Strategic Acquisitions: Lessons on Business Growth from Colin Sanburg

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Gain insights into the entrepreneurial journey and experiences.
• Overcome challenges faced by small businesses with proven strategies.
• Discover the importance of delegating and trusting employees for business growth.
• Learn effective planning for a successful exit from your business.
• Master the art of acquiring and leading struggling businesses to success.

Colin Sanburg is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 22 years of experience in building and acquiring businesses. He started his journey at the age of 21, joining a small business in a marketing role. Through dedication and hard work, Colin quickly gained the trust and respect of the business owner, eventually buying the company and becoming its CEO. Over the years, he expanded his entrepreneurial endeavors by acquiring other businesses in the airport space, including a conveyor manufacturer, a cabinet manufacturer, and a door manufacturer. Currently, Colin is venturing into his first startup, adding another milestone to his impressive portfolio. With his wealth of experience and expertise, Colin is a valuable guest on the podcast, providing insights and practical advice to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to navigate the challenges of business ownership.

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Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners prepare for an exit so you can maximise the value and exit on your terms. This is the exit insights podcast presented by Succession Plus I’m Darryl Bates- Brownsword and today I’m joined by Colin Sanburg. Hey thanks  for joining me, Colin. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Darryl. Appreciate it.

Brilliant. Now, Colin, you’ve got a slightly different story to, I guess, a lot of the entrepreneurs that we have on the show who have already exited their business. You captured my attention with what you’ve already built and your exit game and what you’re building and what you’re planning to do. So why don’t you give us a bit of a background and then we’ll jump in and I’ll see if I can unpick all the right questions as we go.

Yeah, sounds great. So, yeah, I’ve yet to exit, although I certainly intend that in the coming years. I think all of us operating a business have intentions to exit at some point one way or another. And so far my exits have been hiring a CEO. So a little bit of my background I’ve got my first business I got into, I was 21 years old. I was super green. I didn’t know anything about business. I had determined through kind of an interesting scenario that I wanted to be a small business owner, found the person nearest to me who was a business owner and went to work for them. And 22 years later, I still own that company. And I ran that company for about 15 years as CEO and eventually hired my successor and started buying other businesses and so that first one was a conveyor manufacturer. So we make airport conveyors and then later bought a cabinet manufacturer, went back and bought another business in the airport space, a door manufacturer, and now I’m working on my very first startup. So I’ve kind of had the other side of the coin, not as a seller yet, but as an acquires. So that’s kind of my story of how I got to where I am.

Sounds of it, you always wanted to be a business owner, is that correct?

Yes, yes. Starting early in my my probably 1920, I came to this realisation this is what I wanted to do with my life.

And what was it that led you to want to actually be a business owner rather than an employee for someone?

Yeah, believe it or not, it’s kind of a weird story. I was in a job interview, and in that job interview there was a magazine laying on the table and I was waiting for the in the conference room, waiting on the interviewer to come in and talk to me. And I pick up this magazine. It was Ink magazine. And this was back in 1999, 2000, somewhere around there. And the magazine was talking about an entrepreneur who was in the oil busines had failed, went bankrupt, was humiliated, felt really embarrassed about that and ended up going down to the courthouse. Somebody told him that a little side hustle business idea was actually to buy debt. And so he went down to the courthouse, he bought some people’s debt. He called them up and said, hey. I’m not going to harass you, I’m not going to humiliate you. I’ve been through this myself. Let’s work out a plan. I’ll come sit down with you at the kitchen table and we’ll figure out a way to make this work. And I don’t need 100% of what you owed, but I need most of it and let’s work together. And he was immediately successful doing that. And so on the second or third time he went down to the courthouse he actually stumbled upon his own debt and bought his own debt for pennies on the dollar. And this moment I read this. I’m 20 years old ,I’d kind of been a bit of a screw up in my childhood. And it was like this bolt of lightning hit me that said, this is the way. This is the way for you to have a path in life where you can build your own destiny. And even if you stumble, you can go out and take life by the reins and fix it. And so at that moment, I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur. That was it.

Okay, that’s fascinating. And we’ve all got different stories. So you started out, you went and worked for I guess it was a local business. You found a local entrepreneur and you started working for them. What was your first job with this company?

