Summary

Giles Taylor, the founder of Trans Solutions, shares his journey from working in the maritime industry to starting his own logistics company. Trans Solutions specializes in optimizing transportation and offering engineering solutions for businesses. Giles discusses the evolution of the logistics industry and the unique challenges and opportunities in the parcel shipping sector. He emphasizes the importance of negotiation and optimization in saving companies money on shipping costs. Trans Solutions has been self-funded with occasional use of a line of credit. Giles Taylor discusses the evolution of data management in his company, the challenges of negotiating with shipping integrators, and the importance of having the right team. He also shares his experience of making mistakes and the lessons he learned from them. Giles talks about the process of being acquired and how he found the right buyer for his company. He reflects on the source of his grit and the mindset that has driven his success.

Takeaways

• Giles Taylor's background in engineering, operations management, and transportation led him to start Trans Solutions
• Trans Solutions specializes in optimizing transportation and offering engineering solutions for businesses
• The parcel shipping sector presents unique challenges and opportunities for cost savings
• Negotiation and optimization are key in saving companies money on shipping costs
• Trans Solutions has been self-funded with occasional use of a line of credit The evolution of data management in the company, from using Excel spreadsheets to using SQL and Python
• The challenges of negotiating with shipping integrators and the importance of understanding all the charges involved
• The importance of having the right team and the challenges of hiring and managing employees
• The experience of making mistakes and the lessons learned from them
• The process of being acquired and finding the right buyer for the company
• The source of Giles' grit and the mindset that has driven his success

Sound Bites

"Here's a tank that costs $200,000 to make. It's got a million dollars of product in it. And you need to know where it is at all times."

"What was the unsolved problem that you were going to aim TransSolutions at?"

"And some of these databases, are they all ones that you've developed yourselves or do you have to buy some of this data?"

"Then we got up to companies that spend like 150, 200 million dollars on just parcel. And those databases are huge."

"So if you don't know what to ask for it, you're going to miss it."

Links

https://trans-solutions.com/

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/DesigningSuccessfulStartups

Tech Startup Toolkit (book): https://www.manning.com/books/tech-startup-toolkit

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

09:07 Giles Taylor's Music Collection

14:27 The Unsolved Problem and the Birth of Trans Solutions

19:54 Challenges and Opportunities in Parcel Shipping

23:06 Funding and Growth of Trans Solutions

25:14 Navigating the Challenges of Negotiation

31:40 Learning from Mistakes

40:08 The Source of Grit

And here's Giles. Hey, Giles. I'm good. It's good to see you. I mean, I don't ever see you in your office situation because we're usually swimming or sailing or doing something.

Hey, Jolly, how you doing?

You too.

All right. All right. Yeah, it's we this is the we're all relegated back to this for five days a week.

So.

Yeah, five days a week. Okay. So I always like to start by asking people, where are you originally from and where do you live now?

I guess you could say I pretty much grew up in a town, a suburb of Boston, since I was five or six years old. And I live in another suburb of Boston. Although I've not always been here. Left and came back.

And that town was.

Yeah. So you were, you raised in Framingham and, and then you were away for a while. We, we met you first in California. And then by the strangest coincidence, I was asked to come back to Boston and picked Newton to live in. And you decided that it was the right thing to do to come back.

That's correct. Yeah, Santa Cruz.

and you pick, Newton.

Yeah, yeah. It's actually it's more coincidental, actually, Jeffy. We bought a house a block away from the house you were living in.

I know it is kind of strange. okay, so I want to spend most of our time focused on your current company, Trans Solutions. And I'd love to start by you just telling us what were some of the, what was the evolution

you

very strange.

that got you to the point where you knew a lot about logistics and then you were kind of ready to make this leap and do something on your own. But before then, because you went to Mass Maritime Academy and I don't believe that when you went there you were thinking about logistics.

Well, actually it is logistics. It is its supply chain. know, when I got into the business, by the way, it was called operation.

then it became logistics and then it became supply chain. So it's gotten more robust as the decades have gone by. So if you think about it, I went to Mass Maritime to become an officer on a ship and it's either the engine room or the deck. I was an engineer. So I was an officer on a ship that was transporting goods from one country to another. So that's kind of the beginning of your supply chain trail.

Yeah, okay. And from there.

