Summary:
Kevin went from building and selling affiliate websites to building and acquiring hosting companies. After reaching $1mm in annual revenue run rate he and his partner have decided to pause the acquisition plans for now. Listen in to find what acquiring 9 companies in under 12 months looks like and what Kevin would do if he was to start over.
Show notes:
- About Kev
- The Thesis (ROI)
- Starting acquisition (different types of hosting servers)
- Hitting pause on Acquiring and the optimisation process
- Different types of deal structure
- What would he do differently?
- Why Kev wanted to get into the Acquisition space?
- What next in the future?
Mentioned in this episode:
- Chiang Mai, Thailand (Podcast episode with Kev and Coran)
- Site Arrow
- Bulk Buy Hosting
- DC Austin
- 101 -commerce
- Warren Buffet
- Charlie Munger
Article:
We're live today on Truth About Exits. I have my good friend Kevin Graham all the way from Chiang Mai, Thailand. We are both here in Austin enjoying a beer while we record this. Hey Kev, thanks for jumping on the show.
Coran it's great to be here. I know that we've been speaking for quite a while about me actually coming on the podcast and it's great to actually do this in person with a couple of beers and just have a bit of fun with it.
Lets see what happens. I love it. when I met Kev, we were both in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This was quite a few years ago. Was it four or five years ago maybe? Yeah, probably 2014/2015 somewhere around then. Yeah. At the time you were building niche sites, mostly Amazon affiliate sites, right?
Yeah. if I was ever explaining what I do to a taxi driver back then or anyone who knew nothing about the space, I would describe them as small product review websites that were focused on a specific type of product. For example, just taking some inspiration from all the stuff that I bought yesterday to be ready for this show. We could be talking about specifically podcasting equipment and just have a site targeted exclusively on that. Podcasting microphones, these boom arms, the pop filter that I have sitting in front of me here all of that gear is a sort of stuff that would be considered around one small niche and each site would have its own unique niche. Gotcha. We jumped in a little bit early there but one thing you might want to listen to this episode is Kevin's gone from the build and sell side to the buy side and now he's in a pause period. We're actually going to talk about all three of those things but we'll dig into that a little bit more. basically when we met, you were living the dream, you had some cash flowing websites that you built from scratch. The ROI was amazing. You'd managed to sell a couple of these for quite a decent sum. Then you got into hosting. How did you go from building and selling niche sites to the hosting company?
Yeah with the hosting company, it was actually when I started building that it was a specific type of hosting company designed for people doing SEO or search engine optimisation. Basically people working in that space needed a lot of separate hosting accounts with unique IP addresses for each account and they would use those to build small blogs to send links to the sites that are trying to rank. Having managed probably 200 to 300 sites of that type on my own. I had excel spreadsheets out the wazoo trying to manage that and there would be daily tasks in that and checking all the sites were still working, putting the sites by up if one of the small hosts that you bought from had just disappeared overnight.
That was a lot of hassle and I thought to myself, well there has to be a better way. What I did was basically start a hosting company that took a bunch of small hosting companies to replicate what I was buying on the market, combined it all into a single dashboard, a single monthly bill for our customers and made the whole process a lot easier. That's how I got started in the hosting industry. I started that service, which was initially called Bulk Buy hosting in December, 2015 basically scratching my own itch of a problem that I had and trying to solve that problem.
Okay, cool. Yeah, most entrepreneurs do see a problem then you just can't have it not fixed. You’ve got to fix it. This became pretty quickly a very profitable sizable business in its own right. What was the catalyst of you saying, okay I've built this from scratch now I want to go buy some hosting companies. Basically the thing that was leading into that or the impetus for that was seeing the SEO hosting space and hosting all these private blog networks for SEOs as kind of still being the similar risk profile that we had with the affiliate business. Now I was trying to move on from that a little bit more and find a more stable predictable longterm revenue source. I started looking at the acquisition space now for small hosting companies anything under somewhere between 150 and 250K per year in revenue, they're typically valued at 12 months revenue as a sales prices but fairly standard price in the industry, which depending on how you ran it would ideally provide a 50% ROI. You'd get paid back on your initial purchase price in two years. By doing that I could slowly use the profits from the SEO hosting to buy these other hosting companies and increase the longevity of the business.
Okay, that makes sense. That was the thesis that you could essentially earn the money back in two years if they were 50% margins. Could you talk through a couple of those acquisitions and just let us know how they actually played out?
