Podcast EP 136 | If We Bought Twitter: things to consider when acquiring a business

What would we do if we paid $44 USD Bil­lion for a busi­ness that was los­ing 4 mil­lion dol­lars a day?

It’s no dif­fer­ent than buy­ing any busi­ness, you’re either going to let it run, or extract and cre­ate more val­ue through a turnaround. 

We talk about what we would do if we bought Twit­ter, and what you should con­sid­er if you’re buy­ing a business.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every­thing that we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. What do you need to do? How do you do it? Why does it mat­ter? And how to get there. My name is Brad Giles. And, as always, I’m joined today by my co host, Kevin Lawrence in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da. Kevin, good morn­ing. Good after­noon. How you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:33

Good evening. I’m doing great. Life’s good. I’m look­ing for­ward to our con­ver­sa­tion today. Because we’re con­tem­plat­ing if we did a mas­sive acqui­si­tion. There’s this com­pa­ny, I don’t know if you heard about it, but it’s called Twit­ter and or heard was for sale? Well, or at least some­one decid­ed to buy it. So we’re dig­ging into if we bought Twit­ter today, I think it’s gonna be fun. It’s we had some fun think­ing about this. Yeah, some good things are good.

Brad Giles 00:59

Awe­some. Awe­some. I think you said today, and I know that we should­n’t real­ly be talk­ing about the weath­er. You had one foot of snow. Is that right?

Kevin Lawrence 01:06

Yeah. Man, up near a place called Kelow­na near a place called Kelow­na BC. Yeah. Last cou­ple of days. It’s seri­ous. Yeah. And it makes it real fun when I’m dri­ving back to Van­cou­ver in a cou­ple of days over the moun­tain pass, which always makes for a thrilling time. So yeah, yep, lots of snow. It’s fun. It was it was. It was a lots of ice in town. I was in town for break­fast this morn­ing at a char­i­ty event thing. And yeah, there was ice all over the place. And it was quite fun.

Brad Giles 01:40

I like your idea of fun. dif­fer­ent to mine. All right. So well, I’m equipped,

Kevin Lawrence 01:46

I’m equipped. I got all the right equip­ment. So it does­n’t make it more fun. I’m not wor­ried about it. Very Go ahead.

Brad Giles 01:50

All right. So let’s talk about this episode. What we’re ask­ing today is we’ve seen Elon Musk by Twit­ter recent­ly. And he’s made head­lines. Look, it’s the rich­est man in the world buy­ing basi­cal­ly, one of the most, the most suc­cess­ful, I guess, social media, Town Square. Okay, so it’s where all the jour­nal­ists go all the celebri­ties to tweet their thoughts or to com­mu­ni­cate their thoughts. And you know, it has a impact on the world. But we can’t, we can’t under­val­ue Elon Musk, like he did­n’t get to be the rich­est man in the world, with Tes­la, with Pay­Pal, with SpaceX with the bor­ing com­pa­ny with all of his amaz­ing ven­tures, and I prob­a­bly missed one, you know, or two with­out being, you know, if he was a dum­my with­out being, you know, bril­liant at busi­ness. But, you know, in the inter­est of enter­tain­ment, we thought, let’s, let’s reflect on that, first of all, and then maybe posi­tion that into things to con­sid­er if you’re acquir­ing business.