Yeah, so I started out like many small businesses. It was like a marketing job title. I wasn’t doing a lot of marketing. You get into a small business and you’re doing everything right. My very first day on the job. I cleaned out a closet, literally. That was the beginning. But within a year or so, the business was struggling financially and the business owner had a lot of trust in me. I’d earned a lot of respect at the company, even within the first year. Even though I was a kid. And I like to say especially in small business, it’s a little bit like people who are raised on a farm. It’s like you’re a man when you can do the work of a man. And so I showed up, I might have been 21 years old, 22, I might have been a kid, didn’t know anything, but I did the work of a man and so I was treated that way. And so when the business was struggling financially, the business owner said, hey, you don’t know anything about this either. And neither did he. But go tackle it, go figure this out and I dove in with both feet and kind of never looked back.

Okay, so can you give us some context, Colin, like how many people were in this business?

Yeah, at the time it was twelve or 15 people. It was a relatively small business.

Yeah. So a classic small business. Enough to have a bit of a number of layers of employees, but the owner still knew everyone in the business knew what was going on and was calling all the shots.

Exactly. Yeah, kind of that classic hub and spoke where the business owner is making every decision. It’s like they’re running everything with 1000 helpers instead of actually building out a professional organisation.

So let’s just test a theory for a second. My experience with businesses of that size, I could come horribly unstuck here. My experience with businesses of that size is that when they get to that size, it’s kind of the first inflection point for the owners. And what do I mean by that is that a lot of SME business owners are control freaks. They’re used to doing everything themselves. They’re calling the shots, they need things done a certain way. And most of the employees of up to around, I’m going to say 10 or 11 people, they’re helpers. They’re just being told what to do they’re assistants and there’s often a big gap between them and the owner or the owners of a business. And that’s the way they like it because they’re in control. It’s their business, it’s their risk on the line. But the downside of that is that they’re doing everything themselves. As you say, hub and spoke, everything is dependent on them. They are micromanaging and they’re often getting in their own way and they’re trying to delegate. And when they delegate, they’re really telling people what to do rather than giving them some freedom and scope to make their own mistakes. So they’re telling them what to do and still micromanaging. People get frustrated in that environment and they tend to leave because they don’t want to be micromanaged. And so they’ll go somewhere where they don’t have a frustrated boss. As a context, does that correlate with your experience there?

That is 100% the experience.

Oh, thank goodness.

Yeah. To your point, I was the first person who’d ever disagreed with the founder. I was the first one who’d ever told them an opinion that wasn’t just regurgitating what they had just said. And honestly, it led to a lot of headbutting. I ended up buying the business over time, over several transactions. But at the very beginning, I was basically having to say, well, wait a minute, we’re not doing this right. And I was a kid, I didn’t know what the right way was, but I knew I was seeing a lot of the wrong things. And to your point, what’s so scary about business owners who operate that way? And it’s very natural, it’s super common. within a business of that size because the business owner, to your point, is freaked out by the risk. They’ve never done this before. They’re really in kind of almost a panic mode. The scary part is good people leave, exactly like you said, and the people who stay are never going to get you past that ceiling. They’re never going to get you to the next level. And so you start attracting the wrong people and repelling the right people and it becomes this really vicious cycle that some business owners spend their entire career stuck in.

Yeah. So it sounds like you are quite a resilient character and you are one of the first to go. Hang on a sec we can keep doing this way, but we’ll lose more people, including myself, or we can start. You stood up and said, well, hang on, we need to do something different. I don’t know the right answer, but let me help you out and let’s try and you challenged them and challenged the status quo, which now sometimes that can work really well and sometimes it can be to your own demise. Sounds like this it came off.

What happened? To your point, I would say that we also don’t want somebody in the business who just wants to challenge everything. Right. No, there needs to be merit to it. And so I think what happened with me especially, was when it got to a point where I see we’re going to harm the business and this business was struggling. When I felt like the business is on the line, then I have to speak up. My conscience says I don’t have another choice. And to your point, I had gotten to the point I was either going to leave or we were going to make changes and I had to accept that those were the two likely outcomes and I had to be okay with either of them. But I wasn’t going to spend my career in that type of environment just saying, being a yes man.

Okay, so you’ve challenged, but not for the sake of challenge you’ve gone. We need to challenge these things. There’s some beliefs here we need to change clearly, what we’ve been doing is not working. We need to change something. He’s listened to you, by the sounds of it, taken on some of those ideas, and that led eventually, by the sounds of it, to you starting to acquire some of the business from the owner.

Yes.

How did those conversations come about?

