M&A in Healthcare with John Palusci

24:50See, the pro forma said this and it's me saying, this was really early days with no information. This was really like the very first step to not even to say go, but to learn more. I called the conceptual proforma so that it looked different, so that it was not like the underwriting proforma, the closing proforma. The output was really basic, like top, middle, bottom line, purchase price, diligence costs, IRR, NPV, payback time, all that stuff. A very basic, consistent format. that was informed with a very basic one-page set of preliminary diligence questions that we ask everyone. That if you're doing it well, if you have all the data, it should take a really good analyst like no more than a day to sort through the data, put together the rough valuation estimation, like the guidance of what the seller is expecting.

25:40And then what would need to be true post-close to meet your hurdle rate? Very quick, low effort. You may reach out to the marketing team to figure out like, hey, if we need this to grow 10x in 10 years or five years, like what kind of market share does that equate to? And then the marketing team says, oh, you'll need to have 75 % of the market for this to be true. You say, oh, that's probably not going to happen. Or it's working with the recruiting team to say, hey, like we're going to need to triple the workforce in three years. What's the recruiting environment like? And they say, oh, there's plenty of people available.

26:13Or when I looked at it, it's like, you're going to have to hire the entire nursing workforce of the state of Indiana for this to work, to pressure tests, all of those things. Again, it's about getting quickly to a no or determine if there's a there there under very conservative post-close assumptions. And that's part of that sort of initial package that makes its way to the executive team. Analyst puts that together in a day. And really the corp dev team, the analyst, me, work with the operator who's excited about the deal. And it's the operator presenting it to the exec team with the support of CorpDev, me, on all the reasons they want to do it, but then supported with some real finance along the way.

26:53So this conceptual performance is almost like your what-if scenario. Yeah, and I'm sure everyone does their napkin math, but it's structured, it's standard, folks know what to expect. It's easy to sensitize for your what-if scenarios. And you can put all, you can even Monte Carlo it if you want, which breaks people's brains, but you can get a sense of it. It's a very easy format to work with that people get, but then has beneath it key assumptions on volumes, rates, overhead, that kind of stuff. It means you need to really know the model, the business model. It's harder to apply that to a brand new business that you're not in than one you're just adding on to.

27:30You need really good analysts who partner with the operators can speak their language on what needs to go right, what can't go wrong for that deal to work. Gotta connect the dots. In like your industry, it is like super people-oriented industry. How do you manage that transition to make sure you don't get a bunch of people quitting? That's like what it's all about. Yeah, right. Home healthcare is the asset, is the assembled workforce, is what they call it. It is the people who are taking care of people and they have the relationships with the clients, with the other employees, with the referral sources that are sending business in.

28:04If they all leave before the deal, I don't know what you bought. It's all about the people. And we've learned that the hard way. We haven't perfected it, but I think we've gotten a lot better. It's not going to sound like rocket science, but it's about winning hearts and minds of the people who are transitioning, communicating at just the right time, which sometimes the states or localities require you to notify people in certain timeframes. You have to live within that world, but you want to tell people at the right time to inform them of the change, but not so far in advance that it doesn't mean anything to them.

28:36Telling them a year in advance of a deal happening, it either just spooks them or doesn't really tell them anything. So telling them at the right time, maybe it's 90 days beforehand. That's not just the communication. It is like that's the start of this warm hug of the acquiring organization. This is why this is a net positive for you. You're joining a big family, access to resources you've never had before. or Embiata, it's a very stable, known name that's going to be around for 100 years, a permanent capital base, steady, stable leadership. It's selling to them why it's good for them. And it works for some and hopefully most.

29:14What's interesting and what we found is things that are coming to market, there's usually something going on, the business may be in decline, and people are unhappy and are already thinking about leaving, and they hear about a deal, and that's like the last straw for them, and they're going to leave anyway. You're looking for the people who are pretty loyal to the organization and who are loyal to their patients, their clients, loyal to their colleagues. And you want to tell that story of how this is just better for them. It's sure compensation is part of it and there's ways to manage that, but it's about painting that vision of how this is better for them than otherwise.

29:50So really timing things right to let them know and emphasize the benefits. You ever had a deal blow up in your face? Be honest with me. Yeah. No, I mean, stuff comes out of the woodwork. Tell me. Tell me about some deals that blow over your face. Story time here. I don't know if it was a blow up, but it was like a big, like, I knew it. I told you so. In post-acute healthcare, maybe hospitals, but definitely like in home health hospice, skilled nursing facilities. A lot of states have this concept called a certificate of need, which is like your right to operate healthcare in a certain geography.

