Summary:
In today's episode we talk to Shakil Prasla who has acquired a number of e-commerce business to reach over $25M in annual revenue through more than 7 acquisitions.
Show notes:
- About Shakil
- How & why Shakil started acquiring brands
- Financing the acquisitions (bring on partners)
- Analysing deals & deal criteria
- Taking over an operations teams
- Shakil’s toughest deal to close
- How Shakil looks at acquiring businesses now
- What’s the plan into the future
Mentioned in this episode:
Article:
We are live today. I have Shakil on the line. He's a fellow Austin based entrepreneur. Shaquille, thanks for jumping on the call today Coran and thanks for having me.
Awesome. I've been wanting to get through on the show for a little while here and fortunately you reached out to me first, which is awesome. Thanks for that. Just as an overview of why you might be interested in today's call, I'll just give you a quick snippet of what Shakil has been up too. Shakil has grown his 12 ecommerce brands to over $25 million in revenue in 2018 and most of that has been via acquisition. That's what we'll be talking about on today's call is e-commerce and acquiring e-commerce brands. But first, I'm always interested to ask, when people ask you what you do because you have a lot going on business wise, how do you actually answer that question?
I feel like it's a different answer every time, including yesterday's networking event. What do I do, generally I usually answer with I am an e-commerce acquisition investor I buy a bunch of brands. It is in a nutshell and usually that's not good enough. There's follow-up questions on what that means exactly.
We'll dig into that into what that actually means on today's call but I've always liked hearing how people answer that thanks for that. That's awesome. Okay, how did you get started in e-commerce in the first place?
Yeah, I sort of have a boring story really that got me into it. I never had the intention of buying a bunch of companies. I never had the intention of having 12 brands like this. A big team like this. It all really started off in 2012 one after I graduated my MBA, this was in 2013 I went online to search for jobs, I was just in the market to have a new job after my MBA and and I came across a link that said own e-commerce brand or start an e-commerce brand. I knew nothing about ecommerce. I knew nothing about SEO web development. The only way I could learn this is by watching what other people do sidewind on Odesk, which is now Upwork. I just started hiring a bunch of people to build a website but I had no product. The only thing I knew to do was people import from China. Why don't I just go to China? I went to the Canton fair in 2013 you know, then this is where there's over 60,000 booths there. It's super overwhelming I had no plan but I just walked down the aisle, back and forth, met with vendors and I finally decided to import men's accessories like tie clips, socks, watches, wallets because they're small items and I figured easy to pack, it's the easiest way to go.
I started importing that built my website up, learned about SEO learned about content, learnt about best practices, just really just by researching and seeing what competitors are doing, what other folks are doing and just sort of learning along the way. After about a year I finally made it profitable, right. It took me a year to get things going to make it cash flow positive. I had a choice of either being a consultant and telling people how to start a business, growing the current men's accessory website or the third option was seeing if I could buy a complementary brand to really propel the growth. The third one, this last option sort of just came along the way. I came across a listing through a broker.
I've got to jump in before we go into the acquisitions. Sorry. Yeah, I just want to highlight something here. You've made that soundeasy. But one thing that I noticed with successful entrepreneurs that they perform at a high level versus someone who just wants to become an entrepreneur, a wantrepreneur basically is they will take some time to learn how to do ecommerce first and then come up with a list of reasons why they can't do it. You actually started by saying I want to do something online and built a website first you went and got people to build it for you first and then said I need products I went to China. They're not small steps but what was the driving reason behind you saying, well I want to go source some products, let's go to China. What was the mindset behind that?
Honestly, it was probably a lack of knowledge. When you don't know what you're doing, you just do it. I think that's where sometimes people struggle is too much information, makes them a bit more confused on what to do next. Right. As you said, people will come up with reasons on why not to do it. For me it was just I wanted to sell products online. I knew that people selling on Amazon and other marketplaces, even their website, people were just getting most of their products to China and going on Alibaba or Aliexpress, it just felt a little overwhelming. I just said hey let me just go to China and make a vacation out of it and see if I could source products through it. It was just generally my reasoning. Wow, that's pretty awesome.
