• 40:08
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Veteran business ownership, Patriot Growth Capital, E-commerce, SBA loans, due diligence, business acquisition, veteran training, business transition, entrepreneurial grit, business opportunities, business growth, business partnerships, business challenges, business success.
SPEAKERS
Zack Miller, Damon Pistulka
Damon Pistulka 00:08
All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am so excited for our guest today because we’ve got Zach Miller in here from Patriot Capital or Patriot growth capital. Excuse me, get my notes in front of me, and today we’re going to be talking about helping veterans build their future through business ownership. And Zach, so excited to have you just we were just talking ahead of time before we got on. You guys just closed the business. Oh, my goodness, so much to talk about.
Zack Miller 00:40
Yes, sir. Thanks for having me. Damon, excited to be here.
Damon Pistulka 00:43
Yeah, yeah. So, Zach, let’s just talk a little bit about, let’s, let’s back it up here just a moment, and think about what really got you into this, into helping veterans build their future and help connect them with business, purchasing a business.
Zack Miller 01:01
Oh, my goodness. To keep it short and sweet, you know, I’d been in the startup world for 15 years. Kept getting gobbled up by the saps the sales forces. It was all these technology or media things, yeah, Oracle, good, net, and then Learfield acquired the last company that I was, the startup that I was a part of, and I, you know, had a really amazing opportunity to build some first party audience products and some digital products that they’d never had before. Learfield represents 171 college universities and their athletic programs. So that could be women’s tennis to, you know, Alabama football, right? And beyond Vanderbilt baseball. So I got to help build some really cool products there. And then actually came in to help manage national accounts across the SEC and the ACC for them, and wrote a really cool wave. But you know, I always knew I wanted to do something bigger, something on my own, control my future, whether that was be a financial advisor or sell insurance products where I controlled my own book logistics, I looked at everything, and I had a ton of ideas I could I could create something from scratch and go raise the funding and ultimately dilute myself and have a board of advisors that are dictating what I’m building. This. Didn’t really want to bootstrap it like that. So, you know, it was, it was kind of like an epiphany I had, you know, Cody Sanchez was getting pretty big about four years ago, and I was thinking to myself, I’m going to go buy vending machines or a laundromat or storage units, just kind of, you know, what’s really hot and kind of overcrowded space now, but I was at a mastermind retreat, the legendary mastermind community. Tommy breed love leaves it and all my partners have stemmed from that. You know, I kind of put it out there to the crew that, you know, I’m going to figure a way to get out of the rat ways I was, I was on the road seven days a week, you know, at Alabama during the week, helping their sales team close deals, working some national partnerships, then with CEOs or CMOS in the suite on the sidelines in the locker room, where their families Saturdays, right? And then I’m back in an airport on Sunday, touch, touch home base and go back out. I did not want to continue to live that life, so I kind of put it out to the mastermind group that I’m going to buy something and I’m going to figure out a way to replace, even I can replace as a third of my income, just pay my mortgage, keep food on the table. That would be better than making millions of dollars and never be at home. So that’s kind of what spurred it. When I put that out into the world, my business partner and fighting crime, John Bates, kind of nudged me. He was right there in the room with us, and he said, Hey, man, what have we? What have we? Went in together, raised money, bought businesses, and trained veterans how to own and operate them. And I chewed on that for a minute. The big thing here is, you know, Bates has done 26 years in the Navy. My other partner has done it almost 10 years in the Army, another 120, plus years in the Coast Guard. My both my parents are Marines. I was actually conceived on in Camp Lejeune, and lived in base housing and drank that, that delicious thirst quenching water. Don’t worry, I am with Morgan, and Morgan, I’m, you know, I’m on the list. But, you know, that’s, that’s how it all kind of stemmed. And when he kind of threw that at me, you know, I looked at my parents lives, you know, and I learned a ton from them, right? They pushed me really hard. I mean, they’re Marine, right? So they, they push hard. And I started to notice a correlation, and something that I was aware of. But when I was chewing on this idea, made me really look deeper into it. And watched mom kind of go the corporate route, Dad go to the entrepreneur route. Both had, you know, their downfalls. In many ways, it wasn’t personally them. It was the businesses that they were working with, the people they were dealing with, some unethical things that were happening in those businesses. 