30:22Think of it as like your liquor license in Philadelphia or your taxi medallion in New York. a limited thing that lets you operate. And states will allow you to apply for one and it's a public process. You kind of have to prove to them that another one needs to be issued. But there are some states where they've said, hey, there's enough providers in the market and they're restricted. We're not going to issue any more. The only way you can get one is to buy one. It's like, it's a moat. When they come on the market, it's rare. And when they do transact, it's usually privately. So there's no public data about it.

30:53And so the only sort of way you know what they're worth is maybe what you paid for the last one. But it's all really in the eye of the beholder. You're buying a right to operate, which for one operator may be worth millions and another one may be worth tens of millions. Like it's all in the eye of the beholder. Anyway, what was crazy about this deal, one came up and it was for someone doing skilled nursing services, which is not a CON service usually. But they said they had a CON that was grandfathered in in the 70s. That's like when the concept came about. and they were actually pricing. There was a broker, a local broker who said they'd done these before.

31:29We're pricing it based on, hey, this is a rare opportunity for a CON in this state. These never come up for market and we're going to price it at some number. That was part of our strategy. Great, let's talk. This is a market we won't get into. For ourselves, we're like, I think you're underpricing the CON, but great, it's worth more to us than maybe you think it's worth to a typical buyer. But as we did our very early diligence, like we got the regulatory folks involved, they were saying, I can't find record of this company having this CON, which is normal, by the way. Like when folks were grandfathered in, the state told people, hey, you're good.

32:01But there was no piece of paper. Like some states have registries on these things that were on paper. Extra credit if they put them on the web. Even more extra credit if they keep them up to date. The only way that new people have this ability to operate is if they were operating and no one had shut them down yet. It's like a faith-based thing. Anyway, so we couldn't find a new record of it. And we sort of asked the broker like, hey, can you prove to us that you have this certificate of need? And they said, no, it's not a piece of paper we're grandfathered in. We've got local counsel who guarantee that we're grandfathered in and whoever buys this will be grandfathered into operating.

32:35They'll be good. And we said, great. This is a very rare opportunity to get something for a good price. But along the way, we're like, okay, like, did they really know what they have? And I'm doing side pricing of the business, what they have, and I'm ready for it to price differently. and two months of this go by, I have back and forth in research and then the broker goes silent for like two weeks. And then they come back and they said, turns out we were wrong. We don't have a CON. We need to reevaluate valuation expectations and we're so sorry. Thanks for talking with us. We'll reconnect in a month or two.

33:09So it was like this big, aha, we knew what we were talking about. I told you so. But it ended up meaning a deal couldn't happen and there was nothing really to buy. So you didn't buy it? There was nothing to buy. Yeah, we didn't close on it or even pursue anything with it. It wasn't a blow up per se. You ever had a deal blow up post-close? Like it didn't go well? Yeah. Yeah. And this is where it gets into like, do you choose to integrate quickly or slowly? Sometimes you're buying something where it's like, all right, they've got what they need to keep operating. There's no rush to integrate them or onboard them onto your platforms.

33:40You sort of hope they keep going on smoothly. And then you can pace integration out in a nice way. And we did one where just the business was already in decline. it gets kept on declining. You're trying to catch that falling knife and to stop it from falling, which is tough. And it was just one of those things where it just never recovered. Maybe it's turning around now, but it was as things were falling, you realized you had to integrate to help slow things down, at least fix like the bones of it. But kind of the damage had been done. Every deal, some of them have their thorns. That was one of the thorns.

34:09It wasn't a big blow up. It was just one of those where it's like, we got more eyes wide open on businesses in decline and how you price them and how you set expectations with your own leadership post-close. Because even if you price it incorrectly to buy something and then still see a decline hurts, even if it's like fully expected. What's the philosophy now? Go integrate as fast as you can? We like integrating quickly. Yeah, because you're balancing like how much change is too much change. If you don't integrate quickly, the people on the receiving end of it, there's the shock from change of ownership, which in a very people-centric thing, there's always a shock.

