How to Finance Acquisitions Without Giving Up Equity

25:40Are the qualified small business stock. So they have it where if you start a C-corp from scratch, hold the stock five years, you got up to$15 million tax-free. But if you, in our case, took an S-corp and converted it, or essentially created a new C-corp, merged the S-corp into the C-corp, the third-party valuation creates your basis. And at that point, it's 10x over the basis is federally tax-free. So you're going to be responsible for that first basis you have to pay taxes on, but 10x over it, it's free and clear. Yeah, that's different than it was back when I was. Big, beautiful bill. It changed a lot of these limits because we're prompted.

26:15Why not go for it? But that's where it's like a lot of that consideration is this thing. And there's interesting things you can do in between. If you have to do a liquidity event, you do a 1045 exchange and run your clock out that way. I started as a C-Corp when my CPA friends said, well, you ought to be an S-Corp. I said, no, I don't want to be an S-Corp. I never heard of an S-Corp in public. That's the other thing. You had a clear vision of where you want to take your business. Again, people thought I was half nuts, but that's okay. I got another question. When you think about M &A, and I want to get in your head a little bit about, I feel like your business is so diversified now.

26:45And when you think about how M &A become a driver for growth, I always look at like, even for this business now, like deal room is M &A, it's for the buy side. And when you look at doing deals, it's always stuff we're looking at now is like very close to the core. If you understand this business, you can clearly see how we can capture synergies, how it fit in. You've taken some pretty big bets that stuff is further away from the core business and even bought some like real platforms, essentially. How do you think about that in terms of like, when you look at opportunity, here's stuff I really know it's tight to our current business.

27:16I can see how that we extract value from it versus this is a little bit on left field, but I think it's worth a bet. We're a big transaction processor and we're at scale. We have a few metrics. We like to look at businesses like$250 ,000 in revenue per headcount. Okay. When 40 % margin, can we get this to 40 % margin? 40 % gross or net? EBITDA. EBITDA. Okay. Wow. Okay. With that, you start culling a bunch of things that are not going to fit that criteria. So business health is like number one. Yes, but you can also get into it. We bought City Fund Services in 2015. It was a really great acquisition, but its numbers weren't as good as we wanted, but we felt very confident.

28:03Move them to our platforms and get the numbers we wanted very quickly, and we did. There's a lot to having confidence in what you're going to do and then also doing it. Don't let people, hey, here's the plan. Yeah, but that's, we're going to have to lay off 20 % of the people. Look, that's the plan. Get on with it. Don't tell me about your product plans. Don't tell me about your marketing plans. Where's the list? What list? The list of the 20%. Who's staying? Who's going? We're not doing anything until I get the list and we make that happen. because that gives you the discipline to then have a profitability picture that you can invest.

28:44You're going to create enough cash to be able to invest back in the business and build better products and build better services and do more customer satisfaction, concentrate the expertise. And there's a lot of things that discipline comes back into them.

29:01Bill Stone:How do you become the best M &A practitioner? You learn from the best. That's it. That's the whole secret. It's what we've done at M &A Science from day one. 400 conversations with the best operators alive. You've heard them on the show. So we asked a better question. What if we turned that into a product? So we did. Two certifications. The first, M &A Fundamentals, is for people new to the game. Or maybe you just closed your first deal and you felt every gap. This is how you close them. The second is buyer-led M &A. our flagship we took the best of 400 deals and built them into one framework for the buy side it's about 10 hours 50 artifacts every stage of the deal covered we built both with phd learning scientists the quality is past anything we'd make in-house and you'll feel it in the first 10 minutes you've already listened to the best now go train like them mascience.com

30:09it's like kind of dubbed like the private equity playbook you buy business you just do the cost cutting those things that you need to do which is really get it out of the way get it done and then invest more until here's our vision for how we're going to grow this business Is that pretty standard? It is. You've got to be aware. You've got to know nobody likes to cut, so it's no fun. I guess the thing is just rip the band-aid off. But also recognize that you do it correctly. Yes, that's true, too. Right? Do it correctly. You keep the top 80%. You don't go willy-nilly and lose top 20%. They're supposed to be numbers 80 through 100, not numbers 1 through 20.

