Unlocking Business Growth: Building Partnerships and Acquisitions for Success
On the other end, you could acquire all the assets of the business, you could acquire formal relationships with clients and so on. So do you wanna speak to some of your experiences doing that. Yeah, I was fairly fortunate and as I was building the business, I was reaching out and building relationships with business owners who were in the exact same space as me picking their brain, trying not to step on their toes and trying not to intimidate them or be threatening and, would refer business to them often.
Even though, in some cases it wasn’t the best, it wasn’t in my best interest to, to turn away business, but I wanted to show these, other people in the area that, look, I’m not here to try to destroy anybody. And I think that’s the attitude that a lot of business owners have.
They’re very fearful and very protective of what they’ve built, especially those who have companies that, that they’ve worked hard to put together. And for me it was kinda like I’m going out there, I’m putting myself out there to see if this is even right for me when I was first doing this consulting thing.
And so I need to see what will it look like for me 20 years from now, right? I’m looking at somebody who’s in, has been doing it for 20 years, is that where I want to be? So I want to get to know them, get to know their challenges. And when you start doing that, You align yourself with these people and you become their opportunity, right?
Their opportunity to try something new or to leave. And now they have somebody that they feel like is trusted and aligned with their interests that they could potentially use as a exit strategy. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity with the gentleman that was doing residential work had I not put in the effort to build those relationships.
And I think that oftentimes that work isn’t done and it’s more or less I am in a tough spot. Now what do I do? I guess I’ll just flip through Google and try to find a company and then try to convince them that we might be a good fit. And I don’t think that’s overly successful for anybody. So that’s been my experience, especially with that specific scenario.
But on the other side of it, I think. As you start to grow, or at least if there’s a perception of growth you’ll always get approached by companies who are doing the same thing, right? They want to build that relationship and in some cases they want to open up a location in Washington, DC and they’re, somewhere else geographically.
They’re looking to expand, partner, acquire, that sort of thing. And that was something that was a new experience for us that especially. The fact that it, a lot of that happened for us in 2020. We decided to roll with it and see what that process was like. And it was it was an interesting experience.