Other than the products men's accessories being small and easy to ship was there anything else driving that niche that you were interested in or you thought, hey, I could get into this type of product or was there some other factors behind that choice?
Yeah my criteria was to pick something really laser focused in a niche that wouldn't have high competition. That was cheap, anything about five bucks, that was small. That was it. Men's accessories was one thing. I also looked at, I think it was sunglasses at that point. It was like office supplies. I think those are the three or four things I saw but men's accessories just sounded really cool. I figured, people like to dress nicely. If they buy one cufflink or one tie clip, they'll buy multiple. It was small, it was easy to ship. I just decided on that. Again, I had done no market research to see if it was even going to sell well. I think luck played a huge part in this Coran. I had no idea what I was doing.
Well that's awesome. Well sometimes you don't need a ton of information, you just need the bare minimum and then go get started. You took that leap you probably, in hindsight, you may have got better pricing by going direct to China and building those relationships. Are you still using those relationships from that first trip to China or have you been back since as well?
Oh yeah. I've kept those relationships up and I've gone to China multiple times now. Planning to go again at the end of the year. But you know, going there it's a lot of fun. The culture there is fun. Negotiating pricing there is, it's just fun. They take you out they'll over order on the food. It's just the fun vibe to be part of and what not. Have some fun without businesses at the same time.
Right. It doesn't all have to be spreadsheets and being strict. I like that. Awesome. Okay. Well let's fast forward. As you started, you started looking for any commerce business to buy. You said that you had three options there. Were you playing out those three options at the same time to see what the best option was?
Yeah, I felt like I got a little smarter now, decided to do some market research and you I put out a Facebook post saying anyone that wants to learn about e-commerce, message me or email me, I'm glad to help. That didn't really garner any interest. My second option was to grow my brand Pro-cuffs. Honestly I could have really just automated that and that seemed a lot more appealing than growing it. The third option was just the best option for me, which was to acquire a company. Just a little background on that. My dad's an entrepreneur too and that's what he's done is he buys hotels and convenience stores and stuff. That little fire in me was sort of instilled as I was growing up and my childhood. That sort of helped play a role in acquiring companies.
Well that's an awesome role model to have that as your dad's been successful in the acquisition side, it's no wonder you followed his footsteps. You started looking at e-commerce businesses for sale. Do you remember roughly how many deals you looked up before finding the one to move forward with?
Coran, I bought my first deal that I looked at this is something I advise everyone not to do, is do not buy the first company you see for sale. I had at that time paralysis by analysis numbers looked good, let's just buy it. It was a website called mrcool.com they were selling beverage coolers. Really crappy website, did no marketing. It was all organic traffic, never sold on Amazon. Anyone that buys the website would do what I did, which was list products on Amazon, turn on adwords and that's all I did. Those two strategies and I was able to make my money back in six months.
That's amazing. Yeah. Well, is that your investment criteria now you just see a deal for sale and go buy it? No, no, absolutely not. I think I look at over, at least I look at over a 100 deals a month right now before I get any interest. I mean I have this whole model of acquisitions now, I'm a lot more selective now.
In the early days, were you using cash for the acquisitions? Were you using that in those first couple of acquisitions?
Yeah. The first few acquisitions were all cash deals for me at that time, 2014 I don't think SBA loans or hold backs or seller financing where as prevalent as they are today, at least in the deals I was looking at. There were a lot of cash deals. The first four deals I did were cash deals.
Okay. Were they all around similar sizes? I believe the first one was around 50 or 60K something like that.
Yeah, the first deal was $52,000 and the second one was like around $120,000 and the third one was around like $200K just kept making it bigger and bigger. Really what I was doing was just using the cash flow from the previous business to buy these other businesses. Again, I was just trying to grow them as quickly as possible. Get even cash flow and by larger businesses was the early day model for me.