30:46Yep. Make sure you identify the right people. Exactly. Is it roughly that 80-20? is that most of these businesses you look at, they're just operating in a way where they built some inefficiency, the kind of little, being proactive to let people go. I feel like it's tough in some cases. You work with people for a long time, you end up with a little bloat, I guess. Yeah, that is what happens. And then you're not as disciplined about, now they've become your friends. And now you don't hold them to a standard. It's a tough game. I mean, if you're going to be at the top, you got to be willing to do the things that are sometimes unpleasant.

31:19And at the same time, you've got to be of good cheer. You can't mope around. Nobody wants to see me mope, and I don't ever mope around. Whenever there's a problem, we'll fix it. Good things happen too. Don't get too depressed. You've got to drive that optimism. People like to work with people that want to have a good time, want to be very competent, want to have success, want to celebrate success. That's a really good point. You did go back public again. That was around 2010. Yes. Market looked a lot better. Washington was more acceptable. Build back on the public market. Obama was president. He wasn't exactly the biggest fan of stock markets.

31:58America is a great place to grow businesses. Best place in the world. I want to talk about three really interesting deals that you did. Before I get there, one thing I learned from you. You made a point to me when I was generally asking you about one of the deals I was looking at without mentioning it directly. But you made this point, you got to have a motivated seller. That was a key thing. So I'm looking at opportunities. but you brought in this factor of like how motivated is the seller? And it dawned on me, like that is probably one of the key factors of getting a deal done. It's just how motivated is that seller?

32:26If they're not, you could be just negotiating against yourself for no reason. Yeah. I'd love to hear about your thinking around, determine that. How do you tell if someone's more of just tire kicker, just playing the field versus are they really motivated to sell that you're going to have some confidence you're going to spend the time to get a deal done? You're going Now look at the cap table, who owns what? When you're dealing with the CEO, if that's who's entrusted with doing the process, and you find out, are there private equity firms, are there venture capital firms, are there angel investors?

32:55How long have they been in? Do they want liquidity? How much pressure is the CEO under to get them some liquidity? How are the financial statements looking? Are they spiraling up or spiraling down, just being flat? If they're spiraling up, then they're gonna want a big number. So you got to be prepared to give them a big number or you're not going to get a deal done. If they're spowering down, you got to have enough of a plan. You know how to stop that from happening once you own it. But they'll be much more comfortable selling at a lower price. So there's just some of those kinds of things. And then you got to ask questions.

33:29Have to be perceptive. What's he or she really saying? Does she really want to sell? Or is this, like you said, just an exercise? You get some question to help get you a real indicator of their motivation. You can find out things like they're building a house, but now cash flow is tight. They've put themselves into a kind of a vice and they don't know how to get out. That's when a liquidity event can be very important. Are you willing to grant them some equity if they sell the company to you? And then how much? Like when we buy companies, I don't ever worry about the PE firms or venture capital.

34:06They'll take care of themselves. I don't have to worry about them. And they're not going to help me once they sell anyway. The only one that's going to help me is the current management team. So I'd rather move value into the equity plans for the people that stay than give all the money to the people that are leaving. Either retention plan or rollover equity. Yeah. They're going to really be incentivized to stay. A lot of deals more or less I'm looking at are the ones going down. And I'm curious because I feel, how do you price them in a way where you don't go too low where you're insulting them?

34:35You have a pretty good style that's not threatening. And you have to say, look, I'm looking at some sort of a range here. If we can get somewhere in the range, and you're going to have to have a range too. You know you're going to be able to sell it between here and here. And if we get it somewhere that's in the middle or even more towards your side, there's a chance for a deal to get done. And also, they like that, like with SS &C, that we close. We're not just kicking tires, we close. We have the money and we have banks lined up to loan us as much money as we want. They know we can close. They know we have.

35:10They know we're not chasing the last nickel. That's a good position to be in. And then, like you said, there's different tools. If there's upside of rolling over the equity. Yeah, someone will want two bites of the apple. They want to be able to get their liquidity now, but still have enough of a stake that if we really have a great few years, they're going to get another nice chunk. which could be a better story too if the numbers are going down hey might take a hit now but you'll make it up let's talk about this fmc this is an interesting deal he did back in 05 it was a 207 million dollar all cash deal it was interesting situation because the founder was trying to take this business private and then they had line data had recommended the deal in you won it you had lockups on 91.8 of the shares and you had a six million dollar breakup fee in your favor 10 years later, business up 50 % margins and doing well.

