In a recent episode of the Creative Dealmaker podcast, Carl Allen and Ross Thompkins discussed the intricacies and advantages of joint venturing and business acquisitions. Thompkins shared his journey from being a physiotherapist to becoming an acquisition aficionado. After experiencing a significant loss of work due to a joint venture gone wrong, he pivoted to creating a network of interdependent health companies through acquisitions, realizing that seller financing was a viable option for purchasing businesses, akin to leasing cars or electronics.

Thompkins recounted his first acquisition, a physiotherapy practice, which he secured with 100% seller financing. He highlighted the importance of understanding seller psychology and how it impacts deal structure. Thompkins developed the MUD and Lever scores to assess seller motivation, urgency, and the value of legacy, which played a critical role in his negotiations. This strategic approach enabled him to build rapport and secure a deal that aligned with both parties’ values and needs.

As the conversation progressed, Thompkins elaborated on his ventures in various sectors, including healthcare, recruitment, and HVAC, noting that he has completed about sixteen deals overall. He and Allen expressed enthusiasm about expanding into the U.S. market, emphasizing the ease of conducting deals and raising capital compared to the U.K. They acknowledged the significant opportunity presented by the large number of businesses owned by retiring baby boomers in the U.S., which creates a ripe environment for acquisitions.

Thompkins also discussed his foray into the hormone replacement business, specifically focusing on testosterone therapy for men experiencing symptoms of andropause. He explained the various methods of administering testosterone and the importance of addressing hormone-related health issues for improving overall quality of life. He sees tremendous potential for this business as it expands globally, particularly in regions where awareness and acceptance are still developing.

The podcast concluded with both hosts discussing their respective coaching endeavors, noting the growing interest from real estate investors in business acquisitions. They emphasized the transferable skills between real estate and business buying, such as deal flow generation and negotiation. Both expressed their excitement for future collaborations and the importance of fostering community among aspiring entrepreneurs to share knowledge and support in their acquisition journeys.

Full Transcript:

We discovered one of the major downsides of joint venturing with someone is it’s not your client. And so at any point, they can say we don’t need you anymore, which is what happened, and we lost eighty percent of our work. No. It’s we’re buying businesses like people lease cars. And what’s crazy about the world is we all finance things. Right? We finance cars. We finance houses. We even finance iPhones. Right? You don’t have to buy the iPhone. You can pay for it, like, monthly. So why should doing it on businesses be any different?

If that is a hormone problem, we just take the hormones back to where they were when you were eighteen. And all of a sudden, you’re the best version of yourself again. Energy comes up, mood goes up, clarity of thought comes back. You’re making better, faster decisions. You’re the best husband, the best father, the best businessman you can be.

So we’ve done about sixteen deals altogether now. Nice. A couple more heads of turns. Last one was in the recruitment sector. I figured out a way to measure seller psychology and how that would translate into both the value of the business. A very warm welcome to the Creative Deal Maker podcast. I’m Carl Allen. I’m your host, and I’m gonna be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world.

Hi, guys. Carl Allan. Welcome to another episode of the Creative Dealmaker podcast. Got a really special guest today. He’s a very good friend of mine. He’s also a fellow Brit. He’s also a fellow deal maker. He’s also a fellow deal-making coach. We’ve both been in the acquisition aficionado magazine, and very soon Ross Tomkins is gonna be business partners at the start of a very cool new roll-up that we’re doing. So welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Carl. It’s a pleasure to be here. I wanna tell this really quick funny story about how we met, and then I’d love to hear about your background and how you kinda got into this. I know everything about you, obviously, but my listeners and my viewers on YouTube probably don’t. But what’s really interesting is I met you at the Harbour Club event, Jeremy Harbour’s event, which you reminded me was twenty seventeen, so seven years ago.

I remember going to that event. Loads of people have come into my Dealment coaching program and had said, yeah, you should go to Harbour Club. Like, it’s really, really cool. So I went. I paid for it, and I thought to myself, Jeremy, I didn’t know him at that time, is either gonna kick me out or he’s gonna befriend me. Thankfully, it was the latter, and we’ve become really good mates since then. I have a lot of admiration for Jeremy and all the things that he does.

