Just didn't have the sense of purpose.

And I was kind of in a career that I never really dreamt about to begin with. You act like you have time, but you were never guaranteed that. The catalyst for me of going, you know, I can't spend 40-something years in the corporate world, working for somebody else. So ended up going headfirst into small business. Came out to be about 500,000 or so, SDE, their half is left over for us. It ended up being enough six figures for both of us. That's the same amount of energy and effort that you would spend finding a rental property. But now instead of getting a couple hundred bucks a month of cash flow, you guys get six figures of cash flow. This stuff is stuff that people don't think about when they're buying businesses that will set you up for a long, long, long time. All right. Eric Cluiss, welcome to the Action Academy podcast, buddy. How are you? Appreciate it. Yeah, I'm good. Thanks for having me. Excited to have you, man. 11 months and some change coming, huh? Yeah, yeah, long time listener for quite a while now. And yeah, not quite a year.

Well, just past the year mark adjoining, but. Yeah. So walk us through, man. What happened?

Why are you on the podcast here today? What did you buy? I bought a furniture, fixtures,

and equipment procurement firm business with another member in Action Academy that I partnered up with.

I have a 15-year oil and gas career as a project controls analyst. So kind of like data management, finance, and project management, kind of all rolled together.

And yeah, I ended up buying this one um about 11 months to the day from joining

ashen academy and closed on it so doing that full time now i guess it's been in about six weeks

so enjoying it love and life uh infinitely better than the w2 and looking forward to everything else

yet to come.

Man, I want to take you back first.

So back to your career so that somebody that's listening to this that's sitting in the

corporate job can take some advice from where you were, your experience is, so that they can

know when it's finally time for them to make a plunge.

Then we want to go through the business buying journey. what parts were a surprise to you, what parts weren't a surprise to you, and then finally at the end for the audience that's listening and are watching this, we'll wrap it up with, you know, what challenges are you going through with the post-acquisition phase? I'll try to help you out there live on the podcast as much as I

humanly can to get you guys in the right direction and solve any bottlenecks for you guys.

So let's start with 15 years, oil and gas, making great money. What was wrong? What was off?

You know, you've got the golden handcuffs. You've got the security. You've got this comfort.

What more were you looking for that you couldn't find? That's, yeah, good question. Honestly, kind of purpose or meaning,

just being a number, you know, my company had 50,000 odd employees and just being one of those,

you know, I managed a team of 16 at one point and just not really having a kind of a final say in

things. You know, you can make some decisions, but a lot of it's just out of your control.

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