Bridging the Gaps: Our Focus on Unifying for Success
What we’re moving towards is a more unified company. We are acquisition number two. For this company. So they actually acquired a company in the Los Angeles called 318 318. Might sound familiar to some of your viewers because I believe Charles Edge worked there as the CTO back in the day and funny story, I guess people are still calling looking for Charles to this day.
So they were acquisition number one, and then we were acquisition number two, so they were acquired about a year prior to us and. They’re still going through their integration. The DC market is a little far removed, so we were easier to merge in because the only thing we’re really synchronizing around on our side is tool sets and backend office administration, which was the biggest burden for me and one of the factors for wanting to sell the business was as a owner operator. And I think everyone on the show has commented about this before where it’s, I am too busy working in the business to work on the business, and it was really causing a lot of problems for me and for forcing me to look inward and say, I can’t really grow this anymore without completely stepping back.
But if I did step back, I would have to hire a whole team of people and that would really put me in the red. In order to move forward, I would have to take some major financial steps backwards. So that was one of the main reasons why I wanted to sell the business so that the business could continue to grow, and so that I could continue to focus on what I really loved, which is, Servicing the clients and providing amazing service.
But with the merger of Three 18 and now Grove, the goal is to become one unified team. Right now, we’re in the phase where all of our tool sets have been merged. All of back office systems have been merged. Right now, what we’re doing is probably the most tumultuous part of the process, which is aligning on.
Best practices, how we’re gonna run the business together. Right now, every business unit, LA, DC and San Diego, we’re all running independently with our own business rules. With our own plans and pricing, which is causing a lot of, I wouldn’t say problems, but it’s causing a lot of challenges in terms of growth strategy.