Living 1-2 hrs from acquisition
April 08, 2023
by a searcher in Dallas, TX, USA
Does anyone have experience acquiring a service business and living 1-2 hrs away? Founder will stay on and run day to day operations. Curious what others experience has been with this and what to consider.
from University of Pennsylvania in Portland, OR, USA
There's not a lot to go on in the description, so I'll make the assumption that "service business" means the company is people-heavy and those employees' labor is the primary product. If that is an accurate assumption then I highly recommend you find a way to spend at least 50% of your time local to the business. Unless this is a massive enterprise with layers of management and a history of remote shareholders the employees will care greatly about your character, your vision for the company, your ability to make or keep the company a great place to work, and whether you are interested in them as people. A good portion of the answers to their questions is only demonstrated by your physical presence and face-to-face interactions. We hear and read stories about distant owners collecting mailbox money and spending their days as a capital allocators aggregating businesses for multiple arbitrage. No doubt some of those stories are accurate, but my experience thus far operating a small business and observing the other operators who are part of my new peer group of home services business owners is that small company teams want a relationship with the owner in order to feel confident about their employment choice.
All that said, for the last 18 months my wife and I have I've owned a business 200 miles from our house. We chose not to relocate immediately in order to let our youngest graduate from his high school and wind down some of our community commitments. We leased a townhome near the business and spend ~50% of our time there, with periods of up to 2 weeks away from the business. It's a 50-person plumbing company with several capable managers. Financial results are strong and employee turnover is low during our ownership. When we are on-site we are all-in. I get to the shop early in the morning to talk to the team before they dispatch to jobs and every two weeks we have an all-hands session which I've only missed once. That level of face-to-face engagement seems to be enough and I never felt that I had this much freedom of my schedule in my previous W-2 roles, so it works me too. We are in the process of building a house near the business and will relocate full-time this year. The fact is, we really enjoy these 50 people and want to spend more time with them. I hope you find the same with the team you inherit with your acquisition.
from Rutgers in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Some things I would ask:
- Could I offer hybrid remote/office schedule to employees to help them develop a remote-first communication style? The best way to encourage people to do it is make it benefit them.
- Who am I managing? If you're managing managers it's a bit different than managing individual contributors.
- How can I refocus people on text-based communication? You're not going to be there to hear the water cooler talk, overhear the phone conversations, etc.