Conversations With Coffey

 Demystifying Financing and Raising Capital for Franchise Businesses with Boris Katsnelson

• Guy Coffey • Season 2 • Episode 6

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In this episode I welcome Boris Katsnelson of Black Iron Advisors to discuss the intricacies of financing, M&A transactions, and raising capital for small businesses, particularly in the franchise space. 

Boris shares his extensive experience in investment banking, private equity, and franchising, offering insights into the different stages of financing from angel investors to private equity. 

We talk about Boris's hands-on experience with SpeedPro, the impact of private equity on franchise growth, and the importance of preparing for business exits. 

The conversation aims to demystify complex financial concepts for emerging franchisors and franchisees, emphasizing the value of early consultations with financial experts.

Boris talks about his client Saavi Home in the show:

https://saavihome.com/

Find out more about Boris and Black Iron Advisers here:

https://www.blackironadvisers.com/

Connect with Guy Coffey:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/guycoffey
Website: www.guycoffey.com
Instagram: @guycoffey
YouTube: @guycoffey

 Welcome to Conversations with Coffey with me, Guy Coffey. I've owned independent businesses. I've been a franchisee of a global brand for over 17 years, and I co founded and successfully exited our own franchise brand. This podcast is dedicated to growing the lives and businesses of entrepreneurs everywhere.

by sharing conversations with successful owners and some of my own experiences and insights. So please grab a cup of coffee and let's just dive right into today's episode. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coffey with me, Guy Coffey, and today's special guest, Boris Katsnelson from Black Iron Advisors. Today, what we're going to do is demystify Financing, M& A transactions, and raising capital for small businesses, mostly in the franchise space. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Boris to introduce himself, his background, and uh, what he's doing.

Awesome. Guy, thanks for having me so much on the show. Really excited to have this conversation. So I guess you could call me a finance guy turned business builder to, uh, back to finance guy. So I've been in undergrad at Emory. Went into investment banking, large cap, bulge bracket, Wall Street type investment banking, family offices, MBA from Wharton. 

Then, uh, got the bug to, uh, kind of get back into private equity, but then help turn around companies. So I did that in consumer products, uh, franchising, which we'll spend a good bit of time touching on both as a franchisor and a franchisee. Two systems. Then I did some work in consumer products again in e commerce specifically.

And then I did some stuff in real estate before sort of turning back into kind of core finance, which is what I do now with Black Iron Advisors. And we're a boutique investment bank. We are focused on what we call the lower middle market, which is Kind of one to 7 million EBITDA companies or cashflow.

Typically that translates into, I say, eight to 80 of revenue, million of revenue, but we really like to serve people freely. So I tell friends of mine, you know, even though maybe your company or your friend's company may not be the size that fits for us. We tend to like to serve entrepreneurs and that's where our hearts are.

And our model is very much aligned with that entrepreneur, which we'll get into a little bit more later, but we like to bring, you know, the breadth of experience that we have in the industry. So I tend to spend a lot of time in franchising given the experience and also consumer products and in blue collar trade.

So that's where we spend the bulk of our time at Well, what a background. I mean, someone that was actually in the trenches and not just looking at it from a financial perspective, which can kind of be siloed sometimes, and maybe you're not so familiar with the operational aspect or the marketing or things like that.

You've been on both the franchise or in the franchisee side. I know you've actually worked with SpeedPro, correct? Correct. Tell us a little bit about that just so we can get a, like a flavor for your experience in franchising, because I think that really kind of speaks to your ability to walk in the shoes of the people that you're, you're representing now.

And I think that's a big deal and it's a big differentiator because the, the, most of the people that I've worked with and, and this kind of thing is they've never been in the franchise or a franchisee side, but tell us about your experience. Yeah, absolutely. So in  2014, I kind of had a bug to go and buy and run a company.

