Why You Should Buy a Business Instead of Starting One with Jory Evans

Welcome to episode 244 of the Business Development Podcast.

And today I'm joined once again by Jory Evans, serial entrepreneur, EOS expert, and host of the Built to Lead podcast.

Jory dives deep into business acquisitions and breaks down the smartest way to buy a company even without massive capital.

Stick with us.

You won't want to miss this episode.

The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years.

Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more.

This is the business of Development Podcast, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get expert business development advice, tips and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs and business development reps.

You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business.

Brought to you by Capital Business Development, CapitalBD CA.

Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Hello.

Welcome to episode 244 of the Business Development Podcast.

And today I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back Jorie Evans.

Jory is a powerhouse entrepreneur and visionary leader.

He has transformed Evans Trucking from a single truck operation into a thriving enterprise with over 100 trucks, a heavy duty mechanic shop, and a commercial construction company.

His story is one of relentless growth fueled by a deep commitment to strong leadership and core values.

Jory first joined us on episode 158 where we had an incredible conversation about leadership, the entrepreneurial operating system eos, and the profound impact of a value driven approach in business.

His journey is a true testament to the power of vision, resilience, and staying true to a company's mission.

As the host of the Built to Lead podcast, Jory continues to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs to lead with integrity and purpose.

Jory, it's an absolute honor to have you back on the show.

Yeah, honor for.

Is all mine, I think especially I just come here to get my tires, like pumped right up.

At the beginning I was like, once you've done that, I'm good to go back to work now.

Dude, I had a lot of.

I don't.

I might need to change the camera angle so that I can still fit in the screen.

Oh, you're.

You're doing okay.

You're doing okay.

Plus, we got a nice beautiful road behind you, good background.

We're living life.

Yeah, you had to scrounge to get here today.

I told you when you got here, it's like you should have just rescheduled if your wi fi doesn't work, the world might as well be over.

Yeah.

Anyways, it's typical me pounding things too tight together and then a little problem happens and then it's.

I don't have it all together.

Everybody I.

It might look like that on the outside, but just not real.

That's everybody, dude.

None of us really have it together.

We're wondering how we get up half the time.

Yeah.

I need people to stay it on podcasts, though, so I feel better about myself because it's like you listen to these big time guys and they just act like everything's perfect in their life all the time.

Yeah, I just don't.

I don't think so.

Yeah, yeah, there's.

That's it.

It's.

There's.

Even if business is killing it, there's always something.

Like there's a personal challenge or like we all have our own.

We all have our own shit.

I tell people, okay, when things are really busy and going well, there's this kind of problems.

And when things are slow and not going well, there's this kind of problems.

It's not that I'm ever not busy, it's just what kind of problems I'm dealing with.

Right.

There's still problems.

They're not gone.

It's not less stress.

It's just different.

There are definitely preferable problems, though.

Yeah, yeah, there's preferable problems for sure.

Yeah, I'll always take that.

We don't have enough space because we're so busy.

Problem.

I'll take that.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Dude, your last show.

And right now what's funny is actually we're.

Your last show was 158.

We're actually at 165 or 66 in the release schedule for Real World.

So we're recording a long way into the future at this point.

Yeah.

But the funny thing about that is, is even in that short period of time, your show has been incredibly popular.

A lot of people love that conversation, especially your views on values.

I think you really.

You shook some people good.

It's good.

I've actually been to quite a few people have reached out since that came out, and I've had some really good conversations since then.

I even listened to it because like I've said to you, when I do a podcast, I black out immediately after and forget everything I said.

So it's like entertaining for me to re listen to it as well.

But yeah, some really great conversations came out of that for some people in business that are like, wow, that's a really different perspective of how to do it, which I think is it's really good for people to see a new perspective of doing things different and what value can bring to their life too.

Because yeah, we all want to be in business and make money and grow and that's all good, but we're living in the midst of it, right.

And we want to live a life that one we can be proud of and that impacts other people in a positive way.

And when you inject values, keep that at the forefront, I think that just stays more positive and more life giving to the course of business.

Yeah, I think it was really eye opening for a lot of people.

I think people listen to that and they're like, I never thought about it in that way.

I never thought that like that it would be that important, that it could really be the make or break for your business.

You're hugely limiting factor.

That's how it's just such a limiting factor when you're surrounded by people who don't share your values and you can't.

It's hard to put a number on it and you can't see it until you get out of it and you fix it and then you look back and go, I don't know how we did it before.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, we have a ton of new listeners who maybe haven't gone back and listened to that episode at this point and they're wondering who the heck is Jory Evans?

So do you mind giving us a recap?

Who is Jory Evans?

How the heck did you end up here?

Yeah, this guy that I see in the mirror.

Obviously I'm an entrepreneur, business owner.

Started just working my way up with my dad with a really small business and trucking company which we built over almost two decades now.

Learned a lot of lessons.

Started at 16.

So it's like I'm just a web behind the ears punk kid at that time.

Which was great because I had a decade of learning to do.

And so by the time I had half an idea of what I was doing, I was still early days for me.

Right.

A lot of people don't find what they want to do till I already had 10 years in, which gave me quite a head start on a lot of things.

So that was beneficial.

So yeah, we grew the company over the last two decades and in the meantime again we added the mechanic shop which was a bit of a vertical.

We were spending a lot of money on mechanicking and saw a huge need in that industry in our area.

And so we wanted it to be better for ourselves and we felt we could make it better for customers as well, which is really that that has gone faster and exploded more partly because of the previous experience in business and just knowing which levers to pull maybe a little better and a little quicker, but that's six years in making now.

And then also we have the construction company which is starting to get some traction now, which is pretty exciting too.

So it's all really cool stuff.

I've grown so much and had so much to learn and learned that like I, for me to be able to do these things, I always had to constantly be.

Become better.

Every day, every year, every scenario, I had to learn and improve because you just can't.

Your companies will never outpace you if you're leading them.

You're.

They're not going to be better than you are.

And so if you don't improve, your companies won't improve.

How does one.

And I get that, like things will come up and I'll realize that I have a knowledge gap and I need to figure that out.

But to say you need to improve is one thing, to actually execute improvement is a very different thing.

Right.

Like you can listen to all the self help books in the world.

If you don't do anything, take action.

And execute and actually implement these things.

Right.

And a lot of people in personal development become personal development consumers.

Like they become addicts to it.

And so they are drawn to it because it sounds good and it feels good and they're getting that dopamine hit from like the learning part, but they don't go and execute after.

And so then it never means anything.

I think that's a huge percentage of people consuming this self help and learning stuff is they just never do anything with it, which is really unfortunate.

Right.

And so that to go from learning it to executing it takes discipline.

And that's where typically the gap happens, where people don't improve and get better because they actually don't have the discipline.

Because it takes a ton of energy, effort, discipline, hard mental toughness and everything else to continue to execute over and over again.

It doesn't happen easy.

Like nothing in business is easy ever.

And you just gotta face that it's gonna be hard and then put the work in.

And that's where people fall off the cliff.

In your experience, let's say that obviously you implemented eos and you've killed it.

Like you're, you can just kill it.

You can literally teach a class on it.

Walk me through, man.

Like it was One thing to read, traction, but it was a whole nother thing to actually fully implement that.

How do this?

Is.

This is, like, a hard question to ask, but, like, how do you go from reading a book?

Because I think I read a lot of books.

And what I'll do is I'll implement.

I'm like, oh, that sounds nice.

And I'll.

I'll try to implement that thing or I'll take a lesson.

But I feel like what I do is I never get the whole lesson.

I never get the whole profound lesson from the book.

What I feel like I get is that, like, little tidbit.

And I've done okay, man.

I've done.

I've learned a lot.

I've come a long way, so.

But I could have come so much further, I think, if I could really just put my nose to the grindstone and said, I'm not just going to learn every lesson in this book.

I'm going to implement every lesson in this book and see what happens.

It sounds like you have been able to do that, and I think that that takes a skill set and that takes a lot of dedication.

Can you walk me through what is your process when you read a book and you're like, I want to implement traction or I want to implement this.

How do you do it?

Yeah, I think I have a couple thoughts on that.

The number one thing is I have.

I've read hundreds of books on personal development, business leadership, et cetera, et cetera.

Acquisitions.

Everything that I want to do, I will read and read and read.

First, the problem is there's a lot of crap out there too, right?

Or it's not even crap.

It's okay, decent advice.

Or there's a lot of books that I've read, have one really solid point, and then they just repeat that over and over again.

So not.

Not every book, because I think you can get to feel like, okay, out of every book that I'm going to get, like, a really meaty thing.

Not every book is full of good meat, right?

There's maybe eight, five to 10 books that I've read out of two to 300 that were actually like, okay, there's.

Every bit of that book is gold, and every bit of that needs to be implemented, right?