Kevin Lawrence 03:04

Yeah, and I guess I mean, acqui­si­tion like that, you know, he’s got to have a pret­ty damn good plan. He’s not just want­i­ng to invest that kind of mon­ey on a hope and a prayer I would imag­ine not. He’s a smart guy. He’s sur­round­ed by very, very smart peo­ple. And that’s what we’re kind of dig­ging into today. And, you know, the dis­tinc­tion to kind of look at this is that real­ly, when you’re doing an acqui­si­tion like that, there’s kind of three dif­fer­ent modes, right, is just buy it and hold it and let it run. That’s not like­ly what that isn’t what he’s doing so far. Not not because it was­n’t it was if he saw extra val­ue in it. The sec­ond is when you do see extra val­ue in it. It could be just to do a healthy ren­o­va­tion, update it facelift­ed make it bet­ter, and away you go, which peo­ple often do with, with acqui­si­tions, you know, improv­ing it, stream­lin­ing what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. And then there’s like the knock down, tear down, full blown turn­around, right, where it’s a hard core reset­ting a busi­ness mod­el, gut­ting out all kinds of things out of it, like lit­er­al­ly, like ful­ly tear­ing it down. And I love this metaphor. When we’re talk­ing about acqui­si­tions with clients, and I talk about it a bit as well buy­ing your grand­ma’s house. It’s like when you go and buy your grand­ma’s house, you know, no mat­ter what there’s always good they’re no mat­ter what you’re buy­ing, oth­er­wise you would­n’t buy it. So is it a buy and hold? Is it a light reno that you do on grand­ma’s house? Keep­ing all the her­itage there and you keep some of the old wood pan­el­ing and wood floors and and pre­serve it or is it a full hard­core knocked down or ful­ly got it like a full blown turn­around to mod­ern­ize the whole thing, right? There’s very dif­fer­ent things and the root of it is you need to respect what’s there. But then find the things that you have to change. To cre­ate the extra val­ue. And that’s, you know, in this case, he seems from every­thing that we’re see­ing to be clos­er to the, to the hard­core rental almost to the point of full turn­around in his approach in his approach so far.

Brad Giles 05:16

So if you bought Twit­ter, you know, well, what would you do?

Kevin Lawrence 05:24

Well, def­i­nite­ly sur­round myself with some real­ly smart peo­ple. Yeah. And I’d be doing a hell of a lot of brain­storm­ing on the strat­e­gy and the eco­nom­ic mod­el. Like at the end of the day, how are we going to take this great asset, and find a way to eco­nom­i­cal­ly con­vert it into some­thing that can pro­duce a lot of cash? Right, it’s dom­i­nant in that space, but just just like Face­book did, and find a way to real­ly bring the eco­nom­ic mod­el and I’m not say­ing we do the same things, but like they did with Face­book, to find a way to bring the eco­nom­ic mod­el to life. Like, you know, in the news recent­ly, he was, you know, from from obvi­ous­ly start­ed sell­ing the ver­i­fi­ca­tion marks, was it four bucks a month or some­thing like that? Or? Yeah. Yeah, some­thing like a few bucks.

Brad Giles 06:08

There’s some tac­ti­cal stuff that, you know, is, is under heavy debate. But I guess if you zoom out, and you think about, like, their hedge­hog. So their hedge­hog being what’s their core pur­pose, like to be the world’s town square, or some­thing like that to be the place where, you know, peo­ple can have healthy debate to move mankind for­ward. Right? And I say healthy, because it’s a tox­ic cesspool at times. In fact, most times.

Kevin Lawrence 06:37

Most of those plat­forms can be social, or

Brad Giles 06:39

they can be right. So so to be able to live the pur­pose, okay, to be able to under­stand what they can be best at, which obvi­ous­ly, is deeply con­nect­ed to that pur­pose like they can, they haven’t been the best at that, right. But the chal­lenge is the eco­nom­ic mod­el, as you said, that’s the bit of the hedge­hog that they’ve got to get, right, they’ve got to get their prof­it per x, right, in a way that, you know, adds to the user expe­ri­ence and and that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for, be it adver­tis­ers or peo­ple, who­ev­er it is. So you got to get that right, because I saw him say recent­ly, he was los­ing $4 mil­lion a day. You can’t, you can’t keep doing that for too long, even if you are the rich­est man on the planet.

