Brad Jacobs

If you look at the 500 or so acquisitions that I and my team have done, average multiples in the mid to high single digits.

And I don't like to buy things that are priced for perfection and everything's got to go perfectly, swimmingly right in order to

achieve and maintain at 15 or 20 times EBITDA multiple.

I look for industrial companies for the most part.

I'm not a tech guy.

I use a lot of tech.

I invest in tech.

I am tech forward in my companies.

We utilize tech every possible place we can.

We automate anything we can.

But I don't buy tech companies per se, mainly because the multiples are too high.

Earlier ones taught me more lessons than my more recent ones because I messed up so many times.

I made so many mistakes in my first few dozen acquisitions.

That's where you really learn.

You learn from your mistakes.

You don't learn as much from your success.

And the main mistakes I made in the earlier acquisitions were around people and integration.

I was too slow to integrate.

Now I'm real fast when I integrate.

When I integrate now, I rip off the bandaid and I'm on one CRM, one HRS, one ERP, one dashboard, one key performance indicator metric universally throughout the system.