And so I think out of 300 books, maybe there's 30 to a hundred little tidbits that needed to be put together into something really to where you want to be.

And so then I guess gauging what is valuable and what isn't and how it applies to you is the first step.

Right.

Because sometimes there's things you just can't implement.

Right.

Or it doesn't make sense for you, or it doesn't apply to you, or.

Yeah, you're getting what I'm getting at.

So I think getting advice from other people or find and really finding the books that are like the key ones, like Traction is one of those books that was like a game changer when I read it, I knew this is going to fix so many things for me.

And then knowing that's what you need to execute because you can only execute so many things at a time.

I listen to a guy, his name's Craig Groeschel.

He's a big leadership guy, podcast, church kind of thing.

Yeah.

And he basically says that personally, you can only create one discipline per year of your life.

If you're really focused and committed, you should only are only really able to actually truly create a habit or a discipline one at a time, consecutively.

Right.

And so it takes time to do these things.

You can't just, you're not going to turn your life and every habit, everything you have around in one book and go, okay, this is going to change my life and everything's going to be better now.

It takes a lot of energy and time to execute on things.

And so my process is when I read a book or I find a book, every chapter, I do a note after that chapter.

So I, in my notes and my phone, I have the book title and I literally summarize the book in my own words as I'm reading it.

That way I can get the meat and potatoes of what I think is valuable in there.

Over the years, I've created for myself a searchable bank of all my thoughts on all the books that I've ever read.

Which interestingly, like, when I'm talking on a subject or I'm thinking about something, I can literally type in leadership, or I can type in eos, or I can type in any topic, kind of.

And it will pull every note that I have or any.

Every phrase that I've written on that subject out of all of my notes for the last 10 years.

And so then it can summarize some of your thoughts or really help you get somewhere with that.

So that's a really key for executing as well.

But eos, as a perfect example, I literally, as I read that book, I applied it as I was going and I wrote out my execution process and how I was going to do it, the things I liked and the things I didn't like.

Into like about a six or eight page document.

And then I still have that in a drawer here somewhere.

And I.

That's how I executed and that's how I use that same set of written documents to do it in multiple companies.

Yeah, because there's like, this is what this part means and this is what I'm going to use the Vision Traction organizer for.

And this is how I'm going to go through it.

And I liked this exercise that they recommended.

So I've done it and then I utilized it.

So documenting stuff, and I'm not the best at it.

People who are really high functioning tend to be journal writers.

I'm not.

I want to be.

That's a discipline.

What year I'm going to get figured out, I haven't yet.

But documenting and writing things down, like the, what is the phrase?

The pencil is more powerful than the mind or something like that.

But basically when you write stuff down, you keep it forever.

You have it.

Whereas you can think a thought and then it can be gone tomorrow.

Yes.

And then there's no execution.

So putting things on paper really pounds them into your memory and it helps them become real more easily.

When you write them down, they're just something physically like in your neurochemistry that like just you're making it real.

Like taking a thought that you have that's floating around in the air, in the world and making it into something actually real requires an action to be taken.

Yes.

And so when you write something down, you are take.

You're immediately already taking action toward it, which is the first step of executing it.

So I think that's a huge key to that is to write down your thoughts and how you're going to do it or what you're going to do it or what you think about it in the meantime and then now taking that in and furthering it down growth.

I actually love that because something that I found out a really long time ago about myself is that if I want to get something done, like for instance in bd, if I want to perform high level, I have to plan out my day.

Right.

And so ultimately what I learned a long time ago is whether I'm working for a client or whether I'm working for myself, what I need to do is do a top things to do today list.

So I always start my workday by writing top things, like client.

I'm working for top things to do today.

And I'll list out between, between one and 10 important tasks that I need to get done.

And I typically do Them by order of importance as well.

What's going to move the needle?

And dude, when I do that, I do it.

You kill.

But if I don't do it, I miss.

I either miss something or I don't achieve what I want to achieve.

So, like, I learned a long time ago that for me, part of my process has to be writing down my, my, my key tasks for the day.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you're taking action towards them before you start.

Right.

I think that's the kind of the little nuance there that people go, yeah, you can write a list and check it off.

Writing the list is starting the action taking process.

You're going immediately to take action by writing it down.

And it just.

Action gets more action gets more action.

Like the momentum is picked up.

And momentum is a huge part of getting a lot of things done and moving quickly.

And you say we've had massive growth.

A huge part of that's momentum.

Like we, we're growing, we're moving, we're changing, things are happening.

And then you don't let that momentum die because once you get stopped to get going again, it's hard.

It's like getting distracted.

Right.

Like when you sit down and do work, if you can batch your work in an undistracted set of work that's consistent, you're going to be way more effective in that work set.

Whereas if every two minutes you're getting a text or you're checking an email or someone's coming into your office to ask a question, your effectiveness goes way down.

And so it's.

There's many things about what you're saying that is really key to being an effective performer.

Yeah, it really does start with writing something down and taking it.

Absolutely.

And I actually want to talk to you about momentum because you have had a lot of momentum, man.

Like, you grew your company.

Like in our last conversation, you grew your company leaps and bounds.

During COVID when a lot of people were like, heads in the sand, what do we do?

I don't know, we're in trouble.

You exponentially grew in Covid.

Like you, you took off.

We've tended to, as a company, we've grown the most in the midst of downturns because I didn't know it in the early days why it was happening.

One of is just because of just a pure energy and momentum.

When you're used to growing and changing and buying and moving and shaking, like when you're not, you start to get anxious because you feel like something's wrong.

So then you Go back to taking action, building momentum.

But the thing is in downturns is that market share opens up and everyone's getting hurt in the beginning and we're in the midst of this now in an economic downturn is like people are taking punches, new challenges are happening every day.

Everyone's tightening budget, spending is going the wrong way and you're in turmoil essentially.

Right.

Like you're taking punches and you're.

There's things coming at you and a lot of people just turtle or low down or shrink or back away or, or go bankrupt or whatever it is.

But this too shall pass.

Every phase comes to an end and picks back up.

And so if you can see it that way, you also see how everyone just moved out of your way and how you can build momentum through it.

And then when the economy turns back around, you're a roll and train where everyone else has stopped going.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do.

And then off your jet goes while they're still refueling and figuring out what, how they figure out their problems because they don't have momentum anymore.

And that is why, that's why we always grew, is because we continued to build momentum and continue to keep pace and work really hard in the midst of challenges that paid huge dividends after the fact.

And it might have taken me two or three cycles to realize why we did so well in the, in the midst of it, but once you did, then you do it more intentionally, which even is more powerful.

Totally.

Totally.

And it's so funny, dude, because actually, like the show that I just released last week was on positivity and like the power of a positive mindset and thinking forward and realizing that even in a recession, if you double down, if you don't fire your BD team, hire your BD team.

Right.

Get out there.

Because if you can crush it or you can get through the downturn and you're keeping on, you're still rolling.

Like you said, you're like, you're a personification of what happens.

Yeah.

And like it.

And this isn't to say that we didn't challenge.

We, our companies are, especially the trucking company almost was on the verge of bankruptcy multiple times in the last 16 years.

Multiple times like really dark, tough times that we went through.

And it wasn't like in the midst of that going, it's okay, we're building momentum.

That's not, that's not how it goes.

You can look back and see how it worked out.

But what you're saying staying positive, knowing that it's going to end, knuckling down, putting the work in and like looking at the end goal is okay.

The people who make it through this and are still around are going to be the ones that benefit.

That's the mentality you have to have.

We're going to make it through.

We're going to do what it takes to survive, to take our punches and licks and whatever else and be okay.

I believe we can make it through this.

We got the right people, that we got the right strategy, we got the right team.

Face the brutal facts of what you're dealing with and then make a plan to get through and execute and work, put your head down and freaking work until you make it.

And we're there right now.

Honestly, as a company, like we're in a real challenging time in transportation.

And as a continent, frankly, and globe, the economy is really challenging right now in a lot of places.

And people who don't keep the right mindset and put in the effort and the work and make the right decisions, they don't make it.

Yeah, Jory, teach me.

I want to know.

Teach me about the transportation industry, man.

Like, you are my transportation industry expert.

Like, bar none, you are my guy.

What, what is going on?

Like, why to me it seems I'm going to Walmart, I'm buying groceries every day, I'm going to Home Depot and buying what I need to.

Why?

Like to me it feels, my gosh, like how could the transportation industry be so volatile when we need so much stuff?

It seems to me like something that should just happen all the time.

And sure, there might be better times, but to me it feels like it shouldn't be so volatile.

Why is it so volatile?

Transportation.

There will always be transportation because the world doesn't go without transportation.

The problem that exists in transportation partly is barrier to entry as there is not a huge barrier to entry and it's getting bigger with more regulation and more expense and insurance.