Kevin Lawrence 07:22

No, and it does­n’t make sense. It’s a busi­ness. And unless there’s a way to because you’re the goal is always of a CEO is to improve the or increase the enter­prise val­ue. So if there’s anoth­er lever, he can pull, you know, I don’t know how many more users are avail­able for Twit­ter. So user growth is prob­a­bly not it. Peo­ple that use Twit­ter, use Twit­ter. So could they get more eye­balls spend­ing more time, poten­tial­ly. But at some point, you have a plat­form that’s lever­ag­ing the rev­enue streams out of it. And, and there’s lots of oth­er things. So for me, it would be the eco­nom­ic mod­els, I will be study­ing lots of dif­fer­ent options that oth­er peo­ple have done. And that’s where all of the ener­gy would be, is fig­ur­ing out the eco­nom­ic mod­el, because like you from that, you’re going to hon­our the pur­pose and what it’s about, you can fig­ure out the peo­ple after­wards. In that process, I would­n’t be think­ing about human beings at all. It’s pure­ly hard core cold cap­i­tal­ism con­nect­ed to the pur­pose. Because if you think about the exist­ing team, you’re going to be lim­it­ed. And in many ways, I might not even be using a bunch of the exist­ing team, I would take some, I would cher­ry pick some. But I’d be using a lot of my smartest friends and advis­ers around me to, to real­ly dig in, fig­ure it out. And I, you know, like any strong team would do is that have the finance peo­ple there with us grind­ing num­bers, as we’re brain­storm­ing, try­ing to find ways to see what would work. And, you know, I would, in my case, there’s prob­a­bly, I can think of six peo­ple around the world that I would pull in from dif­fer­ent coun­tries that I know. And, ide­al­ly, get our­selves in the room for a cou­ple of days and come up with a whole bunch of things that we would start to test and iterate.

Brad Giles 09:08

Yeah, and look, that’s what he’s done. He’s brought in a heap of peo­ple from Tes­la and so forth. So, I mean, I’d say it’s maybe a com­bi­na­tion of a ren­o­va­tion and a knock down turn­around, like there’s a lit­tle bit of, there’s some bits that are work­ing real­ly well, there’s some things that they need to improve, but they’re com­ing back to this has to be a suc­cess­ful busi­ness. It can be good for mankind over­all, which, and I say that word mankind because he uses that lan­guage a lot. Yeah, he does, you know, to save mankind by set­ting up on Mars, like all of those types of things, which is, which is fab­u­lous. It’s great to have peo­ple who care.

Kevin Lawrence 09:46

Yeah, so this reminds me of when we were try­ing to before the show, but this brand but of the turn­around of Etsy. Yes. You know, there’s a great Har­vard Busi­ness School case study. We’ve used it with some of our clients as a case did­n’t even our inter­nal team, we did it. It’s an awe­some, awe­some case. But the root of it is, Etsy was com­ing up in the world with their hand­made goods and almost like the craft fair for the world. And it was excel­lent. And at a cer­tain point, though, the found the founder or the CEO of this build­ing, I for­get whether he was the founder or not, but it became kind of like, a lit­tle Wood­stock ish, you know, a whole bunch of lov­ing and free­dom and all this oth­er stuff. And peo­ple were chas­ing the com­pa­ny’s pur­pose. Peo­ple were chas­ing their own pur­pose, every­one had a lot of auton­o­my going off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. But eco­nom­i­cal­ly, it was­n’t work­ing that good. So they were kind of Wood­stock try­ing to be com­mer­cial, but it sort of was a lit­tle more like Wood­stock in the best ways. And the new CEO came in, and it was pret­ty damn con­tro­ver­sial. Like he made changes, and a lot of peo­ple were very unhap­py, because although he hon­oured the ini­tial pur­pose, right, like ren­o­vat­ing Grand­ma’s, he changed it fair­ly, he made it a lit­tle more com­mer­cial, because it need­ed to be in his eyes. And they real­ized the strat­e­gy realigned who the core cus­tomer was, inter­est­ing­ly, they changed the core cus­tomer. And then they slashed the updat­ed strat­e­gy, made notable cuts on the team, and killed a lot of the pro­grams that weren’t direct­ly relat­ed to the strat­e­gy. So they real­ly took is like tak­ing that bush in grand­ma’s front yard, and prun­ing it dra­mat­i­cal­ly, like real­ly cut­ting it way, way back to the point where it might take a cou­ple years to grow back and be strong for a huge pain. And it made a mas­sive dif­fer­ence, once they got past all of the protests and the upset peo­ple and you know, you’ve hurt, you know, you’ve destroyed our com­pa­ny stuff. It was a hard, hard, hard­core ren­o­va­tion, and they did a great job.

