Thomas

But I want to be very clear that with every deal, you have to hire attorneys.

You have to go through a legal process.

But ultimately, deals get agreed outside of all of this stuff.

If you're relying on attorneys to negotiate your deal and all you're doing is sending back paperwork back and forth with legal wording that a lot of you wouldn't understand, it's always going to be difficult to get a deal done.

So this is an example of what happened in this transaction.

Some of the things that they were talking about, so the buyer spoke about they're going to bring in a CEO, lots of other things about their vision, some of the things they do as a fund.

But ultimately, this stuff doesn't really matter.

You leave it to attorneys, negotiate terms you want yourself.

This is Kevin.

Kevin is actually the new CEO of Thrivecart.

He came in as part of the acquisition.

While Kevin ultimately has a private equity fund behind him, it's important for you all to realize you might know a lot of funds by name, but ultimately it doesn't really matter.

People do business with people.

Josh sold to Kevin because he liked Kevin, not because he liked his fund.

So when you're doing these big deals, even if you're doing a deal for a billion dollars, you're still ultimately dealing with a real person on the other side.

So it's something to think about, including if you're on the buy side and you want to acquire a business, realize that people are trying to connect with you as an individual.

They don't really care about company policy, company website, all that kind of stuff.

build a real relationship.

Kevin did that, hence why out of, I think we had 11 offers on this business, Kevin was the one that won.

And it wasn't necessarily because his terms were the best, it's because Josh liked Kevin.