So I had come off of a consumer products company where we helped turn that business around and had some great wins there. And I wanted to move the family back to Colorado where we know each other. Great place to be, obviously. And the first deal that crossed my desk was not speed pro, but it was a franchise or and and I just really fell in love with the space the way to, you know, help Uh, entrepreneur scale and grow their business.

Well, where we can provide the systems, the branding, the tools, all the things, right? That, that, you know, go into being a great franchise, a brand. And then, you know, a couple of months down the line, we, we got introduced to SpeedPro, which was, we're a sign and graphics business. So we had a little over a hundred units at the time.

It was in a area developer model, which means that. You know, basically folks were had territories that were typically states. Larger states were chopped up a little bit finer, but they would help recruit franchisees, support them and also operate their own location. And speed pro really did vinyl graphics, but also it transformed into printing on large materials, like even wood panels that would go under a flatbed printer, all kinds of stuff, big.

Great big graphics is the tagline. Well, while we came up with that while we were there with a marketing agency, and it's still the tagline that's used today. Uh, so really fun ride. We grew that business to 135 locations. We had put a lot of systems in place there that, that the founder had really kind of one of these opportunities where.

That model that I was pursuing, which was, it's called entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is quite popular these days was to, you know, a business owner was ready to retire. And I was kind of the younger guy ready to step in with some NBA tactics and techniques to kind of go grow and scale the business.

And that's what we did. And so I ran that for three and a half years as CEO, and then, uh, sold my equity to my partner, uh, family office, uh, and, and help recruit, uh, my successor. So it was a good outcome for everybody. Nice. What a quick ramp up on the learning curve, I'm sure. Yeah. And it sounds like it was a successful venture and got it, understood a lot of things, put new systems in place, grew the value, sold it to someone you know, like and trust and moved on, right?

Yep. That's, that sounds like an outcome that a lot of people listening. to this show would probably like. So that's, I wanted to recap that for him. 

I wanted you to be on the show because we're, we're friends and, uh, you know, you're, you're wicked smart and I knew that you could help us  kind of demystify all the terms that emerging franchisors or franchisees even some with. You know, multiple units, lots of units. They hear all the time and nobody wants to look dumb ever.

So they might not ask these questions, but I'm not afraid. So I'll ask you to just give us like, who are the players that are, are buying emerging franchisors or helping them out, you know, in this process? It could be years ahead of time. Who is their most likely client? Uh, different stages of development or maybe different industries and what's the difference and how could people have conversations with these people?

So let's check the, let's just take it one step at a time. So we have equity investors, we have, we have debt options to raise capital. Um, I think a lot of people understand the debt portion, you know, a lot of it's driven by SBA loans for smaller deals, obviously with a 5 million cap, it's, it's not going to be for the bigger deals.

But then we talk about. Angel investors and venture capitalists and investment banks and private equity run us through those four things. And if I think it's something that I wouldn't have understood a few years ago, I'm going to ask you to summarize. So yeah, for sure. Early stage. Yeah. It's, it's a lot of, you know, angel investors, which are a lot, a lot of times those are friends and family, quite frankly, that, that, you know, they know you, they trust you, they like you, but there's not a lot to show for.

The business quite yet, right? Like it's, it's just a, Hey, I've known ghee for years and I know I can trust them to your point and, and I'll throw some money behind it. It's tough to value those businesses, right. In terms of like, what is it worth? It's more of an idea. Maybe you've gotten a unit off the ground, but it's still very early days.

It's not making a lot of money. Uh, there's not a lot of revenue to, to, so you've got friends and family and, and there are some institutions that kind of play in the angel investing and that. I would also sort of morph into venture capital, which is venture capital is early stage investors. And there's people that dive into that in a lot of detail.

I'm not a venture capitalist. I've been more in the more advanced companies that are later stage, which is where private equity comes in, which we'll come back to the venture capital.  That you hear these terms seed stage, as you can imagine, those are early, right? See, then you get the series and then there's the letters that come about ABC, whatnot, right?