Well, and I’ll be really candid, I bought 25% when he was still managing the business, and it was still really in that struggling mode and I had taken over the finance of the business, gained a lot of trust, bought the first 25%. It obviously was not worth a lot of money. And then as I took over as CEO, I bought up to 49% and then later, after he’d been gone for a number of years, bought the rest. But, yeah, there was a really interesting moment where we had a mentor really, it was his mentor, but I would visit with as well. And we were going to this mentor over and over again with problems and kind of pitching our individual approaches. And at some point, the mentor said “hey, give the kid a shot”. He knows what he’s talking about. And so the business owner left the business, I became CEO, and the business owner never worked another minute in the business. I mean, not 1 minute literally packed up his desk and was gone one day.

Wow. So just to give us some context, how long had you been in the business at this point?

I took it over when I had been there for five years.

Five years, okay, so five years in. And at what stage did you acquire the 25%?

Probably about three years in.

Okay, so about three years in, you’ve had a conversation, you says, okay, you’re up to purchase some of the equity. How did you value the business at that stage? And you go, I’m going to buy 25%. I imagine it wasn’t a meaningless chunk of change to you. I know the business wasn’t worth a heck of a lot, but I imagine you had to come up with some funding, how’d you value it and how’d you substantiate things.

Yeah, I mean, it was a little bit of a back of the napkin valuation, right. When you’ve got two interested parties. Obviously, I couldn’t afford to come out of pocket for a lot of it, so it was kind of on a loan basis I had to pay back. And really what it came down to as I bought more and more of the business was essentially anything that would have been coming to me as distributions would have been coming to me as proceeds of the business were all going to the original business owner to buy out my shares. But, yeah, it was basically back of the napkin. And really, the business at that point was kind of a salvage. I mean, it was just, okay, it’s got a little bit of cash, it’s got a little bit of inventory. Let’s just come up with a number it had no multiple to speak of at the time.

Yeah. So you agreed evaluation, and I think this is an interesting point for listeners out there to go, how can I construct a deal when it’s just, hey, look, we’re both interested, we’re both keen to make this happen. How do we make it work? The bank might not fund me the money for whatever reason, but if I understand what you just said is basically you agreed that the business basically funded your acquisition. So future dividend payments that should have been coming to you were used as payments for your portion of the loan, and I imagine you had some tax and accounting work to figure out how to make that work.

Exactly.

So it was a mates rates type of deal, but these things happen. You got your advisors to work out the paperwork, so you’re owning 25% for another two years, and then at some point, the founder goes, Colin, over to you. I’ve still got 75% at this stage over to you. And I guess you had some sort of conversation to go, well, if you’re going to leave it to me, let’s make it more interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. I made it clear that really I wanted to ultimately own the business at that point. I’d put so much blood, sweat, and tears into it, and it was maybe a year or two after he left that I did the 49% transaction. So it was kind of a conversation ongoing from the time he left. But, yeah, it was definitely a conversation around how can we make this switch? And interestingly, you were talking about the control freak type of entrepreneur that was it. That’s why it was only 25% at first. That’s why it was only 49% second and that’s how that goes.

Okay. And was there any sense of once the owner had left the business and was out of the business for a couple of years and you were CEO? Was there any sense that I guess you had more bargaining power at this point?

Yeah, I think there was. The hard part was, and it’s really interesting, the same mentor and this is something for everyone listening to think about, especially as you’re going through a transaction, right? This is a guy who was selling his business to me. Now, by the time we were at this point, I was CEO of the company,  I had all the customer relationships, I had all of the team relationships. And so to your point, I had bargaining power. The unfortunate thing is, the same mentor who told him to give me a shot was now in his ear basically saying that I was trying to take advantage of him, which is really ridiculous. That’s not how I do business. That’s not how I would have approached things. And so I would just suggest to everyone is really think about the people that are in your ear. Do they have your real best interests at heart, or are they kind of speaking onto you what they believe for themselves? Right?

Yeah, well, there’s a good point. There’s a lesson in life. Be careful of what other people are projecting. Given that this was sort of a deal, how well documented was the deal and the ownership and I guess even the promise of future share acquisitions coming to you.

Yeah, it was documented. Everything was done professionally with lawyers and that sort of thing. Again, I wouldn’t say our valuation was probably as professional as it could have been, but I know from buying companies including companies that are struggling, that there’s not really a way to value a company that’s got no profit to speak of, right? In the early stages, that was us.