So I went to sea for a few years, worked on oil tankers and, you know, row rows and did some corporate yacht stuff and swallowed the anchor as they call it, came ashore. And I worked as an engineer for General Dynamics building nuclear submarines. That was, you know, that was probably a common transition maybe.

you come off the sea and you go into a power plant or, you know, doing something related to the sea. I, at the same time, I went to get my MBA at nights and weekends and at Providence College. And at the end of that time, I had ambitions to manage people for some weird reason.

Of course, I did that on ships, but I wanted to do a little bit more of that. So I started looking for work and I was hired by a discount retailer in the region to become an industrial engineer, which really fits my personality because I'm a logical person. I like to figure out problems. And that's what that is. That is installing and sending programs, streamlining processes, justifying capex.

projects, you know, just finding better, more efficient ways to do things. And I really enjoyed that. But I still wanted to manage people for some reason. So an opportunity came up at this one facility I was working at in New Jersey. And it just so happened that the general manager and I really hit it off. He became a great mentor of mine. And the

number two position in that facility became available and he suggested I apply for it. I did, I got it and that was kind of operations management by baptism by fire as they say because I that was possibly 400 people, three shifts, fully automated warehouse. but again, really enjoyed that and you know working with

building teams and things like that and learning a lot of stuff. From there, I was recruited by the person who brought me into that company to go work at EMI Music in California, in Los Angeles. that's back in the day, I don't know if that's case today, but back then all the record labels had these distribution arms to house the...

Back then it was CDs and cassettes for the most part, and then distribute them. So there was maybe a dozen or two dozen record labels that belonged to that distribution company. And that's the one I worked for for Capitol Records and Virgin Records and EMI Music. You might have heard some of these Chrysalis records. So I went out there and I became director of distribution. So I ran the warehouse for the West Coast of the United States.

So I was in that time I was responsible for transportation as well, which I didn't have a lot of experience with. But I engineered myself out of a job on that one, but I got promoted to be director of transportation of that same company. I did that for a few years and then I started a family and then was recruited by West Marine, which is where

you know, your wife and my wife worked together and we met as director of distribution again. And that was a relatively small company, but they were in the process of like buying everybody up. they, grew threefold in three years. Pretty stressful job. Just always going, going, going and something new. So I was putting in a lot of hours, but I was learning just so, so much. It was just incredible.

great learning period in my life. that went on for a few years and then again I was promoted to director of transportation of that company. It was a much bigger company at that point than when I started and I really got my feet wet on other parts of just transportation that I had not experienced before. Like we had a fleet of trucks and things like that. My wife Claire and I wanted to

move back east and raise our kids there. And so I started looking and went to the president and I told them and they said they gave me six months to find a job and sure enough I did and I came back to Boston as vice president of operations for a company. I had a couple of pretty good offers Staples was one of them but I was a company officer in this one so they enticed me with a lot of stock options and things like that.

So I was in charge of everything there, know, transportation, warehousing, maintenance, call center, you name it, anything that had to do with operations in the company, the stores. And again, that was again, you know, like more responsibility, a lot more to learn. And it really was helpful for me. But I always had this bug about, you know, this independent bug, you know, like I want to do it myself. I want to do it on my own. I want to see if I can do it on my own, that type of thing.

I guess some people call that entrepreneurial, maybe it is. So I took a chance and I started TransSolutions and that was 25 years ago, 26 years ago.

hearing on today.

You have a gigantic music collection. Did you put that together while you worked at EMI?

know, it's interesting thing. The music industry, think, is probably like the publishing industry that nobody ever leaves. They just kind of move around from record label to record label or distribution company, distribution company. we had this, we had this connection of people in my position for different record companies, and we would trade CDs and stuff like that. there's a lot of free CDs that go out, I mean, to record labels and...

radio station, things like that. So we were no exception because I was at a high enough level. So I had friends at Warner and Sony, and all that sort of stuff. we...

So what you're telling me is that you didn't have to pay retail for all of those thousands of CDs you have.

No, it was all sweat. You know, like I had to work hard.

And then, wasn't there some point in your life where you were actually working with a band that was on the road?

No, no, but what one of the, you know, for somebody in distribution was, it was a benefit to us, but it was part of the job for people that are in sales and marketing, but they would have these things called road shows a couple of times a year. And they would like, we'd go down to Dallas and get the rent, the whole hotel, like 300 room hotel. And they would bring in all these bands, you know, like they're, they're going to promote this coming year. You know, some are older and other ones.

I see. I just got the story a little bit mixed up, but yeah. But you got a chance to see lots of bands.