2001 obviously, you know. Up 2008 right? All these big things that kind of shifted their careers and stalled them out, or, you know, we’re losing an account or not be able to get paid from this guy. And I just kind of noticed that they both went different routes, and, you know, they both, they both found success in those routes, but they didn’t, ultimately, one, my dad didn’t have contracts in the right, legal things in place, and legal team on his side, right when people could not pay him, right, when the housing market crashed, and a lot of people dealt with that, right? So this is an anomaly. It’s just, you know what you don’t know, what you don’t know. Yes, mother, being part of corporate America, rose the ladder, kind of next in line to be that SVP, cmo level at WebMD World Trade Center. Stuff happens 911 and obviously, you know, everybody you know, clinches their pocketbooks. They make cuts. She was removed right from from WebMD, furloughed, basically, and then ultimately took a package. So all that stuff you know, again, really made me know that I wanted to be a little bit more in control, whatever God would allow. But that was really the motivator for me, like, if I could give veterans the opportunity to come in and learn how to run a business, they don’t need the money, they don’t need to know how to run a business. They just have to have the grit and willingness to learn and be coached, which I know they do. I can teach them how to fish, and then they can run and operate businesses for us, ultimately, own those businesses that we run. And the goal is to create, you know, veteran millionaires, basically. And you know, our whole tagline is we want to change veteran family trees through business, right? And that’s by teaching them how to fish, giving them the keys to the car when they’re ready, and allowing them to really own their future.
Damon Pistulka 06:45
Yeah, that’s so cool. That’s so cool. So let’s, let’s talk a little bit, because a lot of people don’t understand the challenges that veterans have when they’re transitioning out, or have they been out for a while and transitioning in the private sector. Talk about that a little bit. And that what you get to talk with people about and their their challenges there?
Zack Miller 07:07
Yes, sir. I mean, you know, when you are on the front lines, right, when you are stationed, when you are going operation through operation, much like an athlete, right? You’re told where to be, when to be there, what to do, right? The mission objective, you get your three meals a day. If you’re lucky, it’s, it’s real food, probably MREs and whatever you can scavenge. But you know, you you have a schedule. There’s a plan, right? They point you in the direction you go, yeah, training for it, you go, execute when you get out of the military that is no longer there, right? And I it all comes back to me for purpose, right? Like there’s no purpose. And then what you’re told, like one of my business partners, who was medically retired due to a botched surgery, right? That the army, you know, that he needed because of his trigger finger, you know, people were telling him to go load boxes for UPS or FedEx, right? And this guy had, had led massive missions and big teams, right? Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan, done some really crazy stuff, but ultimately, he’s a leader right now. He runs a massive nonprofit. He’s a partner in this, right? He’s doing, he’s doing killer stuff, but that’s what you know, the general public, you know, the civilian life kind of looks at these veterans in some way, right? Like we don’t need you to shoot and kill, we don’t need you to to hold the front lines. We don’t need you to, you know, evacuate people like this is, this is corporate America, and I think that they, they’ve got it all twisted, and there’s a lot of good corporations out there that are now doing it the right way with the right recruiting methods, but these men and women come out, and they all they need is a purpose, and they also they just want an opportunity, a door open, because they’re going to work their asses off and they’re ultimately going to climb that ladder. That’s what they want to do. But what I really find in the veteran communities, they lack the purpose, and they’re working in somebody else’s mail room with no career growth opportunity, and that’s a downer when you’ve been doing things right, and you come back out and you’re kind of stalled out and wondering, you know, I can’t get ahead because I’m not being given the opportunity. That’s, that’s, that’s a dream killer, ultimately. So, you know,
Damon Pistulka 09:20
oh, I think he cut out for a second there. Hopefully he’ll be right back, because that was awesome. Again. We have Zach Miller with us today from Patriot growth capital. We’re talking about. There he is. He’s back, already, back, already. Here we go. I do you might just something must have just clicked, but that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yes, sir. It’s all about the purpose. Yeah, and give another purpose. And yeah, because I don’t really, you can talk to people over and over, but they don’t understand the challenge of veterans transitioning in the private sector from the very thing that you just said, is they could be leading a lot of people. In charge of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes, of equipment, and hundreds of lives, 1000s of lives, and come to try to find a job, and it’s, you know, a career path outside of that, and they just can’t. And this is, this is such a waste of talent for us in the United States, that if we and I think as trying to get more and more people in educated understanding this, it really helps. But when we can do that, and when we see the people actually able to do that, and see how successful they are, I think it’s just a wonderful opportunity, because on the flip side of that, we have far too many veterans that are that are stuck in this loop, and it’s a bad loop, yep. And isn’t it, like, it’s close to, like, 30 veterans a day.