That’s where you and I met. Right? You were in that weekend in Jeremy’s apartment in Majorca, and it was a really, really cool, you know, kinda weekend. You and I just gelled, didn’t we? We built great rapport. We’ve kept in touch over the years. Obviously, I live full-time in Texas now. You’re still up in the north of England. I was following you over in Japan. I know you went with your daughter on that really cool trip.

Just give us your background, mate. Where did you come from? How did you get into doing deals? Then we can talk about some of the really cool stuff that you and I are gonna be doing over the coming months and years.

Brilliant. So I’m a physiotherapist by background. I started my first business in two thousand and six and grew that organically. I leveraged a lot of strategic partnerships in there as well. So we really sort of tapped into some of the wider network, and that worked well. We grew that up to thirty-five members of staff. It was a pretty sizable physio outfit for the UK.

Then we discovered one of the major downsides of joint venturing with someone is it’s not your client. At any point, they can say we don’t need you anymore, which is what happened, and we lost eighty percent of our work pretty much overnight. We didn’t get a lot of time. Now that actually was the best thing that could’ve happened in many ways because I was forced through that sort of pain to think of something different, think of something alternative. That’s where I had this idea of growing an ecosystem of interdependent health companies. I realized that acquisition was a faster way to bring those in.

So I sort of had to make a change if you like, and that was about the time when we met, and I had the great fortune to learn from yourself and Jeremy on the same weekend. So then you started doing deals? I started doing deals. Not straight away. Actually, it took me two years to do my first one. I went away. A lot of it went over my head. I was a physiotherapist at the time, treating people’s bad knees and bad backs, and all of this new language and new strategy and new stuff was just alien. It took me a while to get my head around it.

I continued talking to you and consuming your content, and eventually, it kinda started to take hold. But it took two years to get the first deal done, and that was a hundred percent seller financing. This is one of the big things that if you’re not in this game, you don’t tend to understand. There’s a big kind of misconception that if you wanna buy a company, let’s say you wanna buy a million dollar or a million pound company, you’ve gotta rock up at the closing table with a personal check for a million bucks. Right? And you don’t. You can borrow money from a bank or from an investor. You can get an investor to help you put something down at closing.

A lot of the creative deals, and you’ve done a lot of these and so have I, and a lot of my students, your students are doing this as well, is we’re buying businesses like people lease cars. What’s crazy about the world is we all finance things. Right? We finance cars. We finance houses. We even finance iPhones. You don’t have to buy the iPhone. You can pay for it monthly. So why should doing it on businesses be any different?

Obviously, there’s a lot more psychology involved with that. You’ve got to look at seller motivation and all those different things. Let’s talk about your first deal. How did you find it? What was the negotiation? Obviously, you don’t have to name names, but what was the negotiation that got you that deal, a hundred percent seller finance, which is like Navaan? You can close the deals really quickly.

It was really interesting the way it happened. As I hadn’t done a deal up until this point, I was probably still procrastinating a lot. I remember actually looking back then, and I would worry that I was gonna overpay for something, or I’d worry that I was gonna undervalue it and offend someone. It really was all in my head. But I was introduced to this physio. It was another physio practice. They were local to me, so we had great rapport straight away. We saw the world in the same way, and we treated patients the same way.

We got on, you know, they said what they wanted. They said, how much are you gonna pay for it? I said, x. They said, well, that’s less than we thought. I said, well, this is why I think it’s worth that much. Then we applied the three times multiple to it and explained what that meant in real terms for us paying it, all that sort of good stuff. They said, well, are you gonna give us all the money upfront? I said, I actually haven’t got any money. I was planning on paying you over time. They said, that’s perfect, actually. You’re the right person for the business. We trust you.

The missing piece of that as well is we did buy the building as well, which we paid on day one. So they did get day one payment, but then we deferred the rest of the seller finance over a few years. That’s really smart. That’s a really clever strategy because in a lot of cases, there’s a piece of a building, and then there’s a business that trades inside the building. So you’re buying two things. If you can buy the building or if you didn’t wanna buy the building and you sold it to an investor or something like that, then they’ll take not only a discount on the business, they’re getting full price for the building, but they’ll also let you get super creative on how you pay for it.

Giving them something upfront, nothing for the business, just for the building, which, as you know, is a lot easier to finance because it’s a hard asset. What was the seller psychology of that business owner? What was going through their mind? Why did they want to sell? What was it in that deal that convinced them that a monthly payment to sell this company is what I’m actually looking for?