36:03Can we talk a little bit about that deal? Yeah, so Financial Models, we had hired a guy that had run sales at Financial Models. And he said, look, the only thing that Financial Models needs is to have too many people. You're going to have to take care of that. And they got comfortable being, when we bought them, they were doing$55 million in revenue and$11 million in EBITDA. Your 207 is Canadian dollars, and I think it was 165 American dollars. And we paid$165 million for it. And Stamos owned 43 % of the company. But what we invoked was Canadian takeover rules. So if you put in a superior bid, they have no choice but to take it.

36:43We put in a superior bid. I thought line data FMC were gonna go private at a, they were gonna go to private at$12.20. We ended up offering$17.70. 91.8 % of the shares wanted to sell for the higher price. Yeah. No kidding. $55 million and$11 million in EBITDA. That was April of 2005. By December of 2005, they weren't doing$11 million in EBITDA. Now they're doing$34 million. By April of 2006, they're doing$44 million. By December of 2006, they're doing$48 million. We paid$165 million for$11 million in EBITDA, which is 15 times EBITDA. Within a year, it was just a little over three times. Did you have a line of sight that was going to happen?

37:24Was there some confidence that we can uniquely create value with this asset? Or did you get lucky? No, we didn't get lucky. It was good timing. And they had a whole floor that was empty. They were in Mississauga, just north of Toronto. A whole floor that was costing them$680 ,000. They were only making$11 million. That's 6%, 6.5%. Come on. They named all their conference rooms by cities. New York, London, Paris, Toronto, Montreal. You have a conference room named Nairobi. You sell financial systems. How many can you sell in Nairobi? Not many. This is a lifestyle company. Assistancy is not a lifestyle.

38:05It is a public company, and it is trying to get the best returns for its shareholders. So you saw efficiency gains that you could get under your ownership. It sounds like your bid was like 30 plus percent over what the competing bid was. How do you build a logic to do that versus just, hey, I'm going to put 5%, 10 % over? Well, Canadian takeover rules, superior bid is, I think, 20%. Okay. It's not superior. Yeah, it's marginal, I guess. Yeah, because they don't want it to be tit for tat. So if you put that superior offer, they can't come back and... They can top it. They could, okay. Sure. And it kind of makes them look bad, too.

38:40They're not going to top them again. Yeah. Yeah. Those keep companies honest because they know that interlopers like me are going to say, you're not getting that for that price. I'll pay more than that. There's this view, too, of how much you negotiate on the front end of the deal versus how you focus you are. Like your example of value creating activity on the back end. It sounds like there's a much bigger variable on how you execute on the back end versus negotiating that 5-10 % on the front end. It's both. It's both. Yeah, it's both. So to understand the value to make sure you're not overpaying the front end, but you're being competitive at the same time.

39:13Yeah, and usually it's competitive. They're trying to get private, but they weren't about ready to offer what I offered. So when you make that bid, it's not so much based on what competitive bids are looking like. It's more of your own view of how you would price that deal. Does the competitive bids influence your bids? Can. Depends who it is. Like usually against private equity, I can always win. Why? Because I get synergy. Yes. They don't get synergy. I don't need their CFO. I don't need their legal department. I don't need all this overhead. They were traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. We're not gonna trade on the Toronto Exchange.

39:48So you save all those exchange fees. And I don't need to have another board. I don't need another public accountant. I don't need all that stuff. All that overhead goes away. But if you're private equity, you gotta have it all. That's opportunity. Strategics can always bid more than private equity because they have synergies. You're starting to see some private equity act more like strategics when they at least get in with the platform and they're doing a lot of their add-ons, but a little different. Yeah, it's different. And they're the money guys. Yeah. I'm wondering if part of the reasoning is because there's sort of a view on what we're optimizing for an exit at some place where you're not necessarily optimizing for an exit.

40:27You're optimizing for public markets perception of the business. Or is it something else? That's pretty true. At the same time, right? The private equity guys have time horizons. They want to hold it for five years. They maybe want to hold it for seven years. But it depends what's going on. And if they have it for three years and somebody comes and offers them a really good price, they're going to sell. They're not in the business of having 20-year investments. That's not their business. Seven years is a long time. When Carlisle was in us, they started selling after five years. Did you have to engage when you put that offer in because you're essentially buying a public company?