Okay. That sounds like a pretty solid strategy and really safe if you're using cash flow from your existing businesses. How long before that model changed to incorporate debt and what was the thought behind that?
Yeah, I realized the smaller deals between I fear buying anywhere in the six figure range, buying a business for $200K or $800K they're going to have very similar processes. They're going to have smaller teams, opportunities for growth. The model for me, I thought looked very similar. The work behind it was the same. I decided I don't want to keep buying these smaller businesses. I want to go after larger deals. But I didn't have that kind of cash. I did not have $800K sitting in my bank account. I wish I did. I started researching different ways you can finance your deal. The first deal I ended up buying where I used financing, I held my other company's cash flows as collateral. I went to a local bank here, told them look I have these businesses as cash flow can I hold them as collateral and get a loan off that? It took about four months to convince a bank to do that. I went to a bunch of banks and finally I got one bank to take that from me. They gave me a half a million dollar loan to go buy a business.
Yeah, that's great. Did you have any partners at the time or was it still just yourself?
Right when I started using financing, I added on two partners Nimroz and Parvez who I met through a Facebook group and our first acquisition we did together, we took on a loan. That was how that started.
Oh, okay, cool. How did you spread the risk brought in some partners. Did they have skills to bring to the table as well or were they more capital providers?
They were already an e-commerce and they really complimented the skillset that I had. I did things really quickly. I was not detail oriented. I wanted to focus on two or three growth goals and really just automate things. They were the detail oriented, they were the operators. It really just helped mesh that acquisition and the following acquisitions we did. I think that's one of the key success factors of our portfolio is picking good partners that actually compliment you. I've heard horror stories of partnerships not working out. I've heard stories that partnerships do work on and I think having a good partner really helps build a business together.
Yeah, absolutely. Having complementary skills is really important too. You want to cover your weaknesses with who's really strong in that side of things. How did your deal structures change over time? From what was the biggest change, let's say from doing an all cash deal to using financing or debt along the way?
Yeah, there's two things. One, it was a mindset shift now I was using the banks money. I had to make sure that I had money in the bank to be making those monthly payments. Number one and number two the deal structure changed. We were able to give more of the asking price. We were able to beat out other people. Also try to get that deal by using financing some of the deal financing that we've used, I just talked about one which is using my other cash flows as collateral. A really popular one is SBA loans right now where a lot of people are using, government backed loans through banks. The great part about that is you could buy business as low as 10% down. You're getting that 90% financing done at 8% or 7% I think it's 8.25 right now. But if you're buying a 3 or 3.5x multiple, that's a really good return on your money, that's a 30% return on your money and you're borrowing at 8% that's where the math really started making sense to me and I started being really aggressive and acquiring companies through that debt
Okay, excellent. Have you had any bumps along the way? I'm sure it hasn't all been plain sailing specifically when it comes to debt. This is something I talk to people a lot about this and covering debt over the longer term is concerned. Have you had any bumps along the way and how do you think about structuring the deal to minimize your downside?
Yeah, the bumps we've had wasn't necessarily on the financing side. It was just buying bad deals. It was not asking the right questions. I'll give you an example. One of the businesses that we bought, their accounting was based off quick cash flow model, instead of accrual accounting they bought a ton of inventory last year. The financials that they showed was this year. If you look at this year's financials they look really healthy, the cash flows are super high. I didn't really take into account that process of inventory. This year it looks really good. Let's buy the business when in theory I should have kind of taken an accrual accounting for approach to this. You pay a multiple of that cash flow basis and it looks really high and running it, the actual cash that comes back to you is way lower now as we're growing it.