Zack Miller 10:50
Kill them, yeah, yeah. They say 21 but I know it’s the numbers more than Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 10:54
it’s so when. So it’s you. One is too many. And, and that’s the thing that I think these people have gone out and they’ve they’ve served their country, done, done their best work for us, and then we, we do not treat it right now. I’m just so glad that we can have you here today. Zach, I’ll get off my my little soapbox for that, because I think everybody out there that’s not considering veterans as a first line of great candidates for your next leadership position, because if they have a purpose, they will want to help and dig in and do what they need to do
Zack Miller 11:30
to to get things done. Yeah, and the grit, you know, yeah, you know, if you want somebody to actually come in and learn, be coachable, malleable, take action, bring solutions, not problems. These are the men and women you’re looking for.
Damon Pistulka 11:44
Yes, yes. So now you went out, you started raising money. You’re getting things put together to be able to help buy businesses, and then eventually partnered or pair those businesses with veteran owners, and then over time, allow the veterans to buy that business?
Zack Miller 12:02
Yes, sir. So we know, you know, coming. The beautiful thing about the government in America, right? Is they typically come out and they’re eligible for SBA loans, right? They have, they have the ability to do that. So let’s just say, you know, the business is too big for an SBA loan, which maximum is $5 million from the SBA. We can work out creative seller financing terms and notes like we want to. We want the veteran to own the business that we that we place them in, right? And I always look at it this way, right? We we look at wheelchair businesses, sheep boot companies. We’re looking at chalk companies. You don’t have to love the company, right? We have a we have a handful of veterans that come through the advancing line for veterans talent pool. Zach Knight represents one of my partners. And, you know, some people say I don’t like wheelchairs, I don’t want to work. I don’t want to trade in that company. And I come back to them, I say, think of it as an ambiguous e commerce brand. We’re going to teach you how to run an E commerce company, right? And you have a 60 month track to ramp up, right? That’s over 10,000 hours. You’re going to get five years of experience working in our mail room all the way up to the operation side of things. We’re going to train you on the P and L, the accounting, the logistics side, the supply chain, all these things that they probably already have some skills in. And know how we’re going to teach you how to run this business. And the beautiful thing about it is, I know many people. I just met an awesome woman that is running a business strictly through Amazon and Shopify. She makes $30 million a year. She works in her in her living room, right? E commerce is the future. If we can teach you how to run the business, regardless of what it is, at the end of that 60 month period you want to now buy, you know, a million dollars worth of EBIT in that business, or figure out a way to get creative with us and buy that entire business. We’re going to make it happen. If you say, I you bought three or four other companies over the last few years that I really dig. I love that, or I found a business on my own, we’re going to go help you and walk you through with the lenders and help you purchase that business. We want you to own your future.
Damon Pistulka 14:00
I love that. I love that. I love it because you’re you’re helping them to really experience it before they make the commitment to buy it and and all both sides right to be able to go. Is this a fit for me as the person in the business? Is it a fit for the business and and the people that that own the business before they would have the opportunity to buy it, I think it’s a great way to do it, that’s for
Zack Miller 14:26
sure. Yes, sir, we teach you how to fish, right? Yeah, that’s it, yeah.
Speaker 1 14:31
So now
Zack Miller 14:33
you
Damon Pistulka 14:34
had not been buying businesses before this, correct? No, sir. So what are some of the things that you learned about this going through the process so far?
