01
Choosing the Lab
Jeremy did his diligence before he joined anything. “I chose Acquisition Lab after a lot of diligence on a number of similar products on the market. Honestly, it came down to the feel of the organization and frankly the lack of pressure.”
What drew him in was that the Lab was selective. “You almost feel like going through the Acquisition Lab process that you have to convince them you’re the right person, right? And so that selectivity was a draw.”
So did being challenged. “That very healthy challenge of are you sure you want to do this? And here are all the reasons why you shouldn’t and how it could go wrong really built confidence in me.”
“The ethos of what the Lab and Walker has in his approach was what I wanted to be a part of.”Jeremy Fremin
02
Intentionality
Ask Jeremy what changed after he joined and he has one word for it. “It’s intentionality. I had a desire to do things and I was kind of going through the motions, but what the Acquisition Lab provided me was a framework of how to be intentional about what you’re doing.”
The framework came with a check on himself. It gave him, he says, “the accountability for myself on that I was actually doing what I thought I was doing.”
“How do I intentionally go through this process?”Jeremy Fremin
03
The fit
He had some early meetings with sellers, then came across Certified Boom Repair. He started meeting with the seller and “immediately hit it off” with the family.
That was not luck. A family owned and operated business, in the same hands for multiple decades, was on his list of criteria, because it “told me a lot about how they do business, how they treat their employees, how they operate.”
His first LOI was accepted. The deal brought two companies: Certified Boom Repair, and the machine shop attached to it, Anchor Machine & Fabricating.
“To me it was going to be as important for me to fit into the business as the business to fit into me.”Jeremy Fremin
04
The people
His advice to someone trying to acquire a business is to find people going through the same thing. “There is no perfect deal. There is no deal without hair on it, but having a community of common interest that you can bounce ideas off of will take care of a lot of your concerns and get you over the hump.”
He found that in the Lab, where searchers compete for deals but not with each other. “This is a competitive environment on the search and close front, but none of us were competitive with one another. We were all there to help each other be successful in achieving that goal.”
He still shows up at Searcher Circle, the Lab’s quarterly in-person meetups. What he values there is hearing what people did, not being told what to do. “Don’t give me instruction. Tell me what you did.”
“People holding each other accountable, people reveling in others’ successes.”Jeremy Fremin