It's all it is, is they just add letters to it, right? Like an Uber before they went public would have been like in a series, like towards the end of the alphabet. You know, you type raises. I don't know exactly what it was, but, but normally it's ABC is what you kind of hear. Maybe you get to a D and E, but you know, when you're getting into those kinds of rounds, those are venture capital firms.

I haven't seen many players in, in venture. that get into franchising. There's one recent sort of exception of that was a client that we worked on last year. If I may, I'll tell you about that a good way to exemplify it. It's a brand called a daisy, uh, like the, like the flower. And this, this brand was started by executives in franchising that had a lot of success.

They saw A kind of a white space in basically smart home and putting a consumer brand around smart home technology, right? We all have so many connected devices, internet goes down. You've got, you know, uh, audio systems, video systems, security systems. None of us know how it works, right? So, so Daisy came up with this idea that, hey, we want to go and, and build a brand around this, do it right.

So they approached it from, uh, let's go buy these individual mom and pops around the country and build these as corporate locations, and then also franchise with greenfields as well. So Our client last year as a, as a friend here in Denver, his name's Gavin Lancey savvy home. We can link to that in the show notes.

Sure. We helped him sell savvy home, which was a a multimillion dollar operation doing all those things in, in the Denver Metro market. He had a couple of franchises. He had a lot of assistance built out to, you know, do the Greenfield franchising. And Daisy had, um, back to venture capital side, they had raised venture Really?

Because They had it. They had a plan. They had a plan to go and buy and roll up these groups like savvy home, others around the country and to go franchise in a kind of a joint strategy. So they raised venture money to have a bit of a war chest to go buy companies and then also have this greenfield operation and franchising.

And so they raised, I think it was maybe a series a round at that point and got the capital to go do it.  I would say not that common in franchising that I see is, is venture money. Most folks are, are kind of later stage. They kind of get there on their own. A lot of franchises that I see, gee, I don't know about your experience, but they, they tend to bootstrap a lot of the business.

Right. And, and, and frankly people don't like to talk about this maybe as much in franchising, but initial franchise fees. tend to fund a lot of the operations of a business, right? The new franchisees coming into it. And that's just kind of the reality of the business.  If you like this show, would you do me a huge favor and share it with one more person?

It's super quick and easy to do, and it will help me impact more people in a positive way. Thanks. Now back to the episode.  There's one thing when you say rounds. You know, I understand that someone can have a Series A, a Series B, Series C or whatever they're naming them. And to be honest, that's still a little bit murky to me.

So tell us about that. It's like, so choose a tech company. It doesn't even have to be franchising that maybe, you know, like Airbnb or something like that. At one point they probably had a Series A, like they went out,  worked with someone like you, like an investment banking firm. You know, put their, put all their business case together, the market size, you know, like lots and lots of data.

And usually those people have had some kind of success in the, in the past. Like once you've had success in the past, it's way easier to raise money. I do know that, you know, and they're like, one of our family members started a company and eventually as a first organic baby food company, and they had eventually sold to Dannon.

So super, super big exit, super successful. And then she had an idea for, you know, another company, which we just saw commercial for last night when we were watching Amazon prime, it's called love. Every it's like children's toys things.  And it was so much easier for her to raise money the second time around.

Cause she's, she's, she's a big hitter already. Right. And so when they, when she made that case, they're like, yeah, we'll do this. So like someone like that is like, they raise, they raise their initial funding. And then why would they have subsequent rounds? You know, like if someone didn't know, they'd be like, well, they ran out of money.

So they needed to raise more money. And I'm sure that's not the case. So why would they have subsequent rounds? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, right. So a lot of it in venture, which I would just in full transparency, not my area of specialty. We were more established companies, but but I know enough to be dangerous.