You have to take into account the different accounting models, number one. Number two was the research, the due diligence process where one of the businesses we bought, we didn't really do a good job on the research on the technical SEO side of things where the owner did a lot of black hat SEO, a lot of gray hat SEO. I the new Google Algorithm came out, our organic traffic tank and this is a business where we were getting 70% of traffic through organic. When you have that much traffic coming through organic and that dips, it gets really hard to then start making debt payments. It gets hard paying even people's salaries and stuff. Yeah, I've definitely learned a lot through these acquisitions and that's why I look at many deals now is I don't buy the first deal like I did my very first time.
It's just being smarter about things. Honestly Coran, it's just asking about the right questions. It's seeing what fits your skill set right. Maybe someone would really good at SEO, could have fixed that problem, but that wasn't my skill set at that time.
Okay, excellent. You have quite a large operations team now, how do you think about acquisitions and your criteria now that you have an operations team and we might dig into that and as well?
Yeah the way our operations looks at it, I still like looking at the deal flow. That's where my enjoyment comes out of. I spent a lot of my time looking at deals compared to my partners.I still bring in the deal. I still bring in the deal flow. As far as the deals we like to buy. Yes, the criteria has changed from when we first started acquiring companies but they have to be at least five years in business.
The reason why we've picked this is because during those five years they've had a lot of failed strategies that we could learn from. They have a lot of assets, they have built a lot of relationships and if we need to get a loan, it has enough, years of tax returns. If a bank needs them, we definitely want to make sure that it's aged company number two is just a cash flow, we like to buy businesses that are at least cash flowing $300K in profit and the reason for that is again for the first six months we spend a lot of money just growing the company. We hire a bunch of folks, we hire a CEO to run the company and we need those cash flows to pay for all of that including financing. We fixed that as a baseline for us to be comfortable acquiring a company. I think those two things are pretty much my biggest things for me. It could be any product, it can be any niche, it could be any model. As long as it's e-commerce we will definitely take a look at something if it fits those two criteria.
That makes sense. You've got to have a strict high level criteria that you go with. Then obviously looking at the deal by deal, whether it actually makes sense on top of that. Now, when we first spoke about this one, when I got to Austin last year and we had lunch, you were talking about one of the acquisitions where some of the operations team where in a different state and I know you have an office here in Austin as well but you said that you didn't want to move those operations teams and they were really an advantage. Could you talk through a little bit if you can about that process and how that's integrated over time?
Yeah any acquisition that anyone does, if it's not in your home city, if it's not in your headquarters, you have a choice of rehiring those folks or moving those folks to your headquarters. For us, this acquisition we did they were based out of Virginia and initially when we thought about it, we just figured it'd be good moving those 8 to 10 folks back to our headquarters in Houston and after we acquire this company and we met with those folks, they were incredibly smart, loyal folks. This business has been around for 20 years and many of them have been around for 8 to 10 years at the company. They're extremely loyal, number one. Number two, they are efficient and they knew the business in and out. I did not want to just kind of ruffle the feathers and move these folks over.
It was in my best interest to keep the employees there and what we decided to do was the CEO would just work out of our Virginia office. That team included customer service reps. We had a web developer, we had an IT team, you had accounts payable, accounts receivable. We had a really nice team there that I just did not want to move things around and they're amazing folks to work with and they've helped really grow the company and they've really embraced the new ownership that came along with me acquiring it. It's been a good journey for that one.
What advice would you give to someone that is looking to acquire a company with staff in place? Some of the folks looking at e-commerce love of it because of the low staff requirement but if you have staff in place like you've found in Virginia there, what steps did you take to other than going and meeting the people on the team, what else were you looking for as far as skill sets in the team?
Yeah. Honestly there was that challenge of how do I make sure these folks are doing their job properly, right? They were used to someone being the owner, they're in the office making sure that they do a job and now I'm not in the Virginia office. I had to build that trust with them, number one. Number two is just making sure that they're actually doing their job. If someone's out there looking to buy ecommerce brand it's not in your Home Office, you're going to have to create processes and procedures and SOP to make sure that they're doing their job. We have a check in and checkout process right now. We moved everything from server to cloud. We have weekly calls and then I hired someone that will go to the office everyday that manages that office. All those things combined with trust is a huge component to making things successful and to making things just run seamlessly really.