Yes. I basically got started with the acquisition process around this time last year, the start of May last year after chatting to Richard Jalichandra at DC Austin 2018 and hearing about his plan to build a company that was buying up 101 small Amazon Fba businesses, I thought hey, I can replicate this exact same thing in the hosting industry. I already have the industry knowledge, let's go and do some deals. Over the last 12 months, I've done almost 290K worth of deals. Some of them have gone well, some of the gone less well. I've learned a bunch of lessons along that path.
Okay, a couple of things. I forgot to ask you this before, but you mentioned risk and I think the risk is a real driving motivator of most entrepreneurs. We don't often admit this, but this is the reason we do most of what we do is we're scared of something going to zero or something changing. Going from PBN hosting with bulk buy to going and acquiring other hosting companies to do specifically look for a certain vertical. We looking for x type of hosting company that wasn't a PBN hosting company because that would just add to the problem. Did you look at verticals or did you just look at what was available in the market, what was in the price range and go from there?
Yeah, basically I was looking at small standard retail hosting companies that offer domain registration, web hosting, and sometimes VPs hosting or dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is the most basic sort of entry level hosting stuff. If you've ever had a website with Bluehost or Hostgator, you have a small shared part of a bigger server and you pay a small monthly fee for that. Moving up from there, you then have VPs hosting where you have a more dedicated cut out slice of the resources of a server. Then you go all the way up to dedicated hosting where you've got your own physical server sitting in a data center somewhere that is exclusively for your access and your use.
I'm assuming as a complete novice that that means that there's greater fees or higher fees to pay if you have a dedicated server right?
Yeah. As you step up through those levels, the technical knowledge required increases for the customer as well as the monthly prices tend to increase as you go from shared to VPS to dedicated and the margins go the other way. Shared hosting has the best margins. VPS has still good margins and dedicated servers, extremely commodity and the lowest margin of all the categories.
Did you go for the highest margin first?
Yeah. Well, I mean basically we were chasing shared hosting companies as much as we could. Some of them had a VPS hosting component in there, which was okay. A few of them resoled a few dedicated servers at good enough margin that it makes sense to continue to resell them.
Okay, cool. Let's talk a little bit about funding. You mentioned RJ from 101 commerce. Now we know RJ, we've done a deal with RJ and counting, hopefully do many more. I know our RJ pretty well. He loves debt and other people's money to do his deal. I know you were personally funding these deals, did you use some of the capital from selling the niche sites back in the day or were you using the cash flow from the hosting business, the profits from the hosting business to do this. How much did you allocate for acquisitions? Did you have a set amount that you said, okay, this is our thesis, this is what we're going to do, this is x amount of capital?
Yeah. For the capital component, we basically looked at here is the last 6 to 12 months worth of profits that we'd taken as dividends from the bulk buy hosting. We said, okay, this is the amount that we've got that we could allocate towards acquisitions. In addition, I sort of had the longer term play of basically having enough savings sitting around that I had a long enough runway that we could just continue to use the monthly profits as they grew from the ever growing size of the entity to then reinvest that back into more acquisitions. There was the concept at least if these things are throwing off 50% at the bottom, I could basically, there was a potential pathway to being a company doing 5 million in revenue in five years just through doing acquisitions.
Okay. That's a pretty aggressive growth strategy but I love that you're using cash that the business was actually kicking off. That's super smart.
Yeah. It was kind of this idea of taking the dirty money from PBN hosting and then making it cleaner in the longer term with more and more shared hosting which would make the business more reliable, longer term thing with ideally a 15/20 year lifespan on it.
Okay, cool. All right. Let's talk through some of the acquisitions and this is Truth About Exit. Let's talk a little bit about the actual deal terms itself. He's just grabbing his notes. That's hilarious. Could you talk through, just maybe pick a deal whether it's the first deal or one of the deals and how that actually played out one times annual revenue, how did the deal come about?
Yeah, I'll just use one of the our sweetheart deals from the early stage. That one, the guy had posted on an industry forum that it was looking to sell the business. It had been around since the year 2000 a really long history. It was declining at 10 to 15% year on year. We looked at the last 12 months revenue. We then discounted that by the 10 to 15% churn that we'd seen as the trend and then made an offer based on that for that deal.
Wait a minute. Sorry, I got to jump into this. Okay, there's declining revenue. Most buyers would say, hell no, I'm out. There's a churn to deal with, churn is customers that aren't renewing?