They were both a husband and wife team, and their health was failing. That was their real motivation. Why I was the perfect acquirer is because we saw physiotherapy in the same way. There are companies out there that will just come in. They just wanna get as many people in as possible, short appointment times, and we were the opposite. We wanted to have long appointment times, really get to know our clients, make a difference to their lives. That was exactly what, I guess, they wanted to hear, which happened to be true.

When we’re having our team call this morning for the deal that we’re about to buy, I mentioned something. I said that I’d figured out a way to measure seller psychology and how that would translate into both the value of the business and the way that you could structure that deal. What I did is through all the tens of thousands of interactions I’ve had with business owners over thirty years, I figured out that there are actually seven things that you can measure for seller psychology. I created two acronyms. One’s called the MUD score, and the other is called the lever score. The MUD score stands for motivation, urgency, and distress.

The lever score is how important is the preservation of legacy, how important is the preservation of their employees, how much are your values aligned with theirs, and then the strength of the rapport and the relationship that you’ve built. If we look at your deal on the MUD and Lever scores, obviously, they were motivated because they were sick. Urgency would be high if their health was deteriorating. Distress, not so much. But then legacy was probably important because they didn’t want somebody ripping the business apart. Having their employees taken care of would be very, very strong. Your values are clearly aligned based on how you saw physio and they did and all that stuff you just talked about.

Those two things, it looks like you nailed that seller psychology piece. That translates into the creativity of a deal structure. To pay three times for a business purely on seller financing is amazing. So good job. How did that deal go after you closed it? How long did it take you to close that deal, and then what’s transpired with that business since?

It was pretty quick and took a couple of months to get that through. Straight afterwards, we realized I’d made my first mistake, which was that we hadn’t taken into consideration that the owners were working way more than thirty-seven and a half hours. Rookie mistake and the one I never made again. That being said, because we’d absorbed it into our business, it didn’t make a big difference. We were still able to continue to grow that business, and we actually then sold the whole thing a couple of years later, minus the bricks and mortar, which we used to loan and rent to the people we sold it to.

So how many physio deals? You talked about that ecosystem of buying interdependent companies that could grow as a group. Did you sell that entire group? We just sold the physiotherapy component. So we had three physio clinics. We kept the medical supplies, the domiciliary care, the medical device, and all the other elements of the ecosystem. Have you done any other deals since in other or parallel industries that you still own?

We’ve done about sixteen deals altogether now. Nice. A couple more ahead of terms. Last one was in the recruitment sector. We’ve also got a stake in a health and safety company, which is actually bordering on my background in occupational health. We’ve also got a stake in an HVAC roll-up as well. Right. Nice. Are all those deals in England, or are you doing some deals? I know you and I do a deal in America soon, but have you done some of those acquisitions this side of the pond?

All UK. Ours will be our firms in the US, so looking forward to exploring another part of the world. This is one of the reasons why I moved here, Ross. The opportunity is just so much bigger. I hate to say it, deals over this side of the pond are just a lot easier to do. It’s a lot easier to raise capital over here. The whole American market is really conditioned to seller financing. Sometimes in the UK, we don’t even call it seller financing. We call it deferred consideration.

Often sellers confuse earn outs with contracted monthly deferred payments. It’s not the same culture over there. The other issue with America, the other big positive with America is there’s just because there’s a lot more people here. There are just a lot more businesses, and there are a lot more businesses for sale. Last time we updated our model, there were over two point five million small businesses, sub-ten million dollars in revenues, which is ninety-nine percent of all the businesses in the world anyway. There are two and a half million of them for sale, yet only about two hundred and twenty-five thousand or so businesses per year actually change hands over here.

That’s one buyer for every eleven companies that go to market. That’s normally the best in class business that sells, the one with recurring revenues, great customers, great culture, and a fantastic reputation in the market. Those are the deals that go for the high multiples. All these other companies that are left, the only way that owner is gonna be able to sell or retire or move on or do what they’re gonna do is to close it down. When we’re valuing companies, we look at what’s the liquidation value of that business because if no one buys it, that’s all the sellers actually gonna get, notwithstanding that the legacy is gonna get impacted, their employees are gonna get let go. Everything that they’ve built over decades is probably gonna evaporate.