Okay, that makes sense. You mentioned you had to have a CEO or manager for each of the brands individually what do you look for in that role?
I usually like to find someone definitely experienced someone with the e-commerce experience but I found someone that comes from an agency, a marketing agency that has had some kind of senior role in there, has been the best candidate. I say that because someone that's been part of an agency, they have the marketing experience, whether it's through SEO or ads or whatever it is. Then two, they had that management experience because they've had junior marketing folks underneath them. They know how to handle folks, they know how to grow their team, they know how to grow their client base and they have the marketing experience. That all together fits that perfect sort of CEO candidate that could run the company for me that could grow the website or Amazon business for me. Those two characteristics are really important to make a good CEO for me.
That makes a ton of sense, obviously. But clearly the digital marketing person, if they're dealing with multiple clients, would have to get pretty good at project management as well and dealing with a lot of stakeholders, keeping the balls or the plates in the air with plates spinning, to speak. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, cool.let's switch gears back into the deal and talk about the show is true through that exit.we like to get a little bit deep on a deal. Could you tell us about your toughest deal to close toughest deal to close?
Let's see. Not all of them have been smooth sailing either. I'm trying to think through. Yep. Probably my last acquisition was really hard. It was long to really make a deal flow well, you have to have respect and trust between a buyer and seller when you lack one or the other, it really hard to close the deal. We did have that struggle in our last deal where the seller was very, he wasn't hiding things but he was very protective about the information and that makes sense. But when you're selling a business, when you're into due diligence, we all expect to open book and we weren't getting that. That made the deal really hard to really understand the business and get it to closing.
Yeah. We often advise our clients that's really the time to be as open, as honest as possible. Sometimes we have clients that want to piecemeal out information, but we've found that that actually slows the deal down.I totally agree with you though.
Yeah. I mean that was one company I remembered. Another company that I bought in the early days where I actually kept the seller on as a partner. At that time I just said, hey, this guy's really good at marketing. Let me just keep him on. What ended up happening is we never signed any good contracts. We never had any partnership agreements in place. Six months down the line, my partner just said, Hey Shakil company's good. I don't want to work anymore. I'm just going to collect the distribution. I was like, it doesn't work like that were partners. You have to put it in what you're good at. He was right. He didn't have to do anything and it was because we never signed a good contract agreement in place. Again that was another learning point.
But when you buy any deal, you want to make sure not only is your asset purchase agreement there, your consulting agreement there but if you bring on a partner, you have a good partnership agreement in place that even talks about a shotgun rule where you both call out a price and whoever has the highest price has to buy them out at that price. We never had anything like that and I had to bring arbitration, we had to get a third party valuation done. It was a nightmare. But I learned along the way that having good contracts in place can really save or break a deal.
Absolutely. You on the pump, the front, it'll sound interesting on the front end or a no brainer. If someone's operating the business well and they're happy to stay in the business. But yeah, oftentimes you don't think about what goes sideways. Yeah, that's a good reminder. I guess contracts as one thing, is there anything else you'd do differently if you were to go back and start again from zero?
Yeah. Honestly, the amount of data, the amount of deals coming into the marketplace, there's a lot and sometimes deals look too good to be true and I think one of the things if I were to start it off or give advice I'd get to people right now looking at a deal is number one, don't buy your first deal. Number two, understand what you're good at. If you're good at Amazon, if you're good at Facebook marketing, if you're good at funnels or email marketing, use that skill set and find a company that has a void in that but it'll take patients. When you combine your skill set, with the void and a company, you're able to build much more value and the valuation of your company goes way higher. Definitely being patient, finding a business that fits your skill set and not just buying something for the numbers are two pieces of advice I would give to myself buying into anyone that's looking to buy a business.