41:03Did you have to engage with their board at all? Are there certain things that you do to try to get some intel that way? Yeah, you submit a non-binding letter of intent, and then you submit a binding offer. They take it to their board, and their board goes yay or nay. They got a bid for$17.70. I got another bid for$12.20. They're all going to get sued if they take the$12.20. And then the breakup fee, you negotiated a pretty good breakup fee. How does that come in play? We have bankers, too, and they say this is customary, and so, okay. Right. In some ways, it sounds like public deals are easier than private deals.

41:36Can be, but it can be more complicated, too. A lot more shareholders. Well, shareholders and there's regulators. There's a lot of... This deal you had a lot because it was in Ontario. So there's Securities Commission, Superior Court of Appeal. And on and on. So you had a lot of lawyers. We did have some lawyers. But that's the ante. If you're going to play, you're going to have lawyers. You're going to have accountants. You might have consultants. We try not to have too many consultants. Why is that? Expensive. And then they leave. Yes. You taught them all this stuff. Yep. No, no, no. We want our people to know all this stuff.

42:10I'm picking up the theme around efficiency. This second deal I want to pull out. Lobop. This is a deal. Is it based in London? Yes. This is back in 2012. About$890 million and 572 euros. All cash deal. You beat out TPG at the time. The same thing. You had a quote around synergies. We don't need two CFOs or two CEOs. We need one. Then you had regulators between the US, UK, Cayman, Luxembourg. I don't know what this means. It says it closed with a Luxembourg squeeze out at 99.95%. So it's just that you couldn't not let your shares give you a share because it was a superior deal and they didn't want tail end pieces that had to be chased down after the deal closes.

42:54This is like a prime example of the strategic meeting in private equity. And again, it was the same line you had. We don't need two CFOs or two CEOs. It's the same thing. Yeah, I remember talking to Hans, who was a CEO, good guy, smart. We went out to see them, and he basically told me that none of their customers wanted us. It was TPG and Advent, private equity firms. And I said, is that right? So you, Hans, an FX trader out of Salomon Brothers, and me, a CPA out of Pete Marwick, they want you to do their accounting, not me. I said, I bet you Hans, if I bid more than you, I bet I win. And if you bid more than me, I bet you win.

43:31And by the way, Hans, if I bid more than you, I will be relentless to close. And my banker said, when you said that, all of the people just sat back in their chair and went, oh, he's not kidding. What was that setting? Was that in a boardroom? In Mayfair at Global. With the whole board present? Or is it just a few of them? Okay. It's interesting how that happens in deals. It was essentially like a form of banter. Not so much playful. No, it's serious business. It's$890 million. That's a lot of money. But it's like it took it personal. It's like the customers don't want you. He's trying to tell me.

44:08He's selling. Yeah. It's selling almost like an intimidation type of tactic. Trying. Trying. It doesn't really work, though, does it? I'm trying to think of scenarios where it might. Well, but some people. I've had that with competitors where they told me that we're going to out-compete you. It doesn't bother. Now we're doing more revenues than they are. Now I grew up in Indiana. I know how we solved disagreements. And that's my background. I understand it. Okay, that's where we're going. Then let's go. But that was a great acquisition for us. A lot of really smart people really helped our fund administration business.

44:41At the time, we were like eighth in the world and they were ninth or we were ninth and they were eighth. And after we did the deal, we were third. Wow. And then we were soon second, and then we were soon first. So when we closed the deal, it was State Street first, Citco second, us third. And within two years, it was us first, State Street second. That was a big move to get the market share up. Yeah, and now that business does billion seven in revenue, something like that. And you bet on the synergies. That's the bottom line. You got a discipline. You sort of know. They were a fund administration company, and they're in Mayfair.

45:16Their rent was 90 pounds a square foot. You know how long we were in Mayfair? About a month. He's just like, get out, please. Can you teach me about how you think about capital allocation? I know it's different because I'm private, you're public. But like a deal like that, you're public, like what are your levers? You can get different kinds of debt. You get more equity. How do you think through, hey, I'm about to do this$900 million deal. How do I put the capital together and do it in a way that you know how you're allocating it for the return on capital? Yeah, we're a highly profitable company.

45:46We can pay the debt down fast. and we can cover the interest expense pretty easily. The debt service is one. You know your cash flowing and say, there's a debt service ratio we can definitely cover. And that's, we are not anxious to use our shares. Is there like a rule of thumb of what kind of like debt ratio coverage you're looking for? It's usually how many times is your EBITDA levered? Well, right now we're a little less than three times levered. Okay. We've been as high as six. Then we pay it down fast. Done that several times. Paid it down fast after a low-bop. we paid it down fast. After Advent, we paid it down pretty fast after DST.

