Building Successful Buy-and-Build Platforms: Alpine's Blueprint for Strategic M&A with Haley Van Cleve

23:53We're articulating what our platform is and what it's not. A lot of people in these markets take different approaches and that's great. We're trying to find partners and businesses who are aligned with our philosophy, who are excited by it, who maybe don't want to switch out their general ledger system, but understand, Hey, if I want to be part of this bigger vision, I get why I'm going to have to do that and why I'm going to have to sign up for some of this. A lot of that happens, that vision conversation, that expectation setting conversation happens ahead of an LOI or getting deeper into diligence.

24:24and some people opt out. And that's totally fine. But we'd rather do that upfront versus getting a deal closed and then having to go operate together and realizing there's misalignment. That's so interesting. Doing this upfront and really emphasizing it helps you throughout the process. But when it comes down to the real grinding with integration, you go back to that same vision, your thesis and what end state you had in mind. That's where you get proactive on integration. Because again, the fail point I see is companies are afraid to break things. Definitely. So they essentially do a very minimal integration.

24:57And then there's a backlog of actual real integration work to do. You don't do that. We try not to. And I tell you all this now. And this is also learned over a lot of years of stubbing our toe and making mistakes along the way. And like I said, in the early days, being reticent to make some of those changes up front and being reticent to tell a founder, Hey, we're going to tell you five inconvenient truths. You're not going to want to hear these five things. But this is what we're going to do. And this is how we're going to do it. And we found when you explain the why and the bigger vision, people understand it.

25:29And it's easier to have an uncomfortable 30-minute conversation about those things up front and then have a ton of alignment for the next 10 years than it is to get into things and realize we have to make changes a year-end that just slow us down and are hard to kind of wrap your head around. Let's blow up the bad. We don't want to glorify this. This isn't easy. What's the hardest thing instead of making all this work, the platform and making the add-ons? Two things. One, we spend so much time up front aligning on a vision of what we're trying to build. If we're trying to build a$100 million plus EBITDA business, we need the team to get us there.

26:05And we are often starting with a$2,$3 million EBITDA business to begin with on the software side, flip those to be revenue numbers. But we overhire the team in the early days. So we will hire that team to be the$100 million plus EBITDA business before we even have our sites on a deal. And that's expensive. So we'll hire five execs to sit on our bench and work with us for 12 months to find the right market and find the right business. And then you have a$2-3 million business and you have a very heavy exec team. You're building out an M &A team, an integration team. It's pulling a lot of that build up front for us, which has worked because it lets you go really fast.

26:41But it's hard and it means you have to be confident you can scale the business because you've just taken on a lot of costs. And then the second thing is the integrations. To really scale and push M &A, you have to build the integration capacity up front and you have to be able to integrate businesses and onboard them quickly. That's something that in our early days, it just took far too long for us to integrate and to onboard. And it really slowed down our pace and it slowed down our visibility. What do you do? How do you prep a platform to be able to integrate? You have to understand the market and have a vision of what actually are we going to integrate?

27:17Because you don't want to integrate just for integration's sake. You want to have a why. You want to be able to motivate and rally people behind a vision. So getting really clear on that, doing the homework in advance. And then it's building the team to do that. Oftentimes, we're ultimately building an M &A team and a separate integration team. And those are people that are systems integrators. They understand the nuts and bolts operationally of what's going to happen at the business. and they're able to go win with the partner businesses we're partnering with and actually go execute, roll up their sleeves and make that happen.

27:50So it's kind of getting that leadership, just even in the mindset, this is what we're going to do. We're going to be integrating these companies. Maybe think about your domain and what it's going to take to do that. So two big things. It sounds like a big upfront investment that you got to invest ahead to have the team that can go execute on the big picture when you're putting in these executives and they're in a tiny business to start with, may seem a little off, but that's something you got to rationalize. And then building that integration muscle early is the second big one. Definitely. So we get the platform and then we add on businesses.