Zack Miller 14:45
Feel like I could teach a masterclass on this. This is a the MBA I got over the last 21 months. So it’s one, it’s, it’s, it is not easy. Doesn’t even matter if you got the cash, it’s not easy. Yeah, right, finding the. Deal is, is an art understanding your Buy Box and what you’re looking for, right? Again. It doesn’t like I really enjoy golf, right? I’m not looking to buy golf companies. I’m looking for companies that have really good books, you know, they’ve got an account and they’ve got good systems and processes in place, right? So we look at $1.5 million of EBITDA to $10 million of EBITDA. That’s the start. And it has to have an E commerce focus, obviously. And it also needs to be growing at least over the last three years, if not five. I mean, I’m looking at the buy box right now. We need, you know, ad spend, to be 10 to 20% of revenue, roughly, like there’s we have put together a very, a very, you know, strong Buy Box, yeah, well, understanding your buy box first, you know, create that, throw it up on the wall. You know, work with mentors on that, figure that out. The next thing is finding the deals, right? So there are many marketplaces out there, but you’re going to want to find a lot of off market as well, because I have physically, personally, you know, analyzed over 317, deals to date, right in the last 21 months, I’ve killed every single one of those. I’ve made seven loi offers. I got one business 12 days away from closing in, the seller walked. And then, you know, this last deal that we just closed, our very first one. You know, we went under loi about almost 30 days after that, seller walked in on that one business, got the LOI in place and put together an amazing offer, brought our due diligence team, in which you need to have a strong due diligence team, I suggest highly you have a third party team. Knows what they’re doing. It’s worth the money, quality statements of earnings, all these things you get in this game, you’re going to figure it out. You want to de risk it as much as possible. Um, but you know, we got through due diligence, everything was looking great. You know, we had the, the SBA, the, and I’m forgetting the acronym right now, forgive me, but, you know, we had basically the contract in place, everything legally worked out. And coming, you know, 30 days away, we found out that the SBA was going to be changing some rules on June 1, all right, and we’re trying to get to the closing table as quickly as possible. Well, the SBA and the banks don’t move as fast as, yeah, I want to move right. It’s like government. So they dragged their feet. We went into June, had to restructure the entire deal. Ended up closing this deal. We went under loi in March, September 18, right? So it’s going to take more time. You’re going to have to analyze more deals, you need a team in place, or at least some vendor relationships where you have trust to help you with the due diligence process. Because I don’t care if you’re from the banking world or you know you worked in Wall Street, or you’ve ran businesses, due diligence is a cumbersome process with loi, with with a potential seller, you know, an owner of a business. You got to let them know up front. This is going to be hard. This there I’m at, you know, think about buying 20 houses at one time. I’m going to ask for statements that I’ve asked for every, every 30 days. I’m going to ask for the same statement. I’m going to need you to upload at this point. It’s, it’s typically around like, 303, documents, from taxes to articles of exordination, to your to your all your books, all your vendors, quality statements of earnings. Actually looks at every single dollar since you open that business, every dollar that went out of that checking account. They map it back to something right? If it’s not, it’s red flag. So it’s, you know that what I’ve learned. It’s we could, we could literally have multiple podcast episodes on this, because it’s a wealth of information. But working with that bank, working with your due diligence team, working with the seller, it’s going to be cumbersome, but look at it as an opportunity to learn and then go build that relationship with that owner, because it even if right June, when June 1 hit, we could have lost that deal immediately. This it was a husband and wife team. They’re making great money. The business was continuing to grow. He could have not sold this business right when it didn’t go through the way he wanted it to go. Yeah, you know, I made it a point to make sure that we developed a relationship. It all comes back to a sale, in a way, but with integrity, right? Like we like to keep, we want to keep our owners on, right? So this, this seller is actually going to stay in place for three years with us, and absolutely love him. Him and his wife are salt to the earth people. You know, Christ followers, really good people, and have done an amazing job building this business. So building that relationship is key, because you never know what’s going to show up. SBA can, literally, they can change the rules whenever they want, whenever they want. So don’t think you know this is just going to be squeaky clean. We’re going to get it through the finish line. Nothing to worry about every single day of this process. I had, I had a hard time sleeping. You. Just never know what’s going to pop up, and you need to be ready for it.