46:23That's part of it. You do it to get the deal done, but then when you really execute on the cost synergies, you sort of get that. You get cash flow. Yeah, you get your cash flow back and then you can pay that debt down faster and you'll just pay it down as quick as you can. That's the concept. All right. That's my big takeaway today. I'm going to go out and do a deal and apply it right after this. How does that work? Do you have bankers that just sort of manage all that placement for you? Do it all internal? No, no. Yeah, we use Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or Barclays or, yeah, we use all kinds of banks.

46:49It's got a few banks on Roldex, hit them up, let them know you're looking at a deal. We're a very strong credit. People like our debt. They know we pay it back. They know we pay it back fast and that we're very sensitive to our debt holders as well as our shareholder. And people say, why do you care so much about your debt holders? I'm going to do another deal. I'm going to need more. I've talked to a number of your team members, colleagues, employees. They hold a lot of respect for you. There's some balance you have of the discipline is part of the culture, for sure. They definitely know things need to get done, but somehow you maintain to be approachable.

47:24There's some unique balance that you've figured out. I don't know what you're thinking of. How do you approach it? Especially when you buy a business and here's a bunch of employees that are now SS &C employees that didn't choose to come work for SS &C. And they maybe heard things about Bill Stone. But how do you sort of build that impression when you start working in that business? No, I smile at people. You smile at people? And I laugh. And I'll tell him, I said, I've never in my life had anything that was as important to me, such a compliment to me than to be able to lead such a great group of people as you.

48:00My ability to lead you is one of the great accomplishments of my life. You're important to me. And everybody knows they can send me a text, send me an email, call me, and I get back to them. you're genuine or authentic. You capture that point too of if this team doesn't work out, this deal is not going to work out. You're sort of acknowledging that face on. I think that's the other part. It is you got to have that, that burning desire that from the moment you wake up, it's just you're motivated to do. You still have it. You're like approaching 70 past 70, 71, 71. You haven't lost it yet. Not yet.

48:33I love it. That's a great inspiration. A lot of hard work, good breaks, some bad breaks, fight through. That sounds like you're still motivated about what's coming up next, too. Because like I said, everybody's, from what I talked to, a little nervous. Climate's changing with the AI, Lentland Escape, the whole restructuring business. Do we? Yeah, we're going to do$6.7 billion in revenue. Close to$3 billion in EBITDA. Life's not all bad. No? You got a great spot? Yeah, we're in a pretty good spot. This Blue Prism deal. So my notes say this is another UK-based company. 2022 1.6 billion us dollars 1.25 euros all cash vista equity had already recommended deal to fold it into tipco you jumped it this was done under the uk takeover code rule 2.7 it's a bolt bidco cooperation agreement was funded with 1.53 billion of fresh debt at SOFR plus 225 with 50 bips floor right as the rates moved.

49:41Was it a fun deal for you? It was a good deal. It also showed that we were committed to artificial intelligence and robotic process automation and natural language processing. I like to tell people, look, SS &C doesn't dabble. We go in. We do it. We got 1 ,400 people that were experts in these things. And then we just did Calistone, and we brought another 250 people that specialized in tokenization and other forms of cutting-edge financial technology. So we spend the money, and we have a better set of products for our customers and more services. So that's been a very big competitive advantage that we have.

50:23How does this UK takeover code, how does that work? Very similar to the Canadian takeover code. You can put in a superior bid. They have no choice but to either top it or take our bid. A real ultimatum. That's a rule 2.7. The same economics applied. When you look at this deal, you put the same view on synergies, made sure that the model really worked for you to... Also that we could deploy a lot of bots, robots into our business. We've deployed 3 ,500. It saved us a lot of money just in our own business. So it's recognizing that some of these technologies are very effective in making you more efficient.

51:05It makes you more efficient. Does that mean you look at it as a way to reduce headcount? Or is it looking at more of... It changes people's jobs. So it's less competitive. But at the same time, I tell people, look, you've got to be willing to change. You've got to be willing to learn new things. Otherwise, you put your job at risk. Because we can use a bot to do that. But we have all kinds of training courses, all kinds of this, all kinds of that. We're here to help you, but you've got to be here to help yourself. You sort of really model that out. Here's other additions you're going to get in terms of efficiency gains.