Brad Giles 12:02

The prob­lem is that even­tu­al­ly you run out of oth­er peo­ple’s mon­ey. Yeah, exact­ly. And, and that’s why we go back to the base the Hedge­hog, like, You got to be liv­ing your pur­pose, you got to be in the wheel­house of what you can be the best at, and you got to get your eco­nom­ic mod­el right.

Kevin Lawrence 12:21

Right! But if you don’t have the scale, all that oth­er stuff is fine. But with­out the eco­nom­ic mod­el, that does­n’t work. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, in our world, there’s been a lot of com­pa­nies that could get away with, espe­cial­ly in tech spaces of not mak­ing mon­ey. Of just using oth­er peo­ple’s mon­ey to build this machine with the intent of mak­ing mon­ey one day some­day in the future.

Brad Giles 12:42

And that’s like We Work. I don’t know, if you’ve seen there’s a Net­flix series about we crashed, we work, it’s the same thing. Even­tu­al­ly they were 100% about the pur­pose and you know, ele­vat­ing con­scious­ness until they run out of some­one else’s mon­ey. And then it all kind of became a bit of an issue. Yeah, so I can remem­ber, a client acquired a busi­ness and we spent a lot of time on the cul­ture, okay, because the prob­lem is, is that if you if you’re bring­ing anoth­er this was a merg­er, I sup­pose merg­er acqui­si­tion rather than sim­ply a new own­er, which is the Twit­ter exam­ple, right. But if you look at the changes that have been made, a lot of the changes have been to realign the cul­ture, or along with busks are the val­ues. But if if for you, you know, com­ing back to me and mor­tals like us, if you’re look­ing to acquire a busi­ness or you’ve acquired a busi­ness, you can’t under­es­ti­mate the inte­gra­tion of the two cul­tures, and just how much of a prob­lem that can be, unless you spend enough time to get it right.