Correct.
When the renewal's up, hosting is either monthly or annual, quarterly, whatever the payment cycle is, there's a set amount of people that won’t renew. That's one metric but then a declining revenue. What did you do when you saw that? Did you model out and project forward that same decline and work that into your offer? Could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, we'd look to that. Basically we'd tried to predict what the churn and decline in revenue would be over the next 12 months. Basically the website was super ugly. It looked like it had been built back in 2000 and hadn't really moved on since then. The customers that were on that brand, highly profitable but they were using a really old website builder and we saw the potential to come in and basically because it was such an old company in an old brand, it had a very powerful domain associated with it as well as the ability for us to turn on new revenue streams with offering more modern things. Offering wordpress hosting to these customers. Basically our thesis was we could hopefully stop some of that rot of customers saying, Hey, I want to leave I'm going to go build with Squarespace or Hey, I want to leave, I'm going to build a wordpress site. Stem some of those losses by offering those new services as well as maybe trying to grow through building up organic SEO rankings for the new products that we'd start offering.
Okay, cool. That makes sense. How did you structure the deal?
That one was cash. We had a two or three page APA that we sent, what might we both signed off on it and then wired the cash and had a set date about two weeks in advance from that. That would be the actual handover date. In that time the seller got all of his notes that he could think of out of his head onto paper. I ended up with a 20 something page, word document of all of his just random stream of conscious thoughts about everything that needed to be done. We'd running the business on a longer term fashion. Yeah on that set day we swapped over the payment processing and basically took the digital equivalent of the keys, here is your passwords away you go, enjoy,
Wait, wait, wait. Hang on. Hang on. Say two weeks to write down his thoughts. You'd pay him and then he's off into the sunset. Yeah, I mean he's still available to us on email if we have any questions and stuff. But yeah, here's the handover. Great. Let's go.
Okay. You're pretty technical tech savvy guy, that's not terrifying to you. Most people would be terrified by that.
It's exciting.
Or maybe hold back some cash at least to make sure that the seller does actually fulfill on being available to you after the sale. That's interesting that you took that approach. Why did you take that approach instead of making a deal structure that was more buyer friendly?
I guess in these sorts of deals that one was mid five figures, uh, nothing sort of deal sub 100K deal. There's a lot of competition in that space now. I was one of three to five people that had contacted the seller and sort of bidding for the ability to be the successful person that take it over on the calls with the seller I had built a lot of rapport and had basically afterwards he said, hey, the other people did not have the same ideas and plans of what they want to do with the brand. I trusted you the most to be the person to continue to run this brand into the future, which was a great vote of confidence. I mean the reason that you wouldn't use those sorts of more buy side friendly terms is because, well one, it's 50 something K and two because of that high competition at that space or that sort of level of the market, it wouldn't work if I or would be less likely to be successful if I said his 75% up front and 25% in 30/60 days,
Gotcha. Yeah. Building rapport with the seller when you're dealmaking at any level is really important. The larger deals we start to work on, the more it actually plays, the more personal relationship matters. that's an interesting strategy. in the beginning when you got started you said you wanted to get to 5 million in revenue in five years. Had you thought through or was it simply just lets a quiet get to 5 million in revenue and then we're done regardless of what happens along the way, what was the actual play there?
It was a very simplistic plan. I looked at it and said, hey, if we continue to do acquisitions that through 50% out the bottom we would be able to hit that point of 5 mill rev in five years. Then at that point I would go, okay, what do I do next? I mean there would obviously be the ability to sell it if I want to. They'd probably be the ability to then take two and a half mil and then grow to seven and a half million the next year and so on and forth. But five years felt a good time period to try and just forecast and work towards.
Okay, it's been about a year. how's it been?
Mixed results, let's just say mixed results. The projection of profit certainly hasn't played out, which is impacted the longer term return of capital. Right now we've sort of hit a pause on acquisitions temporarily while we reevaluate the thesis. Try and look and learn some data from the nine acquisitions that we've done over the last year because I was just trigger happy on acquisitions. I was let's just buy all the things. Some of those things have been less good than some of the other things and I really need to now sit down and review all those deals, look at which ones have been most successful, which ones haven't and try and build a more robust rule set around the deals that we will and won't do.