Yeah, I never met.

Yeah, I went to a lot of concerts and I have a lot of me, a lot of artists and what have you. It was pretty fun. Pretty fun.

Okay, so back to TransSolutions, because what I'm curious about is, so you made it clear, part of your incentive was do it on your own and just make the jump and be an entrepreneur and try it. But what was the unsolved problem that you were going to aim TransSolutions at?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So my background was pretty robust. I mean, I did engineering, I did operations management, I did transportation. Right? So like you could go off on any one of those. I really debated that. I really liked the engineering stuff, the industrial engineering stuff and the warehousing stuff, bringing automation to distribution was very, very nice at that time. There wasn't a lot of that going on. So it was kind of leading in.

But I had realized that, you like all the big consulting firms had divisions that were doing all that stuff. I just figured it's going to be too competitive. The one thing that was happening and I learned a great deal at EMI Music was the parcel side. That is a unique kind of part of transportation because it's really an oligopoly with just UPS and FedEx. And back then there was RPS and a couple of other ones.

pretty much they're the big dogs on the street and then you throw DHL in there for the international part. But they really controlled pricing to a large extent. And what I had realized in both the EMI music and the West Marine job and also the VP of operations job.

was it was this kind of neglected part of transportation that a lot of people didn't pay a lot of attention to. So they have a unique offer that nobody else has and that is a guarantee to deliver packages on time. So they state what they're gonna deliver it on. Like for example, next day AM, it's gotta get delivered by 10 .30 in the morning with a few exceptions. If it doesn't, then you can get your money back.

So there's a lot of people that were working for UPS and FedEx that started business at the same time doing that. So collecting those refunds and they set up business and they were pretty successful. So I thought that was getting pretty saturated, but what wasn't happening was the negotiation piece or it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of players in that. And I said, you know, I've done a lot of negotiating and you know, up to this point and although this is a little bit different, I, you know,

done it plenty of times and I've saved my company lots and lots of money, millions of dollars. And I said, you know, let's, think this is what I want to try. So I thought there was a, you know, there was a space there at that time, you know, it's 25 years ago now. And I thought that would give me the most, the biggest opportunity to be successful.

And I was right.

Okay, could you tell us exactly what TransSolutions does?

Yeah. So of course, when we started out, just kind of did parcel stuff, right? And, but you know, you learn pretty quickly in consulting, you can't be a one stop show, a one man show on one product, you know, cause the same customers might come back to you and say, well, can you do something on that? Or can you do something on that? Or really more importantly is you don't have

business coming in all the time, right? So you can have these gaps, so you have to kind of broaden your catalog of offerings. And so I had that experience in transportation, so I could add things on that. For example, there's air, surface, and ocean, or water transportation. So on surface, you might have heard of the term less than truckload, so that's like palletized freight. And then there's truckload, that'd be full truckload.

And then there's Last Mile, which really came of age during COVID. There's Parcel, course, and there's all kinds of other stuff, too, like very kind of nuanced, sophisticated stuff. So we had to learn to do that stuff and become excellent at it. And we did. And so that broadened our...

know, catalog of what we could offer and then brought in more business because of that. we could do, we've done, we do all modes of transportation, every kinds of transportation you can imagine. Some really basic stuff and some really pretty sophisticated stuff. So we grew that side and then, but the engineering side of me, the person who likes to figure out problems never wanted to be in the engineering part. So we do, that's the other half of the business. So we do engineering. So that could be something as simple as.

Hey, can you write a job description for a transportation manager for us? Or can you give us some guidance on what do they have for automation and transportation out there? To as sophisticated as tracking a tank that holds drug substance, that's the basis of your drugs, and keep track of it around the world, right? So.

So in this particular project, was 1 ,500, almost ,600 of these tanks that cost $200 ,000 a piece to make. So if you just lost a few of those, it's a big issue. But they didn't track it. They tracked it manually, like get on the phone and start calling type of thing. And that was partly due to the software that they were using, partly due to nothing really existed to do that. So if you think about this, Jathi, and I know that you're going to be thinking about this after our call because you like to noodle these things out too.

Here's a tank that costs $200 ,000 to make. It's got a million dollars of product in it. And you need to know where it is at all times. GPS doesn't work. Your basic satellite system doesn't work. So we had to figure out how can we track a tank that's sitting 100 feet under the ground in a Faraday box freezer.