Like all the things, things that it takes to put together a trucking company get more and more challenging every year.

So that slows the expansion, contraction of the number of people in the market.

Okay, I'm no expert, I'm not an economist, but I have many thoughts about.

But at the end of the day, like in Covid, they injected so much money into the economy that we had a real upturn in transportation because people weren't traveling and they were spending money at home.

So consumer spending was at an all time high and people had all kinds of money that wasn't their money that they typically even have.

And so spending just went through the roof.

And in the midst of that in trucking.

So like from about 2020 going forward, people are spending, spending.

They're renovating their houses, they're buying new houses, they're going on local holidays, they're buying more food because they're staying at home and eating.

Like the money stayed more so in the country at that time.

And there was more of it because the US injected however many trillions of dollars in Canada probably it began hundreds of billions of dollars injected into the economy.

Fast forward two years, okay, that's over now, and we stop injecting money.

All that money's been put into the market and things are inflating in value because everything devalues when you put more money into the market, and especially when you print it, it devalues values.

The worth of the dollar, it's carton of eggs is worth $6.

And if you double the amount of money in the economy, then it's worth $12.

That's just facts of how it works, right?

And so now everything's starting to inflate and the government goes, okay, but we need to start bringing this money back.

So we increase taxes, we put carbon taxes on things.

We tell people they have to pay their loans back, that they borrowed, that they didn't realize.

We put more regulations on things we stopped.

They trying to slow the train down.

They increase interest rates, which then means everybody's now paying higher interest on their loans, higher interest on their homes, higher interest on their cars.

Things become unaffordable.

So things have inflated in price.

And when we borrow money against them, we're getting hit even harder.

So they're twice as expensive and the interest is twice as much, and it just becomes unaffordable.

So then consumer spending does this down up because your utility bill is twice what it used to be.

Your mortgage went up by $500 a month.

And we're not going camping this weekend, this long weekend because we can't afford the fuel to drive out there.

And we used to buy steak three times a week and now we're going to eat it once a week because we have to tighten our budgets at home.

And every like in the last year, every single household, within reason, every single business, every single everything said we need to get our spending under control.

Our expenses are too high and our revenues are decreasing or our incomes are not increasing and our expenses are expanding.

So then consumers, whether it be you and your wife at your house or Me and my business with my leadership team or anybody is going, we have to decrease our expenses and our spending.

You don't renovate your house, you don't buy a new house, blah, blah, blah, on and on it goes.

Okay, well, when that happens, less things get bought, less things get transported, less things happen in general, like the housing starts in Canada are dismal still.

You know, there's huge demand.

But the cost of a new house to what you can rent it out or what you can afford is too high.

So even if there is demand, you don't build a new house.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying there's none.

It's not none.

It's just way down from where it would be, should be, could be.

And when you don't build new houses, we don't ship lumber and we don't ship shingles and we don't.

And when the oil field's not pumping because the barrel isn't climbing because there isn't demand on fuel, which you're seeing right now, the barrel's been slowly creeping down over the last year especially it went up and down anyways.

There's just not consumer demand in the market, which means we move less stuff.

Yeah.

And the problem is from 2020 to 2023, it was huge.

So we had huge entries into the transportation industry.

I believe in the US we went from.

And don't.

Again, I should cite stuff and get real data.

But this is.

I read this somewhere, but basically it was we went from 1.4 million registered class 8 trucks in the transportation to over 1.7 million.

So basically a 25% increase on transportation on the road, trucks registered in businesses.

Wow.

And so they met the demand.

Rates are really high.

Everyone says, hey, we can make money in trucking.

So they get into trucking or they grow their business or whatever they do.

And we ride those two years where everyone's spending and now we come down and we got to normalize.

So we have 25% too much supply in the transportation industry and we have less demand or some maybe even similar demand to what it normally should be.

And so then it becomes a bloodbath to the bottom because everyone's transportation is a super high capital scenario.

You're very indebted and there's a lot of equipment and iron involved.

And so you have big truck payments on expensive trucks that you bought for the.

At the most expensive time in the history of trucks.

And you got to make your payments.

And the fuel is expensive and the insurance, everything's expensive.

But the Demand decreases and the supply.

And demand is always the answer.

Too much supply of trucks, not enough demand in transportation.

These guys are going to get screwed over.

Yeah, it works.

And so it's been, I'd say, I think about the last 16 months, it's come to roost in the transportation industry, especially the like general freight market.

Certain niches of transportation still do okay because their particular industry or niche is still steady or whatever.

Yeah.

But in the general freight market, it's been a very challenging and tough downturn.

Time rates decreasing in the neighborhood of 20 to 30%.

Wow.

And there's never been 20, 30% margin in transportation, ever.

These things come down, expenses go up, and then you're in trouble.

As a transportation company, that is.

So that there's your.

My humble opinion on what's going on in transportation industry.

So it is a bloodbath until it normalizes.

When the supply of trucks on the road comes down to meet demand, then it'll level off.

Yeah, yeah.

And until consumer spending can increase, it's not going to get better.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you for that.

One of the things that I had a question about because obviously from.

I want to talk about carbon tax for a sec.

Just because I know that carbon tax is bad like, and you know what, whatever, believe whatever you want about green, green world.

I'm with you.

I want a greener world too.

But what I don't want to do is pay 50% or more for food.

Right.

At the end of the day, I'm so frustrated about going to the grocery store and every time I walk in there, I walk out with four or five items and it cost me 100 bucks.

It's just getting so ridiculous, the cost of food.

And one of the questions that I had was what was the impact of carbon tax on the trucking industry?

Honestly, in the midst of the, the busy season, nothing.

Because every dollar of carbon tax gets passed on to the end user.

That's just the facts of the matter.

Expenses go up, rates go up.

Right.

And so you're grow if it costs.

I was, here's a perfect example.

When I was, I was doing some apparel stuff and they were buying hoodies and T shirts and hats by container loads and bringing them across the ocean.

Right.

And basically they put carbon taxes on fuel.

And so then it doubled and tripled the cost of the transportation across the ocean.

And so then hoodies went from being $10 a unit to $20 a unit overnight.

And it wasn't because they were more expensive to make in China.

They were the same price at China.

And they were double the price here because of the transportation which related to the price of the fuel that they were charging.

It's the same difference.

If you put a 50% tax on fuel, it and my fuel goes up by 50%, I have to charge more.

And therefore your transportation of your strawberry to the grocery store costs as much more.

And that's.

This percent of your strawberries is transportation.

Yeah, it's.

Right, it's.

I don't know what they were thinking with that one.

Because if the idea is to get people to drive less, it's like when they used to just raise the price of smoking, but everyone was addicted to cigarettes.

So it's guess I'm just paying more.

That's basically what the carbon tax is.

You think to a point, like even the cigarette comparison or the carbon tax to a point it works.

But when the bulk of the fuel and stuff being purchased is going into the industry that provides the food, like putting a carbon tax on farming is that it's direct to customer.

You might as well just put it on the food.

It's the same exact thing.

And it's carbon tax.

This is how I try to really make it simple to people.

When they do a stimulus package and they print money and they give everybody money, everyone goes out and spends the money.

And so it's stimulate.

Yes.

What's the right.

Stimulate the economy.

And then things get busy for a little bit because we just pump money into it.

So that's what basically Covid did is we kept pumping money into it to keep everything rolling and happy and nice and everyone felt good.

But there's always a consequence.

And the carbon tax is the exact opposite of a stimulus package.

We put a tax on something and it affects everybody across the board because you can't not buy fuel, you can't not heat your house, you can't not buy groceries.

And so all it does is immediately take money out of every individual's pocket, which means they will spend less on other things.

So it does the absolute opposite of stimulated economy.

Turns it down.

Right.

So a carbon tax is essentially a destimulation.

I think better words.

I can't.

Vocabulary terrible today.

Stimulator.

It just.

It crushes the economy and it crushes the middle class and everyone who's spending money on everything.

Because the carbon affects everything that you spend money on.

Yeah, I.

It frustrates me.

I don't know if you can tell.

I'm not a fan.

I'm not a fan of the carbon tax.

I want it to go away.

It doesn't make any sense.

Especially when we've just been through such a, such a horrible time with COVID and everyone's trying to recover.

It's like the least they could have done was put a break on that for a minute.

Like it didn't make any sense.

And from the standpoint of a government is to help the people.

It's not helping the people.

No, for sure.

And again, I get some of the ideals behind it, but they just.

It doesn't work.

It's like communism.

It doesn't work.

So what you will see if the Conservative government gets elected in Canada, because we're Canadians, I know no one else cares about us, but if the Conservative government gets elected in Canada and they get rid of the carbon tax in this country, you will, it's.

It will be the equivalent of a stimulus package.

Like you will see immediate benefits to the economy.

Like humongous.

You'll see a turnaround.