34:43If you integrate later, then there's this other shock, which like you hope that you're building up trust and credibility in the in-between and that they're willing to like sit with you through it and that they'll come out okay on the other side. We found that it's just better to rip the bandaid off and just go through it quickly. Get that extra year of turning things around. Yeah, don't make it more painful than it needs to be. Rip the bandaid off. Can we talk about deal structure? Sure. You've done some cashless deals. Teach me how to do some cashless deals. Hey, everybody listening to this. You got a company to sell.

35:15I got to cash this offer for you. And this may be unique to nonprofit, may be unique to home healthcare, but it's probably one of the most beautiful things I've seen as an M &A person. I dream about this all the time. Sending a nonprofit. Yeah, I know. Sending a for-profit. I know, that'd be ideal. And so, I mean, this goes to the heart of like why people do start these businesses. It's a community benefit. They're helping their peers in their community. They're hiring people and employing them. We've maybe done three of these in the past few years. It's not often, but it's possible. the founder is maybe they're financially secure, but their business is going downhill and maybe it started to lose money where their options are close up shop and just send everyone to the wind, sell it to someone who's willing to pay something.

35:57Or this other thing, which is find a really good successor in the market. This is a market where we're in and well known, where you're finding a great landing place for the employees and the clients after the fact. You don't really sign anything. It's an agreement that like, we're going to be here to catch your employees when you announce this. You do all the work for integration, you spin up your onboarding teams, your client transition teams, and you're there at the announcement of, hey, we're here to connect you to jobs. We're here to transition you onto the services. But no money is exchanging hands.

36:30So you don't have a hurdle right you're trying to meet. You're just trying to do what's right by everyone. The operators are engaged because the cost of acquiring an employer, a client is less than when you're buying it. So they're engaged to do it right. But it really depends on, yeah, like the seller and kind of where they're at. Are they about evaluation or are they about continuity in their community? And so... That's what I'm interested in. Is that a scenario where it's like, ah, there's not that much goodwill here. Like it's probably not going to get much value anyway. So let's just... Yeah.

36:57Or it's going to be so complicated or the deal costs are going to outweigh any value. I mean, some of these are usually pretty small deals. Like they probably would have transacted for under a million. Okay. So a smaller deal, the main driver is more about a smoother continuity and just giving a greater good, hey, the mission's aligned. We want a good transition for the people. All right. Yeah, I don't know if you can do it, but... I don't know. If anybody has some ideas for me, let me know. It's funny. It's always, especially when you're working with the founder, we'll actually ask early as a joke or in jest about what you consider doing this or nothing.

37:30And then sometimes they bite. Sometimes they laugh. You put the little angle of bait and see if it works. Because going through diligence, going through negotiations. It can be taxing on an organization. It's a lot easier then if you have a cashless deal. What are other levers that you have to pull on? Because you're not rolling over equity. You got owner financing. You got earnouts. What are levers that you're using? I haven't done a ton of earnouts. Especially with Medicare and Medicaid, there's regulatory guardrails you have to watch out for that make that tough. usually it becomes into like continuity of employment ideally if you've got a leader who's there like it's hey you can come be a great leader and do even greater things with Beata and you can focus less on payroll and like the not so fun stuff of running a business and focus on growth or focusing on helping your community it's about removing distraction if you're able to bring those people over to the organization it's letting them flourish post deal But if it's someone who's looking to retire after the fact, maybe it's a good handoff to one of their relatives to come join the organization.

38:40But you're not trying to retain that leadership for another three years or so? I mean, if it's someone who's looking to retire, like they want to stay max six months. A lot of them are retired. Yeah. If they're earlier in their career, and if it's a big enough business that can support the cost of them being a leader, it's come be a leader of a division. Then it's more of a retention versus trying to, you know, equity. Most of your deals are cash deals then. Yeah, it's almost all cash. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Just one or the other. Go cash, all cash or cashless. That's right. Spin the wheel. We'll figure out how we're going to structure this.

39:13The execution part. This is the thing I've noticed. You got to find the right deal that aligns with their strategy. That's given. But the execution, aligning your diligence and integration planning together. And you talked me through that in terms of how you line that and how that sort of optimizes successful integration. Yeah, at Bayata, the diligence integration team were the same team. Ooh, you guys heard that? Same people. Right there. That solves 100 paper cut problems. Through all of this, there's none of the throw the grenade over the wall to the next team to deal with. Whether it's from corp dev to diligence integration ops, there's no handoff.

