39:53
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