So it's got stainless steel all the way around the freezer so you can't send a regular signal through there. A high frequency signal through there. has to be low frequency signal. How do you do that? So it took several months but we came up with a pretty cool solution. And it was 100 % traceable of the tank. And in addition to that, it's like any other project, there's always a scub creep. They want to know how much product was in the tank and...

what the temperature was and things like that. So those are add -ons, but pretty cool solution. That's the engineering side.

That's, I will think about that. I will think about that.

Yeah, yeah, a little hint. Iridium satellite system.

Giles Taylor (18:40.787)

Thank

that can go 100 feet down into the ground.

No, it's not that so much. It's a, I guess Elon Musk satellites, which by the way, he has half of them up there in the sky, in space, is lower to the earth. And then the iridium is a little bit higher than that. And then other ones are further up. So that's where the low frequency signal comes. So you have to get it to a mobile tower and go through that network. So then you've got to put a beacon in the warehouse, which transfers down.

in that case, 100 feet. That was an exception. Most of them are just in a warehouse in a Faraday block.

but anyway.

So it's the basic idea that people come to you because they feel like they could spend less money on shipping and ask you to help them do that because they just feel like they're spending too much. And so this is where you figure out how to optimize all of their product on

you know, to try to fill a truckload or be partial shipment and combine with other people's partial shipments. I'm just trying to sort of suss out how you, what are the big swings you can take to save somebody a lot of money on shipping?

You know, there's there's a thousand ways to skin the cat, right? It really depends on the particular situation. So I'll tell you, we have a call later today with a big company that's then. Anyway, you see him, let's say we see him on Sunday TV all the time, OK? I can't share the name, but anyway, we they came to us and they wanted a a forecasting system on spend.

and so it'd on our engineering side. And within like a month, I think, well, we asked for a bunch of data when we get that so that we can figure out how we're going to do that solution. So part of the data is looking at contracts with FedEx and UPS in this case, and DHL, and we have a massive database of benchmark rates. There's a third party we get to see lots and lots of rates.

So we run it through there and see how good their pricing is. And it looked like it was pretty, it was okay, you know, we could do better. So we went back to them and say, well, here's how we'll do this project. But you know, did you know, and we can save you X factor on the transportation of your parcel. And they go, we're not worried about that. We're kind of doing that ourselves. Anything, one thing led to another. We got the project.

We save them a ton of money. But after that, there's more money because what we're talking about is getting a better rate and then them executing that. if you optimize the freight, because when you look at the data, and you know this, you're a data guy, you look at the data, you can find other things that you're not necessarily looking for. So you can optimize the freight. So some of the things that we do is what we call cross mode. So maybe it's...

Parcel should be LTL or LTL should be Parcel. Cross service, so maybe you're shipping it second day of the year and it can go brown. Maybe you can consolidate shipments. There's a whole list of things that we go through and find that. And so we have a whole punch lift that we're going to show this today in this call of stuff we can do later, of optimizing their freight. So getting a rate is one thing. When we do that for all modes, optimizing it is a different thing.

Usually, I don't know if I've ever come across a company that had some sophistication of their transportation, which means they're using more than one mode, one service, they have some nuances to it, that we didn't find those opportunities. So it's not just about rates, it's about optimizing the freight too.

So how have you funded TransSolutions?

Allow sweat. Fingernails. I would say self -funded, pretty much. Occasionally, line of credit, but pretty much self -funded and line of credit.

You haven't needed to buy a lot of equipment, assume, just like computers that you can lease anyway.

Yeah, that's a cost that we have, it never exceeds labor.

And some of these databases, are they all ones that you've developed yourselves or do you have to buy some of this data?

No, no, we get it ourselves. But let's talk about the data a little bit because that's really important and that's been a big evolution. So when we started, basically we did everything on Excel, right? And even access, right? Way back when. And we were doing smaller companies, we spend say under $20 million. So you can digest that in Excel spreadsheet for the most part.

Then we got up to companies that spend like 150, 200 million dollars on just parcel. And those databases are huge. So you got to either put them in SQL or some kind of database management solution or use Python to manipulate the data or maybe. So we've evolved to that. But over the years, the pricing with...

The integrators, UPS, FedEx, DHL, is sophisticated. There's a lot of different charges that you have to account for. So it's not just the freight, there's fuel and then what they call surcharges or accessorial charges, like a residential charge, a delivery area surcharge, a signature charge. There's hundreds of them. And you have to factor that in in the analysis because what those companies are really good at is kind of pulling the money out somewhere else and giving it to you where you ask.