28:26How do you know the right pace of doing add-ons? And then is there a point when maybe you're able to slow down for some reason? Is that the integration is the bottleneck or finances? It's a topic of probably the majority of our board meetings is are we going too fast? Are we going fast enough? How does this map to our vision? So it's definitely a topic we are constantly talking about. In services, for the first 6 to 12 months, we actually go a little slower. So there's a world where you partner with 3 or 4 or 5 businesses in a space. We make sure our team is a really strong foundation. We make sure the systems we really have dialed, integrations we have really dialed.

29:04And we're also learning. This is our first time entering a market. Let's make sure we really understand the nuts and bolts of these businesses before we go crank pace. So often kind of a 6 to 12 month period of really dialing and building the right foundation because you don't want to build a house on quicksand and you want to make sure it's solid. In the software landscape, it's a little bit different. Typically, we're doing lower volume M &A. So we might not be doing 30, 40, 50 deals a year in a space. But being really thoughtful about, for our customer base, what are the two or three or four products that make sense together?

29:37And in the software universe, when you're targeting very specific product categories, you have to be a buyer when there's a seller of those businesses. And there might not be 10 payment softwares for lawyers. There might only be two or three that we really want to own. And you got to be opportunistic at the right time of when a deal can happen. Interesting point that you kind of may start off a little slower just to really figure things out and then figure out the right cadence. But it sounds like it's a lot of variables to determine this. It's not just the one playbook that you apply to each company.

30:09It's not one playbook overall. What we've tried to do is make the process a lot the same. So we do a lot of visioning upfront before the first deal. Let's get clear on what our intent is, what our vision is for what this platform is going to become. and then a lot of the decisions you make in the first six months, 12 months, 24 months come out of that. Once you're clear on that vision, let's work backwards for what do we need to do in each year of our investment to end up there. Is there things that may shift or change in that six to 12 months? I kind of want to pick on that legal example because it's an adjacency for us even.

30:43You got one business and you said they were doing more of time tracking. And then is it like in the six to 12 months, does the strategy shift? Do you start looking at market map different? How did that play out in that example? Yeah. So in that example, before we did the first deal, we had mapped the market. So in services, sometimes there's 15 ,000 of businesses in your market. It's a big universe. In software, in legal time billing, there's maybe 100 players there. So we had mapped them. We, before the first deal, had talked to probably 50%, 60 % of them already. So knew their size, knew where they played, knew the focus.

31:18and we kind of had our list and our vision of here's what we want to build to become. Here's the names that we think are a really strong fit with that vision. We don't know exactly which of those names is going to transact in a time period that works for us. But we know every quarter, we're going to call them and talk to them and build the relationship over the long term. So we're who they think of when the time comes. We started with one of those businesses and then really focused on that pipeline and building those relationships and ultimately piece four other of the products together and build those under a single leadership team.

31:50So in software, it's a little bit less. At times, we control the pacing a little bit less. And it's more about being very thoughtful on, these are the companies that we think are a really strong fit and let's be on them every quarter to know where they're at and to be selling our vision and make sure that when the time comes, we're the first person they think of. It is so different because I feel like services, I always think of roll-ups. We HVAC, you guys have a roofing one, which is just very similar businesses in different markets and you'll hone in on geography. Where software, there's no two software companies that are very different.

32:24And then in this example, was it, hey, do we know this one specific vertical time tracking? We're going to really go deeper into that. How do you start thinking of like adjacencies and that view and when is it time to go out of the core? In software, a lot of times we think about there's kind of adjacent in markets. If you think of a grid, there's kind of one axis is the in-market and one is the product category. You think about which product categories do we want to be in for which in-markets. In the legal tech platform that I was talking about, we expanded both to adjacent in-markets. So we had mid-size corporate law firms.

33:01We expanded into personal injury law firms and SMB law firms. So we kind of expanded to different customer profiles. And then we also expanded to different products. So we had a time billing software. We added on a practice management business. We added on payments facilitator, so payments product to allow electronic payments for the time billing side. So we look at both vectors and think about where on this map do we want to play and why? What's our vision of what we're trying to become? Are we trying to cover the entire map or just these four boxes on that map? And then what companies are in each of those boxes?