Thats super solid advice. Sometimes you get really excited at the beginning phase of going out there and looking for companies and you start seeing a few and you’re mind just races with many opportunities. You just want to dive right in.
I mean absolutely as entrepreneurs or people try to jump into entrepreneurs, everyone has a shiny rock syndrome. They look at a prospectus and they see oh something's making $100K and you could buy it for $300K that's super cheap. I want to buy this. Someone that looks out of Amazon business thinks operations are easy, someone fulfills it gives customer service, takes the inventory. That is awesome. I want to buy it. But there's a lot more under the hood besides those two aspects that I think just getting excited causes people to make the wrong decisions. I think just taking a step back, being patient helps make those smarter decisions.
I'm curious, you mentioned that you found partners with other skill sets or complementary skill sets. Would you work on building a team before going to acquire or would you look for acquisitions where like the company in Virginia where you had some operations teams in place that you could leverage in future deals?
Yeah, I would definitely do the ladder, which is buying a company that comes with the operations. I say that because your headache is much lower. I feel like as long as the team that comes with it is on board with your vision. For me, this buying a company, there's a lot more that comes with besides the operations, there's a brand aspect of it. There's the growth aspect of it, there's even hiring folks and when there's a team that comes with it, the business that understands the business, that creates a lot more comfort for me in acquiring something when you buy something there's a lot of knowledge sharing, a lot of knowledge transfer that happens and when a team comes with it just makes it that much easier to buy that business.
Hmm. For the most part to say it plain and simple that the larger businesses is the more operations there is or do sometimes see deals with the potentially over staffed and then you can use those operations as shed services with your other brands. Yeah, in fact both the second option of looking for inefficiencies, cutting out the fact is as something that would really excite me to buy that business. If someone has a 10 folks doing customer service and I SEO team a web developer and I already have that in house, well those are expenses I could just cut out and bring those folks within my team. Now I will say that I wouldn't just cut out someone right away though, everyone brings a unique skill set. There's a reason why they're still hired but I always look for inefficiencies on ways we could reduce overhead while still growing the company.
But yeah, I'm always surprised to see the types of deals out there where I just don't understand why some owners aren't either utilising a certain marketing strategy or B not cutting out the fat and I think some owners just get used to sailing along. They’re cruise control and they're just happy with how business is going.
Absolutely. We often see a lot of owners that have other projects they're working on or they're off to the next thing. Maybe there's a bigger opportunity sometimes the business and are thinking of selling hasn't really been 100% focused on for some time or maybe they've taken their foot off the pedal of the eye off the ball to speak in that sense and then you can come in.
I really liked your approach or your advice of coming in with what is doing a stock take on yourself first and figuring out what you're best at and then buying a business that would, you would bring something to the table. I often refer to this as an unfair advantage. When you're on the buy side, you really want an unfair advantage that the multiple you're paying on cash flow was good right out of the gate but then you know that you can bring something else to that acquisition. How do you look at acquisitions now? Do you look strategically as far as customer base? Do you look, you mentioned deficiencies, what else can you bring to a deal now or how do you think about a deal compared to when it was just yourself in the beginning?
Just looking at your first couple of deals here. I mean honestly at the end of the day you're trying to make more money and doing the due diligence period, I always list out a number of growth goals, right? It could be adding new products, it could be finding a cheaper supplier, it could be using automation or technology to reduce expenses. One of our last acquisitions, the old owner was using a credit card processing system and he was overpaying on it. We moved to a company called payment depot and we automatically saved $70K well on our credit card fees. I mean that's a huge deal to the bottom line though is an eight figure business and they're doing a lot of sales on our website and it's just looking for these little opportunities to make money. Then that's what I like to do during my due diligences or even pre due diligence is identifying growth goals or efficiencies which I can utilise my skill set or knowledge. Because at the end of the day, any acquisition that anyone does, they're just trying to make their money back as quickly as possible. That's what I try to do too.
