Nobody Hired Me to Wait

I spent a year and a real amount of money trying to buy a business. The job I ended up taking came from a guy I had on my podcast five years ago.

I've been quiet for a few months and not for any strategic reason. I've been heads down, and before that I was days away from starting my own thing when a friend I'd stayed in touch with since he came on the show posted about a GM role at a construction technology services company here in town. The owners have run it for fourteen years and would like to spend more time at home. It's the most common story in small business, and it happens to be the one I'd spent several years preparing for, just in a much different form.

Worth sitting with the mechanics of that for a second. He didn't call me. He posted something, and I saw it, because five years ago I asked him to come talk to me for an hour about his business and then stayed in touch for no particular reason. I've said to so many people that the podcast has been the highest leverage thing I've ever done. That remains true today. Three for three on jobs post military, all from people I've known or interviewed.

Three months in, I'm the happiest I've been in a while, and the first real lesson has been about speed. Mostly that I had the wrong idea about it.

Searching for a business and running one are not the same job, even though in the search world they aren't distinguished.

A search looks busy. You're making calls, sending letters, taking meetings, getting on planes. But the actual game is patience. There are no points for heroics. You grind through outreach for months trying to make sure you don't buy a bad company, and the real risk isn't that you'll fail to find one; it's that after six months of slogging you'll talk yourself into one that doesn't fit. My mentor always pounded into my head that the most important thing is that you buy right. It takes a miracle of operational excellence (what he'd call managing right) and selling right to recover from a bad buy.

My search was a struggle. Was anxious to get into a business and every day felt a ticking clock. I didn't really recognize why this was uncomfortable until after the fact. Going into undergrad I was convinced I wanted to work in equities, at a hedge fund or family office. I loved dissecting balance sheets, interpreting valuations, and the world that came with this. A few years of investing my own money directly in public equities taught me I didn't really have the patience to sit around and wait for the right pitches. The patience struggle in search was the same issue rearing its ugly head.

My search didn't end cleanly when this came up. There were a few months in the middle where I was genuinely conflicted, applying for jobs I was overqualified for, talking to anybody who would talk to me, asking for introductions. I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing or what came next. I didn't want to settle, though I could have, and there were weeks where taking a regular guy job would at least give my wife some peace and put a dent in the feeling of inadequacy about not providing for my family in the way I wanted to. I was close to starting something from scratch when the GM role showed up.

Nobody writes about that part. The search content online covers the process and it covers the close, and it skips the stretch in the middle where you aren't sure the process is going to produce anything at all. Seen a lot of people get lost out there.

We started going to church a few months ago and have been working through the book of Acts. The thing I keep getting stuck on is how much of it Paul spends in jail. Years of it, waiting, while people are actively trying to ambush him, and he keeps doing the work he believes he's supposed to be doing the whole time. I'm not going to pretend my few months were anything like that, but it reframed them for me. I'd been treating the waiting as the gap between things instead of as part of the thing. Alex Hormozi calls this the Rocky cut scene, that 120 seconds of any movie where the hero is seen grinding, training, and preparing for the big fight. That 120 seconds can feel a lot like 120 years in the middle of it.

When I took an operating seat back in May, I assumed I was finally switching muscles. Search was patience and this would be speed. I had that exactly backwards.

I came in eager, but knew to take it slow. Easier said than done. The pressure doesn't arrive as advice, it arrives as a situation.

You're new, so you want to prove you were worth hiring. The owners want out, which means somebody is waiting on you to change something. And every day you walk past three or four things that are visibly broken, some of them small and some of them on fire. Doing nothing about any of it feels a lot like failing at the job you just took.

I've found three good reasons to not start swinging the bat immediately when jumping into a new business, whether through acquisition or an exec role. The obvious exception is if you're in a dramatic, immediate turnaround situation where big moves need to be made quickly. More often than not you are joining, and want to be joining, a business that doesn't need you to do anything big in the first 90 days.

The first is that you don't know the downstream impacts. Nothing in a fourteen year old business is arbitrary, including the parts that look arbitrary, and every process you'd like to rip out is load bearing for something you haven't found yet.

