Kevin Tawil

The four of us were negotiating and won, and they came to us with their final offer.

The price is $8 million, I think it was, or something around there, and not a penny less.

And Jim and I looked at each other and said, we're going to have to think about this.

And so we retired to our room, and we had this little squishy basketball that we're playing with, and we're throwing it back and forth.

And our first question was,

How long do you think we have to hang out in here before it's okay to go back in and say yes?

We had experience with roadside assistance, so we had some idea.

We knew that the acquisition of the American Bike Group could be a really good transaction a la roadside assistance.

Turns out it was 10x that.

We didn't know that, but we knew it was going to be good.

But once we got inside and under the covers, you had to spend a few months in the organization.

You're like, oh, hold on.

There's a lot more here than we thought.

How many minutes did you give them?

20 minutes.

20 minutes, okay.

That's the lesson, 20 minutes, no less than that.

We ended up buying, I think it was six times, EBITDA.

It was growing so fast, I think the multiple on a run rate basis was a lot lower than that.

That's an important point, the 18%.