I would tell you is that, you know, normally venture capitalists like to fund the business to. Certain milestones effectively like to, to prove out X, Y, Z, right. In the case of, I don't know that your, your, your family member exactly what they're doing, but they're Uber. It may be, you know, we want to basically prove out that we can open in three markets, right?

And so once we've proven that out and we funded that, then we want to go and open in 20. And then we may be able to want to get into another type of service or things like that. So it's usually. Milestone based in, in my experience when, when they raise, uh, at different rounds and, and also for the founders, you know, there's, there's dilution at every time you raise money, which dilution means I start out, if I'm the sole owner, I own a hundred percent.

I go raise money because I need to, you know, give away equity and I need the capital to go execute on the plan. Now I sell say 20 percent of my company. Now I own 80, but I have say round numbers, 20 million in my pocket to go execute on it. Well, the next time, you know, my valuation might not be. I made a, a big number to begin with.

A hundred million is way too, nobody's raises at a hundred to begin with, right? Just, just for context. Maybe at 10 if they've got some PR prior experience. But point is, right now, I've proven out, like the Uber example, I'm in three markets now. My valuation is gonna go up to maybe $50 million and now I'll sell, you know, I'll now, it's a lot less dilution for me if I need 5 million to get to that next sort of stage.

Then I'm selling 10 percent of my company. Whereas when it was a 10 million valuation previously, if I need 5 million, I'm selling 50 percent of my company, right? So there's sort of the give and take between investors wanting to see progress before they deploy capital. And the entrepreneur also wanting to, you know, sell the loot themselves less and sell less of their company.

So there's a bit of that dichotomy going on, which is healthy.  Yeah. Okay. So I could ask more questions on that, but I imagine for the, the founder, which is the position I always think of, think of is it probably becomes once there's more proof of concept and more momentum behind it, you can actually raise more money for less, for less equity later on once it's proven further.

That makes a lot of sense. A hundred percent. Even if you knew you had this big number to raise, you probably don't want to do that in one big lump sum because at that point in time, it's going to cost you a lot more money.  That makes sense. All right. Well, one thing that's, uh, cleared up in my mind now. So thank you. 

And then we get to private equity and, um, that's the, you know, the most that  I see a lot of. Activity in franchising from private equity companies, our own personal experience with selling Frenchies. Tell us about that and  you know, how does that work and what's, what's good about that from the PE company's perspective and from the founder's perspective and why does it happen so much in franchising, do you think?

So that's where we've, I've spent a lot of my career, right? So when I bought speed pro. We were effectively a private equity firm with a single asset purpose, right? Where I was going to go in and run it. The most traditional private equity firms that you see out in the market, you know, common names that you see are Princeton equity these days, right?

Riverside folks like that. Um, there's many others. And we, we interact with those guys all the time and what we do. And we'll talk about investment banking, our role in this, but, but private equity really. You know, as an asset class people, individuals, if you're a creditor, investor or qualified purchasers, you can invest in private equity and they pull capital from individuals, but a lot from, you know, limited partners that are, you know, the colorado state teachers fund and the fireman's fund and whatnot across the country and they pull this capital and their goal is to go buy into a business.

They typically use it. Leverage or another word for debt to, you know, you could say juice their returns a little bit, meaning they're borrowing money. I'd say even, you know, 10 percent maybe in this market today, probably a little bit lower than that for bigger companies, and they don't have to put all equity to it.

So it'll, it'll increase their returns, but they're really looking for ways that they can. Add value. What is, you know, quite common in the business, especially in franchising is how do we grow the system? Right? How do we grow cash flow to this, you know, to the business? And then ultimately, maybe add, you see a lot of multi brand players in a, in a niche, you know, that Well, with your Frenchies experience and what Riverside has done there, and you can talk to that better than I can, but you know, they're looking to build a quote unquote platform.

You hear that term all the time, right? So they, they want to build similar assets to aggregate higher levels of cash flow. And then you're sort of, playing this game of getting to the next buyer tier, right? So we sell entrepreneur companies that we call consider lower middle market. As I said, in the beginning, one to 7 million, then we're, we'll sell those to private equity firms.