39:51Everyone was organically, amorphously involved at just the right time. And it's the same team. They know what they're looking for. For Bayata, it was really structuring early diligence on if there weren't any gating items to get through in like pre-LOI stage. I was like, all right, what are your first really big questions that you want to invest time and maybe external help into solving? Get past those stage gates. But then it goes into integration planning, which again, in healthcare services, it's about the people stuff. It's heavy HR, job title mapping, finding a place for everyone, planning plans for people who aren't going to make it and making sure that communication strategy is solid, happening, well-received so that it's just a smooth landing for everyone.

40:36And having continuity in the people involved, it's the same people from that core diligence team, but then it's also Lisa Beata, all the functional leaders across all shared services, it's the same people who are involved in deals. They know what they're going to get out of the diligence team and the integration team. versus again, if we only close one or two deals a year and you're not doing it all the time, making sure that people don't forget how things get done. It's being consistent. I see my marketing team slipped a question in this outline. That's what it says. It says you're an early adopter of a buyer control process and use deal room to manage diligence.

41:15What impact did that have on speed, transparency and seller experience? We were early days in that journey. And before that, we were like every other one of your pre-customers. It was spreadsheet madness, tracking. Here's the current status of questions. Here's what has received and hasn't. Trying to reconcile those things. Sometimes it's even the lawyers tracking them. They're billing you for managing your mess. We love just the idea of a very easy interface. The concept of linking your questions to your data room and your actual data room files was big. I think it helped organize the sellers who are responding so they're not just like seeing a list in the spreadsheet.

41:55They see a nice slick tool that's secure, that they can grant access to the right people. They can hold themselves accountable to what's outstanding, what's been reviewed, what hasn't been, and so forth. It makes it very easy for them to keep track of what's going on. Where it really helped Bayata was in the speed of review, flagging risks, issues, follow-ups. It went from a weekly meeting, diligence meeting of, so what do people think? anyone seeing anything that they don't like to very discreet. And this document, I don't like this. And or I know we asked for this and they said they provided it, but it's not what we need.

42:30And it's very transparent. You can stack it, rank it. It also gives built trust in the organization on the deal team that you're running a very tight process that you're not making it up every time. It's repeatable. It's standard. You're often asking the same questions. and we can all hold each other accountable until either we're behind on the seller providing data, we're behind on reviewing things, we're behind on acknowledging that there's no risks. It just puts it all out there. There's nothing to hide behind. And especially when you're in early stages of a deal and in an LOI you're talking about how long diligence it's going to take and you're posturing about how quickly it can go and those kinds of things.

43:08It really puts it out there when things are taking longer, why it's taking longer. And you're not arguing about it. Both the buyer and seller are looking at the same dashboard on Dealroom about what's outstanding and what's not. And you can say, this is why we're stuck. It could be on our side, it could be you. If you've got something in the middle, gatekeeping that information, it's just nobody trusts the process. That's awesome, man. I can't even make up that stuff. Hey, I was just thinking, you're right. You were one of our first major healthcare companies. That was like seven years ago? I think when I joined the joint venture, it had to be 2019-ish.

43:41Yeah, so good six years ago. I remember it because I learned so much about healthcare compliance. Oh, all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, very heavy security requirements. Thank you for suffering through that with us. We had a level of, I just want to say, and even the team involved, we were really thankful that you guys were so nice to work with because we were, back then, we were what, maybe 15, 20 people. So you guys were really like patient with us and we were scrambling and doing the best we could and we made it happen. So that's really cool. And just to hear it from your view. So you got the system, you create a lot of the workflows and hold some accountability, prioritization.

44:18I guess I'm kind of curious from the seller point of view, because I feel like early on, you got to build trust. And it's part of the alignment. It's part of getting the deal structure. And then now you're getting this execution where you're actually using your approach and model. How does that part impact the seller as you get through? Because I feel like that's when it gets tough. I've been on the other side of deals. And I remember there's one where I caught myself blown up. I tried to be a nice, calm person. And people that know me know that. There was like one of those deals where it was like the third time or maybe the fourth time of asking for the same document.

44:48And I lost it. I lost it. How does that come in play as you execute through the deal? Like the process you describe, is it creating more friction? Is there ways you're building trust? What are you doing? No, it's part of the why the seller has chosen you. Hopefully not solely based on valuation, but it's based on you're going to do right by them. maybe financially, ideally in the process that you're not going to blow this thing up because maybe the deal will blow up and you'll part ways, but then the seller is left with something broken. Nobody wants to deal the blow up at the last hour. It's the worst.