Damon Pistulka 20:04
Yeah, it really is. I mean, people haven’t done it. I mean buying a business, like you said, if you’re, if you’re buying a small, Main Street business, and it’s, you know, 150 $200,000 using your own money, they’re not got a lot of people involved. That’s one thing. But when you start to do businesses that are in the 10s of millions of dollars. The the the risk is completely different. First of all, because you got to realize that as a buyer of that business, whether it’s an investment buyer, or you as a private individual that’s going to do that thing, you have a lot of money that you’re just committing yourself to pay every single month until that is paid off and use. And you know, you start to look at going, Oh, wow, yeah, we have $125,000 a month payment that we have to make that wasn’t in that business before. It changes the way that you look at the whole business. Yes, sir, first of all, and that’s one of the things. But you brought up the other thing that I think is is really important in in that is quality of earnings, and that’s from the from the seller standpoint, they really don’t understand why that’s so important until they get to that point and then they realize either I’m really glad that I invested time into having good accounting systems in place and good systems in place, or I’m going to really have a hard, hard time ever selling my business, no matter how successful it is, yes, sir, because that quality of earnings 10 years ago, even it wasn’t that popular, and now It’s very popular and very relevant and very prevalent across the deals. And it’s just something that you got to be able to do. Like you said, every dollar has to be chased in and out of those, those bank accounts for that. And it’s a huge thing to do,
Zack Miller 21:53
yeah, yeah. And, you know, in the E commerce space, and even in the trades world, and you know, many businesses kind of under that $20 million mark, right? A lot of these men and women that build these businesses are extremely successful, and they’re paying themselves a reasonable salary, taking the rest as as I’m dividend, there we go. Right? Distributions and dividends. So distribution, yeah, and, you know, they create kind of a lifestyle business, right? That looks really good on paper, when you start digging in it, it doesn’t, you know, the valuation that they really deserve. It just doesn’t make sense, right? Because there’s not that much cash in the bank. So we’ve, you know, again, the buy box is serious, and that’s why we kill a lot of deals, because you just before you you know quality statements of earnings for us is about 38 to 40 grand, right? Just for that one process, right? And then you got to do diligence team as well. So you’re spending money on legal fees, and lawyers take their sweet time and have to justify their whole career. Yeah, charge you hourly. So, yeah, you start racking up expenses, and you get too far down the rabbit hole. Realize this thing’s gonna not gonna make sense. You’re still paying for it, right? As somebody purchases business.
Damon Pistulka 23:07
Yeah, even just to get to an LOI, you’ve spent a lot of money already, yes, sir, and it’s and to get through the end of the deal, like you said, building that relationship is key, because you are going to go through trying times for you as the buyer and the seller is going to go through incredibly trying times as well. And I really love how you you emphasize building that relationship before so you can continue working on that relationship and through those tough times to get to the end, because there is, you know, that deal fatigue sets in, and sellers will often just say, boop, I’m done. It’s just, this is just too much work. I’ll figure it out later. I’ll let my kids figure it out, whatever it is, but I’m not going to do it and and on the other time, as a buyer, you run into the same thing, it’s like, wow, we’ve done all this, and, you know, we want to get it done. But it’s just so, so, you know, another like this, great example, the SBA just changed it. We had to redo the deal. Oh my gosh, yeah. Or learning, you find out, you know, that that something is wrong with a, you know, a quarter of the inventory or something during the during the process, right? Something materially changes in the business while you’re in the diligence process, there’s so many things that we’ve seen happen. Yeah, we had a company a few years ago that actually had one contract got canceled, that was about 30% of their business. In the process of diligence, they had to notify their customer that they were going to be selling their business, and nothing was going to change, but the customer decided to pull their contract because of it,
Zack Miller 24:46
so you got to keep it close to the, you know, that’s yeah, don’t ask, don’t tell, sort of thing. Yeah. You know, every, every business owner operates differently, right? Those customers, well, they’re, they’re, those are their relationships, yes? And it’s funny, you said. A deal fatigue, because the, you know, the the business owner through this cumbersome process of delivering all these documents and working with his entire staff, or maybe this and his wife, right? That’s running it all. Who knows that? You know they have to continue to run the business. Yes, they’re doing that right. And we’ve, we’ve been under loi with it, with a business that was amazing. We got it was a great deal. It made so much sense. We love the owner. And as soon as we put that, loi and he took his foot off the gas and started snowboarding and skiing every day, and the banks asking us, like, what’s going on with the revenue? It’s declining, you know? So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a crazy process with a lot of different variables, and ultimately you got to establish the relationship to get anywhere.
