Brandon Dawson

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So you go through all this, what I call the devaluation cycle when you're using other people's money and then you ultimately lose and give up control.

And then it becomes, is it really worth it with everybody mad at you and things not working?

And those are the cycles.

So if you know that that's what you need to be prepared for, then the other option is,

bootstrap your company, be in control of it, and learn to force the company to make money.

And if the company doesn't make money, you don't have a lot of headaches because you don't have a lot of people.

And if the company does make money and you set up your reserves, you have enough money to invest in the next iteration.

And if you make a mistake, you don't have somebody cutting your throat because you don't know what you're doing and they're going to get rid of you.

When I was running around with my private equity groups, I was looking at what they would define as platform companies.

A platform company is between 125, 175 million.

It has leadership, it has systems, it has processes, it's profitable, it's predictable, it's got growth trajectory, and it's dependable because all private equity, venture capital is entirely different.

Private equity likes to invest in things that's predictable, it's consistent, and it has upside.

Otherwise, they're not interested in it.

unless they're going to consolidate it into somebody else they like, and they're just investing in you to get rid of all you and the people around you.

So you got to know who you are and what kind of target you are, because a lot of people are excited, oh, I'm going to do a deal with private equity, and then they close, and then they're fired, and their team's wiped out because they were a bolt-on, or they were a plug-in, or they were a whatever.

They just got rolled inside of somebody else's organization.

So seeing all this, I was like, how can I in the small business space create multiple platform companies?

And that gave me the idea of reverse consolidation.

Instead of me raising capital and diluting my equity and going out and buying businesses and trying to turn owners into employees, which doesn't really work,