That’s one of the reasons why I moved over here. It was a combination of deals, entrepreneurial selling attitude to businesses, and then just where you do need to put closing payments down on deals. It’s just so much easier over here. In fact, you can use the federal government to guarantee your financing. For the SBA seven a loan program, we’re leveraging that, as you know, for the business that we’re buying. I was just spending so much time over here, traveling, speaking at events, going to other people’s events, looking at businesses. I was just never at home, and my wife turned around to me at Christmas and just said, like, this is stupid. Why don’t we all just move to America?

My wife said, but we got to pick where we go. I said, well, that’s okay. So we picked Austin, just a really cool place. You know, we’d love to have you over here, and you can stay with us, and we can do loads of really cool things. Our business partner, Becky, is down in Houston, as you know, which will be really, really cool. I’m thrilled that you’re now looking at America. It’s like it’s not a music industry, isn’t it? People try and crack the UK first, which is ten times harder, and then they go to America, which is a much bigger market to do this stuff.

We will welcome you with open arms for US deals. It really is a lot more fun over here. I’m definitely looking forward to it. So yeah, the first one, hopefully, will get ticked off together by December, January. A couple of things I wanna talk about. Let’s talk about your testosterone business that you set up. Now I know you didn’t acquire this. You’ve kinda set this up. I know this is something that’s very close to your heart, and I’d love to get involved with this if I can actually as a customer.

I’d love to go through some of that stuff. You know, as you know, I’m a little bit older than you. I’m fifty-three now. I seem to be getting busier and busier with deals and life and exercise and all that type of stuff. Something just doesn’t feel right inside of my body. Like, I just don’t have the energy that I used to have. So let’s talk about that for a minute because I know you’re crushing it with that, and I think that could be a global business. It’s exciting, actually. Of all the businesses that I own, it’s the one with the most potential because we’re right at the start of the adoption cycle in this.

The upside is incredible. We’ve got conversations going with franchises in about five or six different countries. It’s massive potential, but it is something personal to me as you say. I went through this. For those people that haven’t come across it, it’s basically the male menopause, which is called the andropause. Whilst all women go through menopause and around eighty percent will be symptomatic, many men will be familiar with those symptoms: changes in mood, changes in temperature, changes of weight. We get the same as well, but we think only forty percent of men maybe have symptoms.

Now it could be eighty because we’re also more stoic. We tend not to complain. We don’t go to the doctors. We could just be putting up with it. The common feedback that I hear, and I was exactly the same, is I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but something’s not quite right. That’s how I feel one hundred percent. So brain just a little bit more cloudy, put a little bit of weight on, can’t hold muscle anymore, libido is maybe not quite as strong, and you’re just not quite the person you were. Now it’s totally fixable.

If that is a hormone problem, we just take the hormones back to where they were when you were eighteen. All of a sudden, you’re the best version of yourself again. Energy comes up. Mood goes up. Clarity of thought comes back. You’re making better, faster decisions. You’re the best husband, the best father, the best businessman you can be. What’s the medication for it? Is it like an injection? Is it meds or meds? How do you take it?

So testosterone comes in a variety of forms, actually. It comes in gels, creams, patches, nasal sprays, patches you put in the mouth, injections, oral medication. The two most effective are injections and compounded creams. So that’s two that we specialize in, but it does come in a variety of forms. Is it like the weight loss jab that you can take where you, what, like, an insulin jab? So you just jab it into your fall of your skin? Similar. It doesn’t come in the pen in the same way, but it’s an injection, much like that just with a tiny needle. Oh, definitely. Well, sign me up for that.

What’s the process? So it starts with a blood test. Yes. Like, it’s a simple blood test. And then if you fall within a certain parameter, then we book you in with the doctor, and he’ll go through all of those biomarkers. We look at forty-one. It’s a bit like an aging male’s MOT. It’ll comment on all of those factors within the body, and then if it’s appropriate, offer you a treatment protocol.

Cool. Is it only available in the UK right now? For us personally, yes. We hope to be in Malta, Dubai, and possibly Wyoming within the next month or two. Right. Cool. So I might wait for the Wyoming thing or I’m back in the UK about three weeks when my UK house sells. I’ll be back home for that so I can get all the stuff done for that. That would be cool. That business model there, Ross, would crush it in the United States. Like, it’s massive in America. There are thousands of clinics in America, whereas in the UK, you can count on two hands the clinics there are.