Like you, you couldn't believe.

That's the reality of the situation.

To me, I, I really hope you're right.

I really hope you're right.

So do I.

Yes, I, as a Canadian, frankly, as a North American, because I know, you know what, our friends, United States, they're suffering too.

It's not good for them either.

Everybody is having a really tough time right now with regards to the financial and economic situation in the world.

And we shouldn't have to struggle to buy healthy food for our families.

We shouldn't.

That should not even be a question in North America.

And so anything that we can do to get that back to life.

Where, how?

And you know what?

Houses, I get it, houses are going to go up like it is what it is.

Houses go up.

Inflation's the thing, whatever.

We're not going to do much about that.

But at the end of the day, the goods and services we need for day to day life, the things to heat our home, gas for our cars, food for our kids, that shit needs to stay at a reasonable amount so that everybody can live decent standard of life.

Yeah.

I guess the other point I'll say to your housing and the food question as well as the immigration policy is also a big negative to that, ultimately creating more inflation because they're adding demand to these markets by immigrating.

Like, I think Canada immigrated a million people and in one year.

So that's.

We're 30, I don't even know how many million.

32 or 4 million people.

That's a 3% increase to our population in one year.

And so that creates a humongous demand on our housing market, demand on our food supplies, demand on everything else.

And again, I'm not anti immigration.

I'm just saying from a pure numbers perspective, when you do that, just willy nilly bring as many people in as you feel like bringing in, there's an impact to the citizens of that area.

There's, there's cultural impact, but there's just a pure math impact to our housing market.

If we, I believe we had something like 200,000 housing starts in Canada in the same year as we immigrated, a million people.

And on average, we need one house per two people when you immigrate.

So it's okay.

So we needed 500,000 houses and we built 200,000 houses.

So what do you think is going to happen to the housing market?

Yeah, humongous demand.

And you're seeing it like, you see it now.

There's not enough housing.

Even low income housing, low rental housing, all different kinds of housing are under huge pressure, and a big percentage of it is immigration.

And like the amount of people they brought in, you stop that, then the demand doesn't.

If you built 200,000 more houses per year and you didn't immigrate anyone, we would start getting ahead of it.

Right.

But you can't when you're constantly burying those numbers.

Like, math is math.

That's how it's going to work out.

Yeah, yeah.

We're in the housing market right now and there are gems out there, but my gosh, you gotta hunt.

You gotta hunt for it.

But yeah, like, we're, me and Shelby, we're gonna be into this thing for.

I don't think we're getting the house we want for less than 650, $700,000.

It just, it is what it is.

That's the market that number used to buy you, like, like a mansion, essentially.

Like five years ago, $700,000 house was like, oh, that's like, only rich people live in a 700.

Now.

It's okay.

The middle class are looking at five to $700,000 houses because that's the same house that they were buying for 4 to 500.

Yeah.

I'll tell you, the way that we went into the decision, Jory, is we went into it, we did, we said, we're like, look, it is what it is.

We're going to pay what we're going to pay for this house, but we're going to buy the house we want to stay in for 20 years.

Because that's the solution.

You ain't Flipping houses in a $700,000 market.

Like it is not.

Oh, we're going to stay here for three years and make small improvements and flip this thing for 200 grand profit.

That is not the market we're in.

We're in the.

Buy what you can afford and what's going to last you a while because you're going to be there, the prices.

Are going up, but it's like you can.

You made good money on the house you owned, but then you have to buy in the same market.

So unless you're going to move one market to the other, which is happening in Alberta especially.

Like, we have a huge.

Our.

We're having huge jumps here because BC and Ontario are selling their house for three or four times what ours is worth for the same item and moving into our economy.

Whether they're working remote or getting a good job in Alberta, they're buying a house for a third of the price of their Vancouver or their Toronto house.

Yeah.

And they think they're.

They're loaded.

They're like, I've got all kinds of money now because I just bought a house for a third of what my old house costs.

Yeah.

It's only a matter of time until Alberta, Saskatchewan, we're in the same boat as Ontario and Vancouver equalize because people.

Will move for it.

Our income to housing cost ratio in Alberta is the best in Canada, which means people are gonna migrate here.

Yes.

And Alberta is beautiful.

We live in one of the best provinces in Canada, bar none.

No question.

Alberta is gorgeous.

They were silly for not being here in the first place.

They're just catching up now.

I don't know if you can tell me.

Enjoy.

Are from Alberta.

Yeah.

May.

Slight bias.

Oh, goodness.

Yeah.

No, it's crazy, man.

It's crazy out there.

But.

But there are success stories, man, and you're one of them.

The reality is there are people like you.

You've been in it.

You've been in it through, like multiple governments at this point, and ones that were pro and ones that maybe weren't so pro.

And you're doing amazing.

And not only are you doing amazing, you're actually doing acquisitions.

Yeah, that.

It's a topic that I've really interested me for the last couple of years.

I've been watching and reading and learning a lot about acquisitions because there's some statistical anomalies that again, I'm a math guy, if you haven't picked that up yet.

But there are millions, literally millions in North America of businesses for sale right now, and not millions of Buyers.

So acquisitions are a way that you can really grow quickly as a business and or you can start a business from scratch or you can acquire a business and maybe get a really good deal on a business.

And it's gotten to like over centered now where it's really a much better deal potentially to acquire a business than it is to start one.

Wow.

This one of the statistics that I read recently or heard on a podcast, I can't remember, but basically in the pre 2000s, 80s, 90s years when they would pull people, one in four young people would consider being an entrepreneur.

Starting a business like that was part of their American or Canadian dream is to start a business, become an entrepreneur bubble.

Okay, so when we pull people now in the 2000 and twenties, that's one in ten.

So we have two and a half times less people who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs in this generation than we had previous.

And so we also have a gen X baby boomer generation who are retirement age, who have the greatest generation, who like basically they built this, these countries, they built businesses and that's who they are as a generation.

That's what was valued when they were coming up.

They built these amazing businesses and they want to retire, they want out, they want to sell, they want to get value back for the things they built.

But then no one's coming to buy them.

So really we're in a buyer's market for business.

Which is a really weird thing to think about when you're talking about a market where you can't buy a house for a reasonable price.

Right.

So that being the case for young entrepreneurs or people who are looking to expand their businesses, acquisition has become, and it's always been, but in the more the small business realm where I have experience, it's become very lucrative and there's a lot of good possibility there if you know what you're doing and if you're willing to learn and figure out what has to happen to do an acquisition and do it well.

What made you decide to explore that?

Like obviously you'd come a long way, you'd done incredibly well with Evans Trucking.

What was it that you were like, hey, I think we should look at acquiring another company instead of just continuing to grow your existing company.

Like I get that, like it's one in the same.

But why didn't you just buy the more Trucks or something along those lines?

What was the idea that it would make more sense in this case to acquire another organization?

Partly that learning about the statistical anomaly, seeing that there's more value to be had in buying sometimes than building.

Just go out and start and build a business from scratch multiple times and you'll realize how much energy that requires and the level of risk that requires.

Again, I can't remember the exact statistics and I'll say I get most of this from Cody Sanchez.

If you don't follow Cody Sanchez on and you're an entrepreneur, you're a crazy person.

She's a genius and she's very much into acquisitions and business and she has some stellar advice on acquisitions and business in general.

But basically the failure rate of a new business start is basically.

I think it's.

It's been a while since I actually read these statistics, but I think it's 80% in the first five years and then it's another 80% in the next five years.

So in 10 years, the chance of you succeeding is like, what does that make it?

80%, 20%, 4% chance.

So in 10 years from now, if you start a business Today, there's a 4% chance you're still around 10 years from now.

Wow, those are not good odds.

No, but in business acquisitions and I can't remember the statistic, but I know it's a way, way higher, it's something like 40 to 60% success rate.

Okay.

Acquisitions, because you are buying something typically that is an established business.

It's been around, it's made the 10 years already.

So you.

They made it through.

They're the 4%, they exist.

And so even if they made it through five years, they're 20% out of 80 chance.

And so you're going to buy something that's a little more established, that's already been through a bit of a crucible.

Are you going to make it or not?

They have system, they have all the things that you're going to have to learn.

And I don't think a lot of people for their first business, it's necessarily always a good idea to go out and acquire business can be depends on your experience, your Smarts, industry knowledge, etc.

But when you have a business like we have and there's similar businesses and competitors around us who are at this point reaching out to us, asking if we would be interested in acquiring them because they're looking for succession and they don't have a plan.

Yeah, I can't remember the statistic on the number of business owners that have a succession plan, but it's dismally low as well.

Like most people have no exit idea or plan and they're literally desperate to get out by the time they're 60 to 70 years old and they don't know how to get out.

Yeah, yeah, it's.

Sorry, I don't mean to pause you there.