Kevin Lawrence 13:59

It’s a huge amount of work. We have one client, we worked with the near we’re doing that time, cou­ple 100 mil­lion. And we acquired the num­ber two com­peti­tors in the space who was doing I think 20 ish mil­lion in rev­enue, rough­ly ball­park num­bers. And we acquired them, they were actu­al­ly relieved, which was won­der­ful, because we were just destroy­ing them in the mar­ket. I mean, we built a machine. We had such a strong team incred­i­ble clear strat­e­gy and exe­cu­tion spec­trum spec­tac­u­lar team of a play­ers. We were the team was get­ting stronger all the time, we were hard­core on only bring­ing on high qual­i­ty tal­ent, tal­ent and assess­ing tal­ent. Out­stand­ing. And finan­cial per­for­mance was great when we acquired this com­pa­ny, and it was an acqui­si­tion but we’re rolling them into the busi­ness. But the amount of work we did into doing it prop­er­ly. Like I will tell you like every­one was work­ing their brains out and exhaust­ed. Yeah, we buy the busi­ness. We get the dili­gence done, get the cap­i­tal, away we go, we went in and spent a ton of time get­ting to know who the key peo­ple were in the team, bring­ing them into our fold, we had a list of the peo­ple that we for sure want­ed to keep, we knew that these were the 10 most impor­tant peo­ple, and then our exec­u­tive team paired up with them. And I remem­ber very clear­ly, we’re in a strap plan­ning meet­ing on this acqui­si­tion. And, you know, we’re mak­ing it hap­pen, we know who the key peo­ple are, we’re inte­grat­ing them, we spent time to emo­tion­al­ly bond them with RFP, we did all the right things, then we start­ed work­ing on the sys­tems, but then some­one’s like, we’re all exhaust­ed, we just need to take a breath. And the CEO and I were dis­cussing, we’re say­ing, next quar­ter, this quar­ter, we got work to do, and I’m sor­ry, we’re going to have to pull up our socks, and we’re going to have to find ways to you know, dig down for our own resilience. Because we just acquired a bunch of cus­tomers. And they are the they are all signed up for the num­ber two in the mar­ket by no and not num­ber one, and they were num­ber they were sold, sell­ing against num­ber one, like we’re the bad guys, we got­ta get in the mar­ket, we got to go talk to all of the cus­tomers and make sure the new ones stay, we also got to talk to our exist­ing cus­tomers, and make sure that they’re hap­py and we don’t lose any cus­tomers in the mat. So the point of it being is the engi­neer­ing to do the acqui­si­tion was one, then to do the ini­tial inte­gra­tion strat­e­gy, then to do the inte­gra­tion of the peo­ple of the cus­tomer, not remind the sys­tems, the sys­tems was just admin­is­tra­tive stuff. Yep, well, we had to inte­grate the val­ue of the orga­ni­za­tion, and then lever­age it because we had a plan to increase the val­ue. So it’s, it’s a lot of work, and it’s exhaust­ing work, get­ting it done. And then once you’re done the plan­ning, then you got to do all the work. Yeah. And it’s it worked out incred­i­bly well. But the amount of work that that team put into, it was impres­sive. And, and we know the oth­er ones were that were when peo­ple do an acqui­si­tion, and where peo­ple don’t prop­er­ly approach it. And gen­er­al­ly, most peo­ple don’t peo­ple buy acqui­si­tions with a the­o­ry of the effi­cien­cies and the lift, which rarely is seen. Because it’s it’s incred­i­bly hard work. And some­times they just don’t inte­grate that well, espe­cial­ly if the cul­tures are too dif­fer­ent or things like that.

Brad Giles 17:25

And that’s where you need to make the hard choic­es. Elon Musk, you may or may not know, sent out to man­agers, a list of peo­ple or man­agers, they’re mak­ing cuts, I think they might have cut like 50% of their work­force. Okay. So sub­stan­tial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was sub­stan­tial. And so he was basi­cal­ly say­ing to the man­agers, who were the peo­ple that are going to suc­ceed in this new com­pa­ny, and you need to make the deci­sion as to who your team will be account­able for now, per­haps the way that he did, it might not be your way. But that’s his choice, right. But still, there are hard choic­es. Because if you can see, it’s like when we’re talk­ing about a play­er’s in oth­er parts of of the pod­cast, you know, you need to give the new busi­ness under the new pur­pose and the new val­ues and the new ide­olo­gies of the new leader, the best chance of suc­cess. And if there are peo­ple who are, you know, not going to suc­ceed in that area, or are going to be kind of against that or tox­ic in that envi­ron­ment, the quick­er that you can release those peo­ple from the busi­ness the bet­ter. Yep. And like you said ear­li­er, sur­round your­self with peo­ple who are liv­ing the same val­ues as you who are aligned with the new pur­pose. And they, you know, they need to align with that there’s, there’s, there’s sim­ply, they can find it, but it’s not going to go away.