And then they'll try to aggregate a bunch of assets, grow each individual one, and then get to different tiers, 10 million to be, but our 15 or 20, 25, so on and so forth. When we get to those bigger numbers. Then you've got these, you know, groups like KKR and Blackstone that play when you get into the 25, 50 million of EBITDA companies and that's sort of it.

But, but what people like to your question about franchising is as people would expect, right, royalties are quite. Exciting for people, right? And the royalty revenue, you know, that a franchise or and that's part of what was my allure and buying speed pro was we can do kind of the things at a group level, right?

Where we can build a great brand. We could spend the money on systems and all these things to enhance our franchisees who are the ones really doing the blood, sweat and tears, you know, doing the work, getting the clients and those royalties go up as you know, the average unit volumes go up and more franchises, more dots on the map.

And make it more successful. That's really the job of the franchise or, and when that works great, it works fantastically well, everybody wins in that dynamic. And at the core of it,  I think when I look at it is unit economics to the franchisee is so paramount in that realm. Yeah, no, that's great. You know, what we've seen, you know, happen over and over again is in most cases, the, the PE company comes in, they buy a franchise or whether it's early stage or later stage, And if they have a platform company, they already have, they have shared services.

You know, they're much more professional. The biggest thing for us when we had our, you know, and ours was not a gigantic deal by in, in the realm of, of these deals at all, but they treated it just like it, It was a big deal, whether it was a hundred million dollar deal or our size deal, they had the same players involved, the, the big, the big law firms, you know, the big accounting firms, the big auditing firms, because they don't really want to miss and it's just easier for them to run a system the same way, whether it's a big deal or a small deal, and then they have.

You know, these super, you know, like  in our case, like emerging franchise, or like I hired a fractional CFO, like three years before we sold, you know, to, to help us prepare for sale and things like that. But before that, it was just us doing it, you know, and all of a sudden you get everybody involved in the, the brand is.

Usually like an uber professional and they have systems that, you know, everybody does the same exact thing and they can increase the value that way. And then they put these systems in place that help the franchise system grow. And that usually is a benefit to the franchisees as well. Almost every time.

So it's, it's a good thing, you know, cause sometimes you hear about like, Oh, and then the PE came, company came in and, you know, things were a lot different. Like, yes, they're different, but they're usually just more professional. Um,  and they help people make more money. Right. But everybody does get treated the same way.

You know, I think, and that's not always the case when a system is really small and growing, there's some exceptions that are made that actually don't, don't help them in the valuation process, but it makes people feel more warm about it. So private equity set up really to enhance value, right? Up to your point about what, what are they there?

It, it can sound scary, big and scary. You know, you see movies around, you know. Greed around private equity and wall street, but it you get down to it. They're humans. I Think I'm fairly human and personable and all that nice guy. I can vouch for you  And and you know, they're they're just People that are that are trying to create value for folks and it's it's scale it systems.

It's all the things that you mentioned 100 percent and that's where they're they're really at the core of it as a mentioning right unit economics to the franchisees is what they're trying to drive and successful franchisees. You know, breed great validation for other franchisees coming in the system, growing unit economics, and everybody wins, right?

That's why, you know, it's, you know, the old tagline in franchising is like, you're in business for yourself, but not by yourself, right? And it's,  it may be trite, but it's very true. And then the systems that really work, they really, really do work well. Yeah. And when, when, uh, an emerging franchise or gets purchased by a sophisticated PE company, you're, you're dealing with a whole different level of support in terms of people, tools, you know, processes, you know, they can afford to buy the best, you know, territory mapping system that's available out there that, that nobody as an individual franchise or when they're emerging would ever be able to. 