Damon Pistulka 25:46
Yeah, yeah. And I think when you when you look at that like you’re saying there, that happens a lot of times, and it is, it’s a double stressor for the for the seller, right? Because if they understand that, that business has to keep performing as good or better than it has all the way till that that deal is done, they’ve just added a lot more work. But it also really helps to see from from a seller standpoint, I believe if, if they’re able to do that, and still, you know, not look like they’re they really are stressed, because that means they built a pretty good team. Because when their team can run their business pretty well, that’s that’s a big indicator, and a really good thing from a buyer’s standpoint, that’s for sure. Yes, sir, I agree. Yeah. So if you were talking to people today, what would you tell someone that was out there looking to buy a business.
Zack Miller 26:44
Oh, goodness, okay. Get your Buy Box straight. Create the right partnerships. You need to have operators right, already selected, not an operations team. Get a strong due diligence team in place. Pick the right legal counsel and structure that agreement the right way, I would say, give them equity within your company so you can at least get a discount on their hourly rate, maybe subsidize it. And those are probably the three key things right because you want to be looking at the right businesses and analyzing the businesses that you’re looking for. You don’t want to be wasting time on that end, because finding the right one is hard. And then once you get into that process, pedal has to be to the metal. I mean, you’re going to work 80 hours a week, and you’re going to, you’re going to be working just as hard as that seller is, to ensure that the relationship is tight, that all your due diligence team has everything they need, that you’re all your, you know, you’re filing with the LLC, the SEC you’ve got, you know, all your articles in the right place. You’re setting your business insurance, you’re getting ready for transition. I mean, there’s so many variables. Damon, yes, you know it’s again. I think there’s a masterclass to be taught here over multiple episodes. But build the team the right way, and be evaluating the deals that that fit your Buy Box.
Damon Pistulka 28:00
Awesome, awesome. Well, that is, that is great advice. I just love hearing it when people have gone through the process successfully, because it is now, now getting through it, you can actually start to dig in and really, really work with a business and, you know, start to create something from all that effort. That’s the part about it.
Zack Miller 28:23
That’s where we’re at right now. Yeah, doing the transition, it’s a lot of fun and but it’s a lot of work, right? So the work never stops. There’s, there are no days off, yeah,
Damon Pistulka 28:32
it just comes to it goes from one kind of work to another kind of work, sir, after the after the deal is done. So a couple questions that came up is the, why do you think veterans make good business owners
Zack Miller 28:48
grit? Purpose, right? If you can, if you can, if you can, give them a purpose, they’re going to go and get it done. They’re going to learn. They’ll absorb. They’re coachable. And again, I feel like they’re solution oriented. And again, right there. These are the men and women that are fighting on the front lines for our freedom, right? Like, what stronger character do you need in a human being? Right? Then, then to trust that? So I think that that’s to me, it’s just a strong signal, and as well. Like, if you’ve looked at the way that veterans have been supported, you know, in the past, it’s typically the veteran or the middle spouse. We support the veteran family. We’re all about the family. Again, I’m a family member of two Marines, so I went through it and grew through it. And we understand that, you know, they’re also, they have really strong values and good morals, but they’re able to do more than somebody that just, you know, not necessarily had a silver spoon, but somebody that grew up with without the same sort of struggles when you’re placed in those certain scenarios that the military put you in. You know, it’s, you know, kill or be killed. You know, for to make it simple, when you can bring them in a business and show them a future, you. Of what could be, and be able, like in our scenario, to show them like, this is what we want for you. You’re in this business. It’s a hell of a motivator, right? And motivate somebody that is searching for purpose, and we can give them that motivation, that purpose, and they have that grit and resilience. It’s a beautiful marriage of somebody that, you know, we want to take under our wings and and, you know, show them how great their life can be. We want them to achieve their dreams. And this is just one way to do it.