I literally just interviewed a guy who we were talking about that.

And exactly what we were talking about specifically was I said to him, I don't think most people start a business with the idea of selling it.

And he's.

No, lots of people do.

And I was like, oh, okay, maybe they do.

But I was like, I think more people start a business, grow attached to that business.

It's their baby and they stick with it as long as they humanly can.

They'll ride that thing to the grave.

Their labor of love.

They're passionate about what they do.

Like the ones that make it again, they didn't make it.

They're 4%.

Like, they put their blood, sweat and tears and their life into this business to make it succeed.

And it's a little hard to think about selling that thing unless some people are just cold, analytical people.

That was the plan all along.

This, that I'm doing.

It's about making the money and not if you're a purpose driven and you have a why and you're about your mission and everything else.

And just, I just don't see.

I, I think there are two very different personalities, your businesses and actually his point was, and he made a great point, I started the business with the idea, I'm going to offload it.

So like the whole.

He already went through that.

I told him, I was like, you just, you made the choice up front to deal with that so that you never did get invested in it.

But it's on the other side.

I feel like if you started a business, you built it from nothing.

It became successful, you're personally invested in it, you care about it, it becomes.

I've seen people on this show where I talk to them and they sold their businesses for astronomical amounts of money.

And they went through, they went through.

What do you call it?

They went through like pain when they sold the.

Like you would lose out here sometimes.

Yes, you get tied to your people.

It's a point that I have about acquisitions too, that we'll get to a little later on.

But it's the owner's wishes and the owner's tied to their business is a huge part that you have to navigate when you're acquiring or selling a business because they, they've made commitments to people who are employed by them.

And for them to know.

There's a story of Clif Bar, if You've ever read it?

It's, it's in, I believe How I Built this is the book.

But basically there was two partners and they were going to sell Clif Bar to Kellogg, I think for 90 million or 60 million.

It was a big amount of money.

Not to what it's worth now, but at the time.

And they basically found out that they were based in Oregon and that Kellogg's was going to come and shut all their places down and then outsource it to all their other mills.

And they walked on signing day from the deal when they found that out because they just couldn't.

And again there was more details, but they basically couldn't fathom or stomach the idea of all their employees losing their jobs and their plants and everything that they built just being disseminated so they didn't sell at the end.

So you think about it, it's like, okay, they're, there's more to it than just I'm going to get $90 million and I don't care.

It's not for most people that are really passionate about the business.

It's not about that.

Yeah, once you have enough, it's not just about the money anymore.

That's right.

There's a bigger purpose behind it.

And so when you're a purpose driven business owner, it's not that simple.

Yeah, I completely agree.

You know who obviously we've talked a little bit, I think about who should or like why you would consider acquiring a business.

Is there any reason that you maybe wouldn't consider acquiring a business?

Is there any situation where maybe it doesn't make sense?

Yeah, do think acquiring, just going on deciding one day you're going to buy a business.

And buying a business is, it's a pretty dangerous move if you haven't been in business or are not already an expert in an industry that you're buying the business in.

Because I have this kind of personal belief that every entrepreneur needs to do 10 years of kind of crucible of business where you learn all the skills and all the things that you need and it's just this painful ride, but it's just pure passion and power and energy.

And then when you get to that kind of 10,000 hour, 10 year window, you start to get everything that's required and become good at what you're at being an entrepreneur and a business owner and you've seen enough that most things are not coming out to sideswipe you.

I do know some people who have like just decided, I'm going to buy a business Went out and found something that they thought was cool and bought it and really didn't.

Had some real problems in the course of going through that because they just were totally blindsided because they didn't know what they didn't know.

And then to get heavily invested in maybe a multimillion dollar company when you don't know what you don't know that the downside and the risk is humongous and you just don't realize that going in.

Yeah.

So that's a risk.

A couple other reasons I think you shouldn't when you already own a business.

This is something I deal with frequently because I'm.

I'll be considered a serial entrepreneur and I like to start things and get them going and then keeping them going is always the harder part when you're.

And it's the thing that in some books they call it shiny things where you see something shiny that's really awesome and you want it and so you go buy it and then you get it and you realize that it just distracted you from what you were supposed to be doing and it really wasn't that great anyways.

You see this business, you think this is going to be a gold mine and then you buy it and then you get into it and you realize, oh, this is a lot of work and maybe it doesn't make as much money as I thought.

And n n n.

And then here you are with something that isn't what you thought it was.

And in the meantime, what happened to the business that you were running?

You've taken your eye off the ball.

You've gotten too widespread.

Now you're jack of all trades and a master of none, so to speak.

And I've experienced this a little bit in, in getting into different industries, trucking, mechanicing, construction.

And I've had to learn some really hard lessons because I didn't know what I didn't know.

You're not an expert of a particular thing and when you're not an expert of that thing, things are going to come out of the woodwork that are going to just blindside you and you're going to learn.

You're going to pay a very expensive education cost on that stuff.

Should somebody buy a business with the idea of flipping it.

And it just came to me right now that people do that with houses, right.

Why wouldn't they do that with businesses?

Do you recommend that as like an income investment idea?

It's totally a potential strategy.

It's not something that I've necessarily ever delved into at this Point again.

If Cody Sanchez, if you follow her, she does that, invests and flips.

And so I.

Okay, I, I have a bit of an outline of what I think about acquisitions in general.

So if I follow through, I think we're going to hit a lot of things.

Is going to answer some questions here.

So I think any acquisition is, is a three part process.

And so the first part is, okay, you find a company or you have a company, an opportunity presents itself and you need to decide, do I want to buy this company?

If I do want to buy this company, what I have to evaluate what it's worth and then I have to come up with the deal and the churn.

So I call this portion the deal.

I have to figure out one.

Do I want it?

Why?

Why would I do it?

If I have a business, is it because it value adds my business?

It's a vertical.

Say I'm a mechanic shop, for example.

I'm already spending a couple million dollars a year and various other businesses and I could bring that in house and control that revenue and then I can make that business double its revenue overnight, which is going to make it more profitable.

So there's a huge upside that might be a reason why I want to buy one.

Or, or do you see, if I buy another trucking company and I look at their financials and I go, wow, they pay $0.30 more a liter for fuel than I do.

They pay twice as much for insurance than I do.

They have weight are way overstaffed compared to what we are per person.

If I move them out of their building, into my building where I have room, I'm going to save them their rent down and down the road.

You go, okay, there's a huge upside because I can save this much money on day one.

And I'm looking, I'm like, they're a profitable company as they stand.

Yeah.

So I can bring this much value to them just because of my buying power, because of my expertise, because of my connections, because of all these other things, then maybe that really does make sense to buy them.

I already understand them.

They're in the same industry as me.

They have a different customer base than me.

We're not competing with the same customer.

So that brings new work to me.

There's all these things that you got to consider where if I go out and look at a pie store in town that's got a retail front, I don't know anything about pie stores.

I don't know how I'm going to save them any more money.

I don't my staffing and their staffing are not cohesive in any way.

I'm not buying a million dollars a year in pies, so that's not going to benefit.

Like, I can't see an upside to that business where I can bring my expertise in necessarily and really value add to that business.

To answer your question about should you buy a business to flip it?

Absolutely.

If you can go in and look at the upsides and go, if I buy this business, run it for two or three years, I can increase the profit by however many percent, which will then in turn increase the value by this many percent or increase the revenue by this many, then I will increase the value and I can turn around and flip it.

Now, on that note, at the same time, you have to consider what I said about being a buyer's market for businesses is like, okay, is there a market to resell that business to somebody?

Because you could buy a business and double it in value and that's really good for you.

But if no one wants to buy it anyways, then you've done nothing for yourself anyway other than make the profit potential.

So you definitely have to ask yourself why you're looking at a business, why you want this particular business, what's your knowledge of the industry, what value do you bring?

What.

What's going to have to happen anyways, all that to be said when you evaluate the price of a business and evaluate if you want the business to pursue, we go, okay, I want this business.

I can see the upside.

There's value add there.

Two, it's not a shiny thing.

It's not going to distract me from what I'm doing.

I can do this.

It's going to add value to my other business.

Whatever.

Now we get to the deal, the terms of how we buy a business, right?

If you evaluate a business and it's worth $3 million and you have $3 million in your back pocket, there you go, you can buy it for 3 million.

Not necessarily typically what I would recommend, but that's one way of doing it.

Another way of doing it is you can go to the bank for a loan.

Banks have very specific parameters.

Usually a fair amount of down that is required to do that.

And it's cash.

It's very cash prohibitive.

And in very high percentage of cases, most people don't have the cash to do it.

If I'm in a trucking company and I'm growing it, I'm using all of my cash to grow the business as it is.

So to acquire another business and spend significant amounts, millions of dollars of cash to buy that business.