I love it. That makes a ton of sense. Awesome. Just before we hitting record, we were talking about, you mentioned on your team currently you're really involved in deal flow and we started talking a little bit about you building a personal brand to drive deal flow. I've been talking to a couple of investors about this recently. The interest that just a quick overview of how you feel that's benefiting you in searching for deals. Yeah, whenever people hear my name, I think at least if they've heard another podcast about me or at least read our article, it instills automatic trust. It instills that experience. For me it's definitely been helpful and deal flow. I've gotten a lot of private deal flow that comes with it. If someone's heard my name, he knows I'm in the market to buy a business. That's been helpful. Number two, it's been helpful when I go through a broker and someone's trying to pick between two people and they've heard about me and what I've done with acquisitions. It's always been to carry on the old owners legacy and to grow that business. That helps for a seller to pick a buyer more easily. Then three, I'm always looking to hire folks, whether it's customer service or whether it's marketing or product sourcing or CEO's. I've gotten a lot of people come to me that are looking for a way to work with me and I've really enjoyed that kind of process of having that hiring process come to me instead of me looking elsewhere.
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. It's definitely, it's nice to have a warm introduction and then have a little bit more fire power when it comes to negotiating as well and that's something we go really deep on with our clients. It's not just about getting an offer to them, finding the best buyer, the deal not only can they close, can they raise finance if I need to but also what's their plan after the deal because oftentimes, like you said legacy even in a shorter business two, three years old sometimes have built the business to a point where we've had a number of clients recently where they're actually burning through capital really fast because of immense growth and it's getting uncomfortable for them to keep putting that cash back in or the personal credit is at risk because they've got credit lines on the business, that's why they are looking to exit. For them, they can see where this brand could potentially go. There's a bit of ego behind that and thinking well, I started this from nothing and if I can pass it on to the next person, they could do something better with it. That's kind of cool to say as well I exited here but then that brand keeps going.
If there's any sort of deal structure whatsoever, even if it's a simple short hold back, you want to make sure that the business is going to keep performing because that's what's going to pay you out. Right. Whether it's a note or performance based as even more important than if it's a performance metric.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, just besides a personal brand, I mean, if you're able to build that brand up, people will come to you and say, hey, Shakil you're doing a great job. Is there any way I could invest in you? Anyway, I could invest in your acquisitions. That alone just kind of really helps acquire more companies, acquire more talent, and it's, it's super useful just building that brand up.
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, awesome. What's next? What's your big plan with all of this?
Initially during this process of buying these companies, I remember, I think your last guy on the podcast, he was talking about rollups and stuff. That was my initial goal was just to get everything together, sell it as a roll up and that's always going to be on the back of my mind. But I'm just enjoying this process of just buying companies, building this company culture. We just started EOS within our company and it's just been fun like having people with these ideas and just making an impact on their lives. The whole process has been fun. I think what's coming from me is I'm going to keep acquiring companies as long as I can and as long as I'm making money, I'm going to keep buying.
I like it and I love how simple you make everything sound. This is a good skill you have. I want to invest with you at this point. This is great Shakil. This has been a ton of fun but we were about to wrap up here. We both got other things to do as much as we'd love to keep talking about this all day but how can people reach out to if they do want to just reach out and talk to you a bit more or maybes and invest with you.
Yeah, you could reach out to me through Linkedin. It's Shakil Prasla or I'll provide my email. It's [email protected].
Okay, excellent. We'll put that in the show notes as well over at truthaboutexits.com feel free to jump over there and grabbed that detail. Shakil thanks so much for coming on the show and being open about the good and the bad of dealmaking and I'm cheering you on from the sidelines here. I'm very excited to see where you go and hopefully we'll get to catch up more now we’re both in Austin.
Cool Coran. Good catching up with you. Take care.
Bye.