Brad Jacobs

It's very important to me that I have a personal affinity for them.

Can you define integrity?

Integrity is real simple.

It's being honest.

It's doing what you say you're going to do and being straightforward about it, not playing games.

And I like to work with people that don't require a lot of effort to figure out what do they really mean.

I like to work with people who they mean exactly what they just said.

And they say it in real simple terms.

Two, three, four years down the line, if you find bad things with the company, it's really my fault if I haven't fixed it by then.

But in the first year or two, sometimes it's undisclosed liabilities.

Sometimes there's things in the company that you really weren't aware of because buying a company is a little bit like getting married.

You don't really know who you got married to until after you've been married a little while.

Fortunately, in my case, that's worked out really well.

But sometimes people get surprised.

And when you buy a company...

particularly if you buy it in a process.

If you buy it in a banker-run process, you don't get the fulsome amount of due diligence that you really need in order to responsibly buy a company and confidently think you're not going to have a lot of surprises.

It becomes temporarily insane and develops an access to personality disorder for a short period of time.

And those times are when their spouse tells them, I'm divorcing you.

And another time is when your boss tells you, you're fired.