33:35And let's be really intentional, to use your term buyer-led, let's be very buyer-led about trying to make deals happen with the players who we think are tier one players in each of those boxes. I mean, you're proactive. You reach out to them. You're not waiting for a book to get sent to you. Not waiting. And some people will still hire the bank and that's fine. For a lot of people, it takes seven or eight meetings and a number of years before the timing is right. For us, it's just being top of mind when that time comes. When you say in-market, you use the example, here's like maybe a small firm and one that specializes in different area of law.

34:09And then you have the products. If I think of like ICP or who the actual buyer is, where does that fit in? Is that part of your in-market view? And then you say, okay, like in this situation, it's whoever's doing back office stuff or whatever. Exactly. Is there an ICP? And that's where I was curious. Is that the big thing? It's like we identify this product's going to sell into the same... Because you could have a different in-market, but it's a different ICP, which then all of a sudden you got smoky mirrors that you're not going to cross sell as well as you thought you would. And it totally depends on if cross sell is the thesis with an add-on or not.

34:40I'd say for a lot of our software businesses, it is, we love this ICP. We're really good at the go-to-market on this ICP. Let's look at the three or four other products. We know that same human is going to buy and let's go be able to offer that to them. And for the same customer acquisition cost, we can now three or four X our lifetime value because we have more product to sell them. So that's a thesis for a lot. In some cases, it's not though. We're really good at this go-to-market motion in this size range in this market. There's other ICPs and other buyers of products who we have the right motion to go sell to, but we're not today.

35:18And let's expand via M &A into kind of an adjacent in-market. So we can get in this adjacent market, but it's more about a go-to-market playbook that you can bring in. That's interesting. That's what I was curious about. it's like, how do you keep these acquisitions to be strategic instead of running that conundrum of we're just buying revenue? It sounds like there's a view on that. Maybe it's not purely cross-selling into the same ICP, but there's other factor that gives you an upside that you're going to be able to leverage like the quote market playbook example. Definitely. For us, it's about being clear in the underwriting on what are the levers we're trying to pull.

35:50And then because we work so much with operators, typically have the operators on our bench before they go into the business. It's making sure they're really sold on that. So when we're talking about cross-sell, let's diligence it together. Hey, you're going to be running sales of this business in four months. Let's make sure you feel really confident on your ability to cross-sell these products or to explain this go-to-market playbook to adjacent businesses. I had talked to a range of private equity firms and I'm starting to see some patterns based on the fund size. And if smaller funds, especially sub-billion, all that money is handled in-house.

36:24But as a firm grows, then it could be that the maturity of that business where they'll stand up an in-house M &A function. What's your view on that? When's the right time that you would want to stand up an M &A function and let them run things and be more of like a coach than a driver? It's great when it goes well because it gives the private equity firm a lot of leverage. For us, it goes back to what's the vision. So if we know we're going to do double digit number of acquisitions, add-on acquisitions during our hold on a platform, typically we're going to build the M &A team at that platform.

36:58For us, we typically do it day one. So we're launching a platform right now. We're going to close the first deal probably in the next month or so. We have the head of M &A, the president of M &A. He's also starting to hire two associates under him. So we're building that team even before the deal closes because we know it's so core to the strategy of that business and we want to be able to go fast. In those cases, We're building that team. For us, we have a ton of talent programs. So we hire just awesome individuals and then later figure out where they're going to go. Wait, you keep them on payroll?

37:29We keep them here on payroll. So we have a program focused on kind of that head of M &A, head capital allocator in our portfolio role where we partner with people we think are exceptional. We then go find them a market and a business, pair them with a CEO and drop them into one of our platforms. What kind of background are you looking for in that person? Typically, direct investing background. So a number of them come up through banking, have been on the buy side for a period of time, maybe went to business school, maybe were at a PE firm, but want to be a little bit more hands-on operational and entrepreneurial.