That's it might make the deal not worth it to me, or it might slow down my other side of my business.

That now the impact is to the negative of that.

So then we get into the thing, which is vendor financing.

And in a business buyer's market, where people are trying to get other businesses and don't have buyers banging their door down to buy their businesses, vendor financing becomes a very real thing and a very popular thing, especially right now, for people to sell their businesses.

If they're not interested in vendor financing, they may have a very hard time selling their business and a very hard time getting their value out of their business.

Because if I got cash and it's a buyer's market, I'm lowballing the crap out of you.

Right.

But then we get into the vendors financing, which is a huge opportunity for people who don't have cash or need an opportunity.

Right.

So in the case of the businesses that we've bought, we've heavily used vendor financing to get those deals done.

The thing I love about vendor financing is if I buy a business and the owners are the top salesman, the controller, the cfo, the CEO, which is almost always the case, they want to leave.

Right.

And so when they leave, there's all kinds of potential problems with that, like their employees who are loyal to them, leaving customers who they've gotten and might be loyal to them, or the style and the culture of the company changing.

All those things when they leave could potentially fall apart and the company could be worth a lot less after they leave.

Yeah.

Whereas when they vendor finance you, they're very invested in the success of your business.

If I paid them $3 million, they walk up the door and say, sayonara.

Don't ever call me again.

Yeah.

I'm between a rock and a hard place.

Unless I'm an amazing business guy and I know their business inside now, and I know their customers, I know their people.

But you just don't.

You don't do them.

They say sayonara.

They're not invested in you succeeding in the future.

Whereas when they vendor finance and they're on the hook for, whether it be 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 years for you to repay them for the amount that you financed with them, they're very invested in you succeeding with their business.

Okay.

And if they're passionate about their business, they don't want to see their business fail anyways.

But it's just they still have skin in the game ultimately.

That's the first time I've heard of vendor financing.

So can you, can you introduce our audience to like the definition of what it is and how it exactly works?

It's vendor financing is just the vendor providing financing.

So again, if you're paying your vendor, like the owner of the business, I'm going to try come up with an example.

They're a trucking company.

They have a certain amount of equity and equipment.

They have a certain amount of retained earnings and all these other things that have value.

But then you have the thing called goodwill or the evaluation of the brand and the name of the company.

So you're going to pay them a certain amount for that.

Typically, whether they're heavily leveraged or not, that there's going to be a huge aspect of value in the company that they're selling you and they own that value outright.

And so that equity is theirs.

And so they just will finance it to you, meaning that they will take payments typically at an agreed interest rate or not, depending on what.

Again, the thing about you got to think about buying anything, but especially businesses is anything's on the table.

Like people don't get creative enough about the terms of acquiring another business may be the most important part of what is going on there.

I heard, I've heard someone say you want $10 million for your business?

No problem.

I will pay you $10 million for your cookie stand on the corner.

Okay.

But I'm going to pay you $100 a year for the next thousand years.

And you just got the deal of a lifetime.

So the terms are everything.

Yeah.

And so it depends on, there's a lot of factors in any business, how much profit they're making, if they're cash flowing, what the equity is, what the value is, what the, the sales are like.

There's a lot to evaluate, but once you evaluate what the thing's really worth, now we get to terms, which is how am I going to figure out how to pay this and make money at the same time?

Because we're not acquiring a business unless it's going to make us money.

That's the whole point of it, is that it's going to make us money.

If I'm looking at a business, I'm looking for something that's going to cash flow.

I want to make a payment on that business, but I want it to make more money than the payment that I'm making.

Otherwise why am I doing it?

And so this is where your terms get into play, is that you can give an owner of a business the Value that they want spread over a good amount of time, which typically even has tax benefits to them.

Plus they make the interest on the transaction.

If you finance, because you can go to the bank and finance and pay the bank interest.

Why not pay the business owner the interest?

Why not help them alleviate their tax burden by slowly bleeding the value to them over time?

So there's a lot of positives.

There's a lot of win win to it.

Yeah.

And then at the same time, you get that business owner to be invested in what you're doing and want Frank wanting you to succeed over whatever period of time they're invested in the business, which leads to a way higher success rate.

If you give your business owner a call and go, hey, I don't know what's going on with this one customer, but they're losing their mind and I don't understand what's wrong.

And, and you're paying them $50,000 a month.

They're probably pretty happy to make a quick phone call and find a few things out for you and try and help you overcome that problem.

Because they want to get their payment next month.

That's awesome.

Okay, so this to me sounds like the way to.

Oh, it's absolutely the way.

Unless the business owner is a psychopath and you want them to be gone.

Then it's a different path to take in a lot of cases.

And again, when I'm looking at a business, so anyway, this is the deal that I'm talking about.

We're looking for up upsides.

We're looking to make a deal that cash flows.

So say, let's say, for example, I'm looking at a business and they make a hundred thousand dollars profit a month.

They're making 1.2 million a year.

It's consistent.

I think that's consistent value.

And I think that I can retain all that.

And it's all good.

I might evaluate at that at a 3x multiple of profit.

So I go, okay, 1.2 million times three years, 3.6 million profit.

I'm going to pay you $3.6 million for your business, plus whatever equity you have.

But what I'm going to do is I'm going to get you to finance me for seven years at a fair interest rate which we agree upon.

Let's call it 6%.

Right.

So if I do that again, I can't do the math in my head, but let's say that comes out to $60,000 a month or something like that, they're making $100,000 a month.

So I'm going to pay them $60,000 a month for seven years, which is a really great retirement package for them if they're 60 or 65.

65, yeah.

I'm typically they're not making.

Even if they are right now making $60,000 a month.

Now I can do nothing and make $60,000 a month for seven years and I get 6% on my money the whole time, which in the stock market I may or may not do better than that.

Like maybe the deal's at 7 or 8% or maybe it's at 5%.

It depends what their tolerance and your tolerance is on the terms of the deal.

But they can walk right off into the sunset with a little bit occasional support to you, depending on the terms of your deal.

With a $60,000 a month payment to them for seven years, interest included, they got their 3.6 million plus interest over seven years.

They can get their capital gains tax down over time by keeping their tax rate a little bit lower.

They're usually pretty happy about that deal.

Whereas if I'm coming with cash and I'm going, yeah, your business might be worth 3.6 million, but here's two and a half and you can lock right now at two and a half and you're going to pay extremely large tax bill on that money and you're going to walk with maybe $1.8 million or you can walk with four and a half over seven years.

What do you, what deal are you taking?

Yeah, no kidding.

No, like it really is a win win.

It is win win in a lot of cases.

Now some people want their money and they want to be gone and they don't want to deal with you.

This kind of deal requires trust and reputation.

Like I've been able to do some deals like that because of our reputation and my personal reputation that they believe obviously lawyers are going to get involved.

There's going to be guarantees and all kinds of other collateral and liabilities.

There's way more to it than just a quick handshake deal.

Sometimes it is a handshake deal.

It depends how much money you're dealing with.

Yeah, but it's a huge win win in a lot of cases.

You can give.

The other thing is as the person buying, you can give them what they really deserve for their business.

Because another thing a lot of people don't understand about money is that money is always devaluing, always devaluing.

So for me as the business owner, if I have to write them a check for $3.6 million today, that's $3.6 million today.

But if I'm paying them $700,000 a year on average, we're devaluing currency at 3 to 5% per year.

So every year that goes by, I'm actually paying them less money in value, which saves me money ultimately.

So I can pay them more because the value is further out.

Right.

And if I think I can bring value to that business, I can grow that business, I can do a lot of things with it.

I'm also not putting undue pressure on that business.

So they have cash flow still.

I'm not going to run it into the ground broke because of this huge payment.

There's just a lot of a huge amount of benefits by getting a really strong term and a win win between the owner of the business and yourself.

Okay, awesome.

So basically what you're saying, like a huge takeaway from this show is that it's much better to buy a business out over time through vendor financing than it is per se to even go to the bank or just pay them flat out what they're asking for their business.

It makes more sense actually for both parties and the long term success of the business.

Really in a lot of cases, if you go, there's so many factors that can change that.

But again, my purview as someone who's growing businesses and not typically sitting on halls and hauls cash, I probably wouldn't do no acquisitions, probably off cash because that just wouldn't be possible.

It would be too down, like prohibitive to the growth of my current company to do it.

And a lot of businesses would never sell their business ever.

And they would cut it apart for parts and sell what value they have.

And people do it all the time.

You might have a business making a million dollars a year.

No one wants to buy it.

So you sell all your trucks and trailers and get as much cash out as you and shut it down tomorrow.

Like that happens.

Which is wild.

Right?

Because there's value there.

Yes.

So I think it's a good thing.

There's no trust and confidence between buyer and seller.

I don't think vendor financing typically can be a thing you have.

They have to trust that you're capable to run the business and they're going to get their money in the long game.