Yeah. A business is only valued what someone’s prepared to pay for it. And he was lucky that he had someone from inside the business that was prepared to pay for it. So your first day of, I guess, CEO, what did you start doing? What did you say, hey, look, now I’m in the hot seat. I get control or I get to decide what we’re going to do differently here.

Well, the really tough reality is that the first thing I had to do was lay some people off. I made a really tough choice. And part of what we were dealing with as we were making the decision for me to take over the business was we had about 70% of our revenue that we were losing money on. And 30% of our revenue that we were making money on. And so as a company, we were basically break even or a little down. And I could show on paper and this is coming back to my finance orientation within the business, look, I can show you on a whiteboard in 30 seconds the fact that this 70% of our business is losing because we’re making less money than what the 30% would make on its own.

The old 80 20 rule.

Exactly. And so what I did was I eliminated the 70% of our revenue. And so when I took over the business, I said, hey, we’re not going to do that anymore. And unfortunately, that meant that several employees whose job was solely focused on that part of the business were no longer part of the team. And I was 26 years old. I wasn’t nearly as green at that point, but it was hard. It was a very hard thing to do.

Well, that’s never easy, but it’s either. A couple of employees or all of them.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that’s my belief, is we take care of the company first, before the owner, before any of the individual employees, because we depend on the company to take care of everyone. And if we ever get that misconstrued, It will come back to haunt us. And ultimately jeopardise everyone.

Yeah, okay, so we’ve let go some of the employees, we’ve changed our product offering. Did that start to impact, how quickly did that impact the finances or was there more to be done?

Well, it definitely impacted the finances, so from realistically speaking, it was still 70% of our revenue. So we dropped pretty dramatically in terms of size. We did. And what I believe from the beginning was that if we woke up everyday, it was kind of going back to the classic Jim Collins Hedgehog concept. We had to really realise what our Hedgehog was. And my belief was that if we woke up every day focusing on what was formerly 30% of the business, we would grow it. And we did, and we doubled it. in the first year and grew from there. Now doubling 30% of your business only puts you at 60% of what you were the year before. So realistically, it was still a big hit, but we grew. And one of the big things I focused on early was I obsessed over us making money on every single deal we touched. Originally in the business, these smaller deals were going on and they were just happening on autopilot. And when I started obsessing, we started growing margin and we went from originally 30% to 35% margin on that work, up to almost 60. I think it was 62, 63% by the time I left as CEO. And that was a grinded out over years process. But that was it. I mean, once we could focus on that part of the business, we obsessed over it.

Well done. Okay, so we’re turning around, we’re turning a profit. So one or two years down the track, the business is now profitable. What was the response from the owner who was no longer in the business?

You know, it was weird. There wasn’t a whole lot of response until I came to buy the last piece. And again, the mentor, it was a very bizarre deal. I was brought over to the mentor’s office like this was some sort of negotiation and basically dictated some terms to that he was still going to have control even though I would be the it was just bizarre and unfortunately for everyone at that point, it really impacted our long term relationship. But I was dead set on I’m going to build this to be a successful business and I’m not going to do it in perpetuity for someone else. It just doesn’t make sense. I’d rather go start over. And realistically, the business was in such bad shape for so long that it took me years. I always say the old joke about what do you do when you find yourself in a hole first thing you do is stop digging. So the first phase was just stop digging. Right? That was the eliminating the wrong revenue, getting focused on profitability. It took a long time of even being profitable to climb out of that hole the entire way and start to get above ground and actually start to stack cash and resources and be ready to grow the way we wanted to. And so we were somewhere in that range when we had the final conversation about buying it. And I just said, look, yes, this business is worth more than what it was, and I’m willing to pay you fair rate for what it’s worth today. But this kind of absurd concept of I’m going to pay you a premium, which is what they wanted, and you’re going to have control, and it was just like, come on. At that point, I had my MBA, I had been a CEO for six, seven, eight years, whatever it was. I was like, not a chance. Not a chance. I’ll go out and do my own thing. I’ll go find people to raise capital if I need to, and I’ll do it myself. And at that point, realistically, it was a really bizarre deal because they were pushing this kind of mindset that they had all the cards. And the reality is, like you said even at the earlier negotiation, look, I’ve been running this company. Customers don’t even know who you are anymore. Employees have never worked for you because by that point, most of the employees had turned over. What are we even talking about here? You can’t sell a business with an unwilling CEO. It was just kind of a weird concept.