38:03And this is kind of a way to use their deal background, but go be an operator and the exec of one of our platforms. This is pretty cool. May have to come back and apply for that role. For sure. I want to talk about capital structure. I want you to spill some beans here. because I want to understand you and fund. People put money in your fund and they're in high hopes of getting much more out of that because it's a long-term investment. Is there like a target hold period that you have? We underwrite our models to five years to stay disciplined and be able to compare things apples to apples. I'll say our bias is to go longer.

38:39So our fund life is 12 years. We can have two one-year extensions on that. Our bias is when you get the team right, the market right, You've partnered with great businesses. That's really hard to do. It takes a lot of effort. And the out-year compounding is often some of the most accretive. We will hold businesses much longer when we get those things right. That's so true. I like these tech companies, especially when you got the whole life cycle, like a 20-year span. And you're like, the first 10 years was nothing. It was the last 10 years that just, boom, all the value created. So that makes a lot of sense.

39:12What do you think of metrics? A lot of times I hear the three Xs where you're trying to drive on that five-year model. Is that like the standard in private equity? Each firm has a slightly different focus. For us, what we talk about with our investors is targeting 3x net on our investments. And that's what we underwrite to within the five-year period. Okay. Let's play this out. This is where I get free advice out of you. Let's say tech company, us, is a 50 employees, 10 million ARR. I have identified two targets, each doing 5 million revenue. One is very competitive in nature. the other one is adjacency which I'm like hey this actually cross sells into ICP really well FP &A type of software and so I come to you and I'm saying I want to put this together at 20 million AR combined per forma and get you to fund that deal let's do like simple math can you just say 10x I know we're going to negotiate on that based on other factors and we can talk about how that plays out so that would be like what 20x and I'm asking you for 50 million 40 million to put in the business so I can get these deals done, have some cash to integrate them.

40:17And then 10 million of secondaries because I got to go pay some bills. We're modeling this out. But what I want to know is your view because you're looking at this investment scenario and saying, okay, in five years, based on what Kisan's asking for here, which is 200, I guess a reprieve money, then 240 comes out to be post money. And then you need like 700 and some change to exit out of it. How do you look at that? Because my big question mark is, yeah, this will put us at 20. And then in five years, ideally to get that target, I got to get closer to like 75 million. Yep. So probably going to need more money if I'm going to buy more companies.

40:57We didn't talk about adding any debt structure to this, keeping it simple. So yes, there's potentially a debt and do maybe one more deal. But that's where I'm a little stuck. This could sound great. And I get super excited to do it. But now, hey, am I on the hook and really got to push hard organically? how do you help somebody like me think through really closing that gap to deliver the results that you want? So we're aligned. First off, the majority of what we do is majority positions, typically not coming in in an exact situation like this, but to play out the example. We'll play along for fun.

41:26Yeah, to play along, we do use kind of conservative levels of debt on the business. If you have strong organic growth, you could see a world where in two, three, four years, you are able to leverage cash flows from the business depending on the profitability. you are able to leverage kind of the incremental debt capacity you built to do M &A without needing a significant new chunk of equity coming in. So that can be very accretive M &A. The key is to be conservative and appropriate in the leverage level. So you're not hamstringing the business from executing on the organic growth and the product initiatives that are compounding the business.

42:00And in most of our deals, we're thinking about a mix of organic. How do we supercharged organic? What investments would we make in product or in team to go faster? And we're thinking about the inorganic and how can this business over time, through cash flow, through capacity from leverage, go do really accretive M &A. That's where I get jealous of the service businesses. It's easier for them to do that. Tech gets like everybody's losing money and everybody's got high evaluation expectations on top of it. Exactly. There's that part. So there's a component of that. Maybe I don't know as much as cash flow getting invested in to do it.

42:36I guess, is there that area of thinking through of, oh, if you're going to need more money to go do acquisitions, and I guess a little different maybe in your view, is that something you just factor in? You know, is it looked upon all at once that, hey, this is how much capital need we have to do acquisitions for X years. And then after that period, we'd look at another tranche of equity to put in the business. So I can't speak for other firms. We are reserving when we do the initial deal. we're reserving capital knowing that there's probably going to be needs for additional equity funded M &A in the future.