Right. You know, they have, they have better tools and, and they do things like this all day long and they've done it multiple times. So not trying to sell people on selling to private equity, but it is, it's generally good for the franchisees. And that's, that's kind of the lens that we've always looked at things through because if the franchisees do well, everybody else involved as well.

And if they don't do well, donezo, like it doesn't lie, it doesn't last at all.  If you're interested in learning more or from our guests today, please check out the links in the show notes. If you want to learn more about me, please check out my LinkedIn at Gee Coffee. That's G U Y C O F F E Y. Or for more personal and behind the scenes info, check me out on Instagram.

Which is at the same handle at Gee Coffee. Now let's get back to the episode. One of the things when I was going through this, cause you know, even, even with, I had some experience in this, but there was, there were certain things that I would, I would hear, or I would think about, but I wouldn't do because I didn't, to be honest, I didn't want to look stupid. 

You know, and a lot of people in the beginning, emerging franchisors, or maybe franchisees that have enough units that like, Hey, this might be of interest to an investment group one way or another, you know, they're, they don't have this,  um, experience in this process of. Valuation of selling and what the process looks like.

And you hear it so much. You think everybody else around you knows everything about it. So one of the things that I learned from talking with you and my own experience is like, it's a conversation. You can have  a conversation with a professional that does this all the time and learn so much. And I know that you have shared with Blackiron advisors that you're working with people for sometimes years before.

They're ever actually even going to be ready to do a transaction, but you want to step in earlier, get to get to know them, maybe provide some guidance just from your own experiences and have this conversation. And I'm going to go back to how we started this out. Like the demystification of this is huge and it can happen in some conversations.

And I would encourage people to have these conversations because. You hear about it so much, and this is the exit that most people want to have, right? Right. And having those conversations. So tell me, how does someone, obviously we'll have all your contact information and things like that, but in general, how has it happened before where someone reaches out to you for informational purposes, then it becomes a relationship.

And then down the line, you become the person that's helping drive their transaction and getting the most value for their company. How does that happen? Yeah. Great question. I mean, usually. We meet folks through  Referrals or they, they, they see us, you know, see me on a podcast or someone that,  you know, has known me for a while, usually is how we'll get connected to someone that they're like, Oh, you should chat with Boris because as you said, you know, most people are, they don't do this every day.

It's what I've done most of my career, whether I've been on the investment banking side or the private equity side. It feels comfortable to me because that's what I do. Right. But most people, they're good at building their company and they know that really well. And, uh, but we, we get introduced early.

Usually, you know, certainly we'll talk to people if they're ready now, but it's, it's always great to start that process early on because there are things that we can guide them on in terms of, you know, what, what the market ultimately is looking for. Cause we're in those conversations every week, uh, with, with You know, quote unquote, the buy side, which is what private equity is.

Right. So we can kind of give them that direction. We're working right now early with a multi unit franchisee has about a dozen units in a system, and he wants to, you know, ultimately not. Exit fully, and there's lots of ways to do it. You can sell 100 percent of your business. You can sell a minority stake, or you can sell somewhere in between minority being under 50%. 

And there's different things that the market will be looking for, right? Certain level of maturity of those locations. So you'll, you'll get credit for having started locations, but you won't get full credit as if it's all the way at maturity, which may be in this case might be three years where, you know, you know, I know you're in the fitness business, right?

Your, your plan of fitness, you know, in, um, I bet you in six months is not doing the cash flow that it's doing in year three or four, like no way near, right? Nobody knows you're there. You haven't built the membership base, things like that, right? So we can get in early and say, okay, what's your objective ultimately?

And people that may be, I want to work in a different capacity and I'm working today. Right. Which may mean, okay, I need to bring in a team to basically if I want to go away in three years and  retire, then I need a, I need a senior leader in that company. So I'm not running that business again. Some people look at it in a combination of it as say, I need a certain dollar amount that this is my last, you know, I'm in my sixties and I want this to be my last hurrah and I need 10 million or 20 million to kind of, you know, make it right.