So if you don't know what to ask for it, you're going to miss it. So we had developed a pretty sophisticated tool to be able to do that quickly. In negotiation, we try to get it fast. I don't want you sitting around for a couple weeks and give me an answer back on this. I want it back tomorrow or in two days type of thing. So we needed to have a tool that can do it as fast or faster. And over the years, we developed that kind of a tool for parcel and some other modes of transportation.

So 25 years or so, have you made any mistakes?

my god. We got a couple hours to list those out. my god. Too many.

You

Well, just tell us a couple that were maybe scary.

well, mean, hey, I've you they've been a few years. I've not made any. I lost a lot of money and I had to go right into my savings and pull it out. And that gets scary. I mean, like every I think every small business owner has at some point in time worry about it. Can I make my payroll? Right. Can I pay my people? And that's and that's not a good that's not a comfortable position to be in. I mean, you're you're thinking like what happens next month? You know, make this month and what happens next month? So.

That's something where I go through a lot of fingernails. I have a friend, I have a friend actually, still have him. I met in California who had a small business and he said to me at an early age, mean like literally when I started my business, he said, you can either manage the business or you can be the business. Right? And you have to choose which way you want to go. And that's something I didn't learn.

I didn't execute for many, many years later. But basically what he was saying is you can either go do all the work or you can get people to do the work and manage it. And I chose the former, right? I did the work, you know, partly because I'm growing a business and, know, I don't have a lot of excess cash and things like that to be able to do that. But, you know, you could go get some money to do that, too. And that was more

more of an evolution for me. I figure, okay, I need to have these people on board and trained before the work comes. And that came to me later. So when it comes, you gotta get it done, but if you don't have the people to do it, then you're in trouble. So that's a sunk cost, and you don't like that as a small business owner, but it's a reality. So I think that is...

That had caused a lot of mistakes, things that I could have done better. Marketing, I'm just, I don't know that. I don't know that piece of business. then I've tried, I think everything under the sun and nothing's really worked. But I think, if I had some really good advice on that, I would try to get that. And sales people, so the one thing with a small company is you,

and you're doing the work as opposed to managing it, you do the work, you don't have time to go through the sales, right? Because you got to get the work done. So there's always a gap that you're kind of creating. So that was a learning curve that took, you know, well over a decade into the company, wherefore I got that under control, right? So there's some hiring, you know, like that's always hard to do, you know, it's a...

50 -50 proposition maybe, you know, to get the right person. So, you one thing I did is I said, you know, after hiring some, you know, people that were not the right fit for this company, I said, I'm just going to train them. I'm just going bring them in out of school, train them, do it the way I like to do it. And then there's no conflicts. There's no, like, we used to do it this way and all that sort of stuff. And that's really kind of the method I've been taking. And that's worked out pretty well.

I agree.

What schools are you tending to bring people from?

I've hired a lot of people from Northeastern, BU, Mass Maritime, my alma mater.

So are you taking advantage of the wonderful fifth year that Northeastern has for people doing much more serious internships than other schools do, where they're really your employee for six months? Have you done that? Yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And a little bit more, because I do a lot of teaching over there, guest lecturer, that BU, MIT, colleges around here. So I get to see the person. For example, I taught a class the end of this semester at Northeastern. And usually, I just kind of finish up and leave, and they leave. But occasionally, somebody comes up to me. Well, two people came up to me in this particular class, and they said, hey, I wanted to.

pick your brain about a couple things. They knew, they were seniors, but they really kind of knew transportation. They had the right terminology and things like that. go, that's impressive. Anyway, this was about a project in Mexico, intermodal project, so putting containers on the rail and bringing them up to the United States.

That's a little bit over my skis. I, you know, I didn't have a lot of experience in intermodal in Mexico, but I knew people who did. So I went to them and I brought it them and that looks like it's going to become a project. they're there, you know, I think the difference between some of the other schools I see, I see this at Mass Maritime, at Maine Maritime and Northeastern. These kids want to work. They can't wait to go work. Right.

And you can just see that as soon as you hire them. As soon as you hire them. Yeah.

That's good to hear. That's really good to hear. So now you're in the process of being acquired. How has that process gone?

have been acquired.

Okay, sorry, have been acquired.