45:22Nobody wins. Coming in with a very structured process that you've done before, especially for bad when you're in the small metal market, like the sellers, they haven't done a lot of deals. Maybe the founders, this is a second gig and they've done a deal before, but they don't do this every day. It can be intimidating. In early days, we'd send over the diligence spreadsheet with a thousand things on it. This is our diligence list. And eyes wide open and maybe, I don't know if that killed the deal, but it probably didn't feel good to be a seller to see that in front of you. Because a lot of those things are rote and aren't even meant to answer specific questions or just check the box.

45:56And when you're framing it with the seller, it's you chose us for a reason. We have a process that works. It's very logical. It's very transparent. And it's ultimately if this thing goes through, like it's the buyer taking on the risk. We want to make sure that this goes as smoothly as possible. And that can only go well if we're in the driver's seat. I really don't know any other way. And maybe if we got the sense of a seller not wanting to go that way, we probably wouldn't want to work with them. Given the heads up, you're going to drive the process. Do you warn them? Hey, this is going to be painful.

46:26You probably don't say painful, but it's... Excruciating. It's work. Yeah, sometimes it's asking questions that you wish you didn't have to answer. Having the same team work with them the whole way through is helpful. You build a good, stable partnership. For us, corp dev is definitely very heavy on the front end, but then we have them along the way in lesser capacity. The sort of modern thinking about M &A, there's the concept of integration-led diligence. Yeah. Would you consider what you're describing? Oh, yeah. Everything is about answering the questions you need to answer to integrate well.

47:00So it's an integration-led diligence. Yeah. But that's because I think the nature of Beata, it's like you're buying to run it for forever. It's not a purely like, how much money is this thing making? How much can we sell it for good or bad? I wanted to pick your brain on one of the things you mentioned about buying the declining business. And you got to mention that as an example. What did you learn from that? Because I'm looking at some deals right now where they're declining businesses. How do you get the sense of a true turnaround potential versus your own deal fever hype thing going on? Yeah, I know.

47:33That's what's... Do you say yes to that when you walk away? You can't assume that if you've got something that's growing over time or declining over time, you have to be ready for it to decline faster. Interesting. That gets into like your conceptual performance. And for some of these, it's like, how bad could this go? and over what time period are you willing to wait for it to recover? Which for about it can be a while. We looked at some where it's, hey, let's assume we're going to lose 30 % top line and take five years to recover it and we'll manage margin along the way. Does that still work?

48:04Because it's a deal we still want to do for all the other softer reasons. Again, like your downside scenario, which maybe your super conservative base case assumes that and we definitely, if it's a declining business, We have a few points on the line to understand attrition rates and those kinds of things to have some informed first year and then how long it takes to turn things around, what the work actually is to turn things around. But that's the benefit of the nonprofit is like you can wait and you can take time, but it has to make sense. You try to price it in. And that's like where, again, having a third party appraiser come in is an interesting wrinkle into it because every arm's length buyer says they're going to turn something around.

48:44And then you're arguing about some hypothetical buyer and what they would hypothetically do to turn things around and whether it's practical, whether it's what you would do, whether it's what the seller would do. And you're arguing about a ghost, essentially. Even if you can get a, if you can get a price right, that's incorporated into the price or it ends up being a steal. It still hurts to have a business show up on your books that's declining. That's why that conceptual and like that real underwriting pro forma, like you have to constantly track against, yep, we knew we were going to be this low six months in.

49:15Yep, we knew it was going to take this long for this to break even 10 months in. It's on track, even if it's like not doing well. You kind of just have to ground people to the commitments they made and just make sure you've got a really tight lock on what people signed up for at the get-go. Catching the falling knife. I like your point. don't get optimistic that the decline is going to stop, that even in the worst case, it could actually accelerate. So anybody listening, especially if I'm looking at your business, I'm going to turn that valuation down a turn because there's one I'm looking at where it's declining revenue.

49:48It may just be that the industry, it's really hard to turn that ship because it's not just the business itself, it's everything around it that may be pushing it to decline and it's not something that you can fix really quickly. Yeah. Have you seen the rule of thumb of how much you would... It's just, we were in different industries. Software is so different. But when I look at declining software, I look at that as a really big issue. But yeah, I don't... No rules of thumb. We have a few. I'm going back to the cashless transaction on those deals. That's sometimes the pitch. You're losing money on this.