Yeah, you say that it's a bad thing. I am literally working with buyers right now that have committed capital in the low eight figure range that haven't pulled the trigger in two years and nine deals in a year. The fact that you're needing to pause for a minute and optimize what you've acquired doesn't surprise me at all. Maybe there is an expectation, well most entrepreneurs would just want everything today but I think where you're at is a really good spot actually. You've done some deals you're looking at the numbers. You're figuring out your criteria and then going back to the market when it makes sense for you. I was explaining to you or we were discussing this last Sunday when we first went to record this and we were all talking about it. I think that's actually part of the process is defining the criteria when we're dealing with buyers, we know they're serious buyers. If they have a really rigid set of criteria. What I've found is on the advisor side at least you'll see stronger offers when everything, not everything, you never get 100% but when 80% of the checklist is actually ticked off with this deal, then you'll see a much stronger offer from the right type of buyer.
Yeah, I mean when you say entrepreneurs want everything today for me, the way that I was going about it, I wanted everything yesterday I was very keen to just go out there every week there would be the weekly email from the broker and I would look at that and go, Yup, alright, what's in there that we want to buy? And just try and do those deals. I did a few deals on flipper and one of them has been really good. One of them has been probably the worst deal that we did. But yeah, it was just very much focused on doing deals thing rather than a focus on doing the right deals which earlier this week I had a call with a potential seller who I just reached out to and said, hey, are you interested in selling? Said in a short email, we got on a call and as we're going through the call he mentioned that one of his servers are on a different type of management system management panel than we've normally used now in the past and based on one of the deals I did, I was like yeah sure, hosting is hosting, let's just do deals. But based on this new pause phase that I'm in and trying to review the deals and really break down what was successful, what wasn't and work out that rule set. One of the things has been just stick within a very shallow, not shallow, very narrow, a very narrow niche of types of hosting and this falls outside of that.
it's a no deal. It's something that we just can't do. Yeah. That's where you really get advantages. That's why big companies, we love to deal with strategic acquirers for the most part because they can bring more to the deal than a financial buyer. What I realise talking to you because I know very little about the hosting space that after talking to you a little bit about it, I realized well you explained the differences in technology and then there is no scalability there's no economies of scale to drive costs down. There's very little advantage you can bring to the deal. We've talked about this at length it's somewhat of a commoditized product. Even acquiring new customers can be a tough thing to do because there's a lot of companies, you mentioned Bluehost before that spend a lot on the front end because they have good margins but they're also venture backed they don't need to turn a profit on a customer maybe for a couple of years.
Whereas a small business owner were bootstrapped for the most part or putting capital in and being very conservative you need a return on capital faster than if you're a venture backed a larger company.
Yeah. One of the other little things that you sorta touched on or that you didn't quite touch on there was it creates all these management hassles. Needing to find additional technical talent to handle these different types of servers. One of the acquisitions we did was a game server hosting company. People that want to run Minecraft or a bunch of other games now that has a very different management panel and therefore needs a different type of system administrator to actually manage those servers, which adds to the complexity of the organization. Basically what I'm looking at is kind of creating a little bit the southwest model of we only fly this type of airplane.
This type of airplane is kind of what we're going to start to do as our deal structure of we only buy a c panel hosts, we only by people doing virtualized VPS, etc. We only buy hosting companies that have a certain billing system already in place that we know and understand because otherwise it just becomes too messy.
Absolutely. Cool. I think we've got to that point where it's the realization of what you're looking for now. now the core at this point where you're actually paused for this moment, at least in new acquisitions if you could go back again, what would you do different?
Right, well apart from not doing at least a couple of the deals that we did, there's obviously those learnings that you get out of that. As I was saying before one of the things now is that sort of Southwest airlines model where we own the handle c panel and virtualizer and WFH mts billing, if it's outside of that we're not interested but sure you can be great margins. But that really old one from two thousands that we acquired that had its own custom billing platform in there and we had to do a billing platform migration. Now I was traveling at the time that we did that billing platform migration but every day I was waking up to a bunch of angry emails in the ticketing system from customers saying I hate this new billing platform. Why can't we just have the old billing platform? That's one of the things is knowing a very shallow or sorry, very narrow section of the industry that we want to work with. Very particular with the type of software that we're working with and sticking within that. Again, the game thing is bad because it's outside of that. One of the other things that I've sort of picked up is that we need to take 100% of the company and all of the needed assets.
