Something I’ve seen again and again across my own acquisitions is that the business you buy is almost always running at max capacity. You can’t put 50% more revenue on that team and that set of processes without blowing it up. Most first-time owners also come in thinking they know how the business will grow. Usually they don’t yet. I can’t count the times I’ve gotten into a business and found that two-thirds of it was making great money and a third was losing money. Nobody could see it because the data to show it didn’t exist. So year one tends to mean taking a few steps back. First you put in the systems to capture the data, then the systems to absorb growth. A year or two later you can grow profitably without being the chief cook and bottle washer. @redacted‌ and I got into this on the latest episode of The Intentional Owner, along with how much change a team can take at once. He shared an experiment from his first add-on at Blooma, where he ran four 10-hour days and five 8-hour days side by side for two months. It was chaotic. But it settled the question with data, and the team trusted the outcome because they’d lived through the test. For those who’ve closed, what did you have to build in year one before you could grow? Full episode here: redacted