Yeah, that's not going well. It ended up going well, but getting there, not going well. So I think it was probably four years ago, was at least getting one call a month from somebody who wanted to buy the company. a lot of them were looking for the parcel stuff and other ones were looking for the consulting stuff.

So he's getting a lot of calls, but I wasn't calling him back or anything like that. I was at the age where I'm thinking, OK, I've got to have an exit plan here, start planning this now instead of last minute. So I called a friend of mine from high school who is a venture capitalist. And I said, can you help me with this? And he said, sure. And so he said, well, pick a couple and let's go interview them and see what we got. So we met.

these &A companies. So we talked after the meetings and he said, you know, why don't you just do it to see what the company's worth? It's not going to cost you a lot of money. So I did. And one the things about consulting is the multiple is not huge. It's like under one. Because you're always bringing a new business basically, know, for the P business to a extent.

Yes.

So I said, well, that was a little bit depressing. But then I got to thinking, OK, I'm going to do it. Let's see what, you know, it's not a lot of money. Let's see how it happens. And I couldn't have been more disappointed. mean, really, really disappointed in who they were bringing me. I mean, I'll give you a couple of examples. It's just ridiculous. And like, I can't believe they would even go peddle this kind of stuff. But one person.

First of all, all the calls that he took were like Zoom, but with the background faded out, but they were in his car. Everyone was in his car, you could tell. And he talking about a concept that really wasn't fully structured or formed and kind of spitballing a lot of things and didn't have white papers or anything like that. Introduced me to a couple other people and they didn't have anything either.

It's kind of like this concept they were talking about and they hadn't fully formed it. Another person, I have to laugh about this stuff because it's really absurd. She said, I'm not sure what her background was, I guess it was business or something like that, and she had went to work for a car moving company. So when you relocate, can move your car from California to Boston or whatever. And she had worked for that company in...

for a couple of years and kind of learned the business and she was going to buy the business. But then COVID happened and nobody was moving around. Right. So that that company, I don't know, went out of business or shrunk. She comes to me. This is the offer. You're going to hire me for two years and you're going to pay me like a crazy high salary, crazy high salary with a bonus. And I might buy your business in two years.

That's the offer. So I mean, it was after that call, I just lost it. And I called up the &A company and I said, you know, I can't believe you told me you're going to send these people and blah, blah, blah. And I really let them have it. So anyway, in a couple of weeks, they put another person on the account and he was young, kind of new or newer to it. But he was eager. And he like within a month, he brought me a couple legitimate opportunities. And

So we went down the road of, you know, got to due diligence, you know, so looking at the financials and stuff like that. Well, let me give you a little bit back story to this. So I had a client in California for 13 years and they're a GPO, General Purchasing Organization. So they, you know, they go buy stuff for, know, office supplies, furniture, labor, whatever it is.

So they had one category was transportation, but they really had that developed. So they had hired Transolutions and the model was basically do a couple of projects, learn what they're doing and then take that on and that becomes a new category and then the third party goes away. But they couldn't keep anybody in that position. They either left the company or they moved in somewhere else in the company. So they kept us around because the business was coming in. And finally they hired this one guy for the

for that category and he was really good, smart, quick learner and eager. And we hit it up. We became friends. But I trained him for five years, learning all kinds of freight. And so anyway, he had a parting with that company.

and know got a severance for several months and things like that. And he and then he didn't have a job but I said hell this is my opportunity to kind of sit back a little bit right bring somebody in knows what to do knows what I like to do and kind of run the business for me do the business for me. So I made him an offer and I couldn't offer him a huge salary but I could offer him a good bonus.

That bonus was revealed in the due diligence and they came back and said, what? You're giving this person what percentage of the net profit? The deal's over. They pulled the deal. I mean, we were pretty close and they pulled it because of that. So anyway, I kept him appraised of it because I'm not going to leave him in the lurch. And I told him and he said, OK. He came back to me a couple of days later and said, can I buy the business?

I go, you know what they offered, you know, which is well over what I thought it was going to be. Yeah, I know, I know. Give me a couple of weeks. You see what I can do. And came back in a couple of weeks and I can give you some money. You don't have to loan me the rest of it, but I can, you know, pay it off three, four years.

did the deal. That's who bought the company in January.

that's who bought it.

Yeah. So it was good. One of things that really benefited me is I've had this business for 25 years and it's known in the business. know, the Transolution is I know who those guys are type of thing. If I had gone the other route, it would have been absorbed into that other company. But this way Transolution lives on. Kind of my legacy if you will.

