I'm so excited to bring you this episode. My two guests, Bradley and Logan, bought, grew and sold a local landscaping business in Austin, Texas. You know from the headline that their sale price was eye-watering, especially for a couple guys not yet 30 years old. So the story itself is spectacular, from not knowing what a search fund was in 2017 to selling the business they'd acquired to a public corporation just three and a half years later. But what I actually love most about this conversation is all the strategy that got them from point A to B. We go deep on how Bradley and Logan took a project-based business with chronic and existential cash flow headaches and made it a recurring revenue machine with a predictable sales function. Now their business happened to be landscaping, but the lessons you'll learn here are applicable to so many service businesses where there is both project revenue and contract or recurring revenue to be had. Now you already know how coveted recurring revenue is as a searcher, but it needs to be emphasized: in Bradley and Logan's case, it made the difference between a fragile, hanging-on-by-their-fingernails landscaping business to one that was healthy and growing fast and beating its competition and ultimately worth eight figures to a large and sophisticated acquirer. Now, quick aside about that sale number. You'll hear at the end when I do some quick math to arrive at a number in the $25 to $30 million range. Just to give some more space to that here: though Bradley and Logan of course can't disclose any information about BrightView's valuation math and acquisition price, there is an article on the industry site landscapemanagement.net that says BrightView acquires at between five and seven times EBITDA. So call it six. I assume that's from public filings, BrightView being a publicly traded company. Then the 2019 revenue of WLE, Bradley and Logan's company, is listed on that same industry site's top 100 list from that year as $23.5 million. Finally, industry-standard EBITDA margins in landscaping are in the low 20s. So if you multiply all these numbers together — industry margins by WLE's revenue in 2019 by BrightView's average acquisition multiple — my math gets $28.2 million. So this is just me on a napkin, obviously, but it seems like a fair way to calculate their sale price, much more specifically than just saying eight figures. Of course I couldn't get any confirmation from anybody, but mid to high 20s feels realistic to me. Now I like to know the numbers, especially the big ones, so hopefully I didn't lose you in the weeds there. Okay. And lastly, this interview is over two hours. (I feel like this intro is almost over two hours.) I tried to cut but there was just so much good stuff, I really didn't cut much at all. So it's in two parts. I release part two on Thursday. Please enjoy this story and education from Logan Brown and Bradley Roofner.