43:09So for us, typically in the services side of the business, maybe 10 % of your initial equity check is going in on the first deal and the rest is coming in through time with other acquisitions. And then on the software side, probably less than half of your ultimate equity check is going in on the first deal and more is coming on as you do that M &A. So again, it goes back to having that alignment up front where it can be a problem is if the strategy was, we're not going to do M &A. And then five years in, an amazing deal comes along and the private equity firm hasn't reserved for the ability to do that deal.

43:42So for us, it's getting really clear up front and sizing that appropriately. And then on our end, reserving that capital for future years. That makes sense. It's just all planned ahead of time. But then things could change. Things do change. They have a board meeting to talk about it. Something we try to do is reset that plan once a year. So one of our board meetings each year is rethinking the five to seven year vision and rethinking the ultimate exit plan. It doesn't mean that we want to exit the business or anytime soon, but rethinking what that vision is and how things have changed. And we often see businesses get there faster.

44:18So maybe we set a five-year vision and we hit it in year three or four. And that's great. Let's reset a bigger vision and think about what we need to change now to go even bigger. You mentioned this in-house program, which is really intriguing because you'll have CEOs in-house ready to go. Are they out looking for deals too? They are looking for deals with us. What we mean by our in-residence programs is we hire a CEO, a CFO, a CPO, being people, not product. CPO, an M &A leader. They are sitting in this office. So a number of them are right around the corner over there, come into the office every day.

44:54And we staff what we call a pot around them. So a part of our investing team, a part of our sourcing team. And that team is only working on that and trying to find a market and a business and start a platform over the next 12 months. Oh, so they're all working together as a team. They're working together side by side. And we have sourcing professionals and investing professionals helping them coming with ideas on market. So it's really collaborative. We want to find something that they're going to be excited about. because they're about to vote with their feet for the next seven plus years, and something that's a fit for their background.

45:25So we try to have people who are athletes who can go into multiple industries. But if they come from B2B software, let's go look for something that's B2B software. If they come from route-based field services, let's go look at route-based field services options. So very collaborative, but they're working hand-in-hand with us and very much a part of those teams and bring a ton of credibility. So when we go meet with businesses, they want to talk to operators typically, not investors. And that's a huge selling point. Is there any programs for developing the talent while they're in resident? Yeah.

45:54So we hire experienced folks. And then ahead of that, we hire a lot out of MBA programs. So these are people with five years experience. We have a path for those folks to be CEOs in training and one day become CEOs, a path for them to be capital allocators and M &A folks, a path for CFOs. And typically, they go into our portfolio, study under a seasoned executive. So spend three, five years at a company learning from somebody who we think is exceptional at that, and then coming back and doing it again with us as the ultimate CEO or CFO. So that's interesting. Almost like an apprentice model, partner them up and get them firsthand exposure.

46:33Exactly. And we have 100 plus of those folks at different roles across our portfolio right now. That's so interesting. What is the incentive? Yeah, I kind of got different ones, right? You got folks that are experienced, folks that are pretty new, not quite proven. But when you do get them set up to tackle an investment thesis, go out and drive it, what does that look like? If you can share, I don't know if it's standardized in the industry. You mean in terms of incentives? Yeah, because I mean, obviously there's a cash comp. Let's forget about that. That's like market. People can go look at any kind of salary reports out there.

47:08But for the equity stuff, What gets them super fired up about working with PE? Because it seems like all the rage these days. Yeah. So we structure profits, interest pools. So it's basically a percentage of the profit generated on that investment. We set that up as a pool so they have the same incentive that we have, which is the more profit we generate, the more they make. And I think for a lot of them, once they see the power of M &A done right, the power of integrating really well and being able to grow through acquisitions. they really lean into that model because it can generate really powerful returns.