Well, it's...

I think it sounds, I didn't know that's what you had done. It's great. mean, you know him, you trust him. He'll, you know, for a while he'll keep checking in with you on his, some of his decisions and run them by you. It's kind of like being chairman of the board, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I have to stay on three years in the agreement. But, you know, it's it's good. like it. I mean, and I'm glad he I'm really glad he he was the one that, you know, I just kind of he brought he brought business in day one day one. He brought business in and we were were were assessing this one particular project just this week, I think it was Monday or maybe it's Friday.

Well, you picked the right guy.

And I said, well, how do you see it? And literally, it was exactly how I saw it. Exactly. So I mean, I just have a great deal of comfort in knowing he's going to be around that.

Well, I've saved the most important question for last, is, so doing this and all the ups and downs takes a lot of grit. Where do you think your grit comes from?

You gave me a hint to that the other day. I don't know if I have print. So I've been thinking about it.

I'm probably going to reveal something I've never revealed to anybody, but.

Thank

So.

My parents are very bright and my older sister is bright. I remember being at the dinner table. They'd be talking about something. What the hell are they talking about? I was just way over my head. I kind of felt like I needed a catch up, a step behind. I hung out with smart kids in high school and I always felt like I was a step behind there and I constantly had to prove myself.

I was very shy when I was a kid, like ultra shy. was bright red hair, freckles, a weird name. It was tough. But somewhere along the way, the path you...

You know, you get like, hey, I can do this. I can do it. And if you can build off of that, then I think you can do just about anything. And I know you're the same kind of guy, Juffy.

so sorry about that, but, but I always felt like I was kind of a step behind and I need to work harder to get there. So I embraced challenge. Like this is something new. I want to do it. this is an uncomfortable situation. I want to do it. And I got to the point where I'm, you know, I'm a pretty competitive person, as you know.

And if I put my mind to something, I want to be number one. Whether it's running a business or doing triathlons or swimming, whatever it is, I just have that mindset which I think has formed over many years of kind of trying, failing, trying, succeeding, and constantly pushing myself.

That's, you know, it's, it's, it's a, there's a common theme when I asked this question that there is some sort of stress or, or like overwhelming challenge that people fight back against. And then they channel it somewhere along the way into being an entrepreneur. I mean,

I'm not saying everybody that goes through that becomes an entrepreneur. I'm just saying the people I'm talking to are entrepreneurs, but they all have grit and it comes from somewhere and it's not just like, I came out of the womb and I had it. Nobody feels that way. And it does explain some things like how competitive

Mm

Mm. Yep.

I have to be to hang around with you.

No, you went through the same stimulus. I'll give you another example about that. As you know, I had a head injury skiing a long time ago and, you know, sub -cranial hematoma. So I went into coma, the whole thing, and went to rehab and stuff like that. And I was in the Spalding Rehab, which is a big rehab hospital in Boston. And I was in the head injury wing.

And there's three levels of that. there's, there's mild, moderate and severe. And you're in there with everybody. And, my roommate was severe. I went in as, moderate. and, we'd go, we'd sit in these kind of, let's talk about our injury, brown circles and things like that. And I could just tell there was people that are never going to get over it. Never going to get over it, regardless of what the degree was. And there was people that were.

And I think that's a mental choice. And I think that kind of reinforced kind of who I was, you know, that I'm not going to let this beat me.

Pardon my person.

And then you're back to skiing.

And you know me as a like I've skied faster now. It's like stupid, but you you finally, think.

I don't think when we're skiing, not taking unnecessary risks. We're taking the standard risks that you have when you ski at a ski area, but we're not like whipping through trees at high speed.

True that. Well, since that accident, I've got aversion towards trees and Treeing, skiing in the trees. But yeah, I mean, think, you know, there's you're probably right about that. don't think you maybe some people are born with it, but I haven't met anybody like that. But I think people, you know, that I think they say, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to let this defeat me or I'm not going to let it defeat me. And

And it's.

I agree with you that it's binary. I've always described the situation I was in as I was sitting on the peak of a roof after everything that happened with me. And I could have gone either way to like feel sorry for myself and, you know, in a puddle of jelly or fight back and start to accomplish things. And you did the same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I'm not being judgmental for the people that go the other route. I just think it's, a large degree, it's a personal choice and I'm not sure you're born with it.

Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. This has been fabulous. I am thrilled to have had this 46 minutes with you.

All right.