Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years

And, and Nick, is this personally guaranteed is our phrase here in the, in the States? No. No, it was not. Okay. No.

So pretty much everybody we spoke to and this is actually, this is something Shane introduced, which looking back, I don't know if I would have had the foresight to do this, but straight away, any lender we spoke to said there'll be no personal guarantee signed here. And everybody kind of agreed to it, signed up to it in Ireland because of the financial regulations, if I believe.

And you kind of, you said, Shane kind of starts the conversation.

He raised us. I never, I never would have even known that that was an option. If somebody had, if a bank had said to me, you need to personally guarantee this, I would have just said, fine, because I wouldn't have known there was an alternative to say no, you know. So, yeah, I think in 2008 in Ireland, a lot of, A lot of entrepreneurs got crippled with personal guarantees and even people on, you…

We had a big property crash in 2008 as, as everybody did. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people got really badly burnt with that. So I think there's a big move away from personal guarantees.

Yeah. Yep.

And, and then Nick, how the bullet payment. So you, you've explained how the repayment was going to come at the, the back of the term and the amortization schedule gave you a lot of room to actually not only service the loan, obviously, but even have some, some extra Cash flow, it sounds like. Yeah, but those bullet payments, what was your idea with handling, actually repaying the loan?

It was going to be let's refinance, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it sort of thing. We'll grow into it. Obviously you were planning to grow into being able to pay those down. Well, I think one of the important things that we haven't covered is we're buying these businesses for generally less than 5x EBITDA.

So we were pretty confident that like when we spoke to the main banks, they said, you know, if you brought these businesses together and you had integrated them, you know, we would lend to a business like you at the size you would be if you had brought it all together. So we kind of backed ourselves that we take on this pretty expensive debt. We would integrate the businesses and we would go back…

And it was bank of Ireland that we went to and we had 12 months to refinance or the exit fees like jumped up considerably. There are really sort of unfavorable terms on with this alternative. Is the, is the legal, you know.

What, people often say that, but it was a great product. We're really happy we took it. Yeah, it, it solved the problem for us when nobody else would take it.