You can count on one hand that are any good. It’s so early in the whole adoption cycle anywhere in the world apart from the UK, apart from the US. Good stuff. Let’s talk about the acquisition aficionado stuff. You’ve put on two very, very successful virtual events. I had the pleasure of speaking at both of them. It was really, really good. Let’s talk about that for a minute because I’ve been coaching in this industry now for about ten years as has Jeremy Harbour. I think the only other coach that’s been around that time apart from Dan Pena, I think he’s retired now, was Mike Warren, who’s based over here in the US.

Now there are hundreds of us, right, all coming together through kinda like an industry body. I think it’s absolutely amazing. I know you’ve been on the front cover of the magazine, as have I. It’s a big kind of kudos thing. You and I were on the front cover when it was free. I think you gotta pay to go on it now, but we were free front cover poster boys. Let’s talk about that. How’d you get into that, and what’s the evolution plan for that going forward?

I’m a big fan of what you and Len are doing. Brilliant. Thanks. Yeah. I was introduced to Len. I can’t even remember by who now, but we just kinda got along. I loved what he was doing. As you say, bringing people together. We just started throwing ideas around about how we could expand that. The next step up, of course, was to put on a virtual event because everyone was in their silos, and we had, obviously, yourself, Jeremy, and Mike Warren all on the first one, along with another thirteen speakers.

The plan is, of course, just to keep expanding that, keep growing it, keep growing the reach, keep giving amazing value. The feedback we’ve had has been, as you know, just astonishing. Just can’t believe the price, can’t believe the value, amazing amounts of knowledge being shared. Ultimately, I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences to say that, eventually, we probably want that to be an in-person event as well. I think there’s a lot of power within person events.

As you know, we have our big annual Dealmaker live event. It’s generally at the end of September.

The one we’ve got this year is gonna be in Orlando. This will be our, I think, fourth one, probably about seven fifty, eight hundred people there. It’s mostly members of my protege, inner circle, mentorship community, but then we’re opening it up this year for some people in the more junior programs that we’ve got. And then, yeah, they work really, really well.

I think when you build in a community, you know, for them to get to see you and interact with you and do all those different things, you know, it really is, like, super powerful. And, you know, your model would work perfectly for that because it’s not like I rock up and I talk for three days. I’ve got all my other business partners that come and speak. We do a lot of case studies. I fly in, you know, lots of other guest speakers. Like last year, my keynote speaker was James Lawrence.

I have my members read a lot, right? So I like teaching them things around the subject, around psychology and marketing. It’s not just buying businesses. It’s about, you know, building a life, building a lifestyle, and all those different things. You know, there’s no point making tons of money buying deals if you’re not around to kind of enjoy it and kind of get all the spoils from it.

So one of my big heroes in life is James Lawrence, and he, I don’t know if you know him. He’s called the Iron Cowboy. He’s the guy that did fifty Ironmans in fifty days in fifty consecutive states, like nearly killed himself. It’s like the hardest thing anyone’s probably ever done. And I got so much value from reading that book and watching his documentary. I flew him in to be our keynote speaker last year, and it was so transformational.

What he had to go through mentally and physically to complete that challenge is a million times harder than buying a business, right? People come into the program and think, well, this is a bit like your experience. Like, this is a bit alien. I’m a physio. I don’t really understand a lot of this stuff, but, you know, you stuck at it. Sadly, that’s not what most people do. Most people hit the very first little speed bump, and they quit. They say, oh, you know what? I’ll go off to try and do something else. Maybe I’ll flip land. Maybe I’ll flip real estate. Maybe I’ll trade Bitcoin or maybe I’ll start a business or do something else. And then that doesn’t work, and then people just go through the cycle of doing all these different things, and they never really get anywhere.

So what James did for our group was to really kind of hone us in that grit of just pushing through, having a really powerful why they want to do something, and bringing those people into these events. It just kind of rounds out. So, you know, if we’re just talking about balance sheets and deal multiples, it’ll just get a bit boring. Rounding it out with all these other things is really, really powerful.