Yeah. So how long did those negotiations take to, I guess, complete the final transaction?

Yeah. It took about a year and a half wow. Took about a year and a half  of some heated conversations, some cooling off periods, some trying to reconcile, and ultimately we got a deal done that it ended up being, I think, relatively fair in the end, leaning a little bit in his favor. But I was a big believer, and I’m still a believer. We talked about kind of a sweat equity method of earning shares. I’m a big believer that I have to make any investment worth more than what I bought it for. I’m not going to get sweetheart deals everywhere I go. So it kind of was my mindset anyway. I’m going to have to make this thing prove to be a great deal for me It’s not going to be a great deal from day one.

But by the sounds of it, by the time well. There were three transactions, by the sounds of it, 1st 25, next 24 and each of those transactions occurred at an increasing valuation that’s meant to be a question.

Yes.

And at the final transaction, how was the profitability of the business compared to the lifetime of the business? Was it the most profitable it’s ever been at that stage?

Yes.

So I can imagine that the founder’s reluctance to want to give that up because he sat back and he’s got the dividends coming in, and he’s feeling like it’s paid off. I can imagine him feeling like it’s paying off for all that hard work and his sweat in the early years. Okay, so you now acquired the business. You’ve now got 100% of it. How much longer? And I think you said you still own it today?

Correct.

Yeah. So how’s the revenue and profit of that business today compared to, I guess it’s about 15 years ago now when you first took over complete ownership of it?

Yeah, it’s substantially bigger from when I took over the business. It is probably four to five times bigger in terms of revenue and similar even more so in terms of profitability.

Okay, so you’ve been CEO of the business for seven or so years. You’ve acquired the business as CEO and now 100% owner of the business. You’ve got this down pat, right? You know what you’re doing you’re pretty experienced as a young fella. What else is there to learn? Like, you’ve had some tough decisions laying people off and making some big investments and tough negotiations in acquiring equity. You’ve learned everything there is to learn about running the business by this stage surely.

Not even close. So, as you know, hopefully the smartest I ever am is the last day I’m alive. I’m always trying to get smarter, always. Trying to get better. Interestingly, I ran into some of the same challenges that we were describing earlier on the show. I got back to a size where we’re 15, 17 people and start running into some of those same challenges interestingly. There’s a great book that I love called The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and he talks about a wartime CEO versus a peacetime CEO. And what he’s really saying is, hey, when you’re in wartime, it is command and control. It is do it this way or get out of the way kind of attitude. And when we were in survival mode, when I first took over the company. That was the style it had to be and we got down as small as two or three people .I mean, we had to take it all the way down to the bones and rebuild it. So when we got back to 12,15, 17 people, that style doesn’t really work anymore, and certainly not when we’re a successful company that’s now doing well. And I wouldn’t say that it was as bad I was never a control freak in the micromanaging sort of way, but could definitely have a domineering personality that you would find we’d hit a wall with we couldn’t get the highest caliber people because the highest caliber people wanted the autonomy to run their function more completely. And that took a lot of introspection and growth to figure out how to get beyond that.

I think you’re sharing the message that there’s a lot of mistakes that we can see, but there’s still a lot of mistakes that we need to learn for ourselves even though we know what they are and can see other people doing them, we still have to experience it ourselves and that 10,15 person hurdle growing through that, you experience that as well and changing and adapting your leadership style so the business could transform through that. So Colin, fast tracking it a bit. You’ve now owned the business, so you acquired that business by sweat equity or not sweat equity, but you purchased your way in and earned your place and role in that business. You got a taste for acquiring businesses, so you’ve continued to apply the skills that you’ve learned throughout the years, and I think you haven’t stopped there. You’ve acquired a few more businesses since and applying the same principles?

Yeah, absolutely. So interestingly. We talked a lot about this. My former partner’s mentor, this was the first guy I ever saw in a small business setting. He owned multiple businesses, and he didn’t work at any of them. And even though I had a lot of disagreements with this guy, even though I didn’t agree with his methods, I mean, his methods in that model was to have the he wouldn’t call him a CEO. He wouldn’t hire a proper CEO. He’d have him come kind of bend  the knee, and he would tell him what to do. I kind of gleaned from that. Okay, this guy’s got a really good concept of owning these businesses but not having to work at them. But I didn’t believe in the method he was going about it. And so from a very early stage, even before I took over as CEO of my first company, I always wanted to be involved in multiple businesses. I loved going to a mastermind session, hearing about different business owners, fascinated by different industries and different business models. And so I knew from a very early stage when I got to that point, that was going to be a goal of mine. And so I took some of the lessons that I’d learned from my first business and invested in a second business that was a cabinet manufacturer with a partner who runs that company today. He’s the third generation in it. But some of what I had learned in my first business and that turnaround process was a playbook that he really needed at the stage we partnered together.

