What was their story? Why were they so prepared?

We were representing a PE-backed portfolio company that was adding a tuck-in.

So the seller was just a husband and wife selling their business.

It was a pretty straightforward business.

They had done some things to get ready, like they had paid off, they had a couple of vehicles in the business, they had paid off the vehicles, they knew they were gonna transfer.

They had all of the sort of documentation about all the things just packaged up really nicely.

They happened to be a business that does not have like long-term contracts with its customers.

What's your experience been like that? When a company is real deal ready, how much easier is it to negotiate the purchase agreement?

Tell us about that.

Yeah, that's right.

So sort of going back in the time machine to 2015, when we started Adverse Legal, we as my business partner, Gwen Griggs and I, and 2015, we knew we did not want to build by the hour, but we also understood that we needed... to build by something, right? Couldn't just like make up a number and that wasn't going to work for us.

And there are some people where that kind of approach does seem to make sense and it works for them.

But we are metric driven humans.

Know yourself and we know we like gold stars.

So when I build by the hour, I knew if I build 8.6 hours a day or whatever, I was exceeding mark and it was a very clear metric and so if you're going to take hourly billing out of the way i still needed something to know have i hit the mark for the day and i also felt like i needed some way to to show a client did i did i deliver what you paid for are you getting what you paid for and So we're sitting around going, if it's not billing by the hour, bill by the what? What is it going to be? And the first thing that we came upon was flat fee billing.

Yeah.