I would love to come to that event. If you go in person, I’m happy to come. I’m happy to speak. A lot of my tribe would come and support you as well, which would be really, really good. So, yeah, keep me posted on there. Definitely. Yeah, that is the plan.

And just to build on what you just said there, which is really an important thing, I think, speaks to a lot of people who are thinking about getting into this, I guess. You know, we’ve been able to buy three commercial properties as a happy accident of doing deals. We were then able to invest in residential properties into precious metals in different countries including our own, in cryptocurrencies. And we’ve got residencies in different countries, and all of that wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for sticking out this world of small business acquisition.

Yeah, I know. It’s amazing. I’m not a crypto guy. I don’t really understand crypto if I’m being totally honest with you. So I kind of stay away from there. But the real estate piece, one hundred percent, I, apart from my house in England, I don’t own any real estate in England, but I bought quite a lot in America.

Because what’s really cool about America, and again, this is one of the reasons why I love it here, is the taxation whilst it’s horrendously more complicated than it is in the UK. There’s a lot more loopholes and there’s a lot more programs that really promote entrepreneurship and investment.

So there’s a couple of really cool tactics that you can do. One’s called the ten thirty one exchange, and there’s another called a twelve o two exemption. And, effectively, what they do is they allow you to take a distribution or a capital gain from one asset class and then take that and reinvest it into something else and just kick the tax can way, way, way down the road. So you’re paying very, very little tax, but you’re constantly building your wealth.

And then there’s all these wrappers. There’s all the tax wrappers that you can put around things so that you don’t… it’s like the Rockefeller method. Right now, apart from my Austin house that I just bought, everything else, I control it. It’s all set inside of a tax-efficient wrapper where I’m the trustee of that. And it means that a lot of my wealth creation is at extremely low single-digit tax rates, which I wouldn’t have been able to do that in the UK.

I know some people can set things up in the Isle of Man and offshore and do all that kind of stuff. But over here in America, it costs a lot of money to set it up. But the irony is the guy that set it all up for me, I didn’t pay him. I just I gave him some equity in one of my roll-ups. So I’m in a big roll-up, as you know, right now in the ecomm health and beauty market. And he was really keen on investing in that. And I just said, well, hey.

So me and my business partner, another Ross, we said, hey, well don’t pay us for the equity. Just do all these trust things free, and he did. It’s like, it’s freaking amazing. So, yeah, it’s a really cool way of not only making your life tax efficient. You pay some tax, but you know, not a high net tax. But also, it puts all your assets outside of any direct line of liability, which is really, really cool.

So I’ll introduce you to all that stuff going forward. So a couple of things, Ross, then we’ll wrap. So what, obviously, now you’re an educator in this world now, which I’m thrilled about, and I’m super proud of you for doing that because we don’t educate. Obviously, we charge money to coach people more so than, you know, then they’ll take action.

Right? If it was free, they wouldn’t do anything. But, like, what’s what are some of the common themes that you come across when you’re coaching your army? I’d love to kind of compare notes on who’s your typical customer, like, you know, what are the challenges when they come in? What are their goals? Love to kind of compare notes with, like, what we do in our coaching empire.

Yeah, I love it. So the typical person that I’m working with at the moment because what I say is it’s not an either or. You shouldn’t be going to Kyle or me. Do both. Because, actually, we’re both different. We both got a different angle. Mine probably starts maybe underneath, I guess, because we actually we talk a lot about health, talk a lot about mindset.

And then build up through a knowledge of personal branding and strategic partnerships, how you should never overlook, bid writing as a way to grow a company. And then we sort of finish at M&A. So mine’s maybe a bit more holistic. Yeah. But I’m like, you know, go with Carl. Go do that as well. But this is something separate.

I think because of our other businesses as well, you know, I’m attracting the thirty five to fifty five, fifty year old man. With an eye on their health. They wanna be held accountable. You know, they wanted to do so many deals a year, but they wanna run a half marathon or an Ironman, and they need someone to kind of help give them a bit of a rocket.

Yeah, it’s a bit more sort of yeah. A bit more health holistic based. Everyone’s doing deals. And is it primarily business owners looking to acquire to grow, or is it entrepreneurs that wanna buy companies rather than start them? Or is it a mix of both?

