Speaker 2
That was just one of pause on that. Like having the admin call after the job to follow up, make sure everything is okay. Imagine that is a pretty cool touch that probably doesn't happen with a lot of competitors. So I think that was a cool thing that you just mentioned. More from Johnny in just a moment, including his growth by acquisition strategy, how he bought a quarter million dollar window cleaning business for just a thousand bucks. One best practice when it comes to your side hustle is to set up a separate account for your business. When you mingle your business in personal finances, things can start to get pretty messy, pretty fast. It's really tough to get an accurate picture of profitability. And it just makes tax time a mess. The problem is banking can be a pain. Traditional banks aren't built for the modern agile scrappy entrepreneur like you. This is where our brand new sponsor, Nearside, comes in with a better business checking account experience. There are no monthly fees, no minimum balance requirements, and some pretty cool perks too. For example, you'll earn three layers of cash back that go directly to your bottom line. That's 1% on every purchase, up to an additional 5% on selected business vendors like Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot. And then through MasterCard, up to 10% back at tens of thousands of businesses all across the country. Plus, you'll get exclusive discounts and credits on tools like Square, QuickBooks, Indeed, and Yelp ads. Nearside offers a seamless and rewarding online banking experience for on-the-go entrepreneurs like you. You'll find the Nearside app in both the Google Play and iOS app stores. Go to nearside.com slash side hustle to sign up for your nearside business checking account today. That's nearside.com slash side hustle. You said something earlier about we acquired this other company, which came with these big university contracts. Talk to me about this growth through acquisition because it seems like, well, if I'm going to buy another company, that's going to take a ton of capital. But my understanding is you went about it a pretty creative way.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I had just been listening to a ton of podcasts on acquisition, entrepreneurship, and how to acquire businesses. You can kind of, through the SBA and some creative deal making, you can buy yourself into a really good paying job. So I started down that rabbit hole. And I was like, wait, I can use these things that I'm learning. And I could buy another window cleaning company, apply it to my window cleaning company, and we can grow faster. But we didn't have that much cash. So what happened was coincidentally, I was listening to all this stuff and I was reading Harvard Business Review, how to buy a small business. And I was like, just consuming all this information. And a buddy of mine in my networking group called Litip. It's similar to BNI, if you're familiar. He called me, he's like, Hey, I have one of my Medicare clients. He was the insurancesian of the group. And so he's one of my Medicare clients is retiring. And he's got a window cleaning business in the neighboring city, literally right next door to me. And he needs to sell it. He's, you know, 65 or something. And he wants to move. So I'm like, Oh my God, this is perfect. He wants to retire. No one else is going to probably buy this business. And I assume that he was still really involved in it. And that turned out to be true. So I was like, I could probably get a really good deal on this. And we met and lo and behold, doesn't have profit loss statements. He brings, you know, a one page sheet of all the equipment that he has. And then his last three, he was trailing three year revenue numbers, but they're labeled as profit, right? And so it's like a $250,000 year business, but he labeled it profit. So I'm like, wait, hold on, you're making $250,000 in profit. Yeah. No, that sales. And I was like, okay, that's what I thought. So good signs for me. I was like, okay, I could definitely get a good deal. But you know, I don't want to try to take this guy's business for nothing. So I had to, I had to kind of like educate him a lot on how the process worked and how, how like his business really wasn't worth, because he was asking, coming into the first meeting, he was asking for 300k because that's what he saw on the internet. And so I had to educate him over the next three months on basically like, look, dude, you're still super involved in the business. You're not charging market rate. So if I were to buy this business, and with the way I'm paying my guys now, I have to raise prices immediately. I can't incrementally raise the prices over the next six months to a year to retain more customers. I have to raise prices immediately because my guys are going to be paid on commission, right? They're not going to be doing, you know, what I normally charge 300 bucks for 200 bucks just because I bought this company. That's not, that's not for