Now, when I say 100% of the company, I'm not talking about taking on their legal entity. Obviously we just do asset purchase agreements but we need to take 100% of their assets that's their brand, all their domains all of that. One of the deals we did was a spinout of a hosting company where we took on their shared hosting clients but they retained the dedicated server clients. Now as a result they kept their name and their brand and just said hey shared hosting is now over here with one of our brands which was called Node and dedicated servers and everything else remains with us. That's messy because the old brand remains around and the customers say hey I sent a check to those guys. Why isn't my service on you need to pay us now? It's just messy.
One of the other interesting ones that I've sort of written down as part of our types of deals we'll never do is buying from broken relationships. Now to me when I went into it and earlier on I thought this was a great space to get deal flow from. But two of the deals we've done have been from broken relationships and they've been super messy.
Can you dig into that a little bit?
Yeah, sure. The first deal that we did and it was only seven or eight k worth of revenue, it was pretty tiny, was two friends who started a hosting company and they grew up across a year or something. Then the two friends sort of had a falling out and said hey, we don't want to work with each other anymore. That's except it was only one of the guys who presented it as him owning it, which technically he owned the LOC but the other guy was heavily involved with the actual operations and he was the one that was actually doing all the support for this, a hosting company. This guy basically had an alarm set every 90 minutes all night to get up and check tickets because he was the only guy doing support. Once we discovered that were oh okay well yeah cool. Broken relationship. That kind of sucks. It was messy doing that deal because of the information that wasn't provided out of that broken relationship.
One of the other deals we did, again a broken relationship and there were pieces of information missing that we then needed to try and piece together around how everything was set up because only part of the information was shared. Right. Wow. Okay. Yeah. That's the days, right? When it comes to real estate, that's one of the things divorce, broken relationships, but when it comes to businesses, there are many moving parts that you need all the partners available to tell you exactly what's going on in the business.
Chances are very high that the other business partner doesn't know 100% what the other business partner is doing. I know that that's the case with us. I'm sure that's the case with a lot of different businesses. Yeah. And it's just messy. We want to do good deals that are easy and straightforward and messy deals while I thought they were great earlier on no they just suck.
Yeah. was there any other learnings? I see you've got some notes here. Is there anything else that you would do differently?
Yeah, probably the other things trying to minimize the disruptions and changes. Now it's sorta touched on that before we'd changing the billing system anytime that you're changing anything it's a potential churn risk. As we're going through and we need to swap out payment processes that create some churn because there are people that basically have these hosting accounts sitting around for two, three, five years or whatever on monthly recurring billing, kind of like that gym membership that you signed up for when you got here to Austin. It's been two or three months. I'm sure you've got that gym membership, you're not going anymore. It's the exact same thing happens in hosting. Trying to minimize all those sorts of disruptions and changes is another way that were doing deals differently or aiming to do deals differently going forward to try and make sure that we don't get too much churn out of them and try and therefore get better deals going on.
Yeah. Awesome. Well I had Ace Chapman on the show. I know that you also know Ace as well and he was saying every time they take over a new business whether it's online, offline or otherwise they always expect that dip and earnings. He actually said it's not because someone's pulling the wool over your eyes necessarily. It's the business side of themselves don't really know what it takes to run the business. It's intuitive at that point, even if it's only a couple of years old. I feel circling back to defining your criteria and to really narrow skillset or narrow target market, you can bring more leverage to the deal. It might be 50% on paper that you're expecting to 50% margin. Then you can bring another 10% let's say and that could cover some of that transition issue. Then you're into the side when you back on the acquisition train. What's the next step? You have paused the acquisitions, you're running this portfolio. What's next for the main company Site Arrow. What's next for Site Arrow?
Yeah, as I mentioned before my next thing, I'm here with you and Austin right now. Next Wednesday I fly back to Chiang Mai, Thailand. When I get back there one of my things that I've got on my list to do is actually to sit down deep dive into all of the nine deals we've done and really try and look for more nuanced learnings. Then my sort of short list of blatantly obvious things that have gone wrong and try and really refine that rule set around and thesis around the type of acquisitions we want to do. Then we'll just continue to monitor the market. If something that fits into that narrow little slot, sweet spot of these are the types of deals we want to do comes up, then we'll review it and maybe proceed. I think that's one of the advantages of not taking outside capital is that you can wait and really, I don't know if you've heard this but I've heard Warren Buffet and I think Charlie Munger says this echoes this thought as well. Warren Buffet says that he wishes every investor would get a punch card before they start investing only have 20 holes on it. Have you heard this?
