Sprints & Marathons
September 3, 2021 | Issue #39
Big Deal Small Business: Sprints & Marathons
September 3, 2021 | Issue #39
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With the long weekend a few hours away, I’ve been thinking about how we recharge the batteries when searching for a small business.
I come from an industry where vacation is barely a real thing — we try to escape when find a breather between deals. The norm is to schedule trips last minute and then hold your breath hoping nothing major comes up.
We never set out-of-office auto-responses. I continue to check emails every morning & evening during vacations. It’s pretty normal for folks to join calls throughout vacation.
And if something really catches fire, you’re expected to just cancel your plans — I remember getting blown up each of my first three July 4th weekends coming out of college.
Honestly, I didn’t realize how weird that was until I went on a big group trip with some friends from college. One of them, who works at a major multinational, simply did not bring his laptop on the trip.
Meanwhile, I was literally on the beach with my laptop and shaky wifi hotspot trying to catch a signal to complete some slides for a bond financing.
Enough complaining, let’s get to the point of this post.
Now that I’m flipping to full-time search, a part of me is excited for all that pressure described above to melt away.
But the flip side is that there’s no real pressure from….anywhere, at any time, to be working hard. It’s 100% a self-motivation game.
Most searchers are cut from a similar cloth in that they don’t need top-down pressure to be productive. But that creates a novel issue — there’s also no way to know when to stop and take a break.
In PE life, when there’s a break in deal flow, I don’t need to go out looking for the next deal. I lick my wounds from the last dead deal and wait for more work to arrive from an unrelenting staffer.
But in search, that next deal isn’t coming unless you go generate it. Taking a break between deals feels like you’re allowing your deal funnel to dry up. It’s easy to feel guilty if you’re not using any free times to go click through one more NDA.
As a result, if you’re a self-motivated searcher with 1-2 years runway (read: almost all searchers), how do you carve out that break for yourself to recharge the batteries?
You’ve heard the cliche that [insert difficult life goal] is a marathon, not a sprint. That may be true in some cases, but I don’t think that’s true here. It’s not reflective of my time in PE or my time in search.
To me, search feels like a series of sprints, one after the other, until one happens to cross the finish line. The problem is you don’t know how many sprints it’ll take before you cross that finish line. You also don’t know if the sprint you’re currently on will be the one that gets across the finish line.
Given that lifestyle profile, I think the best time management approach cannot be a slow steady burn. You can’t attempt to run a marathon because getting a deal through closing requires a sprint. If you’re 18 miles into a marathon, good luck sprinting at that moment.
The only way to have enough gas for that final sprint is to take real breaks between sprint. That way you go into EVERY sprint with the juice to cross the finish line, because hey, that might be the one.
What does that mean in practice?
I’m trying to get better at giving myself decompression time. When I set deadlines for myself in the CRM, I sometimes give myself an extra couple buffer days. If a broker wants to set up a call, schedule it for Tuesday, not Monday, to give yourself time to prep during the week.
This may seem obvious to you, but is new to me — I don’t allocate work to the weekends like we do in PE. It’s very common in my day job for us to discuss something on Friday afternoon with the deliverable due “over the weekend”. I’m not doing that to myself anymore unless it’s truly pressing.
If I’m not excited by anything in the deal funnel, just kill those deals and wait a few days before starting to inquire on new deals again.
I try not to generate 5 deals throughout each & every week as that’s a slow burn that wears me out. Instead, I want to generate 10 deals quickly, work my way through them over 2 weeks, have a few days to relax, and then start up the engine again.
These are things that work for me, obviously you’ll have to solve them in a way that work for you, but the overarching messaging is likely consistent.
Once you find that great deal that you get under LOI, you’ve got 60-90 days of unrelenting sprinting. If the day after you go under LOI you’re already feeling the burn, it’s going to be a very hard couple months.
Give yourself the time & grace upfront to be best-positioned to get that deal closed.
Conclusion
That was a very long-winded way of justifying for myself why I am doing (almost) NO work this long weekend, and I hope you do the same!
Enjoy it, and looking forward to hitting the ground running next week.
As always, I’m around to connect or trade notes. Hit reply to this email or find me on Twitter.
Thanks,
Guesswork Investing
P.S. I’d always appreciate introductions to potential acquisition targets or brokers (primarily targeting $750K-$1.5M+ of SDE or EBITDA, ideally located in the Northeast, West Coast, or Colorado).