And you got to trust that they're less so as the buyer, but you got to trust that they have a solid business.

They're selling you something that's that is worth what they say it's worth and that they're going to be invested in your ongoing success following that.

And it doesn't always like, it doesn't have to be 100%.

Under finance, if there's any variety, like you can have cash, bank and under finance in some deals you can have all three.

You can do bank and cash, you can do all cash, you can do bank and vendor financing, you can do any percentage shift that makes sense.

Often if there isn't as much trust in the deal, you'll have to put a certain amount of cash up front in the vendor finance to give the confidence to the seller that they're going to get their money out eventually.

Or they might need the money for whatever they want to do post business if they're looking at buying another business or doing something else.

And again most, in most cases I'm talking about people exiting because they're not exiting to go buy another business.

So no one's buying me out and I'm vendor financing them and then I'm going to buy another business maybe.

But more so people who are that retirement age who want to get out and go and retire.

It's a great opportunity for that situation.

Yeah.

One of the questions that I had was is this typically done through like a business broker or is this really like a one on one?

You go and approach the owner of the business and start that negotiation or start that ask, are you wanting to sell your business?

Like where.

How do you find these companies that are willing to do vendor financing?

As with anything, there's many ways to skin a cat, right.

There's a million different scenarios, right.

With that data.

Knowing that there's.

I can't remember the number, but it's something like 8 million businesses for sale in, in the United States right now or something to that effect.

There's they're out there, right?

And a lot of cases they're not for sale.

They don't, they would want to retire, but they don't know how and they don't have a succession plan and they're just not thinking about it.

A lot of people don't consider going to a business broker to list their business for sale.

Like some people just they are where they are with no outlook of how to resolve the problem or change it.

They think they're going to work forever.

In our case, I've had multiple business owners approach us who are in our space industry that like us are like our culture, like our reputation, see that there's potential value to us to buy them out, know that we'll probably pay them when we make an agreement.

Yeah, these types of things.

So in our case, they're coming to us.

But again, that took decades of building and then marketing and being known and everything else.

So it depends the way that you're going at it.

If you don't own a business or have a business, and if you're really aggressive, you might.

You're probably looking at business brokers, you're looking at businesses that are out there.

You're looking getting to know people and that own businesses that might potentially want to sell them eventually.

Yeah.

I don't like to share all my trade secrets, but, like, in a lot of cases, if I see business owners that I like and know that have really solid businesses and I know they're that age and they don't have succession plan, I started building a relationship with them because it's okay.

One, I'm absolutely getting value out of knowing them and being their friend as a another entrepreneur and business owner.

So we can add value to each other just by being friends.

And the other part is that if they get to know me and they trust me and they like me, they might see me as a great potential person to buy their business out sometimes.

Day.

Yeah.

Jory, like, I.

I look at you, you're 36.

35.

35.

Your company.

We talked about this last time.

Your companies together are worth probably about 80 million to $100 million.

Is that fair?

I think that would be very high.

I'll take it.

Sure.

We do.

50 million in revenue, and I would say we're probably worth 3.

Okay, so my question to you is that you have built your businesses massive.

You could retire and live like a king on a beach for the rest of your life if you wanted to.

What is it that keeps you in it?

What is it that.

That that has made it that.

I'm sure you've been approached with offers.

What is it that made you say now is not the time is?

What is it?

What keeps you in the business?

Yeah, we've had a prompt or two, but nothing too serious.

This business, like you said earlier, we didn't start or build this business with the intention of selling it.

I have teenage kids right now that I'd love that are interested in our businesses.

I'd love them to take it on to the third generation.

That was a dream of mine, so that's maybe part of it, too.

I think everybody has to do something.

I don't even believe in retirement.

I really think that we all are not meant to retire.

And when we retire, we die.

And we need Purpose, you need to work.

Some people are built like I'm built.

Built to lead is my podcast is I.

I know that I'm built that way.

I'm built to build things.

I'm built to lead people.

I'm built to have impact.

I'm built to help men become the best version of themselves.

And this is a great way for me to do that.

And so that the purpose that's tied into why I do business and not just trucking or mechanicing or construction is.

It's a bigger purpose than that.

And so whether it's this business or another business or a podcast or whatever it be, I know.

I feel.

I know what I'm meant to do and that I'm gonna do it.

And I just have it.

I have a drive in me that I don't know how to turn off.

And it.

It wants to do this.

And if I don't do it, I get weird.

So I keep doing it.

And I think it's a good thing.

Ed Mylett says it well.

He said I'm addicted to the expansion of my being.

And that just means that I am always trying to figure out how I can become a better person, I can have more impact, and I can better the world and society and people in general.

And when you're thinking that way, then growth is just gonna happen.

You can't stop it.

I joke year on years that I say we're not even gonna grow that this year, that means we're gonna grow probably less than 20%.

Yeah.

So just.

It happens organically.

When you live this way and you're looking to improve it, just.

That's the way it happens.

Yeah.

In my experience.

Was there like a point in your earnings as a business owner where the money didn't matter anymore?

Was there like, a point at which it was just like, it wouldn't have mattered whether you made an extra whatever, an extra $10,000 a month or not like it.

Is there really a point that you get to.

That the money doesn't really matter?

Yes.

And not for everybody, but I think for the people that they never hit that point.

They.

There's actually a huge negative to the greed and the need for more that drives them on that is, like, super.

It hurts them.

It hurts their spirit.

It hurts their person, pushes them towards depression and madness.

Essentially, in my mind, these guys just can never, ever have enough for the sake of earning more.

Yeah.

It's okay to be a billionaire if you're not doing it because you have to make more money.

Yeah.

But.

Yeah, There absolutely is.

I think again, there's a study out there that basically says after you make a half a million dollars a year, your lifestyle and your happiness, like your lifestyle will change, but your happiness does not.

You're peak, you can't, you don't get happier, you just get different.

Yeah.

And more like stuff or whatever it be.

And I've somewhat found that to be true is that at a certain point it's like I have everything that I want and more money doesn't change that other than I can make more impact.

And so then the money becomes influence and impact.

And so the more money you make, the more impact you have.

The more we can give away, the more people we can help, the more people I can employ.

EMPLOYEE Our business mission is not to make more money.

Money is not mentioned in our business.

Our mission is to create jobs for people and bring them into community.

And so when we can do that and help them make their lives better, essentially every person that we can.

And so if that's the goal, then money should come naturally, but it doesn't always.

So I'd like to say I don't worry about money, but when you're constantly growing at a huge pace, cash flow financials are always in your face all the time and it causes a lot of stress when you grow at the pace that we grow.

Maybe I could learn the lesson from that at some point.

I haven't yet.

But the reality is that yeah, there is a point where it doesn't matter anymore and you actually have once the stakes on the table, you have to refigure out what your reason is.

Because in the beginning, it's because I need to feed my family and I need to have freedom and comfort.

And once you get past that and you have that, then you have to find a better reason.

Yeah.

Because to me, that's what money's always meant to me is my goal is just to be free.

And ironically, with becoming a business owner, I've went the other way.

I've become less free on a certain level than I ever have, but with more opportunity to be free at some point than I ever have.

So it's, it's a weird jumbled mess where you would be mean.

And I agree because like you, you always are free.

That's the thing.

Freedom is in your mind.

It's not in what you're doing.

You could be in slavery and be mentally free, but the thing is about freedom is that to realize that whatever you're doing right now is a choice that you've Made.

And to come to terms with that and accept that, and if you don't like it, change it.

And so sometimes you think, I hate what I'm doing right now, and you go, okay, but I chose this.

And then I walk through it.

I know why I chose this.

I know why I hear it.

So this circumstance in particular might not be my favorite, but I did choose it because there's a bigger mission at hand, and I do care about that mission.

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's why I'm here right now.

And it doesn't matter what you're doing.

If you're out hiking, and you love hiking, there's still turmoil and hiking.

You can still get caught in a storm and almost die.

You can fall off a cliff.

You can hurt your knee.

Like, not every moment of every beautiful journey is bliss and joy.

Right.

There's trials and tribulations in everything, even the thing we love the most.

Yeah.

And so there's no perfect scenario.

And once you accept that and then.

And do the hard work just for the sake of the mission that you're on, you can take more joy and pride in it and know that it's bettering you.

The hard stuff, the frustrating stuff, the stressful stuff, it's making you better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I agree.

I'm very grateful for the opportunities that have come my way.

I'm grateful to have this show.

I'm grateful for everything that's happened.

I think just at times, there was always a part of me that was like, okay, the whole point of getting into entrepreneurship was to have more time, was to be.

To spend more time doing the things I really love.

And I don't get me wrong, I do.

And actually, what ended up happening was I fell in love with the work a little bit, which really was a bit of a surprise, to be honest, just from being someone who never really loved work, Work was something that I needed to do to do the things I wanted to do, but I really fell in love with the work when I started my own business development firm.