Yeah. Okay, so you’ve come in, you’ve learned from the skills of you as part of being a leader, is learning what to do well and what you want to do and also figuring out what you don’t want to do. And it sounds like you’ve applied that fairly well, acquired another business. Now, how many businesses in your portfolio now?

Four.

Four and is there any end inside, or you’ve got a few more lined up that you want to keep acquiring and bringing into the portfolio.

Yeah, it’s just a time game. I definitely want to continue to grow and it really is like we talked about, the reality is at every stage in life you hit some sort of a ceiling and you don’t grow until you figure out how to get better. And so for me, I’m doing my first startup right now, which is a strategic accounting company that I’m excited about. I have never done a startup, I’ve bought businesses but never done a startup. But I’m deep into making that business successful and really enjoying it. But I ultimately want to get back to this portfolio model of multiple businesses and every one of them needs a CEO.

Yeah. So not be in any of the businesses but steering and guiding all of them.

Absolutely.

So Colin, let’s explore this from, I guess, the listener’s perspective, the listeners learning and hopefully what they’re hearing is there’s a pretty good strategy out there. Whereas you can buy and acquire businesses from within, you can use the profit or the funding from the business to help fund that acquisition. Your role is to then grow significantly the valuation of that business to make it worthwhile as a long term exit strategy so the founder can gradually step away while the next generation comes in. And there’s your foundation for a buy and build strategy. It’s a form of buy and build. You’ve bought it yourself and you’re building and then using the funding instead of paying off the owners, then using the future profits to fund other acquisitions by the sounds of it.

Absolutely.

So there’s a model to build wealth but also build a fulfilling and prosperous life because you’re forever learning and building on the skill sets and the knowledge that you’re acquiring year after year after year from a point of continual best practice or continuous improvement by the sounds of it and continually challenging yourself to be better and better and learn and continually build and run better businesses. So if that’s the framework, if I’ve summarised your career effectively so far, not that you’ve ended you’re still to complete your exit strategy. If that’s the summary of the story so far from your perspective as the person inside that story, what’s the key point that you think that other business owners, they’re the point that you want to share with them and make sure that they take away from our conversation today?

Yeah, I would say that the key strategy is exactly what you talked about, knowing what your vision is, right? What you described as a model that fit my vision. And so that’s what I’ve been doing and it makes a ton of sense for me. If someone is just absolutely passionate about one industry, one business, and that’s what they want to do, that’s great. But I would say that one of the things that they need to take away from this is if you are at the center of your business, your business is not very sellable, right? And for me It was kind of a first step toward an exit is to have a professional CEO, have someone else who can run the business. Ultimately, if I want to sell business, I can’t be at the center of that universe or it harms the value, it harms the likelihood that the transition will be successful. And so for me, this was kind of a step in between that said, I can still own the business but be arm’s length from it  and then when the time comes to sell it, it’s already teed up and ready to go.

Brilliant. So you’ve got an asset that is as liquid as it can be for small business asset.

Absolutely. And if it’s self sustaining in terms of resources, if it’s basically creating additional liquidity over time through profits exactly. To your point earlier, I can continue to reinvest off of that business without harming the value of that business. Right. So it’s kind of the perfect scenario for me. And then when the time comes and we look at that with our businesses. Everything in this world is for sale. 1000 years from now, my family is not going to own these businesses. So realistically there’s going to come a point, and it may be sooner rather than later when the fully liquidating makes sense. But in the meantime, this is kind of a know holding pattern to know me to continue buying more businesses and keep the door open to the right exit.

Excellent. Colin, look, I really appreciate you coming on, sharing this as a strategy and sharing your story with the podcast listeners today. Thanks for your time.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Darryl. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Colin Sanburg is a multi-business owner and Founder of FinElevate. This MBA-led
strategic accounting firm helps business owners use their numbers to make money
rather than simply better categorising their expenses. As CEO and owner of
manufacturing, distribution, and service businesses, he developed a passion for
demystifying small business finance and supporting fellow entrepreneurs in achieving
their dreams.