Mix of both. I’d say fifty fifty. Initially, it was more existing business owners, particularly from the health care space because they kind of seen what we’ve done, and then we’re all, oh, well, if Russ can do it, we can too. But now that’s probably chart started to change a little bit. So we’ve got some startup entrepreneurs looking to get into it. And at the top end, one of the guys is doing around thirty five million at the moment.

Awesome. So, you know, we’ve got real diversity in there. Yeah, interesting. Like, my customer base is very similar. I have about a third that are business owners, so they’re buying deals to scale. The third are entrepreneurs that wanna buy, not start. And then the other third, ironically, and this has been the fastest growth in my community over the past couple of years, is the real estate investor brigade.

Because I bought a real estate coaching company called Partner Driven, and obviously, there’s coaches in. And I don’t run any of my companies like you do. But, you know, I went on to one of the coaching sessions one week and just to meet all the people in that kind of mentorship. And they were saying, well, like, what do you do? So, well, I’m not a real estate guy, although I started buying a lot of real estate. I’m a business buying coach.

Like, I teach people how to buy businesses, how to raise money, how to structure deals, how to do roll-ups, all those different things. And they were like, wow. Like, how cool is that? And when I started talking to them about it, what they all realized was that their skill sets were very transferable.

So when you’re a real estate investor, you learn how to go and generate deal flow. You learn how to raise capital. You learn how to negotiate, build rapport, and then you learn how to transact, right? That’s buying companies as you know. It’s only four—those are the four things that you gotta do, right?

So what I found is, and then when you start talking about how you can distribute from one asset class and invest it into another, what I’d say more than half of all the people that have come into my project community in the past twelve months have been real estate investors. And it’s not just people that wanna buy businesses that have real estate with them, or things like storage units, RV parks, or anything like that.

But a lot of the real estate investors, they do fix and flips, right? So they’ll buy a rundown house for fifty cents on the dollar, and then they’ll, they need a roofing company, an electrician, a HVAC, a plumber, landscaping, hardscaping, cleaning, all that stuff. But then in a lot of these big areas where they’re doing that, it’s really hard for them to get the trade companies to do that work because they’re all busy.

So I’m saying to these people, well, why don’t you just go and acquire those businesses? Right? So what we’re seeing now in our community is in certain parts of the country, real estate investors building these, like, hub and spoke roll-ups in home services, and then they’re able to deploy those businesses into the real estate projects that they got and then feed that back in through the community.

So, you know, they might buy a HVAC business, a residential HVAC business, and they can five X that company revenue-wise in one year just by plugging it into the networks that they’ve already got. So that’s a big trend, you know, that I’m definitely seeing. And the beauty with the home services industry is a lot of those companies, Ross, are owned by what Americans call baby boomers, so the retirees.

And there’s ten thousand of them retiring every single day. Right. About a third of them own a small business. And when you go back to that one in eleven businesses sell, you’ve just got so ten every, you know, every day, there’s ten thousand boomers retiring, so about three thousand businesses. And twenty seven hundred of those companies have got no buyer. Right?

So that’s why we can get really creative with a lot of the deals that we’re doing. Love it. I’m just gonna go and tell my wife we’re moving. Yeah. Come on live here. You know, it’s a big place. Like, yeah, Texas is really hot right now. It was I was playing pickleball yesterday in a hundred and two degree heat, almost had a heart attack. It was so freaking hot.

But, you know, outside of the hot summer months, it’s a really cool place to live. But there’s so many places in America that you can, you can reduce. It’s expensive, though. It’s a lot more expensive than the UK. Cars are cheaper. Fuel is really cheap. Energy is really cheap. But beyond that, it can be crazy. Right?

Property tax or council tax as we call it in the UK. My council tax in England is about four thousand pounds a year. Right? Over here, it’s fifty five thousand dollars a year. Wow. That’s great. And they don’t empty your bins. You’ve got to pay to have your bins collected. And, you know, like in the UK, you can go to the recycling dump, and it’s free. Not here. It’s not. You gotta pay.

Alcohol’s probably double. Supermarket grocery shopping’s probably double, if not triple. You know, gallon of milk’s like, I don’t know, five dollars. It really is. It’s an expensive place to live. And like, there’s no, there’s no, like, middle class in America anymore. Right? You’re either poor or you’re wealthy. Right? You know?