And then obviously, launching this podcast, like, this doesn't.

This is work, but it's not work.

Like, podcasting is super fun.

Like, I get to meet people like you.

We get to have great conversations, get to learn new things, get to make new friends.

There's a lot of perks to not work.

Right.

But the irony is that I've ended up deeper into my work than I ever thought I would be.

And I think there's still a part of me that's okay.

Maybe one day like, you'll have more time to do more vacations or do more like the fun things or the things that you would have considered freedom once upon a time.

I think, like you said, it's like you have to find happiness in the journey.

Maybe I do end up there.

Maybe I do get to that point where I make enough money that it's never like a question.

It's like I'm just happy.

But at the same time, I think I have to learn to be more happy with the journey because I'm probably going to spend more time in the journey than I am going to be spending more time at that.

That long foreseen freedom down the line.

I agree with that.

The only thing that I will say is that we can get into a place, especially as a textbook workaholic that I am, and my wife will confirm that I love the work, too, and almost any kind of work.

Like, if I'm in digging the ditch, I'm like, yeah, let's go.

So the problem is, when you do things without intentionality and beginning with the end in mind, things can go off the rails before you quite realize it.

Because if you love the work and you get in the work and you get in the grind and you keep going, but you lose the intention of the direction you're going, or you lose the intentions of the things that you genuinely care most about in your whole life, which might be your family, your kids, your spirituality, your health.

I'm a Core four guy, so I believe there's four things that are the main things that we're made up of and how it works.

And so if you lose the intentionality to make sure you're staying healthy on that balance.

Yeah, and I don't believe in balance, but in the reality is if you let any of these things fall off a cliff, it derails everything.

The whole train goes down.

If you work so hard and do everything with contention, it's you're just doing great at your podcast and you're doing your thing and you're doing your work and you're making money.

Things are rolling, but you're not paying attention to your health.

You're going to have a heart attack or you're going to have be hospitalized from exhaustion because you weren't taking care of your health and now your family's in trouble, your finances in trouble, your spirituality is in trouble.

Everything's in trouble because you let one thing fall off the rails.

And so this is when I say intentionality is like looking at the end goal of all the things and things you prioritize and hacking out the appropriate amount of time and energy to put into each.

And it's not 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%.

It's 100%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 100%.

You need to give 100% to each thing, the appropriate amount in the appropriate season without letting any of them fall down.

Because if you created your marriage because you're working really hard, it's all not going to matter anyways.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think it's really important to be intentional and understand where you're trying to go and keeping all those things in tune in the midst of all that so that you don't derail the whole machine.

Yeah, no, I love that.

I love that I struggle with it, but I love it.

Everybody struggles with it.

I do this.

This little bit of an exercise with my teen sometimes, and I go, okay, core four.

I want you to think of any random five people, and I want you to just judge them.

Totally judge them on how you think they're doing in the four quadrants.

There's almost nobody you're going to think of that's good on all four all the time.

Like, they're killing it in all four.

Everybody has their cross, the bearer, their thorn in the side or whatever.

Like, he struggled.

Hey, that guy struggles with this health, but he kills it at work, where that guy has always struggles to have good relationships, and his marriage is always a turmoil and his kids are not doing well, but, man, he hits the gym consistently.

Look at him.

So they can.

Everybody has their things that they struggle with are the ones that they kind of let bleed and lose out of the four, unless they're really on top of it and doing this well.

But the people who get all four really well live an amazing life.

Yeah.

And if you can think of a person who has all four things tuned in, their health, their financial and work life, their spirituality and mindset, and their relationships.

If they have all those things tuned in, they're living the dream life, and you see it on them like they're just the happiest person you'll ever meet.

I'm gonna have to have you back to just do another show on that, because that sounds like one of the most important lessons that can be done.

The problem is there's a lot of most important lessons to be learned in life, unfortunately.

Jory, I love talking to you, dude.

Thank you so much for coming back on today.

I appreciate it.

Yes.

There's been a good conversation.

We've meandered, like, a lot.

You're gonna name this podcast.

Every once in a while, there's a podcast that just goes on an exploratory adventure.

And this is one of them.

This is one of them for Cure.

Like, we're lost in the woods right now.

But you know what, there was a lot of great information thrown down.

I think there was a lot of lessons on acquisition.

And before we close up today, if we're talking to somebody, let's say you're talking to somebody who's listening to this right now and they are considering an acquisition, maybe one's on the table for them, or maybe they are looking at buying their first business.

What.

What advice would you give to them if you could only give them one piece of advice?

If I could only give them one, I would tell them to come have a meeting with me.

That takes two to three hours for me to explain everything.

I think, again, I think it's important to separate out the deal and the logistics of the deal.

And I wanted to talk more about logistics of acquisition in this podcast.

We've been going on forever now, but maybe another time.

But there's the deal and then there's logistics and the logistics and is so much different than the deal because you have to get, do I want to buy the business?

What's the business worth?

What are the terms you're going to work out?

How is this going to go?

And then you have to go, okay, now how am I going to do it?

Like, even if the finances and all that make sense now, I have to do it.

There's leadership that's required, there's people that are involved, there's retaining customers, retaining staff.

What the wishes of the owner are.

Is the owner leaving?

Are they staying?

And all this thing, Are they on site?

Are they off site?

Are you bringing them in?

Are you going to them?

That is when I look at a deal and I said this to you earlier, he said, I do the deal and I go.

If I can make the finances and the deal and the terms and all that work and I can see my way through, that's step one.

We talk about that.

And owner and I are on par.

Okay, check that's done.

Now we go to logistics.

And logistics will blow up any deal just as much as the terms and the finances and the equation.

Because if you can't do what is required to make that business successful, if you don't have the skills to go in and lead the team through what is going to be required through the course of Business.

If you don't have.

Like in my case, I can't go take over another business.

I don't have time for that.

So I have to find an operator, a leader, the right person that's going to fit to make sure their culture fits with our culture.

Like, I have a half a page of notes on logistics right now.

Who are their people?

What is their culture?

Do they fit with our culture?

Who's going to do leadership?

Who currently does leadership?

Do they have leaders in place?

Do I need to bring leaders in to put them in?

What's the trust level there between us and them?

Are we going to be hostile when we come in?

Are they looking for someone?

Do we have a relationship already?

There's this.

What are the threats that exist in their marketplace?

Do I have any experience dealing with other sites and locations and teaching culture?

Do I'm going to have to deal with them remotely or am I going to be on site?

There's just so much more in the logistics of doing the deal to be successful in an acquisition.

And that's a whole nother avenue after the deal's already been made.

You know what?

I think that's permission for us to have another show.

So maybe we'll just discuss that because I agree.

I think there's so much more to it than just the deal itself, the financial deal.

You're right.

It's a completely other ball game to then smash two companies together.

Right.

And do it well and do it in a way that it works.

Yeah, I agree.

And there's many ways.

There's 100 different ways to do that.

But you have to come up with an execution plan.

So you have to figure out the logistics, who's going to lead all the things that I just brought up.

You have to figure that all out and create an action plan.

And then you have to execute.

And the execution part is another.

Again, it's the third string of the thing.

So the deal can get blown up in at the deal point, it can get blown up at the logistics point, and it can get blown up at the execution point.

Because you can have the deal figured out and the logistics figure out, but you are unable to execute because of timing, because of legal, because again, I have another whole page of notes that we were open to talk about here, just about all of the potential pitfalls that you're not going to see in the deal and the logistics.

Right.

There's all kinds of liability issues.

There's legal, like a lawyer, a couple of lawyers can blow up any deal faster than anything else.

Yeah, if you let lawyers and accountants get involved and run start getting batten the ball back and forth here, they'll they can blow it up faster than you.

You can say boot and they'll charge you a lot to do it too.

Not to crap on lawyers and accountants, but if you let them get too involved in the deal before you have the deal and the logistics worked out, you're in for a world of hurt.

And I have experienced it and it's not fun.

I mean so there's a lot more to acquisitions that I could talk about.

I could probably talk for two hours on it, but it's the advice is just to make sure you understand the deal, the logistics and the execution.

Deal logistics and execution.

That's a great place to to leave off.

Jory and I do now now I want to have you back.

So we'll have to chat about that off air here about seeing if you want to come back for another one.

Wanting more.

Until next time, we have been chatting with Jory Evans, CEO of Evans Trucking, Evans Pro Developments and Evans HD Serial Entrepreneur.

Total rock star.

And if you love Jory, which we all do, check out his podcast, Built to Lead.

It is excellent and there are tidbits in there for leaders around the world.

Until next time, this has been episode 244 of the Business Development Podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.

This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists.

For more we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

see you next time on the Business Development Podcast.