47:43Does it profit like on the exit? Yes. So they got to be in for the whole ride. Got to be in for the ride. This is beyond golden handcuffs. These are like titanium. For us, the team is the number one most important. If there's one thing we have to get right between team market and business, we pick team every time. They're a huge part of building the platform of the success of the platform. So it's important for us that they have the same incentive that we have and are in it for the life cycle of this investment. So you got the management team, incentivize them with profits on the exit. The team that nobody talks about, the board.

48:21Is there like an approach that you've seen to get the right board that's going to be accretive to these investments? As much as possible, we'd love to have CEOs who have been there and done that in a related business be board members, board advisors. So we cross-pollinate a lot of our platforms. Like you mentioned, we have an HVAC business, we have a roofing business, both are residential home services businesses. So the team from the HVAC business is on the board of our roofing business. And it's phenomenal because they learned a lot in building their platform. And they can say, man, there's five things that I would have done differently in my first year.

48:58Let me just tell you those five things so you don't have to relearn them. We try to cross-pollinate that way from an operational perspective. And then also having thoughtful deal people who can help think about M &A and think about the acquisition side as well. So you might have some folks that really experienced M &A, but the operators get them on the boards of the other companies. What's the operating partner role in the PE firm? It depends. We don't at Alpine have traditional operating partners. So that's not a big piece of our model. For us, it's more take CEOs that we work with and cross-pollinate that way to provide the operational lens and then have people from the Alpine level sitting on the boards of our businesses as well.

49:37So really in-house type of approach. All right, Haley. So I got to ask, not every investment goes picture perfect. I hear about things going sideways pretty often. That's always the fun thing we like to gossip about in our industry. Can you tell me about that? I don't know if you're even comfortable sharing a story about something that went sideways. but just curious, how do you respond to that? What actions do you take? Is there a point where you just write off the investment? Yeah, it happens. I wish it didn't. We try to do everything we can to avoid it, but things go sideways. Things go differently than planned.

50:09Over the past five years, that's become more apparent. We owned a ton of K-12 businesses. In zero of our underwrites did we expect K-12 schools across the nation to be shut down for people not to be in person. We have downside cases, But there's always things that are unexpected that come up and happen and you have to adapt and respond. That's why I keep saying team is my number one thing. Because when you have a phenomenal team, they get creative and get scrappy and come with ideas to board meetings about here's five different paths we could go down. None is what we expected to be choosing between.

50:43But let's talk about it and let's figure out what we're going to commit to and where we're going to go. And maybe to give an example that's not COVID related. Sometimes we also get the market wrong. As much as we try upfront to underwrite it, to build a pipeline before we close the first deal, to have confidence we can scale a business, there have been times we've gotten the shape of a market wrong. And the businesses of scale, by scale, I mean, you know, a million plus of EBITDA. So for a lot of people, that's not scale. But the businesses of scale maybe were fewer than we expected. This market has a ton.

51:15I'm thinking of one example, a ton of 200, 300, 400K EBITDA businesses. That's very different than what we expected in the underwrite. So a year in, we're sitting down with management. We're looking at the plan saying, where do we go from here? And the answer is, we have to build capabilities we don't have today. We can't be doing 2 million EBITDA add-ons, which are very different in our full businesses. We need to be able to acquire 200k of EBITDA at a time. And we have to build an integration engine and an M &A team that can do that. And that is very different than what we've built today. So we're going to pivot it.

51:50Here's the operational plan. here's the target. Here's how we make this happen. And for us, it just comes back to having awesome operators who are going to play through it with you, who are going to be committed to this business for the life cycle of it and find a way to win one way or another. Number one characteristic you look for in an executive team leader? Will to win. How do you do that? How do you test them for the will to win? A lot of rounds of interviews, a lot of references for people interviewing and understanding their motives and their attributes beyond their experience. Because on paper, there's a lot of very qualified people, but really trying to understand the attributes of a person, what motivates them, and how that's going to align or not align with what we need to do in the investment.