Damon Pistulka 30:29
Yeah, that’s that’s awesome. And then, you know, you talked about it earlier, when you’re changing their lives through business ownership, and actually generations and generations out from that’s awesome. So I want to make sure, before we wrap up here again, talk about your buy box a little bit. So if someone’s listening to this, and they go, I got a business that’s kind of like that, and they they’re looking to exit what you know, where are you looking geographically? What kinds of businesses and just rough, top line kind of thing. So an industry, so so people, if they’re listening to this, they can go, oh, maybe I should reach out to Zach,
Zack Miller 31:08
yes, sir. We specifically focus on E commerce, manufacturing and defense technology. We’re trying to overload our operations team that is subject matter experts for E commerce right now, when it comes to the E commerce Buy Box, you know, we were looking at 1.5 million to $10 million of EBITDA. We like, you know, minimum of 18 to 20% EBITDA margins. We needed to be domiciled in the US three years, minimum of a business that’s been around for three years. And then we like growth over those three years as well. No financial volatility. Can’t see large swings in that revenue or that EBITDA year over year. If they’re selling on Amazon or direct to consumer retail. We we’d like that to not be more than 25% of their overall revenue. You know, multiple skews are healthy because you don’t you don’t need just one hero school, like you were talking about. You’re the one business you were working with, right? The one of their clients leaves a 30 revenue so, you know, you need, you know, multiple ways to save that account and save that business and and grow that business. If one of the skews necessarily doesn’t work out. But again, that’s, that’s really what we’re looking for. And then we’re not looking for trinkets or trendy things, you know, supplements, stuff like that. Really hard for us to want to make an offer on that, because we’re ultimately positioning this to sell it to the veteran that comes in gets trained and learns how to work within this business. So we wanted to be around for 10 to 15
Damon Pistulka 32:36
years. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So on the other side of this, how do you, and I know we don’t have a ton of time, but I want to, how do you make the match, the match between the business and the veteran? I was thinking about that because, you know, you got businesses and veterans. I’m just curious.
Zack Miller 32:58
We get asked this a lot, and again, it goes back to me saying, view it as an ambiguous business, right? Doesn’t matter if you don’t like chalk markers, if the business is doing $14 million in top line revenue and $3 million of EBITDA, we’re going to teach you how to run that business when you when you get to the end of the rope, if you don’t necessarily want to buy into that business, you now know how to run an E commerce business. We’re confident you know how to because we’ve trained you. We’ve trained you, we’ve given you the 10,000 plus hours training. So look within our portfolio, or identify a business that you’ve had your eye on, and let’s go figure out a way to help you acquire that. So that’s, you know, it’s not, we’re not taking a better that says, I really love, you know, race cars. Let’s, I want to buy a race car like, put me in one of your race car businesses. That’s not how it works. We do a lot of filtration, you know, to get the right veterans into our bullpen. A lot of that comes down to dream work and understanding what are their goals, for their family, for their selves, for their life, and then we hold them accountable to that. So it’s a lot of like, coaching, training, mentoring, right? And then putting them in a business that, again, remove what it does. It’s still an E commerce business. We teach you how to run that. So I always have to kind of back people up, because that’s, that’s a question we get a time like, how do you find the businesses that the veterans want to run like? We don’t do that. But let’s just say, you know, we right now, we’ve got a hopper full of about seven that have made it through our filtration process that are quality. And it’s not all special forces or Harvard MBAs right there. It comes from, from, it could be it’s literally family members to Special Forces operators. Nice, you know, we, we just want to be able to bring them in and show them how to run a business in a solid way, and then give them the opportunity to again, buy at least a million dollars of eBay at it from that business, if not the entire business. So we’re kind of agnostic in that front, but we just want men and women to be willing to learn right, be willing to be good, and then we can unlock and help them achieve those dreams.