50:19You may probably need to throw more cash into it. Wouldn't you rather just cut bait and have a great experience for your staff? I'm putting you on my deal team, man. You're going to come. We'll go work on some things together. I like that approach. Advice. lessons learned for many leaders listening, trying to build a buyer-led engine, especially if they're not highly regulated people to an industry like yours. But what have you learned? Doing the right thing, it always pays off. Everyone sort of knows. If you're trying to pull one under or trade on asymmetric information or anything like that, it builds trust, credibility.

50:57It makes the deal go smoother. It's just always worked out. It's when deals where someone was hiding something on either side, something comes out of the woodwork or someone had different intentions or was trying to do something the wrong way where the deal blows up or it's not good after the fact. And it can be really tough conversations. And I know definitely, again, it's people centric doing right by the people who are involved in the deal is what matters. I can't understate that. I learned it some of the hard way, but and maybe it's not available to everyone. who were doing deals. I definitely found it to work out that way.

51:33Do the right thing. It's easy. Some people I can see, there are people out there that can't, for some reason, struggle. I don't know. How do you explain that? Maybe you got access to the healthcare research of just some people are just wired. Yeah, maybe it's about wiring. Yeah. Yeah, that sucks too when you got to work on deals with folks that really... That don't align. Yeah, I mean, that can kill it. They're just not capable of doing the right thing. That's a whole other discussion. If anybody's listening to this and wants to talk about that, of doing deals with somebody that's incapable of doing the right thing, you know what I'm talking about.

52:07People that catch them in their fibs and things like that, and they blow all trust and credibility, but you still want to buy the asset. They still want to buy it, yeah. It can be tough. Trust me, I got one. I just hit my head on the wall. It's because I don't want it. Coming from my background, they've done the advisory side. I don't want to do that deal, but then there's a strong business case. Yeah, I know that. Your team wants to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, anybody wants to come reach out to me? I got to ask you, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? It has to do with people who didn't want to do the right thing.

52:37I remember we were looking at one and it was in a market we're already in. Very long tenured pillar of the community was looking for that successor, but wanted monetary associated with it. It was declining business. We were trying to price stuff in. They wanted so many post-deal hooks on what kind of quality requirements you were going to get to in healthcare. You get publicly raided by Medicare. You have to hit certain quality marks. All these things that ultimately are good, but that's for me, the buyer, to deal with. So many requirements. And even with that, we still wanted to do the deal. Way too late in diligence.

53:16We found out they had taken a big loan from COVID from the government. They hadn't paid it back. and it was one of those loans you have to pay back. We found it and we said, this stays with you. You've got a foundation. They're like, nope, you got to take that loan and you got to pay it back. The loan payback was like 3x the valuation that they wanted. So they basically wanted us to take on this crazy liability. Instant net negative net present value. And this came up post-LOI? Yeah, it was post-LOI. Yeah, it was like we were like really far down the line. So it blew up the deal? Oh, we're like, no thanks.

53:50Yeah, just blew it up right then and there. And you also got a sense of like the kind of folks they were. There was no, they didn't tell you any of this? It didn't show up on any of the balance sheet? Well, we learned. No. No? No. And then now we know to ask. Skeletons. Yeah. Give us all your federal relief loan history and all that kind of stuff. You learn from that. And that was just, you know, us learning, right? Especially in that time, we were all learning about that kind of stuff. All those things added up with them. it's oof like wow I don't want to be a partner with you if A you're going to try to saddle me with this last minute and then you also wanted all these post-close hooks that we're still going to be in the community together we said nope we're done sorry wow that's wild that's crazy John this has been a great conversation this was a hoot thanks for having me thanks for coming down and sharing the experience we should have done more it's been all these years we worked together and finally got you here I needed some time to build some good stories so it was good to wait I know you were always busy the whole other day I really appreciate you taking the time helping me become a better M &A scientist if you've listened this far congratulations you are an M &A scientist I'd love to hear from you reach out to me you're more than welcome and invited to reach out to me on LinkedIn I'd love to connect with you I'm a little weary if you ask me for a bunch of big favors because I get way too many but I do love the feedback I'll take the criticism too I try to get better at this any topic ideas are always helpful with that So next time, here's to the deal.

55:20Here's to the deal.

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56:17Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

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