The second is that you don't actually know what the most important thing is. That isn't a matter of being unsure, it's that ranking problems requires context you cannot possibly have in week three. Rank them anyway and you'll spend your best months on your fourth biggest issue.

The third is the expensive one. When you change something before you understand it, everyone watching learns that decisions here get made on impulse, and you're going to need those same people to believe otherwise later. I joined a business that still feels the scars of this.

Before I arrived, the owners brought in a consultant to serve in a quasi GM role. He came in hard, never got buy in from the employees, and left without producing any durable change. Same company, same people, same problems. You could sense the sensitivity to change when talking to people. My aim was to build trust and buy in before starting to drive change.

Mostly it looks like being a sponge. You absorb, you ask a lot of questions, and you write down far more than you act on.

I keep a running file called Brock's Burning Fires of Varying Magnitudes, which is a semi sorted list of everything broken that I'm not fixing yet. I'm not fully GTD pilled, but the one idea I've taken from it is capture (I blame Jon Matzner for this obsession, IYKYK). Writing something down is not the same as deciding to do it, and it isn't procrastinating either. It's what lets you leave a problem alone without losing it, and that turns out to be most of the skill in month one.

Three things happen when you capture instead of act. You stop dumping every observation you've had since Tuesday onto a team that's already at capacity. You give ideas time to marinate, and a surprising number of them turn out to be wrong once they've had a week. And you stop carrying the low grade anxiety of forgetting, which I think is most of what actually makes new operators swing early.

A problem on a list is handled whether it's fixed today or in six months.

I run the same thing on my own work every Friday, revisiting the monthly and quarterly goals and writing down everything in flight along with the next step for each, so that Monday starts with execution instead of orientation.

The list is important because many of the things you observe that need to change boil up into much larger changes down the road. Many of my minor freakouts have sounded like this:

"You guys don't have CRM tracking for where we get leads from? We need to fix that NOW!"

While stuff like lead tracking is important, it's actually a small piece of a larger system that needs a rework (sales process). Attacking these onesie twosie items feels good (and if they really are things you can fix in <5 minutes you should), but more often than not they belong in a larger conversation about what the bigger problem is and only when you're ready to handle that 'project' as GTD would call it (anything with more than 1 step).

Slow is not the same as nothing.

We brought on two additional accountants to work through historical bank reconciliations, which are moving now for the first time in a long time. AR came down sharply, with total outstanding receivables dropping over 70%, the bulk coming from the 60 and 90 day buckets. Hell, I even turned a collection call into a sale. The owner is out of roughly 75% of the day to day, which was the entire point of hiring me.

None of that required me to change how the business fundamentally works, which is sort of the point. There is a surprising amount of value sitting in a fourteen year old company that nobody has gotten around to collecting, and almost none of it requires a strategy.

The result I care most about isn't a number at all. Several employees have told me, without being asked, that they're glad I'm here and that things feel different around the office. I'll take that over the AR chart.

I'm not from construction, which seems to surprise people less than it should.

Moiz Ali, who founded Native deodorant, was once asked about why he got into that space and whether he came from a background in CPG. He said something to the effect of "I don't know anything about deodorant, but in six months I'll know everything there is to know about deodorant."

Rate of learning is a real competitive advantage, and in month three it might be the only one I have. It also happens to require the same thing everything else here requires, which is sitting still long enough to actually take something in.

There may come a day when I run a search again, and that takes patience of exactly the kind I've been describing here: slow, unglamorous, no points for heroics. My day to day now is the opposite, with most of my waking hours going to getting my arms around a new industry, building trust with employees and customers, and running operations well enough to get an owner out of their day to day.

In my quarterly review, the owner had asked the employees for feedback about my first three months. One of the things that made me laugh is that someone asked the owners if they were putting enormous pressure on me to perform and get things done. Funnily enough they haven't at all. That pressure is all mine. Think it was Naval who said something like impatience with action, patience with results. As with most big ideas, there are exceptions to everything. For now we'll keep pushing the rock up the hill, slowly but surely.

Keep attacking, Brock