I have not. That means I'm halfway through this card already.
Weah. He said because if you only had 20 bullets to pull, well 20 punches, you'd think a lot harder about each investment acquisition, whatever it is. Not saying that you should only do 20 acquisitions but if you thought about only having a limited amount and needing that extra if you only had 20 would you acquire this? I think that narrows down the focus before you have the set criteria as well. Once you have the criteria, you could essentially do them all day long. But I think you've actually managed to cover some of the downside Warren Buffet also says famously rule number one in investing is never lose money. Rule number two is see rule number one. Even if at deal that you've acquired is making less than expected, you haven't overextended because often if you lay a debt or investors capital into the mix, you are over extending yourself in some cases.
Right that's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned Warren Buffet. One of the things that I sorta had going into this was that investment thesis around his concept of picking up the cigar that has two or three puffs left in it buying this thing and a great deal getting the bit of extra that you can out of it and then accepting that it's gone and to move on. That's where a lot of these smaller hosting companies that are gradually declining looked good. As I was doing those deals that's what I had in mind. With that first deal the 2000 my mind was that sure it is declining. He had a peak of around two 50K he's doing 65 last year, 55 scheduled ahead for the next 12 months. Let's just pick this up. It's highly profitable. Get what we can out of it before it dies. Maybe try and revive it a little bit stoke that little flame a little bit as you would on a Shisha just get the few little extra puffs out of those coals and it's fine. But I think now what we're seeing is some of those issues that you think maybe this thing's got three puffs in it and certainly got two and changes everything. It's just changing and evolving and adapting that investment thesis to be more robust and more long term. I mean this was my first time on the buy side and it's a bunch of fun going out there and buying all these companies and going, yeah, I own all these things now this is cool, but longer term it actually needs to make business sense, which is kind of where we're at now is that realization and just shifting and adjusting things that it is a more profitable long term sustainable venture going out and doing these acquisitions.
I've got a couple more questions and then we'll wrap up here. I think this has been a good overview of your journey to date and we'll definitely get you back on once you're back on the acquisition train or even if you choose to not do acquisitions. I think that would be an interesting conversation too.
If I'm back on the sell side, I'll be on here for sure.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, my next question is you live in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Quite happily. I've spent time there too. It's famously affordable, why go out and do the acquisitions? Why go through the pain of growing to five mil in revenue? Why? What's the why?
This was the question that's been leveled at me a little bit over the last few days from my co-founder and partner. I just want to build this really big thing and I think it's a lot of fun. This whole game of entrepreneurship, especially acquisition entrepreneurship where you can buy these things, they become part of your overall company and you can use those to grow larger and larger very easily. Going out and through standard marketing, trying to grow 63% in one year, which is what we did through these acquisitions. It's tough if you just go out and spend a bunch of money and buy all these companies all of a sudden you move on and you're a seven figure company and that's cool.
On that note yesterday you came by to pick up some podcasting gear and he came back in and he said hey we just we just ticked over seven figure run rate. congrats man. That's awesome.
Cheers. Thank you. It's kind of for the longest time I mean I've been online for 20/25 years or something and across that time even from my earliest days online I wanted to build a hosting company and now finally have a million dollar hosting company that I control.
It's cool. It's fun, it's exciting.
Awesome. I love that. I think the truth about it is that it doesn't make sense. That's why it makes sense to an entrepreneur to go do it. It doesn't make sense to the average person because we're not average people. Yeah, I mean short the stuff on Chiang Mai just briefly you can live there really cheaply. I've had friends that have lived for five to 750 USD months, 500 to 750 USD a month. It's nothing on the other end you can fall out there you can buy or rent really high end departments go and eat at some really nice restaurants. Actually, I think one of the top restaurants in Asia is based in Chiang Mai based on TripAdvisor. yeah, there's such a wide range there.
One of the biggest downsides of course is that it's 12 hours opposite to us here in Austin. doing deals with the US and as I was doing a lot of this acquisitions from Chaing Mai was difficult getting on calls to actually make that stuff happen. But equally the lifestyle is good there. I don't know if I ever want to leave.
But you don't stay there year round, right?
No, I mean I travel a lot. last year I spent almost six months out of the year outside of the country. This month, sorry, this year I've been a month in Australia, a month here in Austin and then I'll go back. But I dunno, it's easy to get into a really good routine there with good restaurants, gyms, everything else.