Justin Ishbia

We sold to...

followed private equity funds, and we've done some automation vehicles as well.

At the end of the day, I have high confidence in the following statement.

If I buy a business in a growing industry, that is, I'm buying an inefficient part of the market, we make it better, we grow it from single-digit EBITDA to the teens to 30 of EBITDA, we will have lots of buyers, both strategic

and financial sponsors.

So whether it was a platform or an add-on, I think I like that situation.

I'd like to invest in what we call barbell industries, meaning there are usually four or five very large players and there are thousands of mom and pops, but not much of them.

I want to go create the new middle one and then larger players want to buy it.

And so at the end of the day, I also would say,

larger funds want to buy, which by the way, some of my investors are friends of mine who run quite large funds.

I hear when I talk to them, they want to buy a business that's a proven track record of acquisitions, organic growth that beats the industry average by at least 300 basis points, one technology stack system that all businesses are on.

Because when you have those three things you can acquire, you can make them better on one technology system,

They can buy it from you.

It's $30,000 and go to $100,000.

And so we're basically, we like to say at Shore Capital, we are building platforms, not buying platforms.

We like to think of ourselves a lot more like a venture capital firm.

And a venture capital firm's partner with a founder, great founder is an idea.

but usually has a relatively small team.

And then the venture capital firm works with them hand in hand and helps create a whole entire management team.

When we buy businesses, like an orthodontics business, we'll buy one practice, literally one practice with one gentleman, one lady, and we'll go hire a CEO, a CFO, head of business development.