Damon Pistulka 34:58
Yeah, that’s awesome. That. Back. It’s, it’s so cool. What you guys are doing there at Patriot growth capital and and helping to a, first of all, really create some, continue with some great businesses, and then give that opportunity to those veterans to be able to work in the businesses, understand them really well, and then buy them when they’re ready, and if they’re ready, if, like you said, the cool part is, is, no matter what, they’re getting their 10,000 hours of experience, or their their experience in that business, and they can go off and do something else in a completely different light, or they can go with you and buy a different business as well. If that’s not quite the right one for them, exactly,
Zack Miller 35:38
we have so many different ways. We can help them so many different ways. So you never got to get your number married, just the one business. But the beautiful thing as well is, let’s just say the you know, that man or woman that we we put within a business isn’t showing up, or isn’t, you know, meeting the KPIs, or just raises the white flag and says, I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s not for me, I’ve got another opportunity over here. We already have, you know, we have an operations team already in place that’s running that business day to day. So nothing stops with us. We continue to move forward. We just insert another veteran start the process all over again. Yeah, you know that we build a really good model with a partnership team that, you know, I’m so proud to be a part of. And it got to kind of pinch yourself sometimes that, you know, these, these individuals that are involved with us, you know, even, even want to work with us. I mean, it’s crazy, right? Because they’re, we’re all bought into the mission and doing doing well by doing good, it’s a big, big core value for us. So I just always got to kind of pitch myself when I’m on these calls, because I work because I work with a number of individuals that don’t really need to work anymore, but they’re so fired up to be here, and again, we’ve got the access and the opportunity and the partnership, so it’s awesome, very, very lucky.
Damon Pistulka 36:55
Yeah, yeah. Well, Zach, thank you so much for being here today and talking about how you’re helping veterans build their future through business ownership, and how Patriot Capital came together to really around this mission. And it’s just, it’s just incredible what you guys are doing and and love to hear more about it. After you guys come and close more businesses, we’ll have to get you back and talk about it. So before we go, what’s got you excited for the rest of 2025,
Zack Miller 37:25
so we’ve got three Lois out and another offer, right? It’s, it’s kind of the paradox that that we typically live in as men, right? We’ve reached the goal. What’s the next one? Right? We’ve got to continue to move that goalpost. Ultimately for us, it’s to get to 15 companies in the portfolio, 50 companies in the portfolio within the next five years, and build a billion dollar portfolio. So you know, deal flow, deal flow, deal flow, meetings, networking, all the things, while staying engaged on what we’re working in right now and continuing to grow that business. So I’m just fired up to be where we’re at. It’s feel it feels good to finally close one because it has been a labor of love, and every single one of my partners, we have put it all on the line. And I talk about monetarily, sweat equity, like you name it. We put it all on the line, and we’ve, you know, we got one win under our belt, so now we got to go get some more.
Damon Pistulka 38:23
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, Zane, Zach, thanks for being here today. If someone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to get a hold of you? Because I do want to make sure if someone’s looking to sell an E commerce business is saying like that, a one and a half to 10 million EBITDA, you reach out to Zach, reach out to Patriot growth capital. Or someone just wants to talk to you. Zach, what’s the best way to get a hold of you?
Zack Miller 38:46
Yes, sir, I would say find me on LinkedIn. Very, very active out there. You know, big on the platform, and then also Patriot growth capital.com there’s a join your mission button, whether you’re an investor, a veteran, a business owner looking to sell, somebody that just wants to keep up with our newsletter. There’s multiple ways to fill that form out, identify yourself in the fashion that you like, and we will, we will get in contact with you, and most likely, it’ll be me out of the gate. And then, you know, if you’re a veteran, I’ll patch you in with Knight. If you’re an investor on I’ll patch in with Bates and Barnes. You know we’re here for you, so website and LinkedIn are probably the best places.
Damon Pistulka 39:27
Alright, alright. Well, thanks again, Zach. Appreciate you stopping by today and talking with us. Thanks everyone out there who’s listening. I can see we had a lot of listeners in here today, and thank you for being here. If you got in late. Didn’t hear Zach from the beginning. Go back to the beginning and listen to what he had to say about how they’re helping the how they’re buying e commerce companies and giving veterans opportunities to own those companies. Just an awesome mention that you guys have. Thanks again. We’re going to be ending for now. Zach, let’s finish up offline. I want to thank everyone and see you later.
Zack Miller 40:05
Thank you, Damon, appreciate you, brother. You.