Kevin Lawrence 18:57

Cor­rect. So if we go back to what we talked about at the begin­ning, you know, if you’re, if you’re buy­ing grand­ma’s house, you can hold it, and live in it or rent it out as an Airbnb or some­thing. You can do a light rental, or you can do the knock down turn­around. And, you know, in our beau­ti­ful fan­ta­sy world, it’s won­der­ful thing that most of these busi­ness­es are won­der­ful. You can buy them and hold them, but it’s often not the case. There’s a rea­son why they’re for sale. And it’s not usu­al­ly because they’re writ­ing at their absolute prime in their per­fect busi­ness. Right? Used Cars are often used for a rea­son. Now, some­times the own­ers have oth­er moti­va­tions and need the cap­i­tal for some­thing else. But gen­er­al­ly, and this is where peo­ple go wrong with it. You got to be will­ing to make a lot of very tough deci­sions that will make a lot of peo­ple very unhap­py and cre­ate risk. And you got to have the courage to go and take those risks and a lot of peo­ple aren’t cut for that. Or they don’t want to be dis­rup­tive or what­ev­er it hap­pens. To be, and it’s also being smart about know­ing and have the dis­cern­ment to know what works and what does­n’t. So, you know, it’s inter­est­ing, a client bought, I’ve had a cou­ple clients, the num­ber of actu­al­ly bought under­per­form­ing busi­ness­es, buy­ing under­per­form­ing busi­ness­es is real­ly tricky. Because if the pre­vi­ous own­ers could­n’t make it work, what makes you think he can, and you know, if you’re doing you got to be like, Musk can be pret­ty aggres­sive to turn it around. I mean, one tried it was in anoth­er coun­try in anoth­er con­ti­nent, and they tried remote­ly. And it was, you know, I had a fight with the CEO, like, I rarely have this, you have quite a few fights, but I often don’t fight with CEOs. But this one almost needs to fight to get clar­i­ty, and we have a big fight about it. I’m like, Yeah, I know, you’re only buy­ing it for a few mil­lion. Yeah, you know, you’re gonna burn 10 or more, I guar­an­tee it. Not all road otter gen­der, or, you know, and this is not Kev­in’s right, but they burned more than 10 mil­lion. And, and they got, you know, it was hard. And it was a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence. And they got one thing out of it that was of some val­ue. It was just, it was next to impos­si­ble to be every­thing that could nev­er­mind, it was under­per­form­ing and not and not prof­itable. And in a dif­fer­ent coun­try, and in a hor­ri­ble coun­try to do busi­ness in. And there was this, there’s a whole bunch of and again, you got to do it think there’s a learn­ing that’s required in some acqui­si­tions, but you got anoth­er who I am in the US sys­tem, they would buy sol­id busi­ness­es or even under­per­form­ing busi­ness­es, but they were, they were buy­ing oth­er, they knew what they were buy­ing. Yeah, they were buy­ing cus­tomer lists, geo­graph­ic tal­ent and oth­er things. So if the busi­ness is under­per­form­ing, it did­n’t mat­ter. They would look at the busi­ness, they had built the p&l, they know they could turn it into because they had done it many, many times before with a cook­ie cut­ter. And they would buy it, imple­ment a few notable changes, get a notable lift. And if they’d buy it for five times earn­ings. By the time they were done, they were buy­ing it for an equiv­a­lent of one and a half times earn­ings. And it worked incred­i­bly well, time and time, but they had a sys­tem. And that’s the thing we’re doing this expe­ri­ence helps. Go ahead.

Brad Giles 22:13

The thing that you’ve left hang­ing there is how did they lose the 10? mil­lion? Was it through in that sto­ry? Was it through loss­es? Like they just sus­tained loss­es? They lost cus­tomers? What What was it that that caused the loss­es? Do you remember?

