But what if you're not ready to sell? What if you want to keep growing and acquisition is part of your mechanism of growth? What are the things that you are or you would encourage contractors to look for if they're looking to bring or add a company into their umbrella?

Yeah, great question.

And so I think acquisitions can be great for smaller companies, but you don't need to be doing $50 million or $100 million for it to make sense.

And I think buying smaller, right? I think as an owner, it takes a different skill set to run a company doing $2 million in sales than it was doing $5 million in sales.

And so you need to grow, in my opinion, as an owner.

So I often suggest buying a company smaller than yours.

Right.

I got to get my memory going

can do to increase the value?

Yeah, absolutely.

And there's really four things that I preach a lot.

And the first thing is getting out of the van, right? Too many heating and air owners and plumbers are the best plumber, the best salesman, the best technician, the best installer, the best, best of everything.

Every Google review when you see them online has their name in it.

And so- They're limiting their growth, right? You only can grow as much as what you can handle in the workforce.

And so my advice is as quickly as you can for getting yourself out of the van and doing that through growing the business and hiring additional people.

Right.

If you look ahead five years, so 2031, what do you think business brokers are going to need to do to survive in five years from now? Wow.

My Cristobal works half as well as anybody else's.

I think you've got to deliver value at every step of the process.

I think the industry itself appears to be growing, and I think it's getting younger.

When I first got into the industry, it felt like any event I went to, I was the youngest guy there and I wasn't young.

Right.

So I think that and now I go to events and my son's in it, Jim Parker's son's in it.

We talked a little bit about AI, but where do you see the number one tech shift or what's the number one tech shift for M&A business brokers from their side?

So let's talk about kind of your journey into business brokerage first, and then evolving into the world of HVAC.

Wow, okay, we'll go way back then.

So it's kind of crazy.

I'll go, I'll be fast at the beginning, and then maybe slow down at the end, it'll tie in together.

So Initially, my first shot at adulthood, I had a financial planning company.

We did investments, insurance, that type of thing.

I sold that business.

So I'd love to hear some kind of cautionary tale experience that, you know, brokers, sellers, buyers can take something from as like a try not to do this or please don't be like this, you know, kind of situation.

I mean, just

to prove what you're talking about, when I first got in the industry, you know, There wasn't a competition.

We could do a direct mail piece to the state of Florida, every licensed contractor, and I'd get 20, 25 phone calls.

Now I could do that same direct mail piece to the state of Florida and get none.

Just because there's so many, there's so much disruption in the marketplace and so much vying for information.

And so when we made the concerted effort to try to be in all the channels my people are in.

it changed my business, right? I mean, we, you know, once again, where I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on every group chat, I'm answering those things.

right? How does that affect the valuation? Does it affect the evaluation? And what does that look like?