David Royce

they grow about half of their growth is M&A.

And so each quarter they have to hit certain growth targets and they buy up companies.

And what they really want is not the brand.

They just want the customer base with the corresponding technician.

And so what I was able to do was I didn't have a lot of capital.

In fact, I almost bankrupt my first company.

And I realized, hey, if I have more capital, I can expand a lot faster and I'm not going to be limited in my growth.

And so that was the primary reason why I did it.

And I sold, so I sold the first one, just sold off the customer base and the score swine technicians, but I kept the golden goose, which was the Salesforce, the executive team and a key operator in each location.

Then I started my second one, eco first.

And that was more of an experiment of, okay, can we scale?

Can we go into four different States, you know, immediately right off the bat and have it still hold itself together.

Whereas before I was just in Southern California and

and I would go back and forth between each location.

And so I was still there and able to see it, and I could feel comfortable with how the business was operating.

But I took my four very best managers and had them go open up locations.

Things went really well the first year, said, okay, let's open up four more.

And then we just kept opening up states.

I think we were in nine states by the end of that business.

But it was a great way to learn how to run a regional company and how to operate from afar with people and provide a lot more opportunity to my operations managers.