Nicole Lapin

If you have ever been broke like I have, you know those ones.

You can replace your windshield wipers yourself.

You just clip them on, save yourself a stop.

anyway patrick quickly realized that while there's some money in the windshield wiper business scaling it was going to take a long time but he had found a cheat code there were lots of other little businesses just like his around the country selling these niche parts that you don't really think about like windshield wipers replacement rear view mirrors and decorative

gear shift knobs to chains like AutoZone and NEPA.

Patrick discovered that the real money wasn't in selling more product than his competitors, but by buying out his competitors and selling more product that way.

So FBG spent the last decade buying up almost all of its competitors.

And he crushed it.

Last year, it sold its products in-store and directly to customers on five continents, supplied major auto part manufacturers, and employed 26 people,

also did $5 billion in sales.

But like I mentioned, there's not a lot of money in windshield wipers, and yet he expanded.

So how did he do it?

Well, he funded his major acquisition spree with credit.

A lot of credit.

This included $6 billion in junk bonds, which sounds sketchy, but really aren't.

Junk bonds aren't always junk.

They're just high yield interest rate debt.

And for a company with its sales and rapid expansion, it seemed like a reasonable amount of credit and debt.

Cut to over the summer, the company hired an investment bank to help it negotiate the terms of the debt.

During that process, the investment bank discovered that FBG had several billion dollars more in loans from private creditors.