And I think unless you’re making a million dollars a year, it’s a tough place to live, I think, especially if you move to a really nice area. It can be super, super expensive. But, but, no, we will welcome you with open arms.

Oh, okay. One last question for you. What’s the one killer book you’ve read in the last twelve months that pertains to business that you would absolutely recommend that people read? The best book in the last twelve months is one I’ve actually read before. It’s quite an old book, and it has a terrible title, but it’s awesome. And it’s called The Happy Pocket Full of Money.

Really? Let me write that down. I’m ordering that. Happy Pocket Full of Money. Yeah. It’s really good. I think it was written in the fifties or the sixties. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah? Cool. Well, hey. I’ve got I need your UK address, mate, because I’ve got a copy of my book, which I will send you.

Thank you so much. You know, I have a I have a technical book. I have zero money down. This is buying secrets. But then, I decided and I don’t read novels, right? I’m not a novels kind of guy. I decided to write a fable. So it’s a story of a buyer and a seller that come together and they transact on a deal, and then the buyer goes off and does a big roll up and sells it for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Right? So it captures all the technical knowledge you need to learn to find deals, buy them, raise money, scale, exit. But what the book this this is why I wrote a novel. It captures all the drama and the emotion and the psychology that people go through when they do deals. And I think that gets overlooked a lot in a lot of technical books.

Right? But, yeah, you can talk about how to calculate EBITDA, how to take an average, how to do ad backs, like, how to do due diligence, like, how to structure the deal. Like, that’s you know, you can talk about that, and they do. But, like, when a seller gets cold feet, what happens?

Right? When a buyer gets cold feet, what happens? And what happens when the finance this happens in the butt, the financier pulls the plug the day before closing, and he has to pivot and offer a completely different creative deal structure. Like, all those things that happen in reality, technical business buying books don’t cover.

So I tried to get all of that done, and I wrote it all myself. It’s ninety thousand words. I had to take a class. I took—have you ever been on master class? Like, there’s, like, a—No. I’ve seen them. Yeah. Master class, really cool platform. Like, Gordon Ramsay will teach you how to cook or Aaron Sorkin will teach you how to write a screenplay.

Well, there’s authors on there that teach you how to write novels. Right? So, James Patterson was the guy that I watched. Right? And he teaches you how to create intrigue, how to develop characters, how to, like, tie a story together. So I went through that like four or five times.

And then while I was before we moved to Austin, I was spending half of my time in Florida where I’ve got a house and half my time in England. And on the weekends where I was home alone in Florida and I had nothing to do, I’d sit there twelve hours each day and just write.

So I blasted this thing out, like, really, really quickly, but obviously got an editor to just kind of clean up the grammar because I’m, you know, I’m not really a writer. But, yeah, we launched it about two months ago, and it’s mandatory reading for all the people that come into my community.

So I’d love to send you a copy, mate. So I’ll, as soon as I get back to England in a couple of weeks, send me your address. I’ll wiz one up to you. And then, yeah, I think there’s a lot for the personal branding that you know, talked about before. You know, like, being a published author and a best-selling author is, like, really, really good for, you know, speaking and doing all those different things.

But, alright, mate. Well, appreciate your time. Where can people find you, man? Like, if they wanna come into some of your things or, like, how can they find you? Like, do you have a YouTube channel, an Instagram channel, or what’s the best way for people to get a hold of you?

Yeah. So my name, Ross Thompkins dot co dot uk, is the website. You can link to my YouTube and the Instagram on there, but my most active social media platform for anyone is LinkedIn. And, again, just search my name and picture of me in a cap as always.

Perfect, mate. Well, thank you so much for your time. Love you, man. Can’t wait to do this deal with you and build that big roll-up. And, yeah, looking forward to seeing you at some point. I know it’s a couple years since we last were in person. I met you’re on your way to close a deal down in Shropshire, I think.

And, yeah, we met at the services in Lancashire, and I think it kind of seeded the conversation about what we’re actually doing now. How do we do a big roll-up in America and raise capital and do all those different things? So, so, yeah, now I’m physically here in the country. It’s a lot easier to do this.

So have a great rest of your… it’s Monday today, isn’t it? Yeah. Have a great rest of your Monday. I will catch you soon, and thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks, Kyle. Really appreciate it. Speak to you. See you. Bye.