Kevin Lawrence 22:31

Yeah, very clear­ly. Well, there was the ini­tial price was part of that 10 mil­lion, but that was it was I for­get the num­ber it was pret­ty low. Yeah, it was the annu­al the month­ly and annu­al invest­ment in a loss mak­ing busi­ness, right. And there was think­ing, it was like, it was like a boat sunk on the bot­tom of the ocean. And they thought they were gonna get it to float again. And they spent a lot of mon­ey try­ing to pull the boat up from like, pulling up the Titan­ic from the bot­tom. And they could­n’t Yeah, sure it’s valu­able. If you get it up, they just could­n’t get the damn thing off the bot­tom ocean floor. They could­n’t they could­n’t wrap sales. And they could­n’t find a way to get it to a prof­itable posi­tion. And they spent their mon­ey to and again, I love these peo­ple. They’re great peo­ple they tried. But But tak­ing a loss mak­ing busi­ness and turn­ing it around is a big bold move. So a cou­ple things that you know, I made a list of your ques­tions, Brad that you know, you and I would ask if it would have declined. We’ll wrap up here. But you know, is this a buy it and let it run? Is it an opti­miz­er a mild rental? Or is it a knock down turn­around? Right? And if so, you bet­ter make damn sure you’ve got that expe­ri­ence on your team to do it. You know, clar­i­fy­ing who is the core cus­tomer? Who should it be? What is the strat­e­gy to win blank slate, you know, tak­ing with what we have, you know, what’s the busi­ness mod­el we got to use? Who is the team that we want to run with, and often cas­es, the team that’s in the old mod­el, if you make mas­sive changes that are attached to the old way of think­ing, and some­times it’s eas­i­er to replace the peo­ple than it is to change the thinking.

Brad Giles 24:07

And that’s so often you see, a new busi­ness brings a new team or an acquired busi­ness, they bring a new team in to run the busi­ness. Right. And

Kevin Lawrence 24:17

it’s, you know, a quote from I think it’s Ein­stein, you know, a prob­lem will not be solved by the same mind that cre­at­ed it. Yeah. And some­times they could be part of the prob­lem. They could be part of the solu­tion. You nev­er know. You know, what do we need to slash like, what do we need to cut and we need to mas­ter and again, I will say for me, I am not a hard­core slash turn­around type. Leader, Coach facil­i­ta­tor. It’s not my pref­er­ence. I can do it. It’s not my favorite. It’s not my strong suit. I like to take good com­pa­nies and opti­mize and dial them in good com­pa­nies Good to Great and I know you’re sim­i­lar on that Brad. But and it takes but it takes a cer­tain type of per­son and that’s why peo­ple who do it Turn around, they can they can cre­ate a lot of val­ue. It’s just high­er risk and can be real­ly, real­ly high reward.

Brad Giles 25:06

Yeah, yeah. Awe­some. Very, very good. So what would we do? If we bought Twit­ter? I think we cov­ered that. I think. Yeah, yeah. I think we broad­ly cov­ered that. make sig­nif­i­cant changes, get the eco­nom­ic mod­el, right. Make sure that the peo­ple in the right place. That’s good. That’s good.

Kevin Lawrence 25:28

Yep. I would say to sum­ma­rize that, Brad. Yeah, I would fig­ure out the strat­e­gy and the eco­nom­ic mod­el. And then I would go and rebuild that infra­struc­ture, clean slate, and then decide who was keep­ing it who I was­n’t based on that. Yeah. And then but it would be very, it would have to be will­ing to go in and be very clinical,

Brad Giles 25:48

unfor­tu­nate­ly. Real­ly quick­ly. In the pub­lic eye with Yes, enor­mous amounts of crit­i­cism from every sin­gle angle.

Kevin Lawrence 25:58

Oh, that’s I feel that that’s that’s that’s a it takes a lot a lot. That’s a takes a hell of a lot of courage to do that. Awe­some. Yeah.

Brad Giles 26:05

Okay. Good. Good. Check. Have you been doing today’s episode? 136 If we bought Twit­ter things to con­sid­er when acquir­ing a busi­ness? Yeah, my name is Brad Giles. You can find me evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au. And Kevin, you can find at Lawrence and koat​.com. You can find us if it takes your fan­cy. on YouTube. We can see the video ver­sion or of course, wher­ev­er you find your good pod­casts, please be sure to hit like or sub­scribe to the pod­cast to hear us come to you every week and obvi­ous­ly, Kevin and I both have newslet­ters every week that comes out. So hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. I look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week. Take care. Have a great one.