And we can say. Okay, if 20 million is your number, then we may need to see EBITDA at this level to be really clear. And maybe you're 70 percent of the way there. So what do you need to go from, you know, here to there, right? And, you know, we're the capital markets experts as part of the team that folks put together.

And we can be, Uh, intimately involved in and quarterback a lot of that, but we'll bring an exit planner, a CPA to the extent that they, that, you know, our client doesn't have those folks to really, you know, round out the team with the right expertise to get them to their ultimate goal. And our play in this whole thing is just, you know, we want to serve entrepreneurs.

Well, we, we don't require official engagement or mandate along the way. We just simply say, look, we want to share. And be helpful, bring the resources to bear and bring you that capital markets expertise to and tell you what the market's looking for. And then we'll check in periodically by folks that are, you know, exit planners or prep for sale.

Folks will kind of do that more coaching along the way. And then, you know, we just built a lot of goodwill along the way. And typically that works out pretty well because we've gotten to know him really well and we're not. You know, we're not in their pockets the whole time, right? Which we were, we're, we get paid quite well when we, when we exit and sell a company for somebody, but we want to be along for that journey.

And, and again, no cost to the client. It's just, let's build that relationship and do it very authentically. I haven't been in the capital market expertise, uh, industry as long as you have or at all, actually, but I think that's pretty rare where you're willing to,  to work with folks ahead of time. You know, without, because as you know, cause you thought I was crazy, I ran my, I ran my own process for selling Frenchies and went down the path with a bunch of different people.

It worked out, but having access to that capital expertise, it's a big,  every business is going to be exited somehow. It's either going to be, you know, handed down, um, generationally to a different family member or something like that, or it's going to close or it's going to sell, you know? And so if you're building something,  I think it behooves you to know.

What the market is going to look at it like, you know, like, what are the, what are the, what are the high points and what are the areas that need a little polishing, you know? Um, and so I think that's pretty rare because, you know, I got quoted from a few different investment banking firms, not yours, a lot of money, so much so that was like, well, I better try to do this on my own, you know, and that was, you know, it was, it was eyeopening.

You know, and, and, and some of the things that when I did my own process, you know, some, some, some PE companies really liked our development pipeline, you know, our sold not opens and others saw it as a detriment to our value. And it's, since it's your baby, you're like, Oh my gosh, you know, my, they called my baby ugly,  you know,  having someone in your corner.

It's just like, no, like, I wish I would've had that. Like someone like you, because like, no, your baby is ugly to that person. But like that same feature is going to be like a real selling point for, for other private equity companies. Cause it seemed like they all had their own checklist. And then one thing before we land, the plane is here is.

You know, you had mentioned you, PE is, PE is the buy side, right? Yep. So they are buying it. And the flip side of that is the sell side is the investment banker. Correct. I was in franchising for 10 years before I realized that. I, you know, I just thought it was like some investment bankers bought things and some private equity companies bought things.

I didn't know that it was a different, different side of the transaction. So, um, I hope this is, has helped our listeners, obviously. I'm going to have all your contact information. So if someone's got questions and wants to reach out to you, which I encourage people to do, um, besides just being a nice guy, Boris is unbelievably smart and unbelievably experienced, not just in the capital markets, but also from the franchise side and a business operation side, which I.

Think is pretty rare. So I would encourage you, if this is something that's going to be on your path at some point in time, have the conversation earlier, because that always helps for preparation. So Boris, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and your time with us today. Really, really appreciate you.

And if I can ever reciprocate some way, somehow, please let me know, but thanks again, really appreciate your time and sharing all your knowledge today. Yeah, it's been great chatting with you today. And yeah, like you said, we're happy to serve people and. Reach out if we can be helpful and we'll let you know how we can best help you or refer you to other folks in our network that we think are great for what you need at the time.

And yeah, great to be friends with you and look forward to more conversations. Perfect. Thanks. Take care.