51:37And then you top the bid. I see this pattern, though. In this case, you're strong cash flow. You're leveraging debt. When you're not leaning towards equity raise or any of that, it's my lesson here. I want to preserve your wealth. You should probably look at using debt. Yeah, you've got to make sure you can pay it off. You've got to make sure you can handle it. Once you can handle it, it's a lot cheaper than your equity. That's a good point. What about terms where you have the seller do the financing? They don't like that earn-outs, big earn-out person? That can work, but you've got to understand the terms.

52:09They're going to want their pound of flesh. Exactly. On this PRISM deal, I'm curious about, you're running a fairly large publicly traded company.

52:18Bill Stone:How do you think about keeping the market happy? You've got to do your investor calls. You've got to talk to the analysts on the earning calls. and there's just the way you operate a business. I feel like there's this inevitable pressure to grow. How do you look at that as a business, as driving more acquisitions, a big part of feeding that expectation or what does that view look like? You know, in the heyday of us doing a whole lot of acquisitions, interest rates were low, prices weren't too high and we moved fast. People started following us, mimicking what we were doing and they were raising the prices and interest rates went up and it wasn't as attractive.

52:52So we slowed down a little. Right now, software businesses aren't very attractive because you don't know where the re-rate's going to stop. I don't know about adding more debt for software assets that are going to lose value no matter what you do. Once again, you've got to be thoughtful. Yeah, I would assume you'd be more conservative because if you're trading less, then you'd have to look at valuing other assets less. Exactly. That's tough for people to accept. Yeah, and then they won't sell. One thing that we talked a little bit about before was trust. And this line was, I don't walk away, I run away.

53:25Can we talk a little bit about sort of your approach and how you think about some of the deals and the factor of trust, how it comes in play? Well, I always just say, if Target's lying to you, don't walk away, run away. And I don't care how small a thing it is, because you're not going to know about that company nearly what they know. If they say they're doing 10 million revenue, you look at the numbers and find out they're doing 8 million revenue. Gone. We're gone. I just had one I was going to do. And I said, look, you dropped your revenues by 10%. What the hell is this? We're a couple weeks away.

53:58They wanted us to do the deal. I said, we're not going to do it. We're not. We wanted it. But what else aren't you telling us? So that's fun. Red flag, the lie. You're out. Over the years of all these deals you've done, you have a total count. How many deals you've done so far? I think it's a little bit less than a hundred. Okay. We may round it up to a hundred. We've done a lot and we've met a lot of people and we've done, you know, everything hasn't been perfect, but there's been a lot of good deals. When I'm trying to get at, is there any unique thing around diligence that you've built in now that, Hey, this is something that you probably wouldn't do on your first deal, but we've done enough deals.

54:31This is a key thing we do in diligence, the beer test or something. I don't know. Like, what is it? Well, you know, it's the same thing. Getting prepared. Be prepared. It's like doing this interview. You can't sit there after 15 minutes and be out of material. I need an hour. 15 minutes in, you're grasping for straws. You can't do that. No, I had a lot to learn from you. That's the whole thing. You just got to get prepared. And you got to know when you're prepared. I got to ask you, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? Well, I mean, some of the valuations. Pretty amazing. 2021 valuations?

55:06Valuations in like the businesses I've bought mostly. we're peaking in 20, 25 times EBITDA. Wow. You know, if we got 25 times EBITDA, we wouldn't be trading at 15 to 20. We'd be trading at 40 to 50. Yeah. You know, and more of the valuations and it's making sure you can get a valuation where ultimately you can make some money. That's the concept. That's true. But it's kind of on hand. Like, why is that? Is it because there's just so much capital out there and P firms got pressure to deploy it? So they get creative with the model Some of them have so much money. AWS, Meta, or Google. They just got so much money, it's unbelievable.

55:47A lot of capital out there. That's what I wonder with this market. Still a lot of money out there. I've come back around. Bill, thank you so much for taking the time. I learned a lot from you today. I learned a lot from you too. Better M &A scientist. Thank you. Those of you still listening, my fellow M &A scientists out there, I'd love to hear from you. Tell me what you think about this interview. I was excited about it, but I want to hear from you. and if you got other ideas for topics I haven't covered, connect with me on LinkedIn. But make sure you put in there that you listen to this podcast.

56:14I get so much spam. Until next time, here's to the deal.

56:29Bill Stone:Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M &A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an M &A function or optimizing one 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.

57:14Bill Stone:Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

57:28Bill Stone:Views 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 and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.