Bill Brice

But back then, probably to build one of those stores would have been about $150,000, of which there would be a $20,000 franchise fee paid, you know, that the company would receive.

And the company also collected about 5%, 6% royalties.

Some of its use for advertising.

Uh, that company, uh, the system wide revenue, that company probably got up to about 150, $60 million.

Um, but we, uh, uh,

Back in the early to mid, we sold the company in 1996.

And it was sold because someone was coming along and buying up and consolidating frozen dessert franchise operations.

And they said they made us a good offer and we sold it and went on down the road.

It's actually sold pretty much like most businesses, at least back in the day.

You know, it used to be companies were sold based upon, you know, multiples of earnings or cash flow.

It's a little different for, you know, getting used to these days when companies are sold on multiple of sales.

Sure.

Well, probably in –

Things are sold on multiples of EBITDA typically.

And so, you know, probably somewhere between six to 10 times was depending on their growth rates and things like that would be kind of where you would see on a multiple of EBITDA.

Well, I mean, frankly, we did a lot of software back in the yogurt business because we were doing manufacturing and managing a lot of inventory and a lot of stuff.

And so we did a lot of fun stuff around just-in-time inventory and real-time processing of manufacturing operations.

It's all kind of boring stuff, but it was kind of fun to optimize it and make it sing.

So we got out of that business and began to look around.

That was, of course, we're talking now 1997, 1998.