You see it with real estate too, like consolidating land together to sell one big piece to a builder. Yeah. It's the same process. Yeah. Do you think though, like, okay, in my mind, a $50 million business of a bunch of little similar businesses is worth less than a $50 million one business.

Depends how you integrate it. Right. So let's talk about one of my rollups, which is in the health, wellness, nutrition space for women. It's a collection of different brands, which are all combined together and are all integrated into the same model. It's only like Amazon, right? So if you look at Amazon, they've made over a hundred acquisitions in the past 10 years. They bought Whole Foods, they bought Zappos, they bought Audible, all these different companies. So same with Facebook. Facebook's a collection of acquisitions. Apple's a collection of acquisitions. All the trillion dollar companies in the world have got to that size through acquiring other businesses and rebranding them and integrating them into their own infrastructure.

That

makes sense.

Yeah. Because when Facebook acquired Instagram, it's like they paid a billion dollars for Instagram. People thought they were crazy. And I mean, obviously today Instagram is probably worth a hundred billion on its own. Yeah. Right. And I think nobody else could pay a billion for Instagram because it was worth to Facebook far more than

anyone else. Of course it was. I did a really crazy deal once. So back in 2005, I was working for Hewlett Packard. I was an M&A guy for Hewlett Packard. And we dropped $4.5 billion on a software company that was worth about $1 billion. And the market thought we were crazy by offering such a premium price for this business. And it's because we knew that as a software company, for every dollar that a customer would spend on software, they'd spend $10 on hardware and $15 on services. So for us, it was a strategic acquisition so that we could pull a lot more dollars into those relationships. So the value of any business is really based on what someone's prepared to pay for it. And it's like what the big guys do on Wall Street, the large companies, is they innovate and grow through acquisition. So think of Amazon, right? Do you think Bezos one day, when he was sat in his office and one of his team came in and said, Jeff, Jeff, we've got a massive problem. There's this company. They've created this app. It's called Audible. You can listen to books now. People are not going to be buying our books anymore. Did he say, well, get the R&D guys in here. Let's code our own. Let's figure out how to go to market. No, he went and bought it, right? He went and acquired that business. And when he realized that there was a threat, retail was the next big frontier online, did he go and build a supermarket chain? No. He went and acquired Whole Foods, right? Which was crazy. And all the large companies, they buy their growth. Anything you want in business, you can acquire, and you can use other people's money to do it. You want more customers, go and acquire them. You want more revenue streams, go and acquire them. You want a new location, go acquire them. You want a different product to sell that you don't have time to build or the skills to build. Go and acquire the company that does that stuff. And there's trillions of dollars of capital out there that you can go and deploy so you don't have to use little to none of your own money.