52:33You say that I'm like visualizing the shark tank with an apple dangling above it. It's like, all right, you got to get the apple. Show me your will to win. Yeah. And some personality assessments. We do a deep dive and it goes back to childhood and people's reflections on their childhood and what they learned. And four hours later, you come out usually with a pretty good sense of who they are as a human being. And getting the human element right is as important as getting the person who on their resume has the experience. It's a tough thing. That's a whole other interview that we'll have to reserve for another time.

53:06I need some advice before we wrap up here. I'm not quite doing a majority. So we might not talk this time. But for somebody that's thinking to do a minority recap, I'm trying to basically sell our business to that platform. I was under the impression I'd try to go stack 20, which would be good. But it sounds like there's some open-minded firms out there. And I'm trying to do it based on a combined performa that gives a nice position that you know where capital is getting allocated and it helps you out from valuation and so forth. But being balanced is a key thing I'm learning. If you get too greedy on the front end, like the 21 valuations, you're going to pay for it later.

53:42And I know there's like a lot of companies just riding the AI wave and they're putting all that and getting a high valuation. It's like, no, I understand you want to be really reasonable so that you can be aligned and work together to achieve the end goal. Based on that current thinking, what advice do you have for me? just to approach leaders like you and the investment side of working together and just making sure I'm heading down the right direction. You're hard about stacking to the 20 and having thoughts on M &A that you would want to do. My biggest advice to founders, businesses is get really clear on the playbook.

54:15Anybody can do M &A or bring businesses together, but really being able to have a clear vision of what would I do with this business? How could my team or our teams together make this business more valuable? the whole more valuable together than the sum of the parts. And it sounds like for you, it's cross-sell and getting really thoughtful on, why do you think you're going to be successful at cross-sell? Is it the same ICP? Is your team capable of cross-selling? Do you have partnership relationships today that show you can cross-sell and further monetize your base? And for us, the businesses that can articulate a really clear playbook for why an add-on is worth more to you than others helps make it a really interesting and unique opportunity and shows up in the valuation as well.

54:57You got a fair point that I should really validate this stuff. And even some of the partnerships we have, I feel like we can probably invest more and then be able to leverage that to even validate, hey, this is why CrossL would work. And we could probably validate it if it makes sense to acquire those companies. And finding a partner that is aligned on that vision. In my career, there's been times I've probably been so interested in the deal and it's so easy to oversell or force a partnership that isn't a good fit. And I think over time, I've just seen you want to be super clear about what you're looking for, what you want in a partner, what you don't want.

55:31And there's going to be businesses out there, or for your case, private equity firms who might not be a fit, or growth capital firms that aren't a fit. And life is too short in finding partners that are really aligned. Makes the next five, seven years so much better. The working relationship. Definitely. What's the craziest thing you've seen at M &A? Seen a lot of crazy things. In M &A specifically, we did an acquisition in Germany. And I learned that... I thought it was a joke. But in Germany, your purchase agreement needs to be read by your legal team before a notary public. And it's a 15, 16-hour document to get through.

56:06It's just humbling as you work with different countries and in different regions to realize that there's a huge local dynamic of what you do. People are all different. Countries are very different. And so that one was just fascinating. this age of AI, reading the purchase agreement before the notary. Did you sit through the whole reading? I did not, but our team did. Those of you who want to learn more about that, I think Frank Temper, one of the attorneys, I believe it was Denton's, that was in Germany. I actually interviewed him in Dusseldorf and we talked a lot about this. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

56:38It is so wild how different countries have different rules around doing M &A. Definitely. This has been an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time from doing deals to helping me become a better M &A scientist. This was super fun. Thank you for coming to our office and we hope to have you back soon. I am. I'm going to apply for in-house residence role here. Send us your resume. Anybody still listening here, fellow M &A scientists, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for listening through. Always welcome feedback. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Connect with me there. Love to hear what you thought about this interview.

57:11If you've got any topic ideas, be careful asking for favors. I get too many of those. But until next time, here's to the deal.

57:44one that you already have. We're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email, Kisan, K-I-S-O-N, at mascience.com